The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Three times it turned her round with all the waters;

  and at the fourth, it lifted up the stern

  so that our prow plunged deep, as pleased an Other.

  I hold Pikolo back, it is vitally necessary and urgent that he listen, that he understand this “as pleased an Other” before it’s too late; tomorrow he or I might be dead, or we might never see each other again, I must tell him, I must explain to him about the Middle Ages, about the so human and so necessary and yet unexpected anachronism, and something else, something gigantic that I myself have only just seen, in a flash of intuition, perhaps the reason for our fate, for our being here today. . . .

  We are now in the soup line, among the sordid, ragged crowd of soup-carriers from other Kommandos. Those who have just arrived press against our backs. “Kraut und Rüben?” “Kraut und Rüben.” The official announcement is made that the soup today is cabbage and turnips: “Choux et navets.” “Kaposzta és répak.”

  Until the sea again closed—over us.

  6. Inferno Canto XXVI:85–90.

  7. Alta tanto, not tanto alta.

  The Events of the Summer

  Throughout the spring, convoys arrived from Hungary; one of every two prisoners was Hungarian, and Hungarian became the second language in the camp, after Yiddish.

  In the month of August 1944, we who had entered the camp five months before now counted among the old prisoners. As such, we of Kommando 98 were not surprised that the promises made to us and the chemistry examination we had passed had brought no result: neither surprised nor exceptionally saddened. At bottom, we all had a certain fear of change: “When things change, they change for the worse” was one of the camp proverbs. More generally, experience had shown us countless times the futility of every conjecture: why torment oneself by trying to see into the future when no action, no word of ours could have the least influence? We were old Häftlinge: our wisdom lay in “not trying to understand,” not imagining the future, not torturing ourselves about how and when it would all be over: not asking questions of ourselves or others.

  We preserved the memories of our previous life, but blurred and remote, and hence profoundly sweet and sad, like the memories of early childhood and all things that are over, whereas for each of us the moment of entry into the camp was the starting point of a different sequence of memories, near and sharp, constantly confirmed by present experience, like wounds reopened every day.

  The news, heard at the worksite, of the Allied landing in Normandy, of the Russian offensive, and of the failed attempt on Hitler’s life had given rise to violent but ephemeral waves of hope. Day by day each of us felt his strength fade, his desire to live melt away, his mind grow dim; and Normandy and Russia were so far away, and winter so close, hunger and desolation so concrete, and all the rest so unreal, that it did not seem possible that any world and time existed other than our world of mud and our sterile and stagnant time, whose end we were by now incapable of imagining.

  For living men, units of time always have a value, which increases in proportion to the strength of the internal resources of the person living through them; but for us hours, days, months spilled out sluggishly from the future into the past, always too slow, a worthless and superfluous material that we sought to rid ourselves of as quickly as possible. With the end of the time when the days followed one another vivacious, precious, and irrecoverable, the future stood before us gray and inarticulate, like an invincible barrier. For us, history had stopped.

  But in August ’44 the bombardments of Upper Silesia began, and they continued, with irregular pauses and resumptions, throughout the summer and the autumn until the final crisis.

  The monstrous unquestioned labor for the preparation of the Buna factory stopped abruptly, and degenerated immediately into a disjointed, frantic, and paroxysmal confusion. The day when the production of synthetic rubber was supposed to begin, which had seemed imminent in August, was repeatedly postponed, until the Germans no longer spoke about it.

  Construction work stopped; the power of the countless multitudes of slaves was directed elsewhere and, day by day, became more unruly and passively hostile. With every raid there was new damage to be repaired; the delicate machinery, laboriously installed a few days before, had to be dismantled and removed; air-raid shelters and protective walls had to be hurriedly erected, only to prove ironically insubstantial and useless at the next trial.

  We had thought that anything would be preferable to the monotony of the identical and inexorably long days, to the systematic and orderly squalor of Buna in operation; but we were forced to change our minds when Buna began to fall to pieces around us, as if struck by a curse in which we ourselves felt implicated. We had to sweat amid the dust and smoking ruins, and tremble like beasts, flattened against the earth by the anger of the planes; broken by exhaustion and parched with thirst, we returned in the long, windy evenings of the Polish summer to find the camp upside down, no water to drink or wash in, no soup for our empty bellies, no light by which to defend our piece of bread against someone else’s hunger, or, in the morning, to find our shoes and clothes in the dark, raucous inferno of the Block.

  At Buna the German civilians raged with the fury of the secure man who wakes from a long dream of domination, and sees his ruin and is unable to understand it. The Reichsdeutsche of the Lager as well, including the political prisoners, felt in the hour of danger the ties of blood and soil. This new fact reduced the tangle of hatreds and incomprehensions to their elementary terms and redivided the two camps: the politicals, along with the green triangles and the SS, saw, or thought they saw, in the face of each of us the mockery of reprisal and the grim joy of revenge. They found agreement on this, and their ferocity redoubled.

  No German could now forget that we were on the other side: on the side of the terrible sowers who plowed the German sky like masters, high above every defense, and twisted the living metal of their constructions, carrying slaughter every day into their homes, into the hitherto unviolated homes of the German people.

  As for us, we were too destroyed to be truly afraid. The few who were still able to judge and feel righteously drew new strength and hope from the bombardments; those whom hunger had not yet reduced to a definitive inertia often took advantage of the moments of general panic to carry out doubly rash expeditions to the factory kitchens or the stores (doubly rash because, besides the direct risk of the raids, theft carried out in conditions of emergency was punished by hanging). But the greater number bore the new danger and the new discomforts with unchanged indifference: it was not a conscious resignation but the dull torpor of beasts broken in by beatings, and no longer hurt by beatings.

  We were forbidden to enter the bomb shelters. When the earth began to tremble, we dragged ourselves, dazed and limping, through the corrosive fumes of the smoke bombs to the vast squalid, sterile waste areas enclosed within the boundary of Buna; there we lay inert, piled on top of one another like dead men, yet still conscious of the momentary sweetness of our limbs at rest. We looked with indifferent eyes at the columns of smoke and fire breaking out around us: in moments of respite, filled with the faint menacing hum that every European knows, we picked the stunted chicory leaves and wild chamomile from the heavily trampled ground, and chewed them slowly in silence.

  When the alarm was over, we returned from every corner to our posts, a silent uncountable flock, accustomed to the anger of men and things; and continued that work of ours, as hated as ever, now even more obviously vain and senseless.

  In this world, shaken more deeply every day by the tremors of its approaching end, amid new terrors and hopes, and intervals of exacerbated slavery, I happened to meet Lorenzo.

  The story of my relationship with Lorenzo is both long and short, plain and enigmatic: it is the story of a time and a situation by now effaced from every present reality, and so I do not think it can be understood except in the manner in which we understand today the events of legends or the remotest history.

 
In concrete terms, it amounts to little: an Italian civilian worker brought me a piece of bread and the remains of his ration every day for six months; he gave me an undershirt of his, full of patches; he wrote a postcard on my behalf to Italy and brought me the reply. For all this he neither asked nor accepted any reward, because he was good and simple, and did not think that one should do good for a reward.

  All this ought not to seem trivial. My case was not the only one; as has already been said, others of us had relationships of various kinds with civilians, and obtained from them the means to survive; but they were relationships of a different nature. Our comrades spoke of them in the same ambiguous manner, full of innuendo, in which men of the world speak of their relations with women; that is, as adventures of which one can justly be proud and for which one wants to be envied, but which, even for the most pagan consciences, always remain on the margins of the permissible and the honest, so that it is incorrect and improper to boast about them. It is in this way that the Häftlinge speak of their civilian “protectors” and “friends”: with an ostentatious discretion, mentioning no names, so as not to compromise them, and also, and especially, so as not to create undesirable rivals. The most accomplished, the professional seducers like Henri, do not speak of them at all; they surround their successes with an aura of equivocal mystery, and they limit themselves to hints and allusions, calculated to arouse in their audience the vague and disquieting legend that they enjoy the good graces of boundlessly powerful and generous civilians. This in view of a deliberate aim: the reputation of good luck, as we have said elsewhere, proves to be of fundamental usefulness to anyone who knows how to surround himself with it.

  The reputation of being a seducer, of being “organized,” excites both envy and scorn, contempt and admiration. Anyone who lets himself be seen eating “organized” food is judged severely; he shows a serious lack of modesty and tact, besides obvious stupidity. It would be equally stupid and impertinent to ask “Who gave it to you? Where did you find it? How did you manage it?” Only the high numbers, foolish, inept, and helpless, who know nothing of the rules of the Lager, ask such questions; one does not reply to these questions, or one replies “Verschwinde, Mensch!” “Hau’ ab,” “Ucieka,” “Schiess in den Wind,” “Va chier”—in short, with one of those countless equivalents of “Go to hell” which are so abundant in camp jargon.

  There are also some who specialize in complex and patient campaigns of spying, to identify the civilian or group of civilians so-and-so turns to, and who then try in various ways to supplant him. Interminable controversies of priority break out, made all the more bitter for the loser by the knowledge that a “tested” civilian is almost always more profitable, and above all safer, than a civilian making his first contact with us. This civilian is worth much more, for obvious sentimental and technical reasons: he already knows the principles of “organization,” its regulations and its dangers, and, even more, he has demonstrated that he is capable of overcoming the caste barrier.

  In fact, for the civilians we are the untouchables. More or less explicitly, and with all the nuances lying between contempt and pity, they think that, because we have been condemned to this life of ours, because we have been reduced to this condition, we must be tainted by some mysterious, grave sin. They hear us speak in many different languages, which they do not understand and which sound grotesque to them, like animal noises; they see us as ignoble slaves, without hair, without honor, and without names, beaten every day, more abject every day, and they never glimpse in our eyes a light of rebellion, or of peace, or of faith. They know us as thieving and untrustworthy, muddy, ragged, and starving, and, mistaking the effect for the cause, they judge us worthy of our abasement. Who could tell one of our faces from another? For them we are Kazett, a neuter-singular noun.

  Naturally, this does not stop many of them from throwing us a piece of bread or a potato now and again, or giving us their bowls, after the distribution of the Zivilsuppe at the worksite, to scrape and return to them washed. They do it to get rid of some importunate hungry look, or through a momentary impulse of humanity, or through simple curiosity to see us running from all sides to fight each other for the scrap, ferociously and without restraint, until the strongest gobbles it up, and all the others limp away, humiliated.

  Now, nothing of this sort occurred between me and Lorenzo. However little sense there may be in trying to specify the reasons that I, among thousands of others like me, was able to stand up to the test, I believe that I owe it to Lorenzo if I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that a just world still existed outside ours, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, unconnected to hatred and fear: something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.

  The personages in these pages are not men. Their humanity is buried, or they themselves buried it, under the abuse received or inflicted on someone else. The evil and stupid SS men, the Kapos, the politicals, the criminals, the Prominents great and small, down to the indistinguishable Häftlinge slaves—all the grades of the mad hierarchy created by the Germans are paradoxically united in a common inner desolation.

  But Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man.

  October 1944

  We fought with all our strength to prevent the arrival of winter. We clung to the warm hours, at every dusk we tried to keep the sun in the sky for a little longer, but it was all in vain. Yesterday evening the sun went down irrevocably behind a tangle of dirty clouds, chimney stacks, and wires, and today it is winter.

  We know what it means, because we were here last winter; and the others will soon learn. It means that in the course of these months, from October until April, seven out of ten of us will die. Whoever does not die will suffer minute by minute, all day, every day: from the morning, before dawn, until the distribution of the evening soup we will have to keep our muscles continually tensed, dance from foot to foot, beat our arms under our armpits against the cold. We will have to spend bread to acquire gloves, and lose hours of sleep to repair them when they come unstitched. Since we can no longer eat outside, we will have to have our meals in the barrack, standing up; there each of us has available just a palm’s breadth of floor space, and we are forbidden to lean against the bunks. Wounds will open on our hands, and to get a bandage we’ll have to wait for hours every evening, standing in the snow and wind.

  Just as our hunger has nothing to do with the feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a special word. We say “hunger,” we say “tiredness,” “fear,” and “pain,” we say “winter,” and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived, in happiness and in suffering, in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer, a new, harsh language would have come into being; and we feel the need of this language in order to express what it means to labor all day in the wind, in temperatures below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, a cloth jacket and trousers, and in our body weakness, hunger, and knowledge of the approaching end.

  In the same way that one sees a hope end, winter arrived this morning. We realized it when we left the barrack to go and wash: there were no stars, the dark cold air had the scent of snow. In Roll Call Square, in the early light, when we assembled for work, no one spoke. When we saw the first flakes of snow, we thought that if, at the same time last year, they had told us we would see another winter in the Lager, we would have gone and touched the electric fence; and that even now we would go if we were logical, if it were not for this senseless, crazy residue of unconfessable hope.

  Because “winter” means yet another thing.

  Last spring, the Germans constructed two huge tents in an open space in the Lager. Throughout the spring and summer, each of them housed m
ore than a thousand men: now the tents had been taken down, and an excess of two thousand persons crowded our barracks. We old prisoners know that the Germans do not like such irregularities, and that soon something will happen to reduce our numbers.

  One feels the selections arriving. Selekcja: the hybrid Latin and Polish word is heard once, twice, many times, interpolated in foreign conversations; at first we cannot distinguish it, then it forces itself on our attention, and in the end it persecutes us.

  This morning the Poles are saying “Selekcja.” The Poles are the first to find out the news, and generally they try not to let it spread, because to know something that the others don’t yet know can always be useful. By the time everyone realizes that a selection is imminent, they already have a monopoly on the few possibilities of evading it (corrupting some doctor or Prominent with bread or tobacco; leaving the barrack for Ka-Be or vice versa at the right moment, so as to miss the commission).

  In the days that follow, the atmosphere of the Lager and the worksite is saturated with Selekcja: nobody knows anything definite, but everybody speaks about it, even the Polish, Italian, and French civilian workers whom we secretly see on the job. Yet the result is hardly a wave of despondency: our collective morale is too inarticulate and flat to be unstable. The fight against hunger, cold, and work leaves little margin for thought, even this thought. Every man reacts in his own way, but almost no one with those attitudes which might seem most plausible because most realistic—that is, with resignation or despair.

  All those able to make arrangements make them; but they are a small minority, because it is very difficult to escape a selection. The Germans apply themselves to these things with great solemnity and diligence.