The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Die Drei Leute vom Labor

  How many months have gone by since we entered the camp? How many since the day I was discharged from Ka-Be? And since the day of the chemistry exam? And since the October selection?

  Alberto and I often ask ourselves these questions, and many others as well. There were ninety-six of us when we arrived, we, the Italians of convoy 174000; only twenty-nine survived until October, and, of these, eight went in the selection. We are now twenty-one, and winter has hardly begun. How many of us will be alive in the new year? How many when spring comes?

  There have been no air raids now for several weeks; the November rain has turned to snow, and the snow has covered the ruins. The Germans and Poles go to work in rubber jackboots, woolen earmuffs, and padded overalls, the English prisoners in their wonderful fur-lined jackets. In our Lager they have distributed coats only to a few of the privileged; we are a specialized Kommando, which, in theory, works under shelter; so we are left in our summer clothing.

  We are chemists, therefore we work with phenyl-beta sacks. We cleared out the warehouse after the first air raids, at the height of summer. The phenyl beta got under our clothes and stuck to our sweaty limbs and ate away at us like leprosy; the skin came off our faces in large burned patches. Then the air raids stopped for a while and we carried the sacks back into the warehouse. Then the warehouse was hit and we put the sacks in the cellar of the Styrene Department. Now the warehouse has been repaired and once again we have to pile up the sacks there. The caustic smell of the phenyl beta impregnates the only clothes we have, and stays with us day and night like our shadow. So far, the advantages of being in the Chemical Kommando have been limited to the following: the others have received coats and we have not; the others carry fifty-kilo sacks of cement, while we carry sixty-kilo sacks of phenyl beta. How can we still think about the chemistry examination and the illusions of that time? On at least four occasions during the summer we heard talk of Doktor Pannwitz’s laboratory in Bau 939, and the rumor spread that analysts for the Polymerization Department would be chosen from among us.

  Now enough, now it’s over. This is the last act: winter has begun, and with it our last battle. We can no longer doubt that it is the last. At whatever time of day we happen to listen to the voice of our bodies, or interrogate our limbs, the answer is the same: our strength will not last. Everything around us speaks of disintegration and the end. Half of Bau 939 is a heap of twisted metal and smashed concrete; from the enormous pipes where the superheated steam used to roar deformed blue icicles, as large as pillars, now hang down to the ground. Buna is silent, and when the wind is favorable, if one listens intently, one can hear a continuous dull underground rumble, which is the approaching front. Three hundred prisoners have arrived in the Lager from the Lodz Ghetto, transferred by the Germans before the Russian advance. They brought us the story of the legendary uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, and told us how, more than a year ago, the Germans liquidated the Lublin camp: four machine guns in the corners and the barracks set on fire. The civilized world will never know about it. When will it be our turn?

  This morning the Kapo divided up the squads as usual. The Magnesium Chloride ten to the Magnesium Chloride: and they leave, dragging their feet, as slowly as possible, because the Magnesium Chloride is an extremely unpleasant job; you stand all day up to your ankles in cold, briny water, which saturates your shoes, your clothes, and your skin. The Kapo grabs a brick and throws it at the group; they dodge it clumsily, but do not quicken their pace. This is almost routine, it happens every morning, and does not always mean that the Kapo has a definite intention to cause injury.

  The Scheisshaus four, to their job: and the four assigned to the building of the new latrine leave. It should be said that, with the arrival of the convoys from Lodz and Transylvania, our squad included more than fifty Häftlinge, and so the mysterious German bureaucrat who supervises these matters had authorized us to build a Zweiplätziges Kommandoscheisshaus, that is, a two-seat toilet reserved for our Kommando. We are not insensible of this mark of distinction, which makes ours one of the few Kommandos that one can boast of belonging to; but it is evident that we will lose one of the simplest pretexts to absent ourselves from work and make deals with civilians. “Noblesse oblige,” says Henri, who has other strings to his bow.

  The twelve for bricks. Meister Dahm’s five. The two for cisterns. How many absent? Three absent. Homolka gone into Ka-Be this morning, the Smith dead yesterday, François transferred who knows where or why. The count is correct; the Kapo records it and is satisfied. Only we eighteen of the phenyl beta are left, apart from the Prominents of the Kommando. And now the unexpected happens.

  The Kapo says: “Doktor Pannwitz has communicated to the Arbeitsdienst that three Häftlinge have been chosen for the Laboratory: 169509, Brackier; 175633, Kandel; 174517, Levi.” For a moment my ears ring and Buna whirls around me. There are three Levis in Kommando 98, but Hundert Vierundsiebzig Fünf Hundert Siebzehn is me, there is no possible doubt. I am one of the three elect.

  The Kapo looks us up and down with a rancorous smile. A Belgian, a Romanian, and an Italian: three Franzosen, in short. Is it possible that three Franzosen have really been chosen to enter the paradise of the Laboratory?

  Many comrades congratulate us; Alberto first of all, with genuine joy, and not a trace of envy. Alberto holds nothing against my good fortune, and is really pleased, both because of our friendship and because he will also gain from it. In fact, we two are now bound by a very close alliance, under which every “organized” scrap of food is divided into two strictly equal parts. He has no reason to envy me, for he neither hoped nor desired to enter the Laboratory. The blood in his veins is too free: Alberto, this untamed friend of mine, wouldn’t think of settling down in a system; his instinct leads him elsewhere, to other solutions, to the unforeseen, the extemporaneous, the new. Without hesitation, Alberto prefers the uncertainties and battles of the “freelancer” to a steady job.

  I have a ticket from the Arbeitsdienst in my pocket, on which it is written that Häftling 174517, as a specialized worker, has the right to a new shirt and underpants and must be shaved every Wednesday.

  The ravaged Buna lies under the first snow, silent and stiff, like an enormous corpse. Every day the sirens of the Fliegeralarm wail; the Russians are eighty kilometers away. The electric power plant isn’t running, the methanol rectification columns no longer exist, three of the four acetylene gasometers have been blown up. Prisoners “retrieved” from all the camps in eastern Poland pour haphazardly into our Lager every day; the minority are sent to work, the majority leave immediately for Birkenau and the Chimney. The ration has been reduced still further. Ka-Be is overflowing, the E-Häftlinge have brought scarlet fever, diphtheria, and petechial typhus into the camp.

  But Häftling 174517 has been promoted to specialist and has the right to a new shirt and underpants and has to be shaved every Wednesday. No one can claim to understand the Germans.

  We entered the Laboratory timid, suspicious, and bewildered, like three wild beasts slinking into a large city. How clean and polished the floor is! It is a laboratory surprisingly like any other laboratory. Three long workbenches covered with hundreds of familiar objects. The glassware draining in a corner, the precision scales, a Heraeus oven, a Höppler thermostat. The smell makes me start like the lash of a whip: the faint aromatic odor of organic chemistry laboratories. The large semi-dark classroom at the university, my fourth year, the mild air of May in Italy is evoked for a moment with brutal violence and immediately vanishes.

  Herr Stawinoga assigns us our workplaces. Stawinoga is a German Pole, still young, with an energetic yet sad and tired face. He is also Doktor: not of chemistry, but (ne pas chercher à comprendre) of linguistics; all the same, he is the head of the Laboratory. He does not speak to us willingly, but does not seem ill disposed. He calls us Monsieur, which is ridiculous and disconcerting.

  The temperature in the Laboratory is wonderful; the thermome
ter reads 24°C. We think that they can even make us wash glassware, sweep the floor, carry hydrogen cylinders, anything to remain here, and the problem of winter will be solved for us. And then, on further consideration, even the problem of hunger should not be difficult to solve. Will they really want to search us every day when we leave? And, even if they do, what about every time we ask to go to the latrine? Obviously not. And there is soap, gas, alcohol here. I will stitch a secret pocket inside my jacket, and make a deal with the Englishman who works in the repair shop and trades in gas. We’ll see how strict the supervision is: but by now I have spent a year in the Lager and I know that if one wants to steal and seriously sets one’s mind to it, no supervision and no searches can prevent it.

  So it seems that fate, taking unsuspected paths, has arranged that we three, the object of envy of ten thousand condemned men, will suffer neither hunger nor cold this winter. This means a strong probability of not falling seriously ill, of being safe from frostbite, of getting through the selections. In such conditions, those less experienced than us about things in the Lager might even be tempted by the hope of survival and the thought of liberty. Not us, we know how these things go; this is all a gift of fate, to be enjoyed as intensely as possible and at once; there is no certainty about tomorrow. At the first piece of glassware I break, the first measurement error, the first failure to pay attention, I will go back to waste away in the snow and the wind until I, too, am ready for the Chimney. And, besides, who knows what will happen when the Russians come?

  Because the Russians will come. The ground trembles day and night under our feet; the dull, muffled rumble of the artillery now echoes uninterrupted in the empty silence of Buna. One breathes an air of tension, an air of resolution. The Poles no longer work, the French again walk with their heads high. The English wink at us and greet us surreptitiously with a V sign: and not always surreptitiously.

  But the Germans are deaf and blind, encased in an armor of obstinacy and willful refusal to know. Once again they have named a date for the start of production of synthetic rubber: it will be February 1, 1945. They construct shelters and trenches, they repair the damage, they build, they fight, they command, they organize, and they kill. What else could they do? They are Germans. This behavior is not considered and deliberate but follows from their nature and from the destiny they have chosen. They could not act differently: if you wound the body of a dying man, the wound begins to heal, even if the whole body will die within a day.

  Every morning now, when the squads are divided, the Kapo calls the three of us for the Laboratory before all the others, die drei Leute vom Labor. In the camp, at night and in the morning, nothing distinguishes me from the flock, but during the day, at work, I am sheltered and warm, and nobody beats me; I steal and sell soap and gas without serious risk, and perhaps I will get a coupon for a pair of leather shoes. Besides, can this be called work? To work is to push carts, carry ties, break stones, shovel earth, grip with bare hands the repugnant iciness of frozen iron. Whereas I sit all day, I have a notebook and a pencil, and they have even given me a book to refresh my memory on analytical methods. I have a drawer where I can put my cap and gloves, and when I want to go out I have only to tell Herr Stawinoga, who never says no and asks no questions if I delay; he appears to be suffering in his flesh for the ruin that surrounds him.

  My comrades in the Kommando envy me, and they are right; should I not call myself content? But, in the morning, as soon as I escape the raging wind and cross the threshold of the Laboratory I find at my side the companion of all moments of respite, of Ka-Be, of the Sundays when we rest—the pain of remembering, the old fierce anguish of feeling myself a man again, which attacks me like a dog the moment my consciousness comes out of the darkness. Then I take my pencil and notebook and write what I could never tell anyone.

  Then, there are the women. How long since I’ve seen a woman? In Buna we quite often met the Ukrainian and Polish women workers, in trousers and leather jackets, heavy and violent like their men. They were sweaty and disheveled in summer, bundled up in thick clothes in winter. They worked with spades and pickaxes, and did not make us feel that we were working next to women.

  It’s different here. Faced with the girls in the Laboratory, we three feel ourselves sink into the ground with shame and embarrassment. We know what we look like: we see one another and sometimes we happen to see our own reflection in a clean window. We are ridiculous and repulsive. Our heads are bald on Monday, and covered by a short light-brown mold by Saturday. We have swollen, yellow faces, permanently marked by the cuts of the hasty barber, and often by bruises and numb sores; our necks are long and knobbly, like plucked chickens. Our clothes are incredibly filthy, stained with mud, grease, and blood: Kandel’s trousers come only halfway down his calves, exposing his bony, hairy ankles; my jacket slips off my shoulders as if off a wooden clothes hanger. We are full of fleas, and often scratch ourselves shamelessly; we have to ask to go to the latrine with humiliating frequency. Our wooden clogs are intolerably noisy and are encrusted with alternate layers of mud and regulation grease.

  Then, too, we are used to our smell, but the girls are not and never miss a chance of letting us know. It is not the generic smell of the badly washed but the smell of the Häftling, faint and sweetish, which greeted us on our arrival in the Lager and which tenaciously pervades the dormitories, kitchens, washhouses, and latrines of the Lager. One acquires it immediately and never loses it: “So young and already stinking!” is the way we greet new arrivals.

  To us the girls seem like creatures from another world. There are three young German girls, besides Fräulein Liczba, the Polish warehouse keeper, and Frau Mayer, the secretary. They have smooth, rosy skin, nice colorful clothes that are clean and warm, and long, well-brushed blond hair; they speak with grace and self-possession, and, instead of keeping the Laboratory neat and clean, as they ought to, they smoke in the corners, eat bread and jam tarts in front of us, file their nails, break a lot of glassware and then try to blame us; when they sweep, they sweep our feet. They don’t speak to us, and they turn up their noses when they see us shuffling around the Laboratory, squalid and dirty, awkward and unsteady in our clogs. I once asked Fräulein Liczba for some information, and she did not reply but, with a look of annoyance on her face, turned to Stawinoga and spoke to him quickly. I didn’t understand the sentence, but I clearly made out “Stinkjude,” and my blood froze. Stawinoga told me that we should address him directly with any question about the work.

  These girls sing, just as girls sing in laboratories all over the world, and it makes us deeply unhappy. They chat among themselves: they talk about the rationing, about their boyfriends, their homes, the approaching holidays. . . .

  “Are you going home on Sunday? No, I’m not, traveling is so uncomfortable!”

  “I’m going for Christmas. Only two weeks and it will be Christmas again; it hardly seems real, the year has gone by so quickly!”

  . . . The year has gone by so quickly. This time last year I was a free man: an outlaw but free, I had a name and a family, I had an eager and restless mind, an agile and healthy body. I thought about many faraway things: my work, the end of the war, good and evil, the nature of things, and the laws that govern human actions; and also about the mountains, about singing, love, music, poetry. I had an enormous, deep-rooted, foolish faith in the benevolence of fate; to kill and to die seemed to me matters alien and literary. My days were happy and sad, but I regretted them equally, they were all full and affirmative; the future stood before me as a great treasure. What is left today of the life of that time is only enough to make me suffer hunger and cold; I’m not even alive enough to be able to kill myself.

  If I spoke German better I could try to explain all this to Frau Mayer; but she would certainly not understand, or if she were intelligent enough, and good enough, to understand, she would be unable to bear my proximity, and would flee from me, as one flees from contact with an incurable invalid, or a man condemned to dea
th. Or perhaps she would give me a coupon for half a liter of civilian soup.

  The year has gone by so quickly.

  The Last One

  By now Christmas is approaching. Alberto and I are walking side by side in the long gray formation, bent forward to better resist the wind. It is night and it is snowing; it is not easy to stay on our feet, and it’s even more difficult to stay in step and in line; every now and again someone in front of us stumbles and falls in the black mud, and we have to be careful to avoid him and get back in our place in the column.

  Ever since I’ve been in the Laboratory, Alberto and I have worked separately, and on the return march we always have a lot of things to tell each other. They are not usually things of a lofty nature: about work, or our comrades, or the bread, or the cold. But for a week now there has been something new: every evening Lorenzo brings us three or four liters of soup from the Italian civilian workers. To solve the problem of transport, we had to procure a menaschka, as it is called here: that is, a zinc-lined pot, made to order, more like a bucket than like a pot. Silberlust, the tinsmith, made it for us from two pieces of a gutter, in exchange for three rations of bread; it is a splendid, sturdy, capacious container, with the characteristic shape of a neolithic tool.

  In the whole camp only a few Greeks have a menaschka larger than ours. Besides the material advantages, it has brought a noticeable improvement in our social standing. A menaschka like ours is a certificate of nobility, a heraldic emblem: Henri is becoming our friend and speaks to us on equal terms; L. has assumed a paternal and patronizing air; and, as for Elias, he is perpetually at our side, and although on the one hand he spies on us persistently to discover the secret of our organisacja, on the other he overwhelms us with incomprehensible declarations of solidarity and affection, and deafens us with a litany of fantastic obscenities and oaths in Italian and French that he learned who knows where, and by which he obviously means to honor us.