The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  1. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, translated by Allen Mandelbaum. Inferno Canto III:84.

  On the Bottom

  The journey did not last more than twenty minutes. Then the truck stopped, and we saw a large gate and, above it, a sign, brightly illuminated (the memory still jolts me in my dreams): Arbeit Macht Frei, Work makes us free.

  We get out, they have us enter an enormous bare room that is poorly heated. How thirsty we are! The weak gurgle of the water in the radiators drives us wild; we have had nothing to drink for four days. But there is also a tap—and above it a sign saying that drinking is forbidden because the water is polluted. Nonsense. It seems obvious to me that the sign is a joke, “they” know that we are dying of thirst, and they put us in a room, and there is a tap, and Wassertrinken verboten. I drink and incite my companions to do likewise, but I have to spit it out; the water is tepid and sweetish, and smells like a swamp.

  This is hell. Today, in our time, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on our feet, and there is a tap that drips and the water cannot be drunk, and we wait for something that will certainly be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen. What to think? One cannot think anymore, it’s like being dead already. Someone sits down on the floor. The time passes drop by drop.

  We are not dead. The door opens and an SS man enters, smoking. He looks at us, in no hurry, and asks, “Wer kann Deutsch?” One of us whom I have never seen comes forward; his name is Flesch and he will be our interpreter. The SS man makes a long, calm speech; the interpreter translates. We are to form rows of five, with an interval of two meters between man and man; then we are to undress and make a bundle of our clothes in a particular way, the woolen garments on one side, all the rest on the other; we must take off our shoes but pay careful attention not to let them be stolen.

  Stolen by whom? Why should our shoes be stolen? And what about our documents, the few things we have in our pockets, our watches? We all look at the interpreter, and the interpreter asks the German, and the German smokes and looks right through him, as if he were transparent, as if no one had spoken.

  I had never seen old men naked. Mr. Bergmann wore a truss and asked the interpreter if he should take it off, and the interpreter hesitated. But the German understood and spoke seriously to the interpreter, pointing to someone. We saw the interpreter swallow and then he said: “The officer says, take off the truss, and you will be given Mr. Coen’s.” One could see the words coming bitterly out of Flesch’s mouth; this was the German’s way of mocking us.

  Then another German comes in and tells us to put the shoes in a certain corner, and we put them there, because now it’s all over and we feel outside of the world and the only thing is to obey. Someone comes with a broom and sweeps away all the shoes, sweeps them out the door in a heap. He’s crazy, he’s throwing them all together, ninety-six pairs, they’ll be unmatched. The door is open to the outdoors, a freezing wind enters and we are naked and cover our bellies with our arms. The wind slams the door shut; the German reopens it and stands watching with interest how we writhe to hide from the wind, one behind the other. Then he leaves and closes it.

  Now the second act begins. Four men with razors, shaving brushes, and clippers burst in; they wear striped trousers and jackets, with a number sewn on the front; perhaps they are of the same kind as the others this evening (this evening or yesterday evening?), but these are sturdy and glowing with health. We ask many questions but they catch hold of us and in a moment we find ourselves shaved and shorn. What comical faces we have without hair! The four speak a language that does not seem of this world. It is certainly not German; I understand a little German.

  Finally another door opens: here we are, locked in, naked, shorn, and standing, standing with our feet in water—it is a shower room. We are alone. Slowly the astonishment dissolves, and we speak, and everyone asks questions and no one answers. If we are naked in a shower room, it means that we’ll have a shower. If we have a shower it’s because they are not going to kill us yet. Why then do they keep us standing, and give us nothing to drink, while nobody explains anything, and we have no shoes or clothes, but are all naked with our feet in the water, and it’s cold and we’ve been traveling for five days and can’t even sit down.

  And our women?

  Engineer Levi asks me if I think that our women are like us at this moment, and where they are, and if we’ll be able to see them again. I say yes, because he is married and has a small daughter; certainly we’ll see them again. But by now my belief is that all this is an elaborate ploy to mock us and insult us. Clearly they will kill us, anyone who thinks he is going to live is mad, it means that he has swallowed the bait. Not me; I have understood that soon it will be over, perhaps in this very room, when they get bored with seeing us naked, dancing from one foot to the other and trying every now and again to sit down. But there are two inches of cold water on the floor and we can’t sit down.

  We walk up and down pointlessly, and we talk, everybody talks to everybody else, which makes a lot of noise. The door opens, and a German enters; it is the officer of before. He speaks briefly, the interpreter translates. “The officer says you must be quiet, because this is not a rabbinical school.” One sees the words that aren’t his, the malicious words, twist his mouth as they emerge, as if he were spitting out a foul taste. We beg him to ask what we’re waiting for, how long we’ll be here, about our women, everything; but he says no, he doesn’t want to ask. This Flesch, who is so reluctant to translate into Italian the icy German phrases and refuses to turn our questions into German because he knows it’s pointless, is a German Jew of about fifty, who has a large scar on his face from a wound received fighting the Italians on the Piave. He is a closed, taciturn man, for whom I feel an instinctive respect, because I am aware that he began to suffer before we did.

  The German leaves and now we are silent, although we are a little ashamed of our silence. It was still night and we wondered if the day would ever come. The door opened again, and someone else wearing stripes came in. He was different from the others, older, with glasses and a more civil face, and much less robust. He speaks to us and he speaks in Italian.

  By now we are tired of being amazed. We seem to be watching some mad play, one of those plays that feature witches, the Holy Spirit, and the Devil. He speaks Italian badly, with a strong foreign accent. He makes a long speech, he’s very polite, and tries to answer all our questions.

  We are at Monowitz, near Auschwitz, in Upper Silesia, a region inhabited by both Poles and Germans. This camp is a work camp, in German it’s called Arbeitslager; all the prisoners (there are about ten thousand) work in a factory that produces a type of rubber called Buna, so the camp itself is called Buna.

  We will be given shoes and clothes—no, not our own—other shoes, other clothes, like his. We are naked now because we are waiting for a shower and disinfection, which will take place immediately after reveille, because one cannot enter the camp without being disinfected.

  Certainly there will be work to do; everyone must work here. But there is work and work: he, for example, works as a doctor. He is a Hungarian doctor who studied in Italy, and he is the dentist for the Lager. He has been in the Lager for four years (not in this one: Buna has been open only for a year and a half), but we can see that he is quite well, he’s not very thin. Why is he in the Lager? Is he Jewish like us? “No,” he says simply. “I am a criminal.”

  We ask him a lot of questions. He laughs sometimes, replies to some and not to others, and it’s clear that he avoids certain subjects. He doesn’t speak about the women: he says they’re fine, that we’ll see them again soon, but he doesn’t say how or where. Instead he tells us other things, strange and crazy things, perhaps he, too, is playing with us. Perhaps he is mad—one goes mad in the Lager. He says that every Sunday there are concerts and soccer matches. He says that anyone who boxes well can become a cook. He says that anyone who works hard receives prize coupons to
buy tobacco and soap with. He says that the water really isn’t drinkable, and that instead a coffee substitute is distributed every day, but generally nobody drinks it, as the soup itself is watery enough to quench thirst. We beg him to find us something to drink, but he says that he cannot, that he has come to see us secretly, against SS orders, since we still have to be disinfected, and that he must leave at once; he has come because he has a liking for Italians, and because, he says, he “has a little heart.” We ask him if there are other Italians in the camp and he says there are some, a few, he doesn’t know how many, and right away changes the subject. Meanwhile a bell has rung and he immediately hurries off, leaving us stunned and disconcerted. Some feel reassured, but not me. I think that even this dentist, this incomprehensible person, wanted to amuse himself at our expense, and I won’t believe a word of what he said.

  At the sound of the bell, we can hear the dark camp waking up. Suddenly water gushes boiling out of the showers—five minutes of bliss. But immediately afterward four men (perhaps they are the barbers) burst in, yelling and shoving, and drive us, wet and steaming, into the adjoining room, which is freezing; here other shouting people throw some rags at us and thrust into our hands a pair of worn-down shoes with wooden soles. We have no time to understand; already we find ourselves outside, in the blue and icy snow of dawn, and, barefoot and naked, with all our clothing in our hands, we must run a hundred meters to another barrack. Here we are allowed to get dressed.

  When we finish, each of us remains in his own corner, and we do not dare lift our eyes to look at one another. There is no mirror in which to see ourselves, but our appearance stands before us, reflected in a hundred livid faces, in a hundred miserable, sordid puppets. Here we are, transformed into the phantoms we glimpsed yesterday evening.

  Then for the first time we become aware that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality has been revealed to us: we have reached the bottom. It’s not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition more wretched exists, nor could it be imagined. Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listened, they would not understand. They will take away even our name; and if we want to keep it, we will have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, remains.

  We know that we are unlikely to be understood, and that this is as it should be. But consider what value, what meaning is contained in even the smallest of our daily habits, in the hundred possessions of even the poorest beggar: a handkerchief, an old letter, the photograph of a cherished person. These things are part of us, almost like limbs of our body; it is inconceivable to be deprived of them in our world, for we would immediately find others to replace the old ones, other objects that are ours as guardians and evocations of our memories.

  Imagine now a man who has been deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, of literally everything, in short, that he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, heedless of dignity and restraint, for he who loses everything can easily lose himself. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided, with no sense of human affinity—in the most fortunate case, judged purely on the basis of utility. It is in this way that one can understand the double meaning of the term “extermination camp,” and it will be clear what we seek to express with the phrase “lying on the bottom.”

  Häftling: I have learned that I am a Häftling. My name is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the mark tattooed on our left arm until we die.

  The operation was slightly painful and extraordinarily rapid: they placed us all in a row, and, one by one, according to the alphabetical order of our names, we filed past a skilled official, armed with a sort of pointed tool with a very short needle. It seems that this is the true initiation: only by “showing one’s number” can one get bread and soup. It took several days, and not a few slaps and punches, for us to become used to showing our number promptly enough not to hold up the daily operation of food distribution; weeks and months were needed to learn its sound in the German language. And for many days, when the habits of freedom still led me to look for the time on my wristwatch, my new name, ironically, appeared instead, a number tattooed in bluish characters under the skin.

  Only much later, and gradually, a few of us learned something of the funereal science of the numbers of Auschwitz, which epitomize the stages of destruction of European Judaism. To the old hands of the camp, the numbers told everything: the period of entry into the camp, the convoy one belonged to, and, consequently, the nationality. Everyone will treat with respect the numbers from 30000 to 80000: there are only a few hundred left and they represent the few survivors of the Polish ghettos. You’d better watch out in commercial dealings with a 116000 or a 117000: they now number only about forty, but they represent the Greeks of Salonika, so make sure they don’t trick you. As for the high numbers, there is something essentially comic about them, like the words “freshman” and “conscript” in ordinary life. The typical high number is a corpulent, docile, and stupid fellow: you can make him believe that at the infirmary leather shoes are distributed to all those with delicate feet, and persuade him to run there and leave his bowl of soup “in your custody”; you can sell him a spoon for three rations of bread; you can send him to the most ferocious of the Kapos to ask him (it happened to me!) if it’s true that his is the Kartoffelschalenkommando, the Potato Peeling Unit, and if it’s possible to enroll in it.

  In fact, the whole process of introduction to what is for us a new order takes place in a grotesque and sarcastic manner. With the tattooing operation over, they have shut us in an empty barrack. The bunks are made, but we are strictly forbidden to touch them or sit on them: so we wander around aimlessly for half the day in the limited space available, still tormented by the fierce thirst of the journey. Then the door opens and in comes a small, thin blond boy in striped clothes, with a fairly civilized air. He speaks French, and we throng around him with a flood of questions that until now we had asked one another in vain.

  But he does not speak willingly; no one here speaks willingly. We are new, we have nothing and we know nothing; why waste time on us? He reluctantly explains to us that all the others are out at work and will come back in the evening. He left the infirmary this morning and is exempt from work for today. I asked him (with an ingenuousness that already, only a few days later, seemed to me incredible) if at least they would give us back our toothbrushes. He did not laugh, but, with his face animated by fierce contempt, he threw at me, “Vous n’êtes pas à la maison.” And it is this refrain that we hear repeated by everyone: you are not at home, this is not a sanatorium, the only way out is through the Chimney. (What does it mean? We’ll soon learn very well what it means.)

  And so it was. Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within reach of my hand. I opened the window and broke off the icicle, but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away. “Warum?” I asked in my poor German. “Hier ist kein warum” (there is no why here), he replied, shoving me back inside.

  The explanation is repugnant but simple: in this place everything is prohibited, not for hidden reasons but because the camp has been created precisely for that purpose. If we wish to live here, we had better learn this quickly and well:

  The Sacred Face has no place here!

  Here we swim differently than in the Serchio!2

  Hour after hour, this first interminable day of limbo draws to its end. Finally, as the sun sets in a tumult of fierce, bloodred clouds, they order us out of the barrack. Will they give us something to drink? No, they line us up again, lead us to a huge square, which takes up the center of the camp, and arrange us meticulously in squads. Then nothing happens for another hour: it seems that we are waiting for
someone.

  A band begins to play, beside the entrance to the camp: it plays “Rosamunde,” the well-known sentimental song, and this seems so strange to us that we look at one another and snigger; we feel a shadow of relief, perhaps all these ceremonies are nothing but a colossal farce in Teutonic taste. But the band, on finishing “Rosamunde,” continues to play marches, one after the other, and suddenly the squads of our comrades appear, returning from work. They walk in a column, five abreast, with an oddly unnatural, stiff gait, like rigid puppets made only of bones; but they walk scrupulously in time to the music.

  They, too, arrange themselves like us in the vast square, according to a precise order; when the last squad has returned, we are all counted and recounted for more than an hour. We are inspected at length, and the results all seem to go to a man dressed in stripes, who reports them to a group of SS men in full battle gear.

  Finally (it’s dark by now, but the camp is brightly lit by floodlights and spotlights) there is a cry of “Absperre!” at which all the squads break up into a turbulent confusion of movement. The men no longer walk stiffly and erect as before: each one drags himself along with obvious effort. I see that all of them carry in their hand or hanging at their waist an aluminum bowl almost as large as a basin.

  We new arrivals also wander among the crowd, searching for a voice, a friendly face, a guide. Against the wooden wall of a barrack two boys are sitting on the ground: they seem very young, sixteen at most, the faces and hands of both are grimed with soot. One of the two, as we’re passing by, calls to me and asks in German some questions that I don’t understand; then he asks where we’re from. “Italien,” I reply; I would like to ask him many things, but my German vocabulary is extremely limited.