by Primo Levi
As for the moral aspect of this new state of affairs, Alberto and I are forced to agree that there’s nothing to be very proud of; but it’s so easy to find excuses! Besides, the very fact that we have new things to talk about is no negligible gain.
We talk about our plan to buy a second menaschka to rotate with the first, so that we’ll need to make only a single expedition a day to the remote corner of the site where Lorenzo is now working. We talk about Lorenzo and how to reward him; later, if we return, we will of course do everything we can for him, but what’s the use of talking about that? He knows as well as we do how unlikely it is that we’ll return. We ought to do something at once; we could try to have his shoes repaired at the shoemaker’s shop in our Lager, where repairs are free (it seems a paradox, but officially everything is free in the extermination camps). Alberto will try: he is a friend of the head shoemaker, perhaps a few liters of soup will be enough.
We talk about three new undertakings of ours, and we agree that for obvious reasons of professional secrecy it’s inadvisable to discuss them openly: it’s a pity, our personal prestige would be greatly increased.
The first is my brainchild. I knew that the Blockältester of Block 44 was short of brooms and I stole one at the worksite; as far as that goes, there is nothing extraordinary. The difficulty was how to smuggle the broom into the Lager on the return march, and I solved it in what I believe to be a completely original way: I broke up my stolen property into handle and head, sawing the former into two pieces and carrying the various parts separately into camp (the two pieces of the handle tied to my thighs, inside my trousers), where I put it back together. For this I needed to find a piece of tinplate, a hammer, and nails in order to join the two pieces of wood. The whole business took only four days.
Contrary to what I feared, the customer not only did not devalue my broom but showed it as a curiosity to several of his friends, who gave me a formal order for two more brooms “of the same model.”
But Alberto had other irons in the fire. In the first place, he had put the finishing touches on Operation File and twice already had carried it out successfully. Alberto goes to the tool warehouse, asks for a file, and chooses a fairly large one. The warehouse keeper writes “one file” next to his number and Alberto leaves. He goes straight to a safe civilian (a gem of a rascal from Trieste, as sharp as they come, who helps Alberto more for love of the art than out of self-interest or philanthropy), who has no difficulty in exchanging the large file on the open market for two small ones of equal or lesser value. Alberto gives “one file” back to the warehouse and sells the other.
And he has just achieved his masterpiece, an audacious new combination, of singular elegance. It should be said that for some weeks Alberto had been entrusted with a special duty: in the morning, at the worksite, he is given a bucket with pliers, screwdrivers, and several hundred celluloid labels of different colors, which he has to mount on special brackets in order to tag the numerous and lengthy pipes for hot and cold water, steam, compressed air, gas, naphtha, vacuum, etc., that run in all directions throughout the Polymerization Department. It should also be said (and this seems to have nothing to do with it: but does not brilliance perhaps consist in finding or creating connections between apparently unrelated types of ideas?) that for all us Häftlinge the shower is a distinctly unpleasant affair for various reasons (the water is inadequate and cold, or else boiling, there is no changing room, we don’t have towels or soap, and during our enforced absence we can easily be robbed). Since the shower is obligatory, the Blockälteste need an inspection system that enables them to apply sanctions against anyone who evades it. Usually, a trusted member of the Block is placed at the door, and, like Polyphemus, touches each man as he comes out to feel if he is wet; if he is, he gets a ticket, and if he is dry he gets five blows from a truncheon. One can claim one’s bread the following morning only by presenting the ticket.
Alberto’s attention was focused on the tickets. In general they are only wretched pieces of paper that are given back damp, crumpled, and unrecognizable. Alberto knows the Germans, and the Blockälteste are all German, or German-trained: they love order, systems, bureaucracy; furthermore, although they are aggressive, quick-tempered louts, they take a childish delight in glittering, multicolored objects.
Thus the theme is stated, and its brilliant development follows. Alberto systematically stole a series of labels of the same color; from each one he made three small disks (I organized the necessary instrument, a cork borer, in the Laboratory): when two hundred disks were ready, enough for one Block, he went to the Blockältester and offered him his Spezialität at the mad price of ten rations of bread, paid in installments. The customer accepted enthusiastically, and Alberto now has at his disposal a marvelous and fashionable article, guaranteed to be accepted in every barrack, one color per barrack (no Blockältester wants to be regarded as stingy or reactionary). Even more important, he doesn’t have to worry about competitors, as he alone has access to the basic material. Isn’t it well thought out?
We talk about these things, stumbling from one puddle to the next, between the black of the sky and the mud of the road. We talk and we walk. I carry our two empty bowls, Alberto the happy weight of the full menaschka. Once again the music from the band, the ceremony of Mützen ab, caps off smartly in front of the SS; once more Arbeit Macht Frei, and the Kapo’s announcement: “Kommando 98, zwei und sechzig Häftlinge, Stärke stimmt,” sixty-two prisoners, number correct. But the column has not broken up, they have made us march as far as Roll Call Square. Is there to be a roll call? It is not a roll call. We have seen the crude glare of the floodlight and the well-known profile of the gallows.
For more than an hour the squads continued to return, wooden clogs clattering harshly on the frozen snow. When all the Kommandos had returned, the band suddenly stopped, and a rasping German voice ordered silence. Another German voice rose up in the sudden quiet, and spoke for a long time angrily into the dark and hostile air. Finally the condemned man was brought out into the blaze of the floodlight.
All this pomp, this ruthless ceremony are not new to us. I have already been present at thirteen public hangings since I entered the camp; but on the other occasions the crimes were ordinary, thefts from the kitchen, sabotage, attempts to escape. Today it is different.
Last month one of the crematoriums at Birkenau was blown up. None of us know (and perhaps no one will ever know) exactly how the exploit was carried out: there was talk of the Sonderkommando, the Special Kommando attached to the gas chambers and the ovens, which is itself periodically exterminated, and which is kept scrupulously segregated from the rest of the camp. The fact remains that at Birkenau a few hundred men, helpless and exhausted slaves like us, found in themselves the strength to act, to bring to maturity the fruits of their hatred.
The man who is to die in front of us today took part in the revolt in some way. It’s said that he had contacts with the rebels of Birkenau, that he carried arms into our camp, that he was plotting a simultaneous mutiny among us. He is to die today before our eyes: and perhaps the Germans will not understand that this solitary death, the death that has been reserved for him as a man, will bring him glory, not infamy.
At the end of the German’s speech, which nobody understood, the rasping voice of before again rose up: “Habt ihr verstanden?” Did you understand?
Who answered “Jawohl”? Everybody and nobody: it was as if our cursed resignation had taken shape by itself, as if it had become a collective voice above our heads. But everybody heard the cry of the doomed man, it pierced the thick, ancient barriers of inertia and submission, it struck the living core of the man in each of us:
“Kamaraden, ich bin der Letzte!” (Comrades, I am the last!)
I wish I could say that from among us, an abject flock, a voice had risen, a murmur, a sign of assent. But nothing happened. We remained standing, bent and gray, heads bowed, and we did not uncover them until the German ordered us to do so. The trapdoor op
ened, the body writhed horribly; the band began playing again, and we, once again in our line, filed past the final tremors of the dying man.
At the foot of the gallows, the SS watch us pass with indifferent eyes: their work is done, and well done. The Russians can come now: there are no more strong men among us, the last one is hanging above our heads, and, as for the others, a few nooses were enough. The Russians can come: they will find only us, the subdued, the lifeless, worthy now of the undefended death that awaits us.
To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze. From our side you have nothing more to fear: no acts of revolt, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgment.
Alberto and I went back to the barrack, and we couldn’t look each other in the face. That man must have been tough, he must have been made of another metal than we are, if this condition, which has broken us, could not bend him.
Because we, too, are broken, defeated: even if we have been able to adapt, even if we have at last learned how to find our food and to withstand the exhaustion and the cold, even if we return home.
We have lifted the menaschka onto the bunk and divided it, we have satisfied the daily fury of hunger, and now we are oppressed by shame.
The Story of Ten Days
We had been hearing the rumble of the Russian cannons sporadically for months when, on January 11, 1945, I fell ill with scarlet fever and was once more admitted to Ka-Be. Infektionsabteilung: that is to say, a small room, which in fact was very clean, with ten bunks on two levels, a wardrobe, three stools, and a commode with a pail for bodily needs. All in a space of three meters by five.
It was difficult to climb up to the upper bunks, for there was no ladder; so when a patient got worse he was transferred to a lower bunk.
When I was admitted, I was the thirteenth. Of the twelve others, four—two French political prisoners and two young Hungarian Jews—had scarlet fever; there were three with diphtheria, two with typhus, and one suffering from a repellent facial erysipelas. The other two had more than one illness and were incredibly emaciated.
I had a high fever. I was lucky enough to have a bunk entirely to myself: I lay down with relief, knowing that I had the right to forty days’ isolation and hence rest, and I believed that I was still in good enough shape not to fear either the aftereffects of scarlet fever or the selections.
Thanks to my by now long experience of camp life I had managed to bring with me all my personal belongings: a belt of braided electrical wire, the knife-spoon, a needle with three pieces of thread, five buttons, and, finally, eighteen flints that I had stolen from the Laboratory. By patiently paring with a knife, you could make, from each of these, three smaller flints, just the right gauge for a normal cigarette lighter. They were valued at six or seven rations of bread.
I spent four peaceful days. Outside it was snowing and very cold, but the building was heated. I was given strong doses of sulfa drugs, I suffered from an intense nausea and was hardly able to eat; I had no wish to talk.
The two Frenchmen with scarlet fever were likable. They were country men from the Vosges who had entered the camp only a few days before, with a large convoy of civilians swept up by the Germans in their retreat from Lorraine. The elder one, whose name was Arthur, was a small, thin peasant. The other, his bunk companion, was Charles, a schoolteacher, thirty-two years old; instead of a nightshirt he had been given a summer undershirt, which was ridiculously short.
On the fifth day the barber came. He was a Greek from Salonika: he spoke only the beautiful Spanish of his people, but understood some words of all the languages spoken in the camp. He was called Askenazi and had been in the camp for almost three years. I do not know how he managed to get the post of Frisör of Ka-Be: he spoke neither German nor Polish, and he wasn’t excessively brutal. Before he entered, I heard him speaking excitedly for a long time in the corridor with a doctor, a compatriot of his. He seemed to have an odd look on his face, but, because the expressions of the Levantines are different from ours, I couldn’t tell whether he was frightened or happy or excited. He knew me, or at least he knew that I was Italian.
When it was my turn I climbed laboriously down from the bunk. I asked him in Italian if there was some news: he stopped shaving me, squinted at me in a grave and allusive manner, pointed to the window with his chin, and then made a sweeping gesture with his hand toward the west.
“Morgen, alle Kamarad weg.”
He looked at me for a moment with his eyes wide open, as if waiting for a startled reaction, and then added, “Todos, todos,” and returned to his work. He knew about my flints and shaved me with a certain gentleness.
The news stirred no immediate emotion in me. For months I had not known pain, joy, or fear, except in that detached and distant manner which is characteristic of the Lager, and which might be described as conditional: if I still had my old sensitivity, I thought, this would be an extremely moving moment.
My ideas were perfectly clear; for a long time now Alberto and I had foreseen the dangers that would accompany the evacuation of the camp and its liberation. In any case, Askenazi’s news was merely a confirmation of rumors that had already been circulating for some days: that the Russians were at Częstochowa, a hundred kilometers to the north; that they were at Zakopane, a hundred kilometers to the south; that at Buna the Germans were already preparing mines for sabotage.
I looked at the faces of my comrades one by one: it was clearly useless to discuss it with any of them. They would have replied, “Well?” and it would all have ended there. The French were different, they were still fresh.
“Did you hear?” I said to them. “Tomorrow the camp is going to be evacuated.”
They overwhelmed me with questions. “Where to? On foot? . . . The sick, too? Those who can’t walk?” They knew that I was an old prisoner and understood German, and they assumed that I knew much more about the matter than I wanted to admit.
I didn’t know anything more: I told them so, but they continued to ask questions. How annoying. But of course they had been in the Lager for only a few weeks and had not yet learned that in the Lager one does not ask questions.
In the afternoon the Greek doctor came. He said that all patients able to walk would be given shoes and clothes and would leave the following day, with the healthy, on a twenty-kilometer march. The others would remain in Ka-Be with caretakers to be chosen from among the less seriously ill patients.
The doctor was unusually cheerful; he seemed drunk. I knew him: he was a cultured, intelligent man, egoistic and calculating. He added that everyone, without distinction, would receive a triple ration of bread, at which the patients visibly brightened. We asked him what would happen to us. He replied that probably the Germans would leave us to our fate: no, he did not think that they would kill us. He made no effort to hide the fact that he thought otherwise; his very cheerfulness was eloquent.
He was already equipped for the march. As soon as he left, the two Hungarian boys began to speak excitedly to each other. They had nearly recovered but were extremely debilitated. It was obvious that they were afraid to stay with the sick and were deciding to leave with the healthy. It was not a question of reasoning: I, too, would probably have followed the instinct of the herd if I hadn’t felt so weak; terror is supremely contagious, and a frightened man’s immediate response is to flee.
Outside the barrack the camp sounded unusually agitated. One of the two Hungarians got up, went out, and returned half an hour later with a load of filthy rags. He must have taken them from the warehouse for clothes to be disinfected. He and his comrade dressed feverishly, putting on rag after rag. One could see that they were in a hurry to get the matter over with before the fear itself made them hesitate. It was crazy of them to think of walking even for an hour, weak as they were, especially in the snow, and with those broken-down shoes found at the last minute. I tried to explain this, but they look
ed at me without answering. Their eyes were like those of frightened animals.
Just for a moment it crossed my mind that they might even be right. They climbed awkwardly out of the window; I saw them, shapeless bundles, lurching into the night. They did not return; I learned much later that, unable to go on, they had been killed by the SS a few hours after the march began.
It was obvious that I, too, needed a pair of shoes. But still it took me perhaps an hour to overcome nausea, fever, and inertia. I found a pair in the corridor. (The healthy prisoners had ransacked the storeroom where patients’ shoes were kept and had taken the best ones; the shoddiest, broken and unpaired, were lying all over the place.) Just then I met Kosman, the Alsatian. As a civilian he had been a Reuters correspondent in Clermont-Ferrand; he, too, was excited and euphoric. He said, “If you return before me, write to the mayor of Metz that I’m on the way back.”
Kosman was notorious for his acquaintances among the Prominents, so his optimism seemed a good sign and I used it to justify my inertia to myself; I hid the shoes and went back to bed.
Late that night the Greek doctor returned with a knapsack on his back and a balaclava. He threw a French novel onto my bunk. “Keep it, read it, Italian. You can give it back when we meet again.” Even today I hate him for those words. He knew that we were doomed.
And then finally Alberto came, defying the prohibition, to say goodbye to me from the window. We had been inseparable: we were “the two Italians” and most of the time our foreign comrades got our names mixed up. For six months we had shared a bunk and every scrap of food “organized” in excess of the ration; but he had had scarlet fever as a child and I had not been able to infect him. So he left and I remained. We said goodbye; it didn’t take many words, we had already said everything countless times. We did not think we would be separated for very long. He had found a pair of sturdy leather shoes in fairly good condition: he was one of those people who immediately find what they need.