In times of war, neutrality doesn’t exist. Pacifism is just a euphemism for laziness. The impartial were simply thought to lack the conviction with which to defend their ideas.
The camp at Fossoli fell to the Nazis on September 8, 1943. It proved to be a great asset from a geographical point of view, offering direct access to northern Europe. Beginning in January 1944, the camp, which had been holding Italian Jews for some time, began interning political opponents of the German regime and anyone else the SS officers didn’t trust.
On February 22, 1944, a group of Jews and other prisoners boarded buses bound for the Carpi train station, where they left on a two-week journey to Auschwitz. The convoy carried 650 “pieces,” as they were called, who garnered as much respect as cuts of meat hanging in a butcher’s back room. Among these “pieces” was Primo Levi.
While the detainees at Fossoli were treated like livestock and trains from Carpi left for Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, and Ravensbrück, the villagers tried their best to carry on with daily life. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to know what was happening; they were simply aware that anything they said would change very little. The resistance took shape, and membership of the antifascist organization Giustizia e Libertà37 continued to grow. But real revolution hadn’t yet begun.
Not far from Carpi, in the countryside surrounding Modena, peasants’ daily routines went unchanged: they tried to lead a semblance of normal life despite the absurdity of everyday rituals against a backdrop of war. Lucrezia Bugatti, whose son Lanfranco had left for the front in 1941 and hadn’t sent her news in months, was among those who stubbornly went about her life and refused to fret over stories of extermination, invasion, and resistance. Cloistered in her Modena home, she focused on washing and cooking, her bulwark against descending into madness.
Still, two Italian officers came knocking one morning. Good news never warranted such a visit; the two men had the unfortunate task of announcing that Signora Bugatti’s son had perished, crushed by… during… somewhere along… near the… The where, the when, the how, and the why evaded the poor woman, who felt as though she was losing her sense of hearing as the two men gave their explanations. The men’s voices were drowned out by the deep, sustained keening of a funeral horn hissing news of her son’s death directly into her ears. And all at once, like a frog in winter, she froze. She had little hope that spring would ever return to release her from her frozen interior.
* * *
37.Justice and liberty
God is a Tuber
malnutrition will make an individual more susceptible to tuberculosis. Sergio didn’t have far to look to understand why he had contracted the disease. He was unknowingly infected in May 1945, just as the Third Reich capitulated and restored freedom to a massacred Europe. Italians detained in the USSR weren’t sent home until October of the same year. And Sergio started showing symptoms of consumption in September. One month before his repatriation. Why couldn’t he have hung on another few days and fended off the bacteria as he’d fended off so many other enemies? That was precisely the problem: his body had battled so many adversaries, it couldn’t take any more.
Sergio lost nearly ten kilos in one month, though he hardly noticed. He had been swimming in his pants for some time and was already having trouble keeping his belt over his emaciated hips. Today’s weight-obsessed women would clamour to know his secret, but in those days thinness was not a measure of beauty. Magazine covers were more likely to feature strong women working for the war effort than pin-ups in swimsuits, bottoms in the air and one finger over the lips as if to say, “Oops! Sorry if I’ve offended you.”
When Sergio began to have erotic dreams involving scantily clad women stroking him lustily and urging him to drop his pants, he knew something was wrong. He wasn’t the type to entertain such risqué nocturnal fantasies. These exciting dreams, accompanied by fever, sweats, and tremors, were more an indication of an infection than a resurgent libido. And the ghastly cough, initially raspy, then thick and bloody, had nothing to do with being aroused.
The infirmary staff tried to treat him as best they could, but antibiotics for tuberculosis had not yet been developed. Rest was the only remedy. That, and proper nourishment so that the sick might regain their strength. Instead of dry black bread, Sergio was given sweet, spongy loaves. But he wasn’t hungry. The mere thought of food left him retching, setting off a seemingly inexhaustible bout of coughing.
Alfonso, who was even worse off than Sergio, was in the next bed over. The two often laughed together, which gave rise to uncontrollable coughing fits. The men claimed that coughing had become their main means of expression and entertained themselves by answering some of life’s most fundamental questions with a cough.
“You think that we’re—cough, cough—really descended from Adam and Eve?”
“Cough, cough, cough, cough… Cough, cough… Cough, cough, cough.”
“Me—cough—too—cough. Cough, cough. And are we alone in the universe—cough?”
“Cough, cough, cough, cough… Cough. Couuughhh, cough, cough!”
“I totally—cough—agree.”
“Cough, cough.”
“Oh come on—cough, couuggh, couuughh. Now you’re just exaggerating! COUGH.”
“Couuughh!”
“You’re really—cough—a nihilist—cough, cough. I’d never have thought it.”
“Cough, cough, cough.”
It wasn’t so far from the truth. Regarding the universe, and everything else.
Sometimes a cough is worth a thousand words.
After all the years of famine, horror, death, and inhumanity, they had gradually lost their language. All they had left were rumbling stomachs, grunts, and phlegm to let the world know they still existed. Life for them was now communicated through coughing and the clearing of throats. Hmm, hmm. Excuse me. I don’t mean to be a bother, but I’m still here.
Speaking is risky.
Better to be discreet and let out a timid cough in case old enemies are lurking, ready to interpret your words as new declarations of war. It takes precious little to provoke a man’s hostility.
No doubt, then, why Sergio would continue to be reserved, introverted, and uninterested in developing social bonds. Or why each peal of laughter would end in three or four embarrassed coughs.
Sergio’s condition deteriorated. He should have been transferred to a real hospital where he could have received proper treatment, not just prayers and promises of a better tomorrow. But it was time to go home. News that the war was over had finally crossed the Dnieper River and made it to the lager. A single train would take them from lager 58 back to Carpi. If he wasn’t on that train, Sergio would have to bum a ride. And since hitchhiking in the Mordovian steppe was a dim prospect, he took the train along with Alfonso and a handful of other patients. They were accompanied by a Russian doctor, a woman mainly there with a pat on the back and an encouraging word for lack of actual medication.
Globetrotters often find the trip home much faster, buoyed as they are by the excitement of seeing loved ones and sleeping in a comfortable bed. On this trip, however, the road home seemed more interminable than on any previous trip. The journey was far from a pilgrimage: if the war had done anything, it had served to show Sergio that God did not exist, that worship in the hope of receiving favours was pointless.
God was just a tuber growing in people’s minds like the lesions that ravaged Sergio’s lungs. He took root in the depths of their suffering and stretched His stems and buds right up to the fringes of their uncertainties.
There was no guarantee that Sergio would make it to Carpi alive. With his penchant for irony, the non-god would likely kill him as he exited the train or crossed the doorstep of his childhood home.
The war was over, but the world was still rife with folly.
The Shower
eventua
lly, the train stopped. For good this time, after twenty days of lurching.
The journey was not quite over, but fortunately the end was in sight. Sergio could not have endured another three weeks of slow, damp, coal-tainted progress in his condition. Alfonso had already thrown in the towel; his body had been abandoned somewhere between Kiev and Kraków.
The soldiers were unloaded at Frankfurt. On the station platform Sergio ran into Primo, whom he hadn’t seen since Kalach-na-Donu. They held each other in a long embrace as if to prove to one another they were both still alive, not just two ghosts who, unaware that they’d passed on, had dreamed up a friend of days gone by.
“Let’s stick together from now on, OK?”
“I won’t leave you, Primo. We can watch over each other. Cough, cough, cough.”
“What’s with the coughing?”
“Tuberculosis.”
“Shit, it got you, too? You’ll be as good as new when we get to Carpi, I promise. My father is friends with Dr. Franzoni. He’ll fix you up.”
“I know him! He’s the one—cough, cough, cough—who delivered me.”
“Are you kidding? Well he’ll have to bring you into the world a second time, then.”
They disinfected the soldiers, along with their clothing, before continuing on to Italy. The men were sprayed down with a foul-smelling liquid, some mixture of alcohol, bleach, and another antibacterial agent, then dried with giant fans. No one wanted them bringing Bolshevik germs onto European soil.
Once they had gone through the first round of decontamination they boarded another train, this time bound for Pescantina in the province of Verona. They arrived at noon on Saturday and were taken to the courtyard at the boys’ high school, which was empty for the weekend. They were made to wait in the middle of the flowerless garden while the disinfectants were organized.
Though they had made it home to Italy and were less than a hundred kilometres from Carpi, Sergio felt hunted. Threatened. During the long minutes he spent huddled with his peers in the middle of the cold, barren yard, he couldn’t help thinking they were about to be tortured or slaughtered. That would have been easier: eliminate everyone the war had touched in any way so it could never be discussed again. Erase the unwelcome memory by wiping out the people who had lived through it. Start over with a truly blank slate. Pretend as if none of it had ever happened. Press on without having to admit that we all have our faults.
Sergio and his friends were asked to undress. They could rest assured: “take a shower” wasn’t code for “kill them all.” They were genuinely going to get cleaned up, their impoverished bodies scoured and their skin scraped of every last trace of inhumanity.
How can five years
of wandering
of slavery
of fighting
of epidemics
of famine
of cannibalism
be wiped away?
With difficulty.
A layer of unhappiness would always remain—a thin film, shiny and glistening, of bitterness and terror.
Always.
Sergio had to abandon his clothes. The ones he had been wearing since he’d left Carpi that spring morning in 1941. He felt almost nostalgic at having to relinquish the shreds of cloth. His threadbare undershirt, its cotton nearly transparent, and the torn fabric of his trousers—their texture, scratchy to the touch, the weight they took on when dripping with water… They had become home. These disintegrating clothes had become the walls of his house. They were all he owned. He held them out to the officer.
Sergio found himself stark naked before the young man’s troubled gaze. He was likely a new recruit who had never known Auschwitz; what else could explain his reaction to Sergio’s stooped shoulders, his skeletal frame?
Clearly uncomfortable with his own authority, the boy ordered Sergio to step up and aimed a stream of water at him that was so powerful it could have cut through glass. Or at least that was Sergio’s impression when the spray hit him between the eyes. It felt like someone was slicing his body up, tearing it apart to reorganize the puzzle pieces. The shower didn’t target just the grime; it stamped out your old life, boring through your skin to deliver a new being, one lacking memory and desire. Afterwards you ached to stay under the water forever, holding your breath, cleansing your body of its sins over and over again.
Sergio had not bathed in years.
Years.
Years.
Years.
Years.
He said the words aloud so the others could hear, so they, too, would share his disbelief. Years without soap or warm water, without bathtub or robe, without cream or perfume. Years of smelling only your own briny scent of sweat and tears.
Sergio smiled.
They burned the clothes. They made a fire, right there on the schoolyard’s stone slabs. What should have been a joyous spectacle resembled a pyre for the nation’s traitors. Sergio watched his clothes turn to ash, then dust. A prelude to his own demise.
The students returned Monday morning and discovered the remains of the fire over recess. To spare the poor kids the truth, they were told that vandals had come through, burning things that did not belong to them.
This is how history is made: by blaming those who were not there and telling our children stories that absolve us of responsibility.
The Moral of the Story
the soldiers were given clean civilian clothes. Although they were small, they still hung off Sergio. He wasn’t given a mirror to admire his figure in, but he wouldn’t have recognized himself anyway. He joined the army at nineteen; he was now twenty-four. Yet his face reflected a whole lifetime of hardship and sacrifice.
No train ran from Verona to Carpi, since the bridge over the Po River had been bombed by the Allies. Or had it been the Germans? When you shifted allegiances in the middle of a war, it wasn’t clear who was responsible for attacks or whom to retaliate against. With the railroad out, a Red Cross van would be bringing home Sergio and the eight other men from his region. It was already late so they would have to wait until the next morning. Four men from Modena, a kid from Medolla, one from Mirandola, another from Camposanto, and the two friends from Carpi would all need to sit tight a bit longer before reuniting with their loved ones.
Although they finally had a decent bed in a room that was warm and comfortable enough, nobody could sleep. Excitement kept them awake for part of the night, with helplessness eventually taking its place. The young officer keeping watch over their sleeping quarters had given them a vague idea of what had happened in Italy while they had been gone. How the war had touched those who had stayed behind. It wasn’t just the prisoners of war who had felt fear and suffering; everyone back home had been running on anxiety and terror throughout six years of hostilities. Tables laid bare, and for evening fare nothing but watery broth set before slumped shoulders and threadbare cloth. What the soldiers returning from exile found most horrifying wasn’t how the conflict had played out over the years as much as its final outcome.
On April 25, 1945, the Partigiani liberated Genoa: the fascist siege was over. Archbishop of Milan Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster hosted a meeting between members of the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia38. The committee, led by Alfredo Pizzoni, met with Mussolini to demand his surrender. Mussolini refused and attempted to flee, but Partigiani soldiers found him the following morning on an escaping German convoy. On April 28, Il Duce was sentenced to death.
Benito Mussolini was executed in the village of Giulino di Mezzegra by Colonnello Valerio, along with his mistress Clara Petacci and sixteen others. Their bodies were transported to Milan, where they were publicly defiled. People sought revenge on their lifeless corpses, as if that could alter the course of history.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone
shower of pebbles
sudden avalanche
&nbs
p; of women with nothing to hide
and men who have been forever faithful
meteorites that pelt down on a planet
where all is well that ends well
for it is peopled with
the brilliant, the artless.
Rocks’ limpid glare
stoning of prayers
great words collapse, giving way to
a most punishing darkness.
Only the deserving will be forgiven
only the chosen will be deserving
only the faithful will be chosen
only those whose faith is judged admissible will be deemed sincere.
We
irreproachable gods of the human race
we
incorruptible and virtuous judges of the court of grace
where good is separated from evil
like the wheat
from the chaff.
To put a stop to further desecration, the bodies were strung up by the feet and hung from the roof of a filling station in Piazzale Loreto, where fifteen Partigiani had been executed and publicly displayed the previous year.
Eye for eye, corpse for corpse
tooth for tooth, rampage for rampage
death for death, noose for noose.
We will think highly of you only if
you prove that
your sentiments
are pure and free of
destructive intentions
we will be maleficent only if you are
injurious
only if you prove hurtful
dangerous
only if you initiate hostilities.
In any case
the fault will always
fall to you.
Our hands will remain unsullied,
our consciences washed
of all suspicion.
Revenge is best served cold, with a side of lukewarm acrimony and a steaming pile of hatred.
Behind the eyes we meet Page 15