by Luce d'Eramo
Every ounce of energy drained out of me, I looked at him, half-strangled, my head twisted in the vise of his arm: “That’s all that…” I stammered.
He let me go, saying, “I may be thirsty, but not thirsty enough to drink up your bullshit.” He pushed me away with his elbow and slipped in among the deportees.
Not long afterward we reached our destination. He helped the sickest passengers jump down off the train. It was still night, amid deserted tracks in the middle of the countryside. I sat on the edge of the floorboard so I could slide down. He gave me a hand.
“The performance is over,” he whispered to me, “you can go home.”
*
Subsequently, I met my friend-enemy only once more, about two months later. I was in line in front of a K-Lager infirmary to pick up an ointment for the scabies that gnawed at me. He was a few meters behind me, on the men’s line that stretched alongside ours, the women’s queue. His eyes signaled me not to speak. He looked at me as if seeing me lifted a weight off his chest. Still gesturing with his eyes, he suggested changing places, to get closer. Shaved head, dark circles under his eyes, a shadow of himself.
I had so hated him during those two months that I was surprised to be glad to see him. We were now side by side, close but separated by a hundred insuperable centimeters.
“Ciao,” his lips said.
“Ciao.”
“We should keep in touch.”
“Now?” I had already planned my escape down to the tiniest details, it was a matter of days.
“Why? Did you give in?”
“Me?” I felt a wave of resentment: “Fascist blood?” My anger quickly passed, however. “Listen,” I said, barely using my voice, only moving my lips, which he stared at intently, “I’ll tell you a secret that I haven’t told anyone. I have a plan to escape. Listen to me, come with me.”
“And the others? Have you thought about the others?”
I contemplated the wraith of a man who had spoken those words. Sorrow strangled me; how to communicate to him, in the few seconds we had, everything that had built up in me during my time at the K-Lager in Dachau? My line, not as long as his, was moving more quickly. He kept moving a place ahead to stay beside me, running the risk that the deportees might get angry, that the SS might bash his head in with a rifle butt. Finally, I replied:
“The others? I despise victims.” I looked at him, torn apart by a kind of savage love for those victims I despised. I stepped back a place, pushing the woman who’d been behind me into my spot. My eyes sought an answer from my friend-enemy as he looked at me from the depths of his gaunt face.
“I searched for you,” I told him.
“They tortured me,” he said, holding out two fingers without nails, the sensitive flesh exposed to the quick. “And two months in solitary confinement. But I didn’t talk.”
“Come with me,” I told him, moving back another place.
He shook his head no.
“Do you blame me?”
No again, and he couldn’t contain a boyish smile.
I was about to step back again, but the Kapo, quicker than I, lashed me with her whip. “You have to come, understand?” I cried loudly now, as an SS dragged me toward the infirmary. I broke free, exclaiming “Heil Hitler,” standing at attention in front of the jailer, who, not knowing how to interpret the authoritative tone of my Nazi salute, took his hands off of me.
I just had time to turn around and glimpse the face of my friend-enemy: “You have to live,” my lips repeated with a complicit smile. “Let’s go,” I then ordered the SS, glancing at the Kapo with a sudden feeling of indulgence and turning one last time to my tortured comrade, who silently mouthed “Good luck” (were his eyes laughing at me?).
My Kapo was a middle-aged black triangle, a former druggie; they said she’d even sell her brother for a pinch of snow, and now she had us to trade for a rare Gardenal tablet.
*
My memories of the K-Lager have not faded. I can summarize them in a few paragraphs.
Dachau took me by surprise. I hadn’t imagined it to be the way it was. It was talked about at Höchst, horrible rumors floated around, but they had no substance in our perception. It was like the ogre in fairy tales, at most an oppressive nightmare in which monsters transform into one another and facts have no veracity.
Astonishment was perhaps the strongest feeling I experienced on arriving in Dachau. To the point of sometimes not believing what I was seeing with my own eyes at the very moment I saw it. Perhaps this was one reason why, back in the civilized world, I suppressed for decades those abysmal depths that were roused only in my sleep when a scene from the past gripped my soul like an octopus, raking up ghostly appearances that again seemed unreal.
The shock I felt at the time is still today something that I never forget when talking to someone who has never been in a K-Lager (concentration camp) or T-Lager (death camp).
In the twelve weeks that I remained in Dachau I did not for a moment stop being stunned by the incredible number of privations the human body can endure. I even laughed at the thought of how outraged I’d been over the foreigners’ treatment at Höchst, where, by comparison, people lived in comfort and freedom, including the Osten and P. Yet here, where we inhaled the intolerable, indignation virtually died in a kind of dazed stupor.
To be truthful, at the beginning I got a little worked up; I was disheartened by human nature, seeing the incredible speed with which a thinking brain (mine first of all) adapts to the most unlivable conditions. Later, however, I realized that it was not surprising if minds in weakened bodies were extinguished as well. The light of reason was focused on its own vital breath. The body’s sluggishness made the brain drowsy; it had only enough energy to get by one more month, one more day, one more hour. And in a few weeks I was wholly absorbed by another discovery that then turned all my criteria at the time upside down.
I’m referring to the absolute normality of crime, physical violence, informing on others, and perversion as routine practice in day-to-day dealings, all quickly seeming natural, familiar. I had already felt a strange joy at being alive, there in the freight car; a kind of rapture when, upon arrival at the K-Lager, I’d dropped to the ground in the middle of a bunch of women, on the gravel of a courtyard, where we were then kicked, beaten, spat on, all of us lying there, docilely apathetic, until they shoved us into a barrack where the bliss of being finally able to stretch out on the floor abruptly erased our torments. On the faces of my companions, who lay on the floor with real gasps of pleasure, I had seen the same taste for brutalization that shamed me in my sleep.
At first what humiliated me was the immoderate ability to enjoy the least bit of relief. It wasn’t like at Höchst, where I restrained my anger. Here I was so engrossed in what I was doing, meticulously wrapping myself in a blanket, salivating over a mouthful of bread slowly chewed in a corner of the barrack, that basically every other thought remained abstract to me. I ignored the reproachful looks, which didn’t even begin to get through to me.
“What? Is this what you came back for? To sleep with lice? To drool over the most rancid swill? What about the struggle? A couple of weeks and the struggle is forgotten?” Silence. I yawned.
“Who would I struggle with?” I answered myself.
The first fifteen days had ticked away slowly in one of the isolation barracks, in Quarantine Block, along with dozens of foreigners dehumanized like me and like the SS men who occasionally came to inspect us, Ukrainian and German lumpenproletarians, even Tartars, in whom brutality was so natural as to seem guileless. I had to keep telling myself “they’re monsters” so as not to let myself be taken in by their Selbstverständlichkeit* in enjoying their cruel impulses, like slapping you around, kicking over a full mess-tin, hawking a gob of spit on a blanket—not spitefully, though: just as a matter of course, to pass the time.
Then came the biggest discouragement. The Nazis did not issue me a red triangle—assigned to political detainees—but branded
me with a black one, allocated to the “asocials.” And they assigned me a bunk in one of the black triangles’ barracks. The red triangles’ Block was situated on another street inside the K-Lager, and I couldn’t easily get to it. The men were even farther away, separated from the women. The Osten and P, like the male and female yellow triangles (the Jews), were virtually inaccessible to us Western and Central Europeans. Impossible to know if Grùscenka was there. The barracks seemed endless to me. Some said there were twenty, some fifty, and some a hundred thousand of us interned in the camp, but I didn’t know anyone who had made a map of the K-Lager and its outbuildings, like my comrades at Höchst had done, and to this day I am unable to estimate.
I know that for days I looked for Martine. I didn’t find her. I scanned all the faces at the canteen, at roll call, in the lavatories: no one from IG Farben.
Gradually I began to wonder if I had really come here to share the fate of my old comrades, since each day I cared less about not finding them. I reached the point where I dreaded running into one of them.
IV
I had to do as Grùscenka had done from her surveillance post in the underground toilets of the Ch 89: look around to form as accurate (and exhaustive) a picture of the situation as possible for myself, and quickly too, before I became so malnourished that I would no longer have the strength to think. The most likely time for observing was during evening roll call in the yard, when the K-Lager internees returned from work, but I mustn’t overlook the lavatories at dawn. In addition to Sundays. And at night I could get to know my bunkmates when they returned from their shifts in the factory or in the quarries.
My barrack contained mostly alcoholics of all ages. I counted twenty-two drunks when I arrived. They were all flabby women, their features blurred by alcohol, docile and whiny about the utter tedium. Though genuinely embittered toward the Nazis, they couldn’t be trusted: one drop of schnapps involuntarily loosened their tongues.
There were also two nervous petty thieves who were always stealing our rations. When a prostitute reported them to the management, they accused her of having instigated them to revolt, and the woman was exterminated in the infirmary, with an injection, like they usually did with the incurables (in fact, she was suffering from last-stage syphilis). One night, the two petty thieves robbed each other, partly because by now it was difficult for them to steal a single crumb from one of us: we had set up sentry shifts in the barrack, one hour apiece day and night, and if they made the slightest suspicious move, we were on them, beating them up: “Call the Nazis if you can.” They stabbed each other, and were immediately immobilized by the German shepherds and shot down by machine-gun fire in the yard.
The most quarrelsome, however, were the professional prostitutes, about ten of them, from every country, most ravaged by venereal diseases. I remember a young Bohemian with clouded vision who felt each object with her fingers and took tiny steps when she walked, and who, for fear of being exterminated, firmly insisted that she could see quite well as the women waved a hand in front of her unblinking face: “Lucky you, with your good eyes!” they laughed, winking at one another.
“That’s right,” the young woman replied. “I can see.”
“So what’s this?” They held up a potato. The girl reached out her hands. “No, don’t touch. Guess. Go on, guess.” Her face would light up when by chance she got it right.
But the “asocial” who made the most lasting impression on me was a Flemish girl who came from a camp of free workers.
One evening she went to sleep in the barrack of a Slav whom she’d recently chosen as a friend. After having sex with her, the guy had gone to the toilet and sent another man back to the bunk. After a certain number of successions the girl had become suspicious, not only of her friend’s virility—every half hour he was ready again—but also of certain differences (one time he was fatter, another time thinner), until she noticed the coming and going between the bunk beds and started to resist, futilely, in a silent scuffle. She couldn’t say when she’d started to scream, howling so loud that the guards had come running. She filed a complaint against the Slav, but the facts (and male mentality) were against her: Why hadn’t she stayed in her barrack? They assigned her to a brothel on the Russian front. But when she raised her fist against the portrait of Hitler, blaming him for all the abuses she’d suffered (her words), they deported her to Dachau. Here she practiced a degrading prostitution, going off to the latrines with SS of the lowest ranks, German or Ukrainian farmhands. She would return to the barrack good-natured in her loose skin of starved fat, her eyes gentle, and she always offered some of us a little piece of her measly earnings, a bit of wurst, a hunk of bread, a packet of jelly.
Three pink triangles lived on a pair of top bunks: Danish (or Norwegian?) lesbians who ignored the entire universe; always intent on washing together and combing one another’s hair, spotlessly clean given the environment, refined, gaunt, they showered one another with concern and caresses until late into the night, consumed by a communal ardor that made them seem happy in our eyes, beyond hunger and brutality, wholly immersed in reciprocal tenderness. When approached, they answered politely but in monosyllables, and hastened to retreat to their bunks. Sometimes I saw them spoon-feeding one another in turn, all three from the same mess-tin.
We had only one green triangle in the barrack, that is, a common criminal. She was a French prostitute, an infanticide, her face disfigured by some kind of incident as a result of which she had no chin, almost no nose, and a slit for a mouth; her eyes were constantly wide open because the skin was drawn taut by the scars. It seems she was exceptional at giving blow jobs. I was there when a well-built, good-looking SS sergeant spent his nights at the window of the barrack begging her to come out, giving her as many as three chocolate bars at one time, just to tempt her to join him. Someone had reported him. Rumor had it that it had been Lulù herself. The Nazi sergeant seemed desolate, not so much for being sent to the front with one of those Strafbataillonen in which discipline was harsher than in the Foreign Legion, as for no longer being able to see Lulù. Before leaving, he gave her all his pay, even his savings, and countless things to eat. She uttered something in a toothless mumble, through the scar with no lips, as she put away his gifts and, noticing that I was watching her, moved close to my ear: “There are many ways to make them pay, you too should learn them.”
I never quarreled with those women, who on Sunday regularly came to blows, except for the three lesbians. Spiteful tricks, mockery, accusations, and scenes always played out on Sundays, when forty-two women got in one another’s way in a cramped, overcrowded room (eleven by five meters) with seven three-story double bunks. They ripped one another’s coveralls, tore out what little remaining hair each had. On weekdays they were taciturn; at most they talked to themselves, feverish, after evening roll call, when each would lie moaning on her pallet, sighing to herself with her eyes open.
It was awesome to hear them swear their hatred for the Nazis, weary of the guards who had enjoyed making them “sing” for a drop of schnapps or a pinch of tobacco.
Even though I was the only Italian and no one understood my language, I lived in terror of talking in my sleep. That was another reason why I didn’t want to think about my old comrades: What if I dreamed I was talking with Martine? I might give myself away in French, let a mention of Frankfurt-Höchst slip out, say my real name.
There wasn’t a bunkmate who didn’t mumble words in her restless sleep, and I had the feeling I wasn’t the only one straining her ears to catch some meaning in those scraps of disconnected phrases. I scrutinized each face when I awoke, looking for a possible Judas smile as evidence that I had revealed something. If I had exposed myself, how long would it then take the camp’s management to send my new fingerprints to IG Farben? To have them compared to those that were kept on file there, to see if by chance they were identical…?
As soon as one of us slipped away, we all surrounded her. We made the drunkards breathe in our face
s and the first one who smelled vaguely of alcohol had to account for how she’d gotten it, prodded by pinpricks and burns.
I couldn’t even rely on the support of other internees. The black triangles were shunned by everyone, especially by the red triangles, who feared they were informing to the SS. The “asocials” were considered much more treacherous than the green triangles, ordinary criminals, who had their own code of silence. There was talk of a well-known anti-Nazi militant, whom the Lagerführers had purposely assigned to the “asocials” to undermine his reputation among the deportees from the start. Their plan had succeeded: the man had remained isolated until he slit his wrists.
At one time I’d been saved by virtue of my notoriety as a Fascist volunteer; the Italian consulate knew I existed, there were too many factors that stood in the way of cleanly eliminating me. And above all, let’s face it, I had not been considered dangerous.
But now things were different. No one would have claimed the existence of an Elena Pareschi, a recidivist and a clandestine. The false identity that I had given the Nazis was their license to kill me.
So, best not to breathe a word. Only your companion from the freight car knows who you are and even if he despises you, he won’t betray you. Continue looking around without attracting attention, but be quick about it, before you’re too debilitated to be able to do anything.