by Primo Levi
It seems to me unnecessary to add that none of the facts are invented.
PRIMO LEVI
You who live safe
In your heated houses,
You who come home at night to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who toils in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for half a loaf
Who dies by a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
With no hair and no name
With no more strength to remember,
With empty eyes and a womb as cold
As a frog in winter.
Ponder that this happened:
I consign these words to you.
Carve them into your hearts
At home or on the street,
Going to bed or rising:
Tell them to your children.
Or may your house fall down,
May illness make you helpless,
And your children turn their eyes from you.
(TRANS. J. GALASSI)
The Journey
I was captured by the Fascist Militia on December 13, 1943. I was twenty-four, with little common sense, no experience, and a definite tendency—encouraged by the routines of segregation forced on me during the previous four years by the racial laws—to live in an unrealistic world of my own, a world inhabited by civilized Cartesian phantoms, by sincere male and bloodless female friendships. I cultivated a moderate and abstract sense of rebellion.
It hadn’t been easy for me to choose the mountains, and to help set up what, both in my opinion and in that of friends who were little more experienced, was supposed to become a partisan band affiliated with the Resistance movement Justice and Liberty. We lacked contacts, arms, money, and the experience needed to acquire them. We lacked capable men, and were swamped instead by a deluge of outcasts who, in good or bad faith, came from the plain in search of a nonexistent organization, commanders, weapons, or merely protection, a hiding place, a fire, a pair of shoes.
At that time I had not yet been taught the doctrine that I learned very quickly later, in the Lager: that man is bound to pursue his own ends by all possible means, and he who errs but once pays dearly. So I can only consider the following sequence of events justified. Three Fascist Militia companies, having set out in the night to surprise a much more powerful and dangerous band than ours, which was hiding in the next valley, broke into our refuge in a spectral snowy dawn and took me down to the valley as a suspicious person.
During the interrogations that followed, I preferred to declare my status of “Italian citizen of Jewish race.” I felt that otherwise I would be unable to justify my presence in places too secluded even for an evacuee, and I believed (wrongly, as it subsequently proved) that the admission of my political activity would have meant torture and certain death. As a Jew, I was sent to Fòssoli, near Modena, where in a vast detention camp, originally meant for English and American prisoners of war, all the numerous categories of people not approved of by the newborn Fascist Republic were being assembled.
At the moment of my arrival, that is, at the end of January 1944, there were about a hundred and fifty Italian Jews in the camp, but within a few weeks their number rose to more than six hundred. For the most part these were entire families captured by the Fascists or the Nazis because they had been careless or had been informed on. A few had given themselves up of their own accord, reduced to desperation by a vagabond life, or lacking the means to survive, or wishing to avoid separation from a captured relative, or even—absurdly—“to be in conformity with the law.” There were also about a hundred Yugoslav military internees and a few other foreigners who were considered politically suspect.
The arrival of a small German SS squad should have made even the optimists dubious; but we still managed to interpret the novelty in various ways without drawing the most obvious conclusion. Thus, despite everything, the announcement that we were to be deported caught us unawares.
On February 20, the Germans inspected the camp with care and publicly and loudly upbraided the Italian commissar for the inadequate organization of the kitchen services and for the insufficient amount of wood distributed for heating; they even said that an infirmary would soon be opened. But on the morning of the 21st we learned that the following day the Jews would depart. All: without exception. Even the children, even the old, even the ill. Our destination? Nobody knew. We should be prepared for a fortnight of travel. For every person missing at the roll call, ten would be shot.
Only an ingenuous and deluded minority continued to hope; we others had spoken at length with the Polish and Croatian refugees and we knew what departure meant.
For those condemned to death, tradition prescribes an austere ritual, calculated to emphasize that all passion and anger are spent, and that the act of justice represents only a sad duty toward society which leads even the executioner to have pity for the victim. Thus the condemned man is shielded from all external worries, he is granted solitude and, should he want it, spiritual comfort; in short, care is taken that he should feel around him neither hatred nor arbitrariness, only necessity and justice and, along with punishment, pardon.
But this was not granted to us, for we were many and time was short, and, in any case, what had we to repent, for what crime did we need pardon? The Italian commissar accordingly decreed that all services should continue to function until the final notice: the kitchens remained open, the cleaning squads worked as usual, and even the teachers in the little school gave lessons in the evening, as on other days. But that evening the children were given no homework.
Night came, and it was such a night one knew that human eyes would not witness it and survive. Everyone felt this: not one of the guards, neither Italian nor German, had the courage to come and see what men do when they know they have to die.
All took leave of life in the manner that most suited them. Some prayed, some drank to excess, others became intoxicated by a final unseemly lust. But the mothers stayed up to prepare food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed the luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of children’s washing hung out to dry in the wind. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the pillows, and the hundred other small things that mothers remember and children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not feed him today?
In Barrack 6A old Gattegno lived with his wife and numerous children and grandchildren and his sons-in-law and hardworking daughters-in-law. All the men were carpenters; they had come from Tripoli after many long journeys, and had always carried with them the tools of their trade, their kitchen utensils, and their accordions and violins, so they could play and dance after the day’s work. They were happy and pious folk. Their women, working silently and quickly, were the first to finish the preparations for the journey, in order to have time for mourning. When all was ready, the food cooked, the bundles tied up, they loosened their hair, took off their shoes, placed the funeral candles on the ground, and, lighting them according to the customs of their fathers, sat on the bare soil in a circle for the lamentations, praying and weeping through the night. We gathered in a group before their door, and experienced within ourselves a grief that was new to us, the ancient grief of a people that has no land, the grief without hope of the exodus, renewed in every century.
Dawn came upon us like a betrayal, as if the new sun were an ally of the men who had decided to destroy us. The different emotions that were roused in us, of conscious resignation, of futile rebellion, of religious abandon, of fear, of despair, now, after a sleepless night, converged in a collective, uncontrolled panic. The time for meditation, the time for decision was over, and all reason dissolved into an unrestrained tumult, across which flashed, as painful as the thrusts of a sword, the happy memories of our homes, still so near in time and space.
Many things were then said and
done among us; but of these it is better that no memory remain.
With the absurd precision to which we later had to accustom ourselves, the Germans held the roll call. At the end the officer asked “Wieviel Stück?” The corporal saluted smartly and replied that there were six hundred and fifty “pieces,” and all was in order. They then loaded us onto buses and took us to the station at Carpi. Here the train was waiting for us, with our escort for the journey. Here we received the first blows: and the thing was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, in either body or spirit. Only a profound amazement: how can one strike a man without anger?
There were twelve freight cars and six hundred and fifty of us; in mine we were only forty-five, but it was a small car. Here, then, before our very eyes, under our very feet, was one of those notorious German transport trains, one of those which never return, and of which, shuddering and always a little incredulous, we had so often heard tales. Exactly like this, detail for detail: freight cars closed from the outside, inside men, women, and children packed in without pity, like cheap merchandise, for a journey toward nothingness, a journey down, toward the bottom. This time it is we who are inside.
Sooner or later in life we all discover that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but few of us pause to consider the opposite: that so, too, is perfect unhappiness. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition, which is hostile to everything infinite. Our ever inadequate knowledge of the future opposes it, and this is called, in the one instance, hope and, in the other, uncertainty about tomorrow. The certainty of death opposes it, for death places a limit on every joy, but also on every sorrow. Our inevitable material cares oppose it, for, as they poison every lasting happiness, they just as assiduously distract us from our misfortunes, making our awareness of them intermittent and hence bearable.
It was the very discomfort, the blows, the cold, the thirst that kept us aloft in the void of a bottomless despair, both during the journey and after. It was not the will to live, or a conscious resignation, for few are the men capable of such resolution, and we were but a common sample of humanity.
The doors had been closed at once, but the train did not move until evening. We had learned of our destination with relief. Auschwitz: a name without significance for us at that time, but at least it implied some place on this earth.
The train traveled slowly, with long, unnerving halts. Through a slit we saw the tall pale cliffs of the Adige valley pass by, and the names of the last Italian cities. We passed the Brenner at noon of the second day and we all stood up, but no one said a word. The thought of the return stayed in my heart, and I cruelly pictured to myself the inhuman joy of that other journey, with doors open, no one wanting to flee, and the first Italian names . . . and I looked around and wondered how many, amid that poor human dust, would be struck by fate.
Among the forty-five people in my car only four saw their homes again; and ours was by far the most fortunate.
We suffered from thirst and cold; at every stop we clamored for water, or even a handful of snow, but were rarely heard; the soldiers of the escort kept off anybody who tried to approach the train. Two young mothers, still nursing their infants, groaned night and day, begging for water. Our state of nervous tension made hunger, exhaustion, and lack of sleep less agonizing. But the hours of darkness were a nightmare without end.
There are few men who know how to go to their death with dignity, and often they are not those you would expect. Few know how to remain silent and respect the silence of others. Our restless sleep was often interrupted by noisy and futile disputes, by curses, by kicks and punches delivered blindly to ward off some troublesome and inevitable contact. Then someone would light the mournful little flame of a candle, to reveal the obscure swarming of a confused and indistinguishable human mass, sluggish and aching, rising here and there in sudden convulsions and immediately collapsing again in exhaustion.
Through the slit, known and unknown names of Austrian cities, Salzburg, Vienna; then Czech and, finally, Polish. On the evening of the fourth day the cold became intense: the train ran through interminable black pine forests, climbing perceptibly. The snow was deep. It must have been a branch line, as the stations were small and almost deserted. No one tried, any longer, during the halts, to communicate with the outside world: we felt ourselves by now “on the other side.” There was a long halt in open country. The train started up again very slowly, and stopped for the last time, in the dead of night, in the middle of a dark and silent plain.
On both sides of the track were rows of red and white lights, as far as the eye could see; but there was none of that confusion of sounds which tells of inhabited places even from a distance. By the wretched light of the last candle, with the rhythm of the wheels silenced, along with every human sound, we waited for something to happen.
Next to me, crushed, like me, body against body for the whole journey, there had been a woman. We had been acquainted for many years, and the misfortune had struck us together, but we knew little of one another. Now, in the hour of decision, we said to each other things that are not said among the living. We said farewell and it was short; everybody said farewell to life through his neighbor. We had no more fear.
The climax came suddenly. The door opened with a crash, and the darkness echoed with outlandish orders in that barbaric barking of Germans in command which seems to give vent to a centuries-old rage. A vast platform appeared before us, illuminated by floodlights. A little beyond it, a row of trucks. Then everything was silent again. Someone translated: we were to get out with our luggage and deposit it alongside the train. In a moment the platform was swarming with shadows. But we were afraid to break that silence. We all busied ourselves with our luggage, searched for someone, called to one another, but timidly, in a whisper.
A dozen SS men stood to one side, legs apart, with a look of indifference. At a certain moment they moved among us and, in low voices, with faces of stone, began to interrogate us rapidly, one by one, in bad Italian. They didn’t interrogate everybody, only a few: “How old? Healthy or ill?” And on the basis of the reply they pointed us in two different directions.
Everything was as silent as an aquarium, or as certain scenes in dreams. We had expected something more apocalyptic: they seemed simple policemen. It was disconcerting and disarming. Someone dared to ask for his luggage: they replied, “Luggage later.” Someone else did not want to leave his wife: they said, “Together again later.” Many mothers did not want to be separated from their children: they said, “Good, good, stay with child.” They had the calm assurance of people merely doing their normal, everyday duty. But Renzo delayed an instant too long as he said goodbye to Francesca, his fiancée, and with a single blow, right in his face, they knocked him to the ground. It was their everyday duty.
In less than ten minutes all the able-bodied men had been gathered in a group. What happened to the others, to the women, to the children, to the old people, we could establish neither then nor later: the night swallowed them up, purely and simply. Today we know that in that rapid and summary choice each one of us had been judged capable or not of working usefully for the Reich; we know that of our convoy only ninety-six men and twenty-nine women entered the camps, respectively, of Monowitz-Buna and Birkenau, and that of all the others, more than five hundred in number, not one was alive two days later. We also know that not even this tenuous principle of discrimination between fit and unfit was always followed, and that later the simpler method was often adopted of merely opening both doors of the car without warning or instructions to the new arrivals. Those who by chance got out on one side of the train entered the camp; the others went to the gas chamber.
This is the reason that three-year-old Emilia died: the historical necessity of killing the children of Jews was self-evident to the Germans. Emilia, the daughter of the engineer Aldo Levi of Milan, was a curious, ambitious, cheerful, intelligent child; during the journey
in the packed car, her parents had succeeded in bathing her in a zinc tub with tepid water that the degenerate German engineer had allowed them to draw from the engine dragging us all to death.
Thus, suddenly, in an instant, our women, our parents, our children disappeared. Almost nobody was able to say goodbye. We saw them for a short while as a dark mass at the other end of the platform; then we saw nothing more.
Instead, two groups of strange individuals emerged into the glare of the lights. They walked in squads, in rows of three, with an odd, clumsy gait, heads hanging forward, arms rigid. They wore comical caps, and were dressed in loose striped coats, which even by night and from a distance looked filthy and ragged. They walked in a wide circle around us, never coming close, and in silence began to busy themselves with our luggage, climbing in and out of the empty cars.
We looked at one another without a word. It was all incomprehensible and mad, but one thing we had understood. This was the metamorphosis that awaited us. Tomorrow we would be like them.
Without knowing how, I found myself loaded onto a truck with thirty others; the truck took off into the night at full speed. It was covered, and we couldn’t see outside, but from the jolting we could tell that the road was curving and bumpy. Are we without a guard? Should we jump down? Too late, too late, we’re all going “down.” In any case, we’re soon aware that we are not without a guard. He’s a strange guard, a German soldier bristling with arms. We do not see him, because of the thick darkness, but we feel the hard contact every time the truck lurches and throws us all in a heap to right or left. He switches on a pocket light and instead of shouting “Woe unto you, wicked souls,”1 asks us courteously, one by one, in German and in some pidgin Italian, if we have any money or watches to give him, seeing that they will no longer be of use to us. This is no order, no regulation: it’s obvious that it’s a small private initiative of our Charon. The matter stirs us to anger and laughter and a strange relief.