by Luce d'Eramo
“Lie down here. And if you make a move to ‘service’ any of them, I’ll take you to the Gestapo.”
I fell asleep at once. They shook me a long time before I woke up: “Get up, dummy, and get out of here. If we catch you around again, I warn you, you’re in for it,” the marshal said. And, irritated at having protected me, he shoved me out with a kick in the butt by way of goodbye as I was leaving.
I headed for the station, following their directions. It was dawn, the air fresh, and I filled my lungs. I thought about what to do, walking briskly to get away from that area. I would turn off at the right moment.
But reluctantly I slowed up. I was afraid again. Who knows what bad blood existed between local contingents and occupational forces, between Fascist and Nazi authorities. The radio at the Lager canteen had called Mussolini’s new regime a “phantom government.” True, the stray troops, like the two soldiers from whom I had sponged supper, spoke of allegiance to the staunch ally stabbed in the back, but at the top? In fact, my father had always been vexed when my mother and I exalted the moral virtues of the German people. Yet his mother, my paternal grandmother, was of pure German blood, a descendant of Bavarian families transplanted in Italy at the time of the Napoleons, some of them related to a school of artists founded by Klaus associated with Canova. The first to stray was precisely my grandmother Bettina, who married an Apulian from an aristocratic family, namely my father’s father. But what did my grandparents have to do with anything now? I was losing my train of thought. Oh yes, my father. In Germany there were foreign ministries involved, here it was different, he couldn’t very well do as he did when I was in the Lager, when to punish me for my rash action he hadn’t lifted a finger for me, though in his position he could have come a hundred times to see for himself how I was living. Here if I ran into one of his colleagues, how would it look for him to be ignoring me?
My suicide attempt had satisfied his pride (of course the Frankfurt consul had reported it to him, to crow about the assistance he’d given me), and now an act of clemency toward his daughter the black sheep was essential. The more I thought about it, the more confident I was that it was now a matter of honor for him to find me. And how could I be sure that the marshal wasn’t sending word of my imminent arrival to the soldiers in Como? With a cool head, my story about wandering aimlessly around because I was happy to be back could have looked different to him, all the more so if he was afraid the Nazis might have freed me to use me for their own ends. He’d clearly said as much. So he’d acted like he was being hospitable and released me in deference to their documents, while still doing his duty to keep an eye on me; Machiavellian as he was about the question of fucking, he wouldn’t have taken any risks in this case.
I was quite certain that he was telegraphing not only Como but also the train station in Verona, as well as the bus terminal for coaches to Lombardy, and all checkpoints. This was not the time to head west. I was better off going east, farther into Veneto. It was futile to hope to pass unnoticed. In the hallway of the former school where I’d spent the night, I had seen wanted photos of fugitives with rewards on their heads, people from Piedmont, from Friuli, those nearly hypnotic faces on ID cards, the inexpressive stare waiting for the click. I pictured my face alongside them with an even higher reward—appropriate to my father’s prestige—for anyone furnishing information about me; after all, I thought in my malevolent mood at the time, he would still find a way to not pay (I needed to hate him, to buck myself up). Besides, it was a difficult time, no one trusted anyone else, who would go out of his way to hide me? I had no connections, how would I? How could I establish contacts, at the drop of a hat, the daughter of Fascists, my mother secretary to the Fascist Party since the days of France, with two gold medals from the Grand Council for her assistance to emigrants (she worked night and day to establish nurseries, send children to summer camps, organize theatrical performances, arrange for Fascist Befanas, distribute weekly food parcels). The daughter of notorious Fascists, more than ever in view, repatriated from the Nazi camps. Martine had correctly expressed what everyone would think: that I had saved myself by playing my Fascist cards. What’s worse, those cards had played themselves. There had been no consul to release Grùscenka or Martine. In the words of the marshal, they would have been fair game. The little schoolgirl could afford the luxury of playing Joan of Arc because when all was said and done she wasn’t taking any risks. Being who I was, whatever I did was indulged.
I was crushed by a sorrow and shame that paralyzed my resolve. I had to shed my social class. Changing my name in Italy would be of little use unless I were able to pass through the front. But I despised the Americans and the king. And then what? I would find safety, nothing more, given that I didn’t feel like joining up with the Americans. Assuming getting through the front was feasible. My face lined up with the other wanted persons stared at me from the hallway of the former school I’d just left, as if I had actually seen it there the night before. To begin with, I had to get rid of the documents that I had in my duffel bag. A tremendous decision, and time was against me. It wasn’t salvation, but it was one less risk of being found.
Coming down a side street, I saw a bunch of people being herded by several SS soldiers. They were heading in my direction and I stopped at the corner to watch them. Men and women in civilian clothes moved along slowly, their legs jerking when a Nazi boot kicked them in the shins. The SS, their machine guns pointed at the prisoners’ backs, kept glancing behind them and looking up at the windows of the houses, meanwhile scanning the human pack from side to side, shoving their gun barrels into stragglers’ backs at times.
When they drew near me, an SS (there were six in all) pointed his gun at me, motioning with his head for me to get out of the way. They’re afraid, I thought, they’re in a hurry; they won’t shoot me because they don’t want to wake the neighborhood. I stood there, staring at the SS. Another one caught up to him and came running toward me, his footsteps silent, like in an ambush.
“Pass auf, ich schreie,” watch out or I’ll scream, I told him distinctly in German. Maybe he was surprised by the language, because he stopped. “Take one more step toward me and we’ll all scream,” I said. “Mind you, it’s our signal.”
In an instant the SS sergeant who was following the captives pronounced “Alt” and stepped forward; with his head he motioned two soldiers to go to the rear of the small procession, pointed two others to the sides and a fifth to the head of the group, facing the prisoners, each soldier with his finger on the trigger. When he reached the spot where the SS to whom I had spoken had been standing, he said in a soft voice that did not shatter the early-morning stillness: “Join the column at once or we’ll kill you all. On the count of three. Eins zwo…”
I jumped into the ranks. There was only the clatter of my boots. I absolutely had to get rid of my documents and the repatriation certificate. If they found them I was lost. All I could do was dump the duffel bag. A pang at the thought of the money. No, it was in my pocket, I touched it.
“Hands where I can see them,” said the soldier who was gripping me tightly. “Try putting a hand in your pocket again and I’ll shoot you.”
In fact, I got so distracted thinking about where to hide the money so they wouldn’t seize it that I forgot that the problem was the duffel bag. After several deserted streets, doors began opening. The SS pushed harder to make us hurry. I faked a sprained foot and, bending over in simulated pain, let the duffel bag slip to the ground. Promptly prodded by the barrel of a machine gun, I looked back at the bag as if I wanted to recover it, but the soldier shoved it aside with a kick. I glanced quickly at the number of the door where it lay on the ground and, hopping along on one foot, engraved on my mind the outline of the building and the houses that followed, counting the doors until I read the name of the street. For what it’s worth, I thought, for what it’s worth. I continued memorizing the streets we crossed, sometimes pretending to set down my sprained foot painfully, distressed at not
feeling reborn, at not experiencing the importance of what I had done, unable to enjoy my private freedom due to the anxiety of not forgetting the name of the street and the effort of having to hop along on one foot only, alongside those who had been rounded up and who looked at me unkindly; I was oppressed by a sense of exhibitionism stronger than any other motivation.
III
That this is how it happened, I later denied even to myself. I had to turn fifty before acknowledging that I had been repatriated. What I said initially—so often that I came to believe it myself—was that I had been deported to Dachau with my comrades after the strike. I buried the act performed on that distant August 2 in Verona as something to be forgotten. I wanted it to be the Nazis who had captured and imprisoned me, so that gradually my first months as a volunteer were obscured, the period at IG Farben became hazy, and even my time at the K-Lager in Dachau faded into the shadows, lest the situations it held force me to remember all the rest.
The memories shrank. They focus around the escape from Dachau, then reappear at the hotel in Mainz. What remained to me of that entire wartime experience were a few patchy weeks of wandering through the Third Reich, between a solitary escape and the wall falling on my back: a time apart whose memories—not even disclosed in full—skimmed the surface and did not cause any problems. Suffice it to say that I referred to that period as “my German parenthesis,” as if it were a concluded preface, a preamble to the wheelchair, without which I was unable to move, the historic background to what was more a technical inconvenience than anything else (so I told myself).
The reader encountered it at the beginning of this book, where I described my escape from the concentration camp and my first weeks of life as a fugitive. The girl in “Thomasbräu” and in “Asylum at Dachau” hardly seems the same as the one from “In the Ch 89” and the fugitive from Verona. Judging by how I saw myself in ’53–’54 when I wrote those early pages, I’d been a runaway concerned solely with surviving, with coping, avoiding any attachments so as to have more freedom of movement. Not a trace of the need to “fight together” that had animated me at IG Farben, of the compulsion to find myself back among comrades that in Verona had driven me to join the deported strangers. My going to Germany and my returning there had contracted into a single sensation of escape, and the images I’d retained all centered around this amputated perception.
It took me until 1961, when I wrote “As Long as the Head Lives” (later I will describe under what circumstances), to dare to acknowledge openly that I had gone to the Lagers voluntarily. After fifteen years of confiding it in secret, whispering it to only a very few individuals, increasingly intimidated by others’ reactions to that “rash action” of mine, until its significance had nearly been erased from my mind. And even then, in ’61, I mentioned it only in passing, merely as a topic by which I had tried to move the Soviet captain to pity so that he would take me into Russia.
And then it took me another fifteen years to admit that I had returned to the Lagers of my own free will. Why so much resistance? Why in particular was my about-face in Verona the last memory to surface? Even a year ago, when I wrote “In the Ch 89,” I was unable to get to the repatriation. I described the strike up to the time it fell apart. I stopped my memory at the part where it failed.
That’s what I’m now interested in understanding. What was the origin of that mental block; how had I been able to successfully ignore the tangle of that violent past for so long, believing perhaps that I was putting the lesson to use? Given that I’ve slipped back into my social class, as Martine and Alain had predicted, how had an experience that so marked me been able to settle at the bottom of my thoughts, almost as if it had never happened? Or maybe it had been at work subconsciously, despite my having wanted to ignore it, seeing as it has at last become clear to me, now that I no longer have reserve worlds in which to invent myself. It all came back to me, even that dawn in Verona, the repubblichino marshal’s words in my ears, the human herd steered from the end of a side street by the SS, the consul’s face superimposed over the softened voice promising “the assistance appropriate to your status” in the neat clinic in Frankfurt. Decades to find myself face-to-face with that leap that I had impulsively and blindly made thirty years ago (and meanwhile my hair has turned gray).
But to be able to reconstruct when this repression lasting thirty years of my life began, I must first fill in the gaps of the repressed experience, to see whether folding a social exigency into an individual vision was entirely my subsequent interpretation, or whether that memory lapse hadn’t had its origins in reality, in harsh situations that I didn’t dare remember.
*
Already on the freight train to Dachau, I knew what it meant to be truly on the other side. Four days crammed in with about fifty deported “Aryans” (Jews were in another car), with only the packed lunch that they had given us in Verona—bread, cheese, and fruit—regretting not having swallowed enough water in the drink they’d allowed us before loading us onto the train. Between endless stops when we flung ourselves against the sealed doors and begged for water, making a deafening racket before falling silent, unmoving, worn out by the waiting, the train would start creaking and jolting on the rails again, and we went back to moving around the car like a caged pack of hounds.
I remember certain sensations. We sat in the straw, between one another’s legs to save space. I was crowded between the thighs of my human backrest, in whose company I spent the entire trip. I’d asked another young man who was leaning against me to let me draw my legs up a moment, since they’d fallen asleep on me, and to use my knees as a seat back for a little while. So I was huddled up in a sort of fetal pose, except for my head, which slumped on the shoulder of the man whose chest supported me. His face was leaning on my cheek, and he breathed the sour stench of wet coal into my neck. I in turn took in that rotten egg smell, which rid my nostrils of the persistent reek of diarrhea that polluted the freight car. It must have been night because no light seeped in. The shafts of light that earlier filtered through the chinks in the car had been obliterated. Clasped in that embrace we fought wearily, amid the lurching of the train, the clatter of the moving wheels, the moaning of people racked with thirst. In a parched voice that croaked in his throat, the man spat words of suspicion into my tympanum, and I muttered sarcastic remarks in his ear with some difficulty, because the grating of my tongue scraped my palate; meanwhile, in the dark I tried to read the indistinct gleam that was his eyes, whenever he raised his head to counter me.
My human backrest was one of the deportees from the group in Verona, twenty-five years old.
“I was rounded up by mistake,” he’d said, introducing himself to me when we started out.
But in the freight car, in his detailed way of asking questions, I’d recognized that certain probing tone, the look, the words, typical of Martine, Grùscenka, and Alain. And I surmised that he was not someone rounded up by mistake.
The third night I decided to let off steam: “Stop lying,” I told him. “You’re a communist partisan, I know it.”
I felt him get defensive, physically. And, a little at a time, he came out with words along these lines:
“Not bad, your little performance in Verona, too bad you then gave yourself away, oh yeah, you made the mistake of forgetting that you had twisted your ankle and, as soon as they piled us into the Kommandantur, I saw you walk normally. The Nazis didn’t notice, everyone knows they believe in miracles, but I’m more skeptical…” And: “Cute, though, that SS sergeant, with the nice silencer he had, he could have bumped you off, right? The hell he could. When you told him watch out or I’ll scream, it’s our signal, he immediately lowered his gun. See, it just so happens that I know German. But tell me: whose signal?”
“Idiot,” I hissed in his neck, my throat dry, “I’m sitting here in your excrement…”
“Excuse me, you’re the one shitting on me,” he corrected.
“If we deportees don’t trust one another, it’
s over,” I went on. “They’re the ones who divide us, that way even our morale is in their hands. Isn’t bodily shit enough for you? You have to soil my mind too?”
“You want me to confide to you where our partisan bases are in Veneto? Locations, strengths…?”
I don’t know how many hours later, our human tangle was on its feet again (we took turns sitting on the floor). Making our way through the car to reach one of the two cans for feces that were at opposite ends, with my friend-enemy leading me by the hand in the continuous bustle of people going up and down nonstop to the cans, amid the groans of dismay and distress (and then also of relief) of those who let go and shit in their pants along the endless route, I suddenly forgave my vilifier. He was right, I was at fault; I demanded that a comrade trust me when I myself hadn’t trusted him (I hadn’t told him anything about my history).
After waiting for each other at the can, we were able to continue the trip glued to the wall: a coveted spot; those who secured it defended it tooth and nail. My friend-enemy welded himself to it. Standing, his back against the partition, he stuck to it with a kind of blankness, his face touched by a shaft of light coming from a nearby chink.
“Ah,” he sighed, “stick close to me.” He closed his eyes, his mouth open, his breath increasingly dry and fetid.
Clinging to his neck, against his chest, practically locked together because I had to talk into his ear amid the jolts and groans and din of the moving train, I told him about my life, about volunteering, IG Farben, my parents, repatriation, everything. As I told him, I wept. “You see? They accepted me,” I said. (I was alluding to the Soviet and French workers.) But just then I had to dart away to the can.
When I came back to look for him, he was gone. He had even given up the wall spot to get away from me.
For hours I went back and forth in the car from one can to the other, zigzag, scanning the faces in the shafts of sunlight, but he must have been moving too because I didn’t find him. For the fourth day in a row they hadn’t opened up the car, and thirst intensified my aggression (at least I think so); added to that, the bag of plums we’d each been given when we left had acted as an infernal purgative. As soon as the sliding doors opened in the night, I hurled myself like a wildcat toward the gusts of air that streamed in from outside, smelling of hay. Maybe I shoved my way through a bit heatedly, not to say punching and kicking, because a hand grabbed me, an arm closed around my neck, and his face, bathed in a ray of moonlight, gave me a hateful look as he said, “Fascist blood lives up to its name.”