by Luce d'Eramo
“But of course, I believe you,” she reassured me in the gruff tone her voice took on when she was sad. “Be at peace, Luzi, you were right.”
But I’m afraid I went there mainly to restock my supply of drugs from the various doctors at the university clinic where I’d been hospitalized at the end of the war, counting on a certain popularity that I hoped would carry over from my earlier stay in Pavilion VIII. I went around discreetly showing one and the other my bone X-rays, which I had brought with me to induce them to compassion, and to obtain the precious prescriptions I needed to buy the ampules at the pharmacy. I told them about the Lagers to move them even more.
Sometimes when you go astray and touch bottom, you finally come out on the other side. And I had started to recover. But what I meant to say now is that deep inside I was secretly aware that it was I who had failed. Simply because the class leap in Dachau had been so extreme, the terror of it so violent, that it drove me to take refuge in oblivion. Actually acknowledging it, however? Never! The lady couldn’t admit to her failures, she made others pay for them. The lady understood human frailties so she relativized everything so as not to really side with those beneath her, with whom she declared herself to be so sympathetic. She felt different from the people of her bourgeois class solely because she criticized their conformist lifestyle no matter how they were defined (right or left), while continuing in fact—though with her fruitless reservations—to live like them herself.
You know, snake, it’s not that I’m now shocked by my small-mindedness. I know that human beings’ need to find significance is such that sometimes they seek it even in crime (I had already seen that in Dachau), which wasn’t even my pathetic case. Still, it gives me no pleasure, even academically since I can’t do anything about it, to ascertain that I spent half my life playing hide-and-seek with myself.
That’s how you want it? So be it. That’s how I reacted for thirty years. And we became one and the same, my snake. Even when I finally recognized you, at Villa della Pace, and cried to myself, “I’m a snake,” even then I ignored you coiled up there where you had firmly lodged yourself: in my rancor toward all those who had doomed me and pushed me into your coils.
You want proof? See “As Long as the Head Lives.” In the story where I shed my neo-racism toward my disabled brothers, I accepted as my own the judgment that had devastated me after the war, by writing, Yes, that’s right, I went to the Lagers because I was a Fascist, and, oh, the Soviet captain, though from a country that had seen a revolution from below, did not reject me for it; indeed, he genuinely took pity on me and had effectively helped me without hiding behind slippery words. That was enough for me.
Look, my poor snake, I haven’t lost heart because of that. Gone are the days when feeling like a worm demoralized and depressed me even more. I’ll tell you my one last thought: I am no worse than the others. I am like them (those under your control, I mean), but a bit more rigorous.
At least I was spared one thing in this seesawing back-and-forth, and I kiss the ground in gratitude: I never bought a social conscience with the small change of an ideological label, just as at one time people bought indulgences to get to paradise at a lesser cost.
But that didn’t spare me from also becoming your prey, albeit in a more abstruse and arduous way because you left me nothing to stand on, no matter where I turned. Where did you get the slimy nerve to do such an abominable thing? Just at the time when I’d come closest to escaping from you forever, when I went to the Lagers of my own accord.
And now, my dear enemy, I will crush that reptilian head of yours with the decisive proof (thank God for my mother’s letters, which provided it). Doesn’t the complete absence of the Collis Metall Werke episode tell you something? Only at this moment does the visual image I had of it ten months later materialize before me: it was during the time I was in hiding when, going back toward Höchst, I passed through Mannheim and that underground factory was shown to me from outside. So, before I discovered you and convinced myself that I had always, solely, been on your side, you forked tongue, you had attempted an opposite maneuver to make me believe that, in the Third Reich, I was wholly on the side of the oppressed, fully with them. So that I wouldn’t look for you where you had so cleverly, insidiously coiled up and retreated, there, in the mental reservation with which I had thought to decamp, not entirely because I refused to go back to Italy, but in part, yes, when I had entertained the plan to get myself transferred to the Collis Metall Werke. Most likely I intended to introduce myself to my new comrades in Mannheim as a deportee, without having to deal with being a volunteer Fascist student. But how would I do it? By securing that transfer with a recommendation from above; that is, by taking advantage of the social status of my origins. I had later become aware of the contradiction, for one thing because my relations with my fellow Lager mates had improved, but this oscillation had existed: I wanted to be a worker, while letting people know who I was, thereby deep down laying the ground for the consideration due to my bourgeois circumstances. The fear I subsequently had of reverting to that temptation—using class privilege to save myself from the fate of vulnerable commoners—and wanting to throw away my papers so as to put myself in a similarly helpless position, is even more understandable. But, in this light, the fact that after Dachau and Thomasbräu I got myself hired at Siemens in Munich, again using my real name, is no longer just the boldness of a nineteen-year-old carried away by her impregnability: it’s you popping up again, Mr. Snake, as though I was unconsciously holding on to the possibility of resorting to high places.
Then I’d once again shut off that means of salvation—though hastily, almost as if I didn’t trust myself anymore—by stealing and falsifying doctors’ notes at the factory, a crime that was summarily punished. And when I disappeared, after three weeks at Siemens, I had once more discarded my name (and my class) by sending the factory ID card with my true identity to my mother.
So I was inured against you because in any case, you see, choices do in fact help, but then I didn’t know you as I do today. Now I’m much more alerted to you. I am well aware that our grappling isn’t over (by now this is how it is, I too have my coils around you). But you also know that, despite your deceitful tricks, you had not completely beaten me when I’d escaped from Dachau: love for my comrades still led me back to Höchst, to the place where I had joined their struggle. You know very well that later on, over the course of my life, my excesses and confusions were the results of your poison, true, but they were also the cries by which I called out to them, those lost comrades, as I remained atop the pillar of silence where I unknowingly kept them within me.
And now I am fully aware (you know that, right?), also knowing the aftermath, as I return to the place where my steps led me on that night thirty-two years ago to find my IG Farben comrades at Höchst.
*
It’s February 7, 1945, the Americans are deployed beyond Worms, I have to hurry if I want to be in time to reach my old Lager, the unconscious destination of my about-face in Verona that now seems to have been predestined from the start.
I slept in Mannheim, in a barrack with internees working at the Collis Metall Werke underground factory where I had once thought of being transferred, from the outside a snow-covered hill with bunker-type access. I waited all day for a chance to jump between two carriages of a train bound for Frankfurt. I finally did it when it was twilight and, hanging on to a bumper, my hands and face stung by frost, I reached Höchst. I started walking to Mainz at night; the dry air seemed almost warm after the trip on the bumpers. In the total darkness I made out my barracks: Pfaffenwiese 300, Ledigenheim Lager.
I crawl along the ground and lift the lowest strand of the barbed wire fence. I’m hesitant to press my index finger on the sharp metal points that are not charged by the electric current. I’ll see my IG Farben comrades again. I slip along the wooden barracks and I’m just at my dorm when I see a girl come out:
“Carla, is it you?”
“L
ucia!”
We look at each other wordlessly, like ghosts in the darkness of that February night.
“Didn’t they repatriate you?” she asks.
“Then they deported me to Dachau and I escaped.”
“You shouldn’t have come back here, it’s worse than before.”
“What about you, Carla?”
“They released me after the strike, Luigi too. We’re still together as before, but we’re holding our breath. We’re waiting for the war to end.”
Carla has lost weight. I can’t make out colors but she no longer seems like the big rosy girl she used to be. Her voice is drawn.
“You’ve changed,” I say.
“You too. How did you get in?”
I tell her quickly.
“Please, don’t come to us. The war is almost over. We don’t need any new trouble right now.”
“And the others?” I ask.
“The jinx is gone. If it’s Martine and Grùscenka you want to know about, zilch. Didn’t you find them in Dachau? Pina is seeing a Russian guy, Jacqueline is in the Krankenrevier (the camp infirmary); she sprayed acid in her eyes so she wouldn’t have to work but she used the wrong dose and she’s going blind. But, look, I don’t want to linger with you, they might see us. Go on, clear out, don’t get me in trouble just now.” She starts to return to the barrack and says, “You scare me, you know, you look like a felon.” She closes the door behind her.
I lean against the wooden wall. I’ll go to the Russians, maybe they’ll take me in. A felon, I repeat to myself, and it wrings my heart. My mind suddenly finds solace with the Flemish girl and Lulù (help me, you two, from up there):
Two days before I escaped from Dachau, they had scuffled with two political internees during evening roll call.
“Murderer,” a red triangle shouted at Lulù, “you turned in our comrades.”
“You bet, ladies,” Lulù replied. “Mais oui, mesdames, mesdames,” she repeated, “mesdames.”
“And you, fucking the oppressors!” the political internees threw at the Flemish girl. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
That night I’d heard a commotion behind the barrack in the K-Lager. I glued my face to the windowpane. I glimpsed Lulù from behind, kneeling with her head in the pants of an SS soldier who, standing in front of her, was kicking her and yelling, trying to wrench her head. The Flemish girl appeared, raising a clenched fist to the soldier and screaming, “Filthy Hitler, filthy Hitler.”
The soldier had put two fingers in his mouth (I imagine), because three long whistles pierced the darkness. Lulù had broken away.
“I bit a Nazi dick,” her raucous slit of a mouth crowed triumphantly to the Flemish girl, who was still waving her fist, and, dragging her by the hand, she ran and hid in the barrack.
The soldiers had come with leaden steps. They’d seized both of them. The Flemish girl looked at me, white as a sheet, her voice expressionless: “Tell what they did to me,” she mumbled.
“Tell what I did instead,” Lulù shouted, her hand raised to the sky.
Two machine-gun bursts exploded near the fence. Two days later I fled from that Lager and now I whisper, “Help me, you two,” as I move away from the wall of my longed-for barrack at Frankfurt-Höchst; I’ll go to the Russians, they weren’t programmed for individualism, they won’t reject me. I lie on the ground and crawl to the fence on all fours.
“Halt!” A male voice, German. I lie still, as I’ve seen cockroaches do when playing dead. Cockroaches can think. But the steps move closer, a foot pokes me. I steal a peek from between lowered lids; the eye of a gun barrel is staring at me.
“Stand up, let’s go.”
With the rifle prodding my back, I walk to the Lagerführer’s office. Some phone calls are made. A kick shoves me into a corner.
At some point, I don’t know when, my former Lagerführer comes in; tall, imposing, wearing boots, he slams the door angrily. But as soon as he sees me he’s stunned. His face relaxes. A smile plays on his lips. He sends the guards away with a slight wave of his fingers.
“You are Lucia M.,” he says (but his tone is questioning).
“No.”
“You are Lucia M.,” he says, more and more impressed. “You are Lucia M.,” he yells, suddenly enraged. But he controls himself: “What are you doing here?” he asks softly. I don’t answer, curled up on the floor in my corner.
He calls the guards with a shout: “Search her. Her documents.”
Two men pat me down thoroughly: “No documents.”
“Perfect.” The Lagerführer smiles, and sends the guards away again. I am now standing against the wall. The boots approach slowly, until the voice roars with unimaginable fury, the purple face inches away from my eyes.
“You,” he spits, “the daughter of a Fascist undersecretary, repatriated and treated with all due consideration, have the effrontery to turn up here again and show that slutty face of yours?” A slap. “Whore.” Another slap. “What have you been doing all these months?” A kick to the shins. “Answer me!” Another kick. “I said, answer me!” And on and on. “Filthy whore,” he shakes me, “traitor,” he grabs me by the shoulders and jostles me, “twenty years old, is it possible you can be such a traitor at twenty years old, filthy shameless tramp.” I stare at him, my eyes boring into his face, concentrating on leaning against the wall so I won’t lose its support and collapse (I must have thought that if I broke off eye contact with him I’d be lost). “But I’ll kill you, see,” he snarls as I go on staring at him. It’s over if I faint. And from deep down in my diaphragm, my voice involuntarily hurls the word “Feige” (coward) at him. Like a conditioned reflex I go on repeating it as if that word were keeping me alive.
Herr Barek, the Lagerführer (a German Czechoslovakian), is panting. He sits behind his desk and I slump to the floor (don’t faint).
“That’s why we lost the war,” he mumbles, “because of worthless trash like you.” And as he says it, he doesn’t know that thirty-two years later I still won’t remember him with hatred because he at least admitted that we made him lose the war (it’s the only acknowledgment I’ve ever had).
“I could crush you between two fingers,” he continues, “like a flea, but it would be slim consolation. I’ll have you sent to Dachau—no.” His eyes light up. “Better yet, to a brothel for the Strafbataillonen.” He gives a shout and the guards arrive: “In the guardhouse,” he says, “and tomorrow morning,” he instructs by gestures: two wrists crossed, to specify handcuffs, then a hand chop into the crook of his elbow, to indicate the brothel.
*
In the guardhouse, a small room of about two by three meters, I find a woman huddled up in a corner. I take a closer look: it’s Lidja, a beautiful Russian girl I was friendly with at the time of the strike.
“What are you doing here?” I whisper in Russian.
She tells me that she was caught outside the fence, where she’d gone to pick up some bread from a friend. I tell her my situation.
“Poor you,” she sighs. “I’m getting off with one night in lockup, it’s the maximum penalty for a crime like mine, but you’re screwed.”
“Quiet!” the guard, an elderly man, orders us every so often in an exasperated voice.
Meanwhile, Lidja fingers my coat, my dress, my shoes, all expensive stuff because it’s the best of what I robbed from the bombed-out apartments. Like Louis, I chose wisely. I took only what I could wear. On my wrist I have the little watch he’d given me and around my neck a slim gold chain that I snatched from a body, like the Jewish Sonderkommandos did at Auschwitz.
Lidja has an idea.
“Listen,” she whispers in my ear, “give the guard your watch. Tell him you don’t need it anyway because you’re going to end up gassed in Dachau. In return ask him to give us a blanket for tonight because we feel cold.” I look at her doubtfully. “Do what I tell you,” she insists.
Things go as Lidja predicted. The guard gives me a pitying look, pockets the wristwatch
, and tosses us a blanket.
Once we’re wrapped tightly under the cover, Lidja gives me instructions: “Take off all your good things, including your socks and panties, which I don’t have, and put on my rags. I’ll put on all the good stuff. But slowly, so the guard won’t notice too much movement under the blanket. Okay?”
“Why not?” I whisper.
“Good girl,” Lidja says excitedly. “Then I’ll say that I have an upset stomach and can’t hold it in. When he hears my voice, he won’t prevent me from using the toilet. He knows I won’t run away, he himself is releasing me tomorrow morning. Instead you’ll go to the toilet, wearing my rags. Do you get it?”
“Lidja, they’ll punish you.”
“For what? What did I know? He took the wristwatch, you can tell it’s a woman’s watch, he can’t deny it. If they accuse me, I’ll report him. He’ll have to say that you gave it to him. And the same goes for me. And if I didn’t go to the toilet after all, it was because I blacked out. I’ll have to go in your elegant panties, what a pity, to prove to him that I wasn’t lying. How could I ever have imagined that you would take advantage of the situation? That devious Italian, I’ll say, instead of reviving me … What a bunch of traitors, you Nazis fell for it, trusting them as an ally! Don’t worry, Lucia, words won’t fail me.”
“You’re doing this for me.”
“Hurry up, give me those good things, I’ve been dreaming about them for years.”