The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  He, too, was cheerful and confident, like all those who were leaving. It was understandable: something great and new was about to happen; we could finally feel around us a force that was not Germany’s; we could concretely feel that hated world of ours on the verge of collapse. Or at least those who were healthy, and who, though tired and starving, were able to move, could feel this. But, inevitably, one who is too weak, or naked, or barefoot, thinks and feels in a different manner, and what dominated our thoughts was the paralyzing sensation of being utterly helpless, and in the hands of fate.

  All the healthy prisoners (except for a few prudent ones, who at the last moment undressed and hid in the hospital bunks) left on the night of January 18, 1945. They must have been about twenty thousand, coming from different camps. Practically every one of them died during the evacuation march: Alberto was among them. One day, perhaps, someone will write their story.

  So we remained in our bunks, alone with our illnesses, and with our inertia that was stronger than fear.

  In all of Ka-Be we numbered perhaps eight hundred. In our room eleven of us remained, each in his own bunk, except for Charles and Arthur, who slept together. With the rhythm of the great machine of the Lager extinguished, for us began ten days outside the world and time.

  JANUARY 18. During the night of the evacuation the camp kitchens had continued to function, and the following morning the last distribution of soup took place in the infirmary. The central-heating plant had been abandoned; in the barrack a little heat lingered, but hour by hour the temperature dropped and it was evident that we would soon suffer from the cold. Outside it must have been at least 20°C below zero; most of the patients had only a nightshirt, and some of them not even that.

  Nobody knew what our situation was. Some SS men had remained, some of the guard towers were still occupied.

  About midday an SS officer made a tour of the barracks. He appointed a chief in each of them, selecting him from among the remaining non-Jews, and ordered a list of the patients to be made at once, divided into Jews and non-Jews. The matter seemed clear. No one was surprised that the Germans maintained their national love of classification until the very end, nor did any Jew seriously expect to live until the following day.

  The two Frenchmen had not understood and were frightened. I reluctantly translated what the SS man had said. I found it irritating that they were afraid: they hadn’t yet experienced a month of the Lager, they still hardly suffered from hunger, they were not even Jews, and they were afraid.

  There was one more distribution of bread. I spent the afternoon reading the book left by the doctor: it was very interesting and I can remember it with peculiar accuracy. I also made a visit to the neighboring ward in search of blankets; many of the sick had been sent out of there and their blankets were free. I brought back some quite heavy ones.

  When Arthur heard that they came from the dysentery ward, he wrinkled his nose: “Y’avait point besoin de le dire”; in fact, they were stained. But I thought that in any case, given what awaited us, we might as well sleep warmly covered.

  It was soon night, but the electric light was still working. We saw with tranquil fear that an armed SS man was standing in a corner of the barrack. I had no desire to talk and was not afraid, except in that external and conditional manner I have described. I continued reading until late.

  There were no clocks, but it must have been about 11 p.m. when all the lights went out, even the searchlights on the guard towers. In the distance photoelectric beams were visible. A cluster of intense lights burst out in the sky, and remained there, motionless, crudely illuminating the terrain. One could hear the roar of the planes.

  Then the bombing started. It was nothing new: I climbed down from my bunk, put my bare feet in my shoes, and waited.

  It seemed far away, perhaps over Auschwitz.

  But then there was an explosion nearby, and, before you could think, a second and a third, loud enough to burst one’s eardrums. Windows were breaking, the building shook, the spoon I had stuck in a joint of the wooden wall fell out.

  Then it seemed to be over. Cagnolati, a young country boy, also from the Vosges, had apparently never experienced an air raid. He had jumped out of his bed naked and was crouching in a corner, screaming.

  After a few minutes it was obvious that the camp had been hit. Two barracks were burning fiercely, two others were destroyed, but they were all empty. Dozens of patients arrived, naked and pitiful, from a barrack threatened by fire: they asked for shelter. Impossible to take them in. They insisted, begging and threatening in many languages. We had to barricade the door. They dragged themselves elsewhere, lit up by the flames, barefoot in the melting snow. Many were trailing bandages. There seemed no danger to our barrack, so long as the wind did not change.

  The Germans were not there. The towers were empty.

  Today I think that if only because an Auschwitz existed no one in our age should speak of Providence. But in that hour the memory of Biblical salvations in times of extreme adversity undoubtedly passed like a wind through the mind of each one of us.

  Sleep was impossible; a window was broken and it was very cold. I was thinking that we should look for a stove to set up, and get coal, wood, and food. I knew that all this was essential, but without some help I would never have had the energy to act. I spoke to the two Frenchmen.

  JANUARY 19. The Frenchmen agreed. We got up at dawn, the three of us. I felt ill and helpless, I was cold and afraid.

  The other patients looked at us with respectful curiosity: didn’t we know that patients were not allowed to leave Ka-Be? And if the Germans had not all departed? But they said nothing, they were glad that someone was willing to try.

  The Frenchmen had no idea of the topography of the Lager, but Charles was courageous and robust, while Arthur was shrewd, and had a peasant’s practical common sense. We went out into the wind of a freezing, foggy day, clumsily wrapped in blankets.

  What we saw resembled nothing that I had ever seen or heard described.

  The Lager, scarcely dead, was already in a state of decomposition. No more water or electricity: broken windows and doors were banging in the wind, loose sheets of iron were screeching on the roofs, ashes from the fire drifted high and far. To the work of the bombs was added the work of man: ragged, feeble, skeleton-like, the sick who were able to move dragged themselves in all directions over the frozen ground, like an invasion of worms. They had ransacked the empty barracks in search of food and wood; they had violated with senseless fury the grotesquely adorned rooms of the hated Blockälteste, forbidden to the ordinary Häftlinge until the previous day; no longer in control of their bowels, they had fouled everywhere, polluting the precious snow, now the only source of water in the whole camp.

  Around the smoking ruins of the burned barracks, groups of the sick lay clinging to the ground, sucking up its last warmth. Others had found potatoes somewhere and were roasting them on the embers of the fire, looking around fiercely. A few had had the strength to light a real fire, and were melting snow over it in makeshift containers.

  We headed to the kitchens as fast as we could; but already the potatoes were almost gone. We filled two sacks and left them with Arthur. Among the ruins of the Prominenzblock Charles and I finally found what we were searching for: a heavy cast-iron stove, with the flue still usable. Charles hurried over with a wheelbarrow and we loaded it on; he then left to me the task of getting it to our room and ran back to the sacks. There he found Arthur unconscious from the cold. Charles hoisted up both sacks and carried them to safety, then he took care of his friend.

  Meanwhile, though I could barely stand, I did my best to maneuver the heavy wheelbarrow. I heard the roar of an engine and an SS man entered the camp on a motorcycle. As always when we saw their hard faces, I felt overwhelmed by terror and hatred. It was too late to disappear, and I did not want to abandon the stove. The rules of the Lager stated that one must stand at attention and uncover one’s head. I had no cap and was encumbered
by the blanket. I moved a few steps away from the wheelbarrow and made a sort of awkward bow. The German moved on without seeing me, turned behind a barrack, and went off. Only later did I realize the risk I had run.

  I finally reached the entrance of our barrack and unloaded the stove into Charles’s hands. The effort left me gasping for breath; large black spots danced before my eyes.

  We had to get it going. The hands of all three of us were paralyzed, and the icy metal stuck to the skin of our fingers, but it was urgent to have the stove working, so that we could warm ourselves and boil the potatoes. We had found wood and coal, and also embers from the burned barracks.

  Once the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and then Towarowski (a Franco-Pole of twenty-three, with typhus) proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to the three of us who had been working. And so it was agreed.

  Only a day before, such an event would have been inconceivable. The law of the Lager said “Eat your own bread, and, if you can, that of your neighbor,” and left no room for gratitude. It really meant that the Lager was dead.

  This was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment marked the start of the process by which we who had not died slowly turned from Häftlinge into men again.

  Arthur recovered quite well, but from then on he always avoided exposing himself to the cold; he took on the upkeep of the stove, the cooking of the potatoes, the cleaning of the room, and the care of the patients. Charles and I shared the various outside tasks. There was still an hour of light: an expedition yielded us half a liter of spirits and a tin of yeast, thrown away in the snow by someone; we distributed boiled potatoes and a spoonful of yeast per person. I thought vaguely that it might help with the lack of vitamins.

  Darkness fell; in the entire camp ours was the only room with a stove, and we were very proud of it. Many of the sick from other wards crowded around the door, but Charles’s imposing stature held them back. Nobody, neither we nor they, considered that the inevitable mixing with our sick would make it extremely dangerous to stay in our room, and that to fall ill of diphtheria in those conditions was more surely fatal than jumping from the fourth floor.

  I myself was aware of it, but I didn’t dwell on the idea: for too long I had been accustomed to think of death by illness as a possible event and, in that case, unavoidable, and anyway beyond any possible action on our part. And it didn’t even cross my mind that I could have gone to another room, in another barrack, with less danger of infection. Here was the stove, our achievement, which spread a wonderful warmth; here I had a bed; and, last, by now a tie bound us, the eleven patients of the Infektionsabteilung.

  Occasionally we heard the thunder of artillery, near and far, and at intervals the crackle of automatic rifles. In the darkness, broken only by the glow of the embers, Charles, Arthur, and I sat smoking cigarettes made of herbs we had found in the kitchen, and spoke of many things, both past and future. In the middle of this endless plain, frozen and overrun by war, in the small dark room teeming with germs, we felt at peace with ourselves and with the world. We were utterly exhausted, but it seemed to us that, after so long a time, we had finally accomplished something useful—perhaps like God after the first day of creation.

  JANUARY 20. Dawn came, and it was my turn to light the stove. Along with a general feeling of weakness, my aching joints reminded me at every moment that the scarlet fever was far from over. The thought of having to plunge into the freezing air to find a light in the other barracks made me shudder with disgust.

  I remembered the flints: I trickled some spirits on a piece of paper and from a flint patiently scraped a small pile of black dust onto it, then scraped the flint more vigorously with my knife. And there it was: after a few sparks, the pile caught fire and from the paper rose the thin pale flame of the alcohol.

  Arthur climbed down from his bed enthusiastically and heated three potatoes per person from those boiled the day before; afterward, Charles and I, hungry and shivering violently, left again to explore the ruins of the camp.

  We had enough food (that is, potatoes) for two days only; as for water, we were forced to melt the snow, a torturous operation in the absence of large containers, and yielding a blackish, muddy liquid that had to be filtered.

  The camp was silent. Other starving specters wandered around like us, exploring: beards unkempt, eyes hollow, limbs skeletal and yellowish in tattered garments. Unsteady on their legs, they went in and out of the empty barracks, carrying off the most varied objects: axes, buckets, ladles, nails. Anything might be of use, and the more far-seeing were already thinking of profitable trade with the Poles of the surrounding countryside.

  In the kitchen two men were scuffling over the last few dozen putrid potatoes. They had grabbed each other by their ragged shirts, and were fighting with curiously slow and uncertain movements, abusing each other in Yiddish between their frozen lips.

  In the courtyard of the warehouse there were two large piles of cabbages and turnips (large, tasteless turnips, the basis of our diet). They were so frozen that they could be separated only with a pickax. Charles and I took turns, using all our strength with each stroke, and we got out about fifty kilos. There was still more: Charles discovered a packet of salt and (“Une fameuse trouvaille!”) a barrel of water, perhaps fifty liters, frozen into a huge block.

  We loaded everything onto a small cart (the carts had been used to distribute the rations to the barracks; there were a great number of them abandoned everywhere), and we turned back, pushing it laboriously over the snow.

  That day we contented ourselves again with boiled potatoes and slices of turnip roasted on the stove, but Arthur promised important innovations for the following day.

  In the afternoon I went to the former clinic, searching for anything that might be useful. Others had preceded me: everything had been smashed by inexpert looters. Not a bottle intact, on the floor a layer of rags, excrement, and bandages, a naked, contorted corpse. But here was something that had escaped my predecessors: a truck battery. I touched the poles with a knife—a small spark. It was charged.

  That evening our room had light.

  From my bed, I could see a long stretch of the road through the window: for three days now the Wehrmacht, in flight, had been passing by in waves. Armored cars, Tiger tanks camouflaged in white, Germans on horseback, Germans on bicycles, Germans on foot, armed and unarmed. During the night, long before the tanks came into view, the grinding of their tracks could be heard.

  Charles asked, “Ça roule encore?”

  “Ça roule toujours.”

  It seemed as if it would never end.

  JANUARY 21. But it did end. At dawn on the 21st we saw the plain deserted and lifeless, white as far as the eye could see under the flight of the crows, deathly sad.

  I would almost have preferred to see something moving again. Even the Polish civilians had disappeared, hiding who knows where. The wind, too, seemed to have stopped. I wanted only one thing: to stay in bed under my blankets and give in to the complete exhaustion of muscles, nerves, and will; waiting, indifferent as a dead man, for it to end or not to end.

  But Charles had already lit the stove, the man Charles, our active, trusting friend, and he called me to work:

  “Vas-y, Primo, descends-toi de là-haut; il y a Jules à attraper par les oreilles . . .”

  “Jules” was the chamber pot, which every morning had to be grabbed by the handles, carried outside, and emptied into the cesspool; this was the first task of the day, and if you remember that it wasn’t possible to wash your hands, and that three of us were ill with typhus, you can understand that it was not a pleasant job.

  We had to get the cabbages and turnips under way. While I went to search for wood and Charles collected snow to melt, Arthur mobilized the patients who could sit up to help with the peeling. Towarowski, Sertelet, Alcalai, and Schenck answered the call.

  Sert
elet was also a peasant from the Vosges, twenty years old; he seemed in good shape, but as the days passed his voice took on an increasingly sinister nasal timbre, reminding us that diphtheria seldom forgives.

  Alcalai was a Jewish glazier from Toulouse; he was quiet and sensible, and suffered from erysipelas on his face.

  Schenck was a Slovak merchant, Jewish: convalescing from typhus, he had a formidable appetite. Likewise Towarowski, the Franco-Polish Jew, who was stupid and talkative, but useful to our community because of his expansive optimism.

  So while the sick men worked with their knives, each one seated on his bunk, Charles and I devoted ourselves to finding a suitable site for the kitchen operations.

  An indescribable filth had invaded every part of the camp. All the latrines were overflowing, since, naturally, nobody cared anymore about their upkeep, and the dysentery patients (more than a hundred) had fouled every corner of Ka-Be, filling all the buckets, all the vats formerly used for the rations, all the pots. You couldn’t take a step without watching your feet; in the dark it was impossible to get around. Although we suffered from the cold, which remained acute, we thought with horror of what would happen if there was a thaw: infections would spread unchecked, the stench would be suffocating, and, besides, once the snow melted we would be left definitively without water.

  After a long search, we finally found a small area of floor that wasn’t excessively soiled in a place formerly used as a washhouse. We got a good fire going, then, to save time and complications, we disinfected our hands, rubbing them with chloramine mixed with snow.

  The news that soup was cooking spread rapidly through the crowd of the semi-living; a throng of starving faces gathered at the door. Charles, with ladle uplifted, made a short, vigorous speech, which, although it was in French, needed no translation.