by Primo Levi
Bálla has a pencil and we all crowd around him. We aren’t sure if we still know how to write, we want to try.
Kohlenwasserstoffe, Massenwirkungsgesetz. The German names of compounds and laws float back to the surface. I feel grateful to my brain: I have not paid much attention to it, and yet it still serves me so well.
Here is Alex. I am a chemist. What have I to do with this Alex? He plants himself in front of me, roughly adjusts the collar of my jacket, pulls off my cap and slaps it firmly down on my head, then steps back, and, eyeing the result with a disgusted air, turns away, muttering, “Was für ein Muselmann Zugang.” What a shabby new acquisition!
The door opens. The three doctors have decided that six candidates will be examined in the morning. The seventh will not. I am the seventh, I have the highest entry number, I have to return to work. Alex will not come to fetch me until the afternoon. What bad luck, I won’t even be able talk to the others to find out “what the questions are.”
This time it really is my turn. On the steps, Alex looks at me blackly; in some way he feels responsible for my miserable appearance. He dislikes me because I am Italian, because I am a Jew, and because, of all of us, I am the one furthest from his barracks ideal of virility. By analogy, without understanding anything, and proud of this very ignorance, he displays a profound disbelief in my chances on the examination.
We have entered. There is only Doktor Pannwitz; Alex, cap in hand, speaks to him in an undertone: “. . . an Italian, has been in the Lager only three months, already half kaputt. . . . Er sagt er ist Chemiker. . . .” But he, Alex, apparently has his reservations on the subject.
Alex is dismissed in a few words and set aside, and I feel like Oedipus in front of the Sphinx. My ideas are clear, and I am aware even at this moment that the stakes are high; yet I feel a mad desire to disappear, to avoid the test.
Pannwitz is tall, thin, blond; he has the eyes, the hair, and the nose that all Germans ought to have, and sits formidably behind an elaborate desk. I, Häftling 174517, stand in his office, which is a real office, shining, clean, and orderly, and it seems to me that I would leave a dirty stain if I were to touch anything.
When he finished writing, he raised his eyes and looked at me.
Since that day, I have thought about Doktor Pannwitz many times and in many ways. I have asked myself about his inner workings as a man; how he filled his time, outside of the Polymerization Department and his Indo-Germanic conscience. Above all, when I was once more a free man, I wanted to meet him again, not out of a spirit of revenge but merely out of my curiosity about the human soul.
Because that look did not pass between two men; and if I knew how to explain fully the nature of that look, exchanged as if through the glass wall of an aquarium between two beings who inhabit different worlds, I would also be able to explain the essence of the great insanity of the Third Reich.
What we all thought and said of the Germans could be felt at that moment, in an immediate manner. The brain that governed those blue eyes and those manicured hands said, “This something in front of me belongs to a species that it is obviously right to suppress. In this particular case, one has first to make sure that it does not contain some useful element.” And in my head, like seeds in an empty pumpkin: “Blue eyes and fair hair are essentially wicked. No communication possible. I am a specialist in mining chemistry. I am a specialist in organic syntheses. I am a specialist . . .”
And the examination began, while in the corner Alex, that third zoological specimen, yawned and ground his teeth.
“Wo sind Sie geboren?” He uses Sie, the polite form of address: Doktor Ingenieur Pannwitz has no sense of humor. Damn him, he isn’t making the slightest effort to speak a more comprehensible German.
“I took my degree at Turin in 1941, summa cum laude”—and, as I say it, I have the definite impression of not being believed, I don’t really believe it myself; it’s enough to look at my dirty hands covered with sores, my convict’s trousers encrusted with mud. Yet I am he, the university graduate of Turin—in fact at this particular moment it is impossible to doubt my identity with him, for my reservoir of knowledge of organic chemistry, even after this long period of idleness, responds upon request with unexpected docility. And, even more, this sense of lucid elation, this excitement which I feel warm in my veins, I recognize it, it is the fever of exams, my fever of my exams, the spontaneous mobilization of all my logical faculties and all my knowledge that my classmates so envied.
The examination is going well. As I gradually realize this, I seem to grow in stature. Now he is asking me what was the subject of my degree thesis. I have to make a violent effort to recall that sequence of memories, so deeply buried: it is as if I were trying to remember the events of a previous incarnation.
Something protects me. My poor old “Measurements of Dielectrical Constants” are of particular interest to this blond Aryan with his safe existence: he asks me if I know English, he shows me Gattermann’s textbook, and this, too, is absurd and impossible, that down here, on the other side of the barbed wire, a Gattermann should exist, exactly the same as the one I studied in Italy in my fourth year, at home.
Now it is over: the excitement that sustained me during the entire test suddenly gives way, and, dazed and dumb, I stare at the fair-skinned hand writing down my fate on the blank page in incomprehensible symbols.
“Los, ab!” Alex enters the scene again; I am once more under his jurisdiction. He salutes Pannwitz, clicking his heels, and in return receives a faint nod of the eyelids. For a moment I grope for a suitable formula of leave-taking: but in vain. In German I know how to say eat, work, steal, die; I also know how to say sulfuric acid, atmospheric pressure, and short-wave generator; but I have no idea how to address a person of importance.
Here we are again on the steps. Alex flies down them: he has leather shoes because he is not a Jew, he is as light on his feet as the devils of Malebolge. At the bottom he turns and looks at me sourly as I walk down hesitantly and noisily in my two enormous mismatched wooden clogs, clinging to the railing like an old man.
It seems to have gone well, but it would be foolish to rely on it. I already know the Lager well enough to realize that one should never anticipate, especially optimistically. What is certain is that I have spent a day without working, so that tonight I will be a little less hungry, and this is a concrete advantage, not to be taken away.
To reenter Bude, we have to cross a space cluttered with piles of girders and metal frames. The steel cable of a winch cuts across our path, and Alex grabs hold of it to climb over: Donnerwetter, he looks at his hand, black with thick grease. In the meantime I have joined him. Without hatred and without contempt, Alex wipes his hand on my shoulder, both the palm and the back of the hand, to clean it; he would be amazed, the innocent brute Alex, if someone told him that today I judge him on the basis of this action, him and Pannwitz and the innumerable others like him, great and small, in Auschwitz and everywhere.
The Canto of Ulysses
There were six of us, scraping and cleaning the inside of an underground gas tank; the daylight reached us only through a small door. It was a luxury job, because no one was supervising us; but it was cold and damp. The powdery rust burned us under our eyelids and coated our throats and mouths with a taste almost like blood.
The rope ladder hanging from the manhole began to sway: someone was coming. Deutsch extinguished his cigarette, Goldner woke Sivadjan; we all began to scrape the resonant steel-plate wall vigorously.
It was not the Vorarbeiter, it was only Jean, the Pikolo of our Kommando. Jean was an Alsatian student; although he was already twenty-four, he was the youngest Häftling in the Chemical Kommando. So he was given the post of Pikolo, meaning errand boy/clerk, responsible for cleaning the barrack, for the distribution of tools, for washing the bowls, and for keeping a record of the working hours of the Kommando.
Jean spoke French and German fluently: as soon as we recognized his shoes on the top step of th
e ladder we all stopped scraping.
“Also, Pikolo, was gibt es Neues?”
“Qu’est-ce qu’il y a comme soupe aujourd’hui?”
. . . what was the Kapo’s mood? And the matter of the twenty-five lashes given to Stern? What was the weather like outside? Had he read the newspaper? What sort of smell was coming from the civilian kitchen? What was the time?
Jean was very well liked by the Kommando. It should be noted that the post of Pikolo represented quite a high rank in the hierarchy of the Prominenz: the Pikolo (who is usually no older than seventeen) does no manual work, has a free hand with the remains of the daily ration at the bottom of the vat, and can stay near the stove all day. He “therefore” has the right to a supplementary half-ration and has a good chance of becoming the friend and confidant of the Kapo, from whom he officially receives discarded clothes and shoes. Now, Jean was an exceptional Pikolo. He was shrewd and physically robust, and at the same time gentle and friendly. Although he carried out his secret individual struggle against the camp and against death with tenacity and courage, he did not neglect his human relationships with less privileged comrades, and yet he was so skillful and persevering that he had managed to establish himself in the confidence of Alex, the Kapo.
Alex had kept all his promises. He had shown himself a violent and unreliable beast, with an armor of solid, dense ignorance and stupidity, except for his intuitive and consummate technique as a torturer. He never missed an opportunity of proclaiming his pride in his pure blood and his green triangle, and displayed a lofty contempt for his ragged and starving chemists. “Ihr Doktoren! Ihr Intelligenten!” he sneered every day, watching them crowd around with their bowls held out for the distribution of the ration. He was extremely compliant and servile toward the civilian supervisors, and with the SS he maintained ties of cordial friendship.
He was clearly intimidated by the Kommando’s register and by the daily performance report, and this was the path that Pikolo chose to make himself indispensable. It had been a slow, cautious, and subtle task, which the entire Kommando had followed for a month with bated breath; but in the end the porcupine’s defenses were penetrated, and Pikolo confirmed in his office, to the satisfaction of all concerned.
Although Jean never abused his position, we had already been able to verify that a single word of his, spoken in the right tone of voice and at the right moment, had great power; many times already it had saved one of us from a whipping or from being reported to the SS. He and I had been friends for a week: we discovered each other during the unusual occasion of an air-raid alarm, but then, swept up by the fierce rhythm of the Lager, we had been able to greet each other only fleetingly, at the latrines, in the washhouse.
Hanging onto the swaying ladder with one hand, he pointed to me: “Aujourd’hui c’est Primo qui viendra avec moi chercher la soupe.”
Until the day before it had been Stern, the squinting Transylvanian; now he had fallen into disgrace for some business of brooms stolen from the warehouse, and Pikolo had managed to support my candidacy as assistant for the Essenholen, the daily task of picking up the ration.
He climbed out and I followed him, blinking in the brightness of the day. It was warm outside; the sun drew a faint smell of paint and tar from the greasy earth that made me think of a summer beach of my childhood. Pikolo gave me one of the two wooden poles, and we walked along under a clear June sky.
I began to thank him, but he stopped me: it was not necessary. We could see the Carpathians, covered with snow. I breathed in the fresh air, I felt unusually lighthearted.
“Tu es fou de marcher si vite. On a le temps, tu sais.” The ration was picked up a kilometer away; you had to return with the pot, weighing fifty kilos, supported on the two poles. It was quite a tiring job, but it meant a pleasant walk there without a load, and the ever welcome opportunity of getting near the kitchens.
We slowed down. Pikolo was experienced. He had chosen the path cleverly, so that we would make a long circuit, walking for at least an hour, without arousing suspicions. We spoke of our homes, of Strasbourg and Turin, of the books we had read, of what we had studied, of our mothers: how all mothers resemble one another! His mother, too, had scolded him for never knowing how much money he had in his pocket; his mother, too, would have been amazed if she had known that he had made it, that day by day he was making it.
An SS man passed on a bicycle. It’s Rudi, the Blockführer. Halt! Attention! Take off your cap! “Sale brute, celui-là. Ein ganz gemeiner Hund.” Can he speak French and German with equal facility? Yes, it makes no difference, he can think in both languages. He spent a month in Liguria, he likes Italy, he would like to learn Italian. I would be happy to teach him Italian: why not try? We can do it. Why not immediately, one thing is as good as another, what’s important is not to lose time, not to waste this hour.
Limentani from Rome walks by, dragging his feet, with a bowl hidden under his jacket. Pikolo listens carefully, picks up a few words of our conversation and repeats them smiling: “Zup-pa, cam-po, ac-qua.”
Frenkel the spy passes. Quicken the pace, one never knows, he does evil for evil’s sake.
. . . The canto of Ulysses. Who knows how or why it comes into my mind. But we have no time to choose, this hour is already less than an hour. If Jean is intelligent he will understand. He will understand—today I feel capable of so much.
. . . Who Dante is. What the Comedy is. What a curiously novel sensation, to try to explain briefly what the Divine Comedy is. How the Inferno is divided up, what its punishments are. Virgil is Reason, Beatrice is Theology.
Jean pays close attention, and I begin slowly and precisely:
The greater horn within that ancient flame
began to sway and tremble, murmuring,
just like a fire that struggles in the wind;
then, he waved his flame-tip back and forth,
as if it were a tongue that tried to speak,
and flung toward us a voice that answered: “When I departed . . .”6
Here I stop and try to translate. Disastrous—poor Dante and poor French! All the same, the experience seems to augur well: Jean admires the bizarre simile of the tongue and suggests the appropriate word to translate antica (ancient).
And after “When I departed”? Nothing. A hole in my memory. “Before Aeneas gave that place a name.” Another hole. An unusable fragment floats into my mind: “nor pity / for my old father, nor the love I owed Penelope, / which would have gladdened her,” can that be correct?
. . . but I set out on the open sea.
Of this, yes, I am certain, this I can explain to Pikolo, I can point out why “I set out”—“misi me”— is not “je me mis,” it is much stronger and more audacious, it is a chain that has been broken, it is throwing oneself beyond a barrier, we know the impulse well. The deep open sea: Pikolo has traveled by sea and knows what it means. It is when the horizon closes in on itself, free, straight, and simple, and there is nothing but the smell of the sea—sweet things, cruelly distant.
We have arrived at the Kraftwerk, where the cable-laying Kommando works. Engineer Levi must be here. There he is, only his head is visible above the trench. He waves to me, he is a spirited man, I have never seen his morale low, he never talks about eating.
“Open sea,” “open sea” (mare aperto), I know it rhymes with “deserted” (diserto): “. . . and with that small company of those who never had deserted me,” but I no longer remember if it comes before or after. And the journey as well, the foolhardy journey beyond the Pillars of Hercules, how sad, I have to tell it in prose: a sacrilege. I have rescued only one line, but it is worth pausing on:
. . . that men might heed and never reach beyond . . .
“Reach beyond” (si metta): I had to come to the Lager to realize that it’s the same expression as before: “I set out” (misi me). But I say nothing to Jean, I’m not sure that it’s an important observation. How many other things there are to say, and the sun is already high, midday is
near. I’m in a hurry, a terrible hurry.
Here, listen, Pikolo, open your ears and your mind, you have to understand, for my sake:
Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
you were not made to live your lives as brutes,
but to be followers of worth and knowledge.
As if I, too, were hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forget who I am and where I am.
Pikolo begs me to repeat it. How kind Pikolo is, he is aware that it is doing me good. Or perhaps it is something more: perhaps, despite the feeble translation and the pedestrian, rushed commentary, he has received the message, he has understood that it has to do with him, that it has to do with all men who toil, and with us in particular; and that it has to do with us two, who dare to talk about these things with the soup poles on our shoulders.
I spurred my comrades with this brief address
To meet the journey with such eagerness
. . . and I try, but in vain, to explain how many things this “eagerness” means. There is another gap here, this time irreparable. “. . . the light beneath the moon” or something like that; but before it? . . . No idea, keine Ahnung, as they say here. Forgive me, Pikolo, I have forgotten at least four terzinas.
“Ça ne fait rien, vas-y tout de même.”
When there before us rose a mountain, dark
because of distance, and it seemed to me
the highest mountain I had ever seen.
Yes, yes, not “very high” but “highest,”7 a consecutive proposition. And the mountains when one sees them in the distance . . . the mountains . . . oh, Pikolo, Pikolo, say something, speak, don’t let me think of my mountains, which would appear in the evening dusk as I returned by train from Milan to Turin!
Enough, one has to go on, these are things one thinks but does not say. Pikolo waits and looks at me.
I would give today’s soup to be able to connect “the highest I had ever seen” to the last lines. I try to reconstruct it through the rhymes, I close my eyes, I bite my fingers—but it’s no use, the rest is silence. Other lines dance in my head: “The tearful earth gave forth a wind,” no, it’s something else. It’s late, it’s late, we’ve reached the kitchen, I have to finish: