The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  All those unable to make material arrangements seek protection in other ways. In the latrines, in the washhouse, we show each other our chests, our buttocks, our thighs, and our comrades reassure us: “You’ll be all right, it certainly won’t be your turn this time. . . du bist kein Muselmann . . . more probably mine . . .” and in turn they lower their pants and pull up their shirts.

  Nobody refuses this act of charity to another: nobody is so sure of his own lot that he has the courage to condemn others. I brazenly lied to old Wertheimer; I told him that if they questioned him, he should say he’s forty-five, and that he shouldn’t forget to have a shave the evening before, even if it cost him a quarter-ration of bread; apart from that, he need have no fears, and in any case it was by no means certain that it was a selection for the gas chamber; had he not heard the Blockältester say that those chosen would go to the convalescent camp at Jaworzno?

  It’s absurd for Wertheimer to hope: he looks sixty, he has enormous varicose veins, he hardly even notices the hunger anymore. But he lies down on his bed, serene and quiet, and replies to anyone who asks him with my words; they are the watchword in the camp these days. I myself repeated them just as—except for the details—I heard them said to me by Chaim, who has been in the Lager for three years, and, being strong and robust, is wonderfully sure of himself; and I believed him.

  On this slender basis I, too, lived through the great selection of October 1944, with inconceivable tranquility. I was tranquil because I managed to lie to myself sufficiently. The fact that I was not selected depended almost entirely on chance and does not prove that my faith was well founded.

  Monsieur Pinkert is also, a priori, condemned: it is enough to look at his eyes. He calls me over with a nod, and in a confidential tone explains to me that he has been informed—he cannot tell me the source of his information—that this time there really is something new: the Holy See, by means of the International Red Cross . . . in short, he personally guarantees that, both for himself and for me, absolutely, any danger can be ruled out; it’s well-known that as a civilian he was an attaché at the Belgian embassy in Warsaw.

  Thus, in various ways, even those days of vigil, which seem in the telling as if they ought to have been agonizing beyond the limits of human endurance, go by not very differently from other days.

  The discipline in both the Lager and Buna is in no way relaxed: the work, the cold, and the hunger are sufficient to absorb our attention completely.

  Today is a working Sunday, Arbeitssonntag: we work until 1 p.m., then we return to the camp for a shower, shaving, and the general inspection for skin diseases and lice. And at the worksite, mysteriously, we’ve all found out that the selection will be today.

  The news arrived, as always, surrounded by a halo of contradictory and suspect details: the selection in the infirmary took place this morning; the percentage was 7 percent of the whole camp, 30, 50 percent of the patients. At Birkenau, the crematorium chimney has been smoking for ten days. Room has to be made for an enormous convoy arriving from the Poznan Ghetto. The young tell the young that all the old ones will be chosen. The healthy tell the healthy that only the sick will be chosen. Specialists will be excluded. German Jews will be excluded. Low numbers will be excluded. You will be chosen. I will be excluded.

  Punctually, starting at 1 p.m. exactly, the worksite empties, and for two hours the interminable gray rows file past the two checkpoints, where, as usual, we are counted and recounted, and past the orchestra that for two hours without interruption plays, as usual, those marches to which we must synchronize our steps at our entrance and our exit.

  It seems like an ordinary day, the kitchen chimney smokes as usual, the distribution of the soup is already beginning. But then the bell is heard, and at that moment we know that we are there.

  Because that bell always sounds at dawn, and then it means reveille, but when it sounds during the day it means Blocksperre, confinement in the barracks, and this happens when there is a selection, so that no one can escape it, and so that, when those selected leave for the gas chamber, no one sees them leave.

  Our Blockältester knows his business. He has made sure that we have all entered, he has had the door locked, he has given each of us the card that bears our number, name, profession, age, and nationality, and he has ordered everyone to undress completely, except for shoes. Like this, naked, with the card in our hand, we wait for the commission to reach our barrack. We are Barrack 48, but one can never tell if it will start at Barrack 1 or Barrack 60. Anyway, we can rest quietly for at least an hour, and there is no reason not to get under the blankets on the bunk and keep warm.

  Many are already dozing when a barrage of orders, oaths, and blows proclaims the imminent arrival of the commission. The Blockältester and his helpers, with fists and shouts, starting at the end of the dormitory, drive the crowd of frightened, naked men forward and cram them into the Tagesraum, which is the quartermaster’s office. The Tagesraum is a small room, seven meters by four: when the drive is over, a warm, compact human mass is jammed into the Tagesraum, spreading to fill all the corners perfectly, and exerting such a pressure on the wooden walls that they creak.

  Now we are all in the Tagesraum, and there is not only no time but not even any space in which to be afraid. The sensation of warm flesh pressing all around is unusual and not unpleasant. You have to take care to hold your nose up in order to breathe, and not to crumple or lose the card in your hand.

  The Blockältester has closed the connecting door and has opened the other two, which lead outside from the dormitory and the Tagesraum. Here, in front of the two doors, stands the arbiter of our fate, an SS officer. On his right is the Blockältester, on his left, the quartermaster of the barrack. Each of us, as he comes naked out of the Tagesraum into the cold October air, has to run the few steps between the two doors, in front of the three men, give the card to the SS officer, and go back in through the dormitory door. The SS officer, in the fraction of a second between the two successive crossings, with a glance at front and back, judges our fate, and in turn gives the card to the man on his right or his left, and this is the life or death of each one of us. In three or four minutes a barrack of two hundred men is “done,” and in the course of the afternoon the entire camp of twelve thousand men.

  Jammed in the charnel house of the Tagesraum, I gradually felt the human pressure around me slacken, and before long my turn came. Like everyone else, I passed by with a brisk and elastic step, trying to keep my head high, my chest forward, and my muscles taut and conspicuous. Out of the corner of my eye I tried to look back, and it seemed to me that my card ended up on the right.

  As we gradually return to the dormitory we are allowed to dress. Nobody yet knows with certainty his fate; first of all it has to be established whether the condemned cards were those handed to the right or to the left. There’s no point by now in sparing one another’s feelings with superstitious scruples. Everybody crowds around the oldest, the most emaciated, the most Muselmann; if their cards went to the left, the left is certainly the side of the condemned.

  Even before the selection is over, we all know that the left was in fact the schlechte Seite, the bad side. Naturally, there have been some irregularities: René, for example, so young and robust, ended up on the left; perhaps it’s because he has glasses, perhaps because he walks with a slight stoop, like someone who is nearsighted, but more likely it was a simple error: René went past the commission immediately ahead of me, and there could have been a mistake with our cards. I think about it, discuss it with Alberto, and we agree that the hypothesis is probable: I don’t know what I’ll think tomorrow and later; today I feel no distinct emotion.

  It must likewise have been a mistake with Sattler, a huge Transylvanian peasant who was still at home only twenty days ago; Sattler does not know German, has understood nothing of what has happened, and stands in a corner mending his shirt. Should I go and tell him that he won’t need his shirt anymore?

  There is nothi
ng surprising about these mistakes: the examination is very rapid and perfunctory, and, in any case, the important thing for the Lager administration is not that the most useless prisoners be eliminated but that free places be quickly created, according to a fixed percentage.

  The selection is now over in our barrack, but it continues in the others, so we are still locked in. But since the soup vats have arrived in the meantime, the Blockältester decides to proceed with the distribution at once. A double ration will be given to those selected. I have never discovered if this was a ridiculously charitable initiative of the Blockälteste or an explicit order of the SS, but in fact, during the two- or three-day interval (and sometimes much longer) between the selection and the departure, the victims at Auschwitz-Monowitz enjoyed this privilege.

  Ziegler holds out his bowl, collects his normal ration, and then waits expectantly. “What do you want?” asks the Blockältester: as far as he is concerned, Ziegler is entitled to no supplement, and he pushes him away, but Ziegler returns and humbly persists. He was on the left, everybody saw it, the Blockältester can check the cards; he has the right to a double ration. When he gets it, he goes quietly to his bunk to eat.

  Now each of us is busy scraping the bottom of his bowl with his spoon so as to pick up the last drops of soup, a confused, metallic clatter, signifying the end of the day. Silence slowly prevails, and then, from my bunk, on the top level, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his cap on his head, his torso swaying violently. Kuhn is thanking God that he was not chosen.

  Kuhn is out of his mind. Does he not see, in the bunk next to him, Beppo the Greek, who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow, and knows it, and lies there staring at the light without saying anything and without even thinking anymore? Does Kuhn not know that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty—nothing at all in the power of man to do—can ever heal?

  If I were God, I would spit Kuhn’s prayer out upon the ground.

  Kraus

  When it rains we feel like crying. It is November, it has been raining for ten days now, and the ground is like the bottom of a swamp. Everything made of wood has the smell of mushrooms.

  If I could take ten steps to the left, I would be sheltered by the roof; all I’d need is a sack to cover my shoulders, or the mere prospect of a fire where I could dry myself; or maybe a dry rag to put between my shirt and my back. From one swing of the shovel to the next I think about it, and I really believe that to have a dry rag would be positive happiness.

  It’s impossible to be more thoroughly soaked than I am now; I just have to try to move as little as possible and, above all, not to make any new movements, so that no other part of my skin comes into unnecessary contact with my sodden, icy clothes.

  Luckily it’s not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being lucky, how some chance circumstance, perhaps infinitesimal, checks us on the edge of despair and allows us to live. It’s raining, but not windy. Or it’s raining and also windy, but you know that tonight is your turn for the extra soup, and so today, too, you find the strength to make it to the evening. Or there’s rain, wind, and the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and boredom, as sometimes happens, when you truly seem to be lying on the bottom—well, even then we think that at any moment, if we want, we could always go and touch the electric fence, or throw ourself under the shunting trains, and then the rain would stop.

  We have been stuck in the mud since morning, legs apart, feet never moving from the holes they have dug for themselves in the glue-like soil, hips swaying at every swing of the shovel. I am halfway down the pit, Kraus and Clausner are at the bottom, Gounan is above me, at ground level. Only Gounan can look around, and every now and again he alerts Kraus tersely of the need to quicken the pace or even to rest, according to who is passing by along the road. Clausner wields the pickax, Kraus lifts the earth up to me, shovelful by shovelful, and I gradually lift it up to Gounan, who piles it on one side. Others go to and fro with wheelbarrows and carry the earth somewhere, of no interest to us. Our world today is this hole of mud.

  Kraus misses the target, a lump of mud flies up and splatters over my knees. It’s not the first time this has happened, and I warn him to be careful, but without much hope: he is Hungarian, has a limited understanding of German, and doesn’t know a word of French. He is tall and thin, wears glasses, and has a curious, small, twisted face; when he laughs he looks like a child, and he laughs often. He works too much and too vigorously: he has not yet learned our underground art of economizing on everything—breath, movement, even thought. He does not yet know that it is better to be beaten, because you do not normally die from beatings, but from exhaustion you do, and miserably, and by the time you realize it, it’s already too late. He still thinks . . . oh no, poor Kraus, this is not reasoning, it is only the foolish honesty of a petty office worker, he brought it with him, and he seems to think that in here it’s like the outside, where hard work is honest and logical, and also advantageous, since, as everyone says, the more one works the more one earns and eats.

  “Regardez-moi ça! . . . Pas si vite, idiot!” Gounan swears at him from above; then he remembers to translate into German: “Langsam, du blöder Einer, langsam, verstanden?” Kraus can kill himself through exhaustion if he wants to, but not today, because we’re working in a line and the pace of our work is set by him.

  There goes the siren of the Carbide factory, and the English prisoners leave; it is half past four. Then the Ukrainian girls will go by, and so it will be five, and we will be able to straighten our backs, and only the return march, the roll call, and the check for lice will separate us from our rest.

  It is assembly time, Antreten from all sides; from all sides the mud puppets crawl out, stretch their cramped limbs, carry the tools back to the sheds. We extract our feet from the holes cautiously, so that our shoes don’t get sucked in, and emerge, unsteady and dripping, to line up for the return march. Zu dreien, in threes. I tried to place myself near Alberto; we didn’t work together today and wanted to ask each other how it had gone. But someone slapped me in the stomach and I ended up behind him, look, right next to Kraus.

  Now we are leaving. The Kapo marks time in a harsh voice: “Links, links, links”; at first our feet hurt, then slowly we warm up and our nerves relax. We have bored through all the minutes of the day, this very day, which this morning seemed invincible and eternal; now it lies dead and is immediately forgotten; already it is no longer a day, it has left no trace in anyone’s memory. We know that tomorrow will be like today: perhaps it will rain a little more or a little less, or perhaps instead of digging we will go to the Carbide factory and unload bricks. Or the war might even end tomorrow, or we might all be killed, or transferred to another camp, or one of those great changes might take place which, ever since the Lager has existed, have been tirelessly foretold as imminent and certain. But who can think seriously about tomorrow?

  Memory is a curious instrument: as long as I have been in the camp, two lines written long ago by a friend of mine have been running through my head:

  . . . until one day

  it will no longer make sense to say: tomorrow.

  It’s like that here. Do you know how to say “never” in camp slang? “Morgen früh,” tomorrow morning.

  Now is the time of links, links, links und links, the time when one must not get out of step. Kraus is clumsy, he has already been kicked by the Kapo because he is incapable of staying in line. And, goodness, he is beginning to gesticulate and mumble in a wretched German, listen, listen, he wants to apologize for the spadeful of mud, he still doesn’t understand where we are; it must be said that the Hungarians are a singular people.

  To keep in step and carry on a complicated conversation in German is too much. This time it’
s I who warn him that he is out of step; I look at him and I see his eyes behind the drops of rain on his glasses, and they are the eyes of the man Kraus.

  Then something important happened, and it’s worth recounting now, perhaps for the same reason that it was important that it happened then. I made a long speech to Kraus: in bad German, but slowly, separating the words, making sure after each sentence that he had understood.

  I told him I had dreamed that I was at home, in the house where I was born, with my family, sitting up, my legs under the table, and on the table was a lot of food, a huge amount of food. And it was summer and it was Italy: Naples? . . . yes, Naples, this is hardly the time to quibble. Then all of a sudden the bell rang, and I got up anxiously and went to open the door, and who did I see? I saw him, this very same Kraus Páli, and he had hair, and was clean and well nourished, and dressed like a free man, with a loaf of bread in his hand. Yes, a two-kilo loaf, still warm. Then “Servus, Páli, wie geht’s?” and I was filled with joy and invited him in, and I explained to my parents who he was, and that he had come from Budapest, and why he was so wet; because he was soaking wet, just as he was now. And I gave him food and drink and a good bed to sleep in, and it was night, but there was a wonderful warmth and so in a moment we were all dry (yes, because I, too, was soaked).

  What a good boy Kraus must have been as a civilian: he won’t survive long here, it’s obvious at first glance, as demonstrable as a theorem. I’m sorry I don’t know Hungarian, for his emotion has overflowed the banks, erupting in a flood of outlandish Magyar words. I cannot understand anything except my name, but from his solemn gestures one would say that he is making promises and prophecies.

  Poor silly Kraus. If he only knew that it’s not true, that I have dreamed nothing about him, that he is nothing to me, outside of a brief moment, nothing just as everything is nothing down here, except the hunger within and the cold and the rain all around.