The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  “Allons, petit, attrape.” This tie is dry and a little lighter, but at the end of the second journey I go to the Vorarbeiter and ask to go the latrine.

  We have the advantage that our latrine is quite far away; this permits us, once a day, a slightly longer absence than normal. Moreover, since we are also forbidden to go there alone, Wachsmann, the weakest and clumsiest of the Kommando, has been invested with the duty of Scheissbegleiter, latrine companion; by virtue of this appointment, Wachsmann is responsible for any hypothetical (laughable hypothesis!) attempt to escape and, more realistically, for every delay.

  As my request has been accepted, I leave in the mud and the gray snow, amid scraps of metal, escorted by little Wachsmann. I never manage to understand him, as we have no language in common; but his comrades tell me that he is a rabbi, in fact a melamed, a person learned in the Torah, and, even more, in his town, in Galicia, had a reputation as a healer and a miracle worker. And it is not hard to believe when I think that this thin, fragile, and meek figure has managed to work for two years without falling ill and without dying; on the contrary, he is animated by an amazing vitality of words and facial expressions, and spends long evenings discussing Talmudic questions, incomprehensibly, in Yiddish and Hebrew, with Mendi, who is a modernist rabbi.

  The latrine is an oasis of peace. It is a provisional latrine, which the Germans have not yet provided with the customary wooden partitions to separate the various compartments: Nur für Engländer, Nur für Polen, Nur für Ukrainische Frauen, and so on, and, a little apart, Nur für Häftlinge. Inside, shoulder to shoulder, sit four hollow-faced Häftlinge: a bearded old Russian worker with the blue OST band4 on his left arm; a Polish boy, with a large white “P” on his back and chest; an English military prisoner of war, with his face splendidly shaved and rosy and his khaki uniform neat, ironed, and clean, except for a large “KG” (Kriegsgefangener) on the back. A fifth Häftling stands at the door, patiently and monotonously asking every civilian who enters loosening his belt: “Êtes-vous français?”

  When I return to work, the trucks with the rations can be seen passing, which means it is ten o’clock. That is already a respectable hour, as the midday pause can be glimpsed in the fog of the remote future, and we can begin to derive some energy from the expectation.

  I make two or three more trips with Resnyk, searching attentively, even going to distant piles, to find lighter ties, but by now all the best ones have been moved and only the others remain, repellent, sharp edged, heavy with mud and ice, and with metal plates nailed to them for the rails to fit on.

  When Franz comes and calls Wachsmann to go with him to bring back our ration, it means that it is eleven o’clock and the morning is almost over—no one thinks about the afternoon. The crew returns at eleven thirty, and the standard interrogation begins: how much soup today, what quality, did we get it from the top or the bottom of the vat. I force myself not to ask these questions, but I cannot help listening eagerly to the replies, sniffing at the smell carried from the kitchen by the wind.

  And at last, like a celestial meteor, superhuman and impersonal as a sign from heaven, the midday siren explodes, granting a brief respite to our anonymous, shared weariness and hunger. And the usual things happen again: we all run to the shed, and line up with our bowls ready, and we all have an animal hurry to flood our bellies with the warm slop, but no one wants to be first, because the first person receives the most watery ration. As usual, the Kapo mocks and insults us for our voracity and takes care not to stir the pot, because the bottom belongs notoriously to him. Then comes the bliss (positive, this time, and visceral) of relaxation and warmth in the stomach and in the shed around the rumbling stove. The smokers, with miserly and reverent gestures, roll a thin cigarette, while our clothes, dank with mud and snow, give off a dense smoke in the heat of the stove, which smells of a kennel or a sheepfold.

  A tacit convention ordains that no one speak: within a minute we are all sleeping, jammed elbow to elbow, falling suddenly forward and recovering with a stiffening of the back. Behind barely closed eyelids, dreams break out violently, and these, too, are the usual dreams. Of being at home, in a wonderful hot bath. Of being at home, sitting at the table. Of being at home, and telling the story of this hopeless work of ours, of our never-ending hunger, of our sleep of slaves.

  Then, within the steam of our sluggish digestion, a painful nucleus condenses, and pricks us and grows until it crosses the threshold of our consciousness and takes away the joy of sleep. “Es wird bald ein Uhr sein”: it is almost one o’clock. Like a fast-moving, voracious cancer, it kills our sleep and grips us in a precautionary anguish: we listen to the wind whistling outside, and to the light rustle of the snow against the window, “Es wird schnell ein Uhr sein.” As each of us clings to sleep, so that it will not abandon us, all our senses are taut with the horror of the signal that is about to come, that is outside the door, that is here . . .

  Here it is. A thud at the window: Meister Nogalla has thrown a snowball against the windowpane, and now stands stiffly outside, holding his watch with its face turned toward us. The Kapo gets up, stretches, and says quietly, like one who does not doubt that he will be obeyed: “Alles heraus,” all outside.

  Oh, to weep! Oh, to confront the wind as once we did, as equals, and not as here, like worms without a soul.

  We are outside and each one picks up his lever. Resnyk draws his head down between his shoulders, pulls his cap over his ears, and lifts his face up to the low gray sky where the inexorable snow is swirling: “Si j’avey une chien, je ne le chasse pas dehors.”

  4. This indicated a slave worker from Eastern Europe.

  A Good Day

  The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted in man’s every fiber; it is a property of human substance. Free men give many names to this purpose, and think and talk a lot about its nature. But for us the question is simpler.

  Today, here, our only purpose is to reach the spring. We care about nothing else now. Behind this goal there is now no other goal. In the morning, lined up in Roll Call Square, while we wait endlessly for the time to leave for work, and every breath of wind penetrates our clothes and runs in violent shivers over our defenseless bodies, and everything is gray around us, and we are gray; in the morning, when it’s still dark, we all scan the sky in the east to spot the first signs of a milder season, and every day the rising of the sun is commented on, today a little earlier than yesterday, today a little warmer than yesterday, in two months, in a month, the cold will relent and we will have one enemy less.

  Today for the first time the sun rose bright and clear from the horizon of mud. It’s a Polish sun, cold, white, and distant, and warms only the skin, but when it broke loose from the last mists a murmur ran through our colorless multitude, and when even I felt its warmth through my clothes, I understood how men can worship the sun.

  “Das Schlimmste ist vorüber,” said Ziegler, turning his sharp shoulders to the sun: the worst is over. Next to us is a group of Greeks, those admirable and terrible Jews of Salonika, tenacious, thieving, wise, ferocious, and united, so determined to live, such pitiless opponents in the struggle for life—those Greeks who have prevailed in the kitchens and at the worksite, and whom even the Germans respect and the Poles fear. This is their third year in the camp, and nobody knows better than they what the camp means. They stand in a tight circle, shoulder to shoulder, and sing one of their interminable chants.

  Felicio the Greek knows me. “L’année prochaine à la maison!” he shouts at me, and adds, “À la maison par la Cheminée!” Felicio was in Birkenau. And they continue to sing and stamp their feet in time, and grow drunk on songs.

  When we finally left, through the main entrance of the camp, the sun was quite high and the sky clear. At midday we could see the mountains; to the west, familiar and incongruous, the steeple of Auschwitz (a steeple here!), and all around the tethered barrage balloons. The smoke from Buna lay still in the cold air, and a row of low hills could be seen,
green with forests: and our hearts ache because we all know that Birkenau is there, that our women ended up there, and that soon we, too, will end up there—but we are not used to seeing it.

  For the first time we notice that on both sides of the road, even here, the meadows are green, because, without sun, a meadow is as if it were not green.

  Buna is not: Buna is desperately and essentially opaque and gray. This huge tangle of iron, concrete, mud, and smoke is the negation of beauty. Its roads and buildings have been given names like ours, numbers or letters, or inhuman and sinister ones. Within its precincts not a blade of grass grows, the soil is impregnated with the poisonous juices of coal and petroleum, and nothing is alive but machines and slaves—and the former are more alive than the latter.

  Buna is as big as a city; besides the German managers and technicians, forty thousand foreigners work here, and fifteen or twenty languages are spoken. All the foreigners live in different Lagers, which surround Buna: the English prisoners of war Lager, the Ukrainian women’s Lager, the French volunteers’ Lager, and others that we do not know. Our Lager (Judenlager, Vernichtungslager, Kazett) by itself provides ten thousand workers, who come from all the nations of Europe. We are the slaves of the slaves, whom all can give orders to, and our name is the number that we carry tattooed on our arm and sewn on our chest.

  The Carbide Tower, which rises in the middle of Buna and whose top is rarely visible in the fog, was built by us. Its bricks were called Ziegel, briques, tegula, cegli, kamenny, mattoni, téglak, and they were cemented by hate, hate and discord, like the Tower of Babel; and that is what we call it, Babelturm, Bobelturm; and we hate it as our masters’ insane dream of grandeur, their contempt for God and men, for us men.

  And today, just as in the ancient fable, we all feel, and the Germans themselves feel, that a curse—not transcendent and divine but inherent and historical—hangs over the insolent structure, built on the confusion of languages and erected in defiance of heaven like a stone curse.

  As we will explain, the Buna factory, which the Germans worked on for four years and where countless of us suffered and died, never produced a kilo of synthetic rubber.

  But today the eternal puddles, on which a rainbow veil of oil quivers, reflect the clear sky. Pipes, girders, boilers, still cold from the night’s freeze, are dripping with dew. The earth dug up from the pits, the piles of coal, the blocks of concrete exhale the winter dampness in a faint mist.

  Today is a good day. We look around like blind people who have recovered their sight, and we look at one another. None of us have seen the others in sunlight: someone smiles. If it weren’t for the hunger!

  For human nature is such that sorrows and sufferings simultaneously endured do not add up to a whole in our consciousness but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to a definite law of perspective. This is providential and allows us to survive in the camp. And this is the reason that so often in free life one hears it said that man is never content. In fact, it is a question not of a human incapacity for a state of absolute happiness but of an ever insufficient knowledge of the complex nature of the state of unhappiness; so that the single name of its major cause is given to all its causes, which are numerous and arranged hierarchically. And when this most immediate cause of unhappiness comes to an end, we are painfully surprised to see that behind it lies another one, and in reality a whole series of other ones.

  And so as soon as the cold, which throughout the winter had seemed our only enemy, ceased, we became aware of our hunger, and, repeating the same mistake, today we say: “If it weren’t for the hunger! . . .”

  But how could one imagine not being hungry? The Lager is hunger: we ourselves are hunger, living hunger.

  On the other side of the road a steam shovel is working. The bucket, hanging from cables, opens wide its saw-toothed jaws, hovers a moment as if uncertain in its choice, then rushes upon the soft, clayey soil and snaps it up voraciously, while a satisfied snort of thick white smoke rises from the operator’s cabin. Then up it goes again, turns halfway around, vomits its weighty mouthful behind, and starts over.

  Leaning on our shovels, we stop to watch, fascinated. At every bite of its bucket, our mouths open, our Adam’s apples dance up and down, wretchedly visible under the flaccid skin. We are unable to tear ourselves away from the sight of the steam shovel’s meal.

  Sigi is seventeen years old and is hungrier than all of us, although he gets a little soup every evening from a protector, who is probably not disinterested. He had begun to speak of his home in Vienna and of his mother, but then he drifted onto the subject of food, and now he talks endlessly about some wedding lunch and recalls, with genuine regret, that he failed to finish his third bowl of bean soup. And everyone tells him to keep quiet, but within ten minutes Béla is describing his Hungarian countryside and the fields of maize and a recipe for making sweet polenta—with roasted grains, and lard, and spices and . . . and he is cursed, insulted, and somebody else begins to describe . . .

  How weak is our flesh! I am perfectly aware of how vain these fantasies of hunger are, but I cannot exclude myself from the general law, and dancing before my eyes I see the pasta we had just cooked, Vanda, Luciana, Franco, and I, at the transit camp in Italy, when we suddenly heard the news that we would leave the following day to come here; and we were eating (it was so good, yellow, filling), and we stopped, idiots, fools—if we had only known! And if it should happen again . . . Absurd. If one thing is sure in this world, it is certainly this: that it will not happen to us a second time.

  Fischer, the newest arrival, pulls a package out of his pocket, wrapped with the meticulousness of the Hungarians, and inside there is a half-ration of bread: half the bread from this morning. It is notorious that only the high numbers keep their bread in their pocket; none of us old ones are able to save our bread for an hour. Various theories circulate to justify this incapacity: bread, when eaten a little bit at a time, is not fully digested; the nervous tension needed to save the bread without touching it when you are hungry is in the highest degree harmful and debilitating; bread that is turning stale soon loses its alimentary value, so that the sooner it’s eaten the more nutritious it is; Alberto says that hunger and bread in one’s pocket are terms of opposite sign which automatically cancel each other out and cannot exist together in the same individual; and the majority justly affirm that, in the end, one’s stomach is the vault most secure against thefts and extortions. “Moi, on m’a jamais volé mon pain!” David snarls, hitting his empty stomach, but he is unable to take his eyes off Fischer, who chews slowly and methodically, “lucky” enough still to have half a ration at ten in the morning: “Sacré veinard, va!”

  But it is not only because of the sun that today is a happy day: at noon a surprise awaits us. Besides the normal morning ration, we discover in the barrack a wonderful fifty-liter vat, almost full, one of those from the Factory Kitchen. Templer looks at us, triumphant; this “organization” is his work.

  Templer is the official organizer of our Kommando: he has a highly sensitive nose for the civilians’ soup, like a bee for flowers. Our Kapo, who is not a bad Kapo, leaves him a free hand, and rightly so: Templer slinks off, following imperceptible tracks, like a bloodhound, and returns with the invaluable news that the Polish workers in the Methanol Department, a couple of kilometers from here, have abandoned forty liters of soup that tasted rancid, or that a carload of turnips is to be found unguarded on the siding next to the Factory Kitchen.

  Today there are fifty liters and we are fifteen, Kapo and Vorarbeiter included. This means three liters each: we’ll have one at midday, in addition to the normal ration, and we’ll come back to the barrack in turns for the two others during the afternoon, and be granted an extra five-minute break to fill ourselves up.

  What more could one want? Even our work seems light, with the prospect of two hot, dense liters waiting for us in the barrack. The Kapo comes to us periodically and calls: “Wer hat noch zu fressen?”

&nb
sp; He says it not in derision or mockery but because the way we eat, standing, urgently, burning our mouths and throats, without taking time to breathe, really is fressen, the way animals eat, and certainly not essen, the way humans eat, sitting at a table, solemnly. “Fressen” is the proper word, and is the one we commonly use.

  Meister Nogalla watches, and closes an eye at our absences from work. Meister Nogalla also has a hungry look about him, and, if it weren’t for the social conventions, perhaps he would not refuse a liter of our hot broth.

  Templer’s turn comes. By popular consensus, he has been allowed five liters, taken from the bottom of the pot. For Templer is not only a good organizer but an exceptional soup eater, and is uniquely able to empty his bowels whenever he wants and in anticipation of a large meal, which contributes to his astonishing gastric capacity.

  He is justly proud of this gift of his, and everybody, even Meister Nogalla, knows about it. Accompanied by the gratitude of all, Templer the benefactor enters the latrine for a few moments and comes out beaming and ready, and amid the general benevolence prepares to enjoy the fruits of his labor: “Nu, Templer, hast du Platz genug für die Suppe gemacht?”

  At sunset, the siren of the Feierabend sounds, marking the end of work; and, as we are all sated, at least for a few hours, no quarrels arise, we feel good, the Kapo feels no urge to hit us, and we are able to think of our mothers and wives, which usually does not happen. For a few hours we can be unhappy in the manner of free men.

  This Side of Good and Evil

  We had an incorrigible tendency to see in every event a symbol and a sign. For seventy days we had been waiting for the Wäschetauschen, the ceremony of the change of clothes, and a persistent rumor circulated that there was a lack of clothes to exchange, because, as the front advanced, it was impossible for the Germans to bring new transports into Auschwitz, and “therefore” liberation was near. At the same time, the opposite interpretation circulated: that the delay in the change was a sure sign of an approaching total liquidation of the camp. Instead, the change took place, and, as usual, the officials of the Lager made sure that it would occur unexpectedly and in all the barracks at once.