The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Elias Lindzin, 141565, one day fell inexplicably into the Chemical Kommando. He was a dwarf, no more than five feet tall, but I have never seen muscles like his. When he is naked you can see every muscle rippling beneath his skin, powerful and mobile, like an animal unique of its kind; if his body were enlarged, with no alteration to its proportions, it would serve as a good model for a Hercules—as long as one does not look at his head.

  Under his scalp, the cranial sutures stand out excessively. The skull is massive and gives the impression of being made of metal or stone; the black edge of his shaved hair is visible barely a finger’s width above his eyebrows. The nose, the chin, the forehead, the cheekbones are hard and compact; the whole face looks like a battering ram, an instrument made for butting. A sense of bestial vigor emanates from his body.

  To see Elias work is a disconcerting spectacle; the Polish Meister, and even the Germans, sometimes stop to admire Elias in action. Nothing seems impossible to him. While we have trouble carrying one bag of cement, Elias carries two, then three, then four—no one knows how he keeps them balanced—and while he hurries along on his short, squat legs he makes faces under the load, he laughs, curses, shouts, and sings without pause, as if he had lungs of bronze. Despite his wooden shoes, Elias climbs like a monkey up the scaffolding and runs confidently along girders suspended over nothing; he carries six bricks at a time balanced on his head; he can make a spoon from a piece of tin, and a knife from a scrap of steel; he finds dry paper, wood, and coal everywhere and can start a fire in a few moments, even in the rain. He is a tailor, a carpenter, a cobbler, a barber; he can spit incredible distances; he sings, in a not unpleasant bass voice, Polish and Yiddish songs never heard before; he can ingest six, eight, ten liters of soup without vomiting and without having diarrhea, and begin work again immediately afterward. He knows how to produce a big hump between his shoulders, and goes around the barrack, lopsided and misshapen, shouting and declaiming incomprehensibly, to the joy of the Prominents of the camp. I saw him fight a Pole a whole head taller and knock him down with a blow of his skull to the stomach, as powerful and accurate as a catapult. I never saw him rest, I never saw him quiet or still, I never knew him injured or ill.

  Of his life as a free man, no one knows anything; in any case, to picture Elias as a free man requires a profound effort of imagination and deduction. He speaks only Polish and the surly, deformed Yiddish of Warsaw; besides, it’s impossible to keep him to a coherent conversation. He might be twenty years old or forty; he usually says he’s thirty-three, and has begot seventeen children—which is not unlikely. He talks continuously on the most varied subjects, always in a resounding voice, with oratorical accents and the violent gestures of the deranged, as if he were always speaking to a large crowd—and, naturally, he never lacks a crowd. Those who understand his language drink up his declamations, shaking with laughter; they slap him enthusiastically on his hard back, inciting him to continue, while he, fierce and frowning, whirls around like a wild animal within the circle of his audience. Addressing now one, now another, he suddenly grabs hold of one by the chest with his small hooked paw, irresistibly pulls him forward, vomits an incomprehensible invective into his astonished face, then throws him back like a piece of wood, and, amid applause and laughter, with his arms reaching up to the heavens like a small prophetic monster, continues his raging, crazy speech.

  His fame as an exceptional worker spread rapidly and, by the absurd law of the Lager, from then on he practically ceased to work. His help was requested directly by the various Meister, but only for such jobs as required special skills and strength. Apart from these services, he supervised our daily, dull labor insolently and violently, often disappearing on mysterious visits and adventures in who knows what recesses of the worksite, from which he returned with large bulges in his pockets and often with his stomach visibly full.

  Elias is naturally and innocently a thief: in this he shows the instinctive cunning of wild animals. He is never caught in the act, because he steals only when there is a favorable opportunity; but when there is, Elias steals as inevitably and predictably as a stone falls if you let go of it. Apart from the fact that it is difficult to surprise him, it’s obvious that it would serve no purpose to punish him for his thefts: to him they represent a vital act, like breathing or sleeping.

  We can now ask who is this man Elias: if he is a madman, incomprehensible and superhuman, who ended up in the Lager by chance; if he is an atavism, out of place in our modern world, and better suited to the primordial conditions of camp life. Or if he is, rather, a product of the camp, what we will all become if we do not die in the camp, and if the camp itself does not end first.

  There is some truth in all three suppositions. Elias has survived destruction from the outside, because he is physically indestructible; he has resisted annihilation from within because he is insane. So, first of all, he is a survivor: he is the fittest, the human type best suited to this way of life.

  If Elias regains his freedom, he will be confined to the fringes of human society, in a prison or a lunatic asylum. But here, in the Lager, there are no criminals or madmen: no criminals, because there is no moral law to contravene; no madmen, because we are without free will, as our every action is, in time and place, clearly the only one possible.

  In the Lager, Elias prospers and is triumphant. He is a good worker and a good organizer, and for that double reason he is safe from selections and respected by both leaders and comrades. For those who have no solid inner resources, for those who cannot draw from their own self-consciousness the strength needed to cling to life, the only path to salvation leads to Elias: to insanity and to insidious bestiality. All other paths are dead ends.

  That said, one might perhaps be tempted to draw conclusions, perhaps even rules, for our daily life. Are there not all around us Eliases, more or less fully realized? Do we not see individuals who live without purpose, lacking all forms of self-control and conscience, who live not in spite of these defects but, like Elias, precisely because of them?

  The question is serious, but will not be further discussed, because these are intended to be stories of the Lager, while much has already been written about man outside the Lager. But one thing we would like to add: Elias, as far as it’s possible to judge from the outside, and as far as the word can have meaning, was in all likelihood a happy individual.

  Henri, on the other hand, is eminently civilized and sane, and possesses a complete and organic theory on ways to survive in the Lager. He is only twenty-two; he is extremely intelligent, speaks French, German, English, and Russian, has an excellent scientific and classical education.

  His brother died in Buna last winter, and from that day Henri cut off every tie of affection; he closed himself up in himself, as if in armor, and fights to live without distraction, using all the resources that he can derive from his quick intellect and his refined upbringing. According to Henri’s theory, there are three methods by means of which a man can escape extermination and still remain worthy of the name of man: organization, compassion, and theft.

  He himself practices all three. There is no better strategist than Henri in manipulating (“cultivating,” he says) the English prisoners of war. In his hands they become real geese with golden eggs—if you remember that in exchange for a single English cigarette you can get enough in the Lager not to starve for a day. Henri was once seen in the act of eating a real hard-boiled egg.

  Trading in products of English origin is Henri’s monopoly, and this is all a matter of organization; but his instrument of penetration, with the English and with others, is compassion. Henri has the delicate and subtly androgynous body and face of Sodoma’s St. Sebastian: his eyes are dark and profound, he has no beard yet, he moves with a natural languid elegance (although when necessary he can run and jump like a cat, while the capacity of his stomach is scarcely inferior to Elias’s). Henri is perfectly aware of his natural gifts and exploits them with the cool competence of someone handling a scie
ntific instrument; the results are surprising. Basically it’s a question of a discovery. Henri has discovered that compassion, being a primary and instinctive sentiment, flourishes if skillfully inculcated, particularly in the primitive minds of the brutes who command us, those very brutes who have no scruples about knocking us down for no reason and trampling us once we’re on the ground; nor has the great practical importance of the discovery escaped him, and on it he has built up his personal industry.

  Like the ichneumon wasp that paralyzes a large hairy caterpillar, wounding it in its sole vulnerable ganglion, Henri sizes up the subject, son type, at a glance. He speaks to him briefly, in the appropriate language, and the type is conquered: he listens with increasing sympathy, he is moved by the fate of this unfortunate young man, and it isn’t long before he begins to yield returns.

  There is no heart so hardened that Henri cannot breach it, if he sets himself to it seriously. In the Lager, and in Buna as well, his protectors are extremely numerous: English soldiers, French, Ukrainian, Polish civilian workers; German “politicals”; at least four Blockälteste, a cook, even an SS officer. But his favorite field is Ka-Be: Henri has free entry into Ka-Be; Dr. Citron and Dr. Weiss are more than his protectors—they are his friends and admit him whenever he wants and with the diagnosis he wants. This takes place above all immediately before selections, and in the periods of the heaviest work: to “hibernate,” as he says.

  It’s natural that Henri, possessing such notable friendships, is rarely reduced to the third method, theft; on the other hand, of course, it’s not a subject that he willingly discusses.

  It’s very pleasant to talk to Henri in moments of rest. It’s also useful: there is nothing in the camp that he does not know and about which he has not reasoned in his close, coherent manner. Of his conquests, he speaks with polite modesty, as of prey of little value, but he digresses willingly to explain the calculation that led him to approach Hans by asking him about his son at the front, and Otto by showing him the scars on his shins.

  To speak with Henri is useful and pleasant. Sometimes one also feels a warmth and closeness; communication, even affection appears possible. One seems to glimpse the sorrowful, conscious human depths of his uncommon personality. But the next moment his sad smile freezes into a cold grimace that appears practiced at the mirror; Henri politely excuses himself (“. . . j’ai quelque chose à faire,” “. . . j’ai quelqu’un à voir”) and here he is again, intent on his hunt and his struggle: hard and distant, enclosed in armor, the enemy of all, inhumanly sly and incomprehensible, like the Serpent in Genesis.

  After my talks with Henri, even the most cordial, I always had a slight taste of defeat, and a confused suspicion of having been, in some inadvertent way, not a man to him but an instrument in his hands.

  I know that Henri is alive today. I would give much to know his life as a free man, but I do not want to see him again.

  5. Author’s note: This word, Muselmann, was used, although I do not know why, by the old hands of the camp to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection.

  Chemistry Examination

  Kommando 98, called the Chemical Kommando, was supposed to be a squad of skilled workers.

  The day its formation was officially announced, a meager group of fifteen Häftlinge gathered in the gray dawn around the new Kapo in Roll Call Square.

  This was the first disappointment: he was a green triangle, a professional criminal; the Arbeitsdienst had not thought it necessary for the Kapo of the Chemical Kommando to be a chemist. It was pointless to waste any breath asking him questions; he would not have replied, or he would have replied with shouts and kicks. On the other hand, his not very robust appearance and his smaller than average stature were reassuring.

  He made a short speech in vulgar barracks German, and the disappointment was confirmed. So these were the chemists: well, he was Alex, and if they thought they were entering paradise, they were mistaken. In the first place, until the day production began, Kommando 98 would be no more than an ordinary transport Kommando, assigned to the Magnesium Chloride warehouse. Secondly, if they imagined, being Intelligenten, intellectuals, that they could make a fool of him, Alex, a Reichsdeutscher, well, Herrgottsakrament, he would show them, he would . . . (and with clenched fist and index finger extended he cut the air in the German gesture of threat); and, finally, they should not imagine that they would deceive anyone, if a man who was not a chemist presented himself as one. An examination, yes, gentlemen, in the next few days, a chemistry examination, before the triumvirate of the Polymerization Department: Doktor Hagen, Doktor Probst, and Doktor Ingenieur Pannwitz.

  And with this, meine Herren, enough time has been wasted, Kommandos 96 and 97 have already started, forward Marsch, and, to begin with, whoever fails to keep in line and step will have to deal with him.

  He was a Kapo like all other Kapos.

  Leaving the camp, in view of the band and the SS counting station, we march five abreast, cap in hand, arms motionless at our sides, and neck rigid; speaking is forbidden. Then we switch to threes, and it is possible to exchange a few words amid the clatter of ten thousand pairs of wooden shoes.

  Who are my chemist comrades? Next to me walks Alberto; he is in his third year at university, and once again we have managed to stay together. The third person on my left I have never seen; he seems very young, is as pale as wax, and has the number of the Dutch. The three backs in front of me are also new. It’s dangerous to look behind—I might lose step or stumble—but I try for a moment, and see the face of Iss Clausner.

  As long as we’re walking there is no time to think; we have to take care not to step on the shoes of the person hobbling in front, and not to let our own be stepped on by the person behind, and every now and again there is a hole to get over, an oily puddle to avoid. I know where we are, I’ve already been here with my previous Kommando; it’s the H-Strasse, the road of the warehouses, I tell Alberto, we really are going to the Magnesium Chloride warehouse, at least that was not a lie.

  We have arrived, we go down into a large damp, drafty cellar; this is the headquarters of the Kommando—the Bude, as it is called here. The Kapo divides us into three squads: four to unload sacks from the freight car, seven to carry them down, four to stack them in the warehouse. These last are Alberto and I, Iss and the Dutchman.

  At last we can speak, and to each of us what Alex said seems a madman’s dream.

  With these empty faces of ours, these shaved skulls, these shameful clothes, to take a chemistry examination. And obviously it will be in German; and we’ll have to go before some blond Aryan Doktor hoping that we don’t have to blow our noses, because perhaps he won’t know that we don’t have handkerchiefs, and it will certainly not be possible to explain it to him. And with us we’ll have our old companion hunger, and we will hardly be able to stand steady on our feet, and he will certainly smell our odor, to which we are by now accustomed, but which persecuted us during the first days, the odor of turnips and cabbages, raw, cooked, and digested.

  Exactly so, Clausner confirms. But do the Germans have such a great need of chemists? Or is it a new trick, a new machine pour faire chier les Juifs? Are they aware of the grotesque and absurd test that is asked of us, of us who are no longer alive, of us who are already half mad in the grim expectation of nothing? Clausner shows me the bottom of his bowl. Where others have carved their numbers, and Alberto and I our names, Clausner has written: “Ne pas chercher à comprendre.”

  Although we don’t think about it for more than a few minutes a day, and even then in a strangely detached and distant manner, we know very well that we will end up in a selection. I know that I am not made of the stuff of those who endure, I am too civilized, I still think too much, I wear myself out at work. And now I also know that I will survive if I become a specialist, and that I will become a specialist if I pass a chemistry examination.

  Today, this very day, as I sit at a table and write, I myself am not convinced that these thi
ngs really happened.

  Three days passed, three of the usual unremembered days, so long while they were passing and so short once they had passed, and already we were all tired of believing in the chemistry examination.

  The Kommando was reduced to twelve men: three had disappeared the way people did there, perhaps into the barrack next door, perhaps removed from the world. Of the twelve, five were not chemists; all five had immediately requested permission from Alex to return to their former Kommandos. They did not escape beatings, but unexpectedly, and by who knows what authority, it was decided that they should remain as auxiliaries to the Chemical Kommando.

  Down came Alex into the Magnesium Chloride cellar and called the seven of us out to go and face the examination. Here we are, like seven awkward chicks behind the hen, following Alex up the steps of the Polymerisations-Büro. We are in the lobby, and on the door is a brass plate with the three famous names. Alex knocks respectfully, takes off his cap, and enters. We hear a quiet voice. Alex comes out again: “Ruhe, jetzt. Warten.” Wait now in silence.

  We are satisfied with this. When we wait, time runs smoothly—there is no need to intervene and drive it forward—while when we work every minute moves through us arduously and has to be laboriously pushed out. We are always happy to wait; we are capable of waiting for hours with the complete dull-witted inertia of spiders in old webs.

  Alex is nervous, he walks up and down, and we move out of his way each time. We, too, are uneasy, each in his own way; only Mendi is not. Mendi is a rabbi; he comes from Subcarpathian Russia, from that confusion of peoples where everyone speaks at least three languages, and Mendi speaks seven. He knows a great number of things; besides being a rabbi, he is a militant Zionist, and a linguist, he was a partisan, and has a law degree; he is not a chemist, but he wants to try all the same, he is a stubborn, courageous, keen little man.