The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  The majority dispersed, but one man came forward. He was a Parisian, a tailor for the fashionable (he said), suffering from tuberculosis. In exchange for a liter of soup he offered to make us clothes from the many blankets still to be found in the camp.

  Maxime proved to be really skillful. The following day Charles and I were in possession of jacket, trousers, and gloves of a rough, strikingly colored fabric.

  In the evening, after our first soup, enthusiastically distributed and greedily devoured, the great silence of the plain was broken. From our bunks, too tired to be really worried, we listened to the bursts from mysterious artillery, which appeared to be positioned on all points of the horizon, and to the whistle of the shells over our heads.

  I was thinking that life outside was beautiful and would be beautiful again, and that it would be truly a pity to let ourselves be submerged now. I woke up the sick men who were dozing and when I was sure that they were all listening I told them, first in French and then in my best German, that they should all now think about returning home, and that, as far as it depended on us, certain things had to be done and others avoided. Each of us should carefully look after his own bowl and spoon; no one should offer to others any soup that he might have left over; no one should get out of bed except to go to the latrine; anyone who was in need of anything should turn only to us three. Arthur in particular was responsible for supervising discipline and hygiene, and should remember that it was better to leave bowls and spoons dirty rather than wash them, with the danger of mixing up those of a diphtheria patient with those of someone suffering from typhus.

  I had the impression that by now the sick men were too indifferent to everything to pay attention to what I had said; but I had great faith in Arthur’s diligence.

  JANUARY 22. If it is courageous to face grave danger with a light heart, Charles and I were courageous that morning. We extended our explorations to the SS camp, immediately outside the electric fence.

  The camp guards must have left in a great hurry. On the tables we found plates half full of a by now frozen soup, which we devoured with intense pleasure; mugs of beer, transformed into a yellowish ice; a chessboard with an unfinished game. In the dormitories there were a lot of valuable things.

  We loaded ourselves up with a bottle of vodka, various medicines, newspapers and magazines, and four excellent quilts, one of which is in my house in Turin today. Cheerful and heedless, we carried the fruits of our expedition back to the room, leaving them in Arthur’s care. Only that evening did we learn what happened perhaps half an hour later.

  Some SS men, perhaps lost, but armed, entered the abandoned camp. They found that eighteen Frenchmen had settled in the Waffen SS dining hall. They killed them all methodically, with a shot to the back of the neck, and lined up the contorted bodies in the snow on the road; then they left. The eighteen corpses lay exposed until the arrival of the Russians; nobody had the strength to bury them.

  In any case, by now in all the barracks there were beds occupied by corpses, as stiff as boards, whom nobody troubled to remove. The ground was too frozen for graves to be dug; bodies were piled in a trench, but already in the first days the pile had grown higher than the pit and was obscenely visible from our window.

  Only a wooden wall separated us from the ward of the dysentery patients, where many were dying and many were dead. The floor was covered by a layer of frozen excrement. None of the sick men had strength enough to come out from under their blankets to search for food, and those who had done so earlier had not returned to help their comrades. In one bed, next to the partition, clinging to each other to better withstand the cold, there were two Italians. I often heard them talking, but, since I was speaking only French, for a long time they were not aware of my presence. That day by chance they heard my name, pronounced by Charles with an Italian accent, and from then on they never ceased groaning and pleading.

  Naturally I would have liked to help them, given the means and the strength, if for no other reason than to stop their obsessive howls. In the evening, when all the work was done, I overcame fatigue and disgust, and dragged myself to their ward, groping my way along the dark, filthy corridor, with a bowl of water and the remainder of the day’s soup. The result was that from then on, through the thin wall, the whole diarrhea ward called my name, day and night, in the accents of all the languages of Europe, accompanied by incomprehensible prayers, yet I could bring them no relief. I felt close to tears, I could have cursed them.

  The night held ugly surprises.

  Lakmaker, in the bunk under mine, was a poor human wreck. He was (or had been) a Dutch Jew, seventeen years old, tall, thin, and meek. He had been in bed for three months; I have no idea how he had escaped the selections. He had had typhus and scarlet fever successively; at the same time a serious heart defect had manifested itself and he was crusted with bedsores, so that by now he could lie only on his stomach. Nevertheless, he had a ferocious appetite. He spoke only Dutch, and none of us could understand him.

  Perhaps the cause of it all was the cabbage and turnip soup: Lakmaker had wanted two helpings. In the middle of the night he groaned and then threw himself out of his bed. He tried to reach the latrine, but he was too weak and fell to the floor, weeping and shouting loudly.

  Charles lit the lamp (the battery turned out to be providential), and we were able to assess the seriousness of the accident. The boy’s bed and the floor were filthy. The smell in the small area was rapidly becoming intolerable. We had only a minimal supply of water and neither blankets nor straw mattresses to spare. And the poor wretch, suffering from typhus, was a terrible source of infection, and he certainly couldn’t be left all night in that muck, groaning and shivering with cold.

  Charles climbed down from his bed and dressed in silence. While I held the lamp, he cut all the dirty patches from the straw mattress and the blankets with a knife. He lifted Lakmaker from the ground with the tenderness of a mother, cleaned him as well as possible with straw taken from the mattress, and lifted him into the remade bed in the only position in which the unfortunate boy could lie. He scraped the floor with a scrap piece of metal, diluted a little chloramine, and finally sprinkled disinfectant over everything, including himself.

  I measured his self-sacrifice by the weariness I would have had to overcome in myself to do what he had done.

  JANUARY 23. Our potatoes were gone. For days the rumor had circulated through all the barracks that an enormous pit of potatoes lay somewhere outside the barbed wire, not far from the camp.

  Unknown pioneers must have carried out patient explorations, or else someone knew precisely where the place was. In fact, by the morning of the 23rd a section of the barbed wire had been beaten down and a double procession of miserable wretches went in and out through the opening.

  Charles and I departed, into the wind of the leaden plain. We were beyond the broken barrier.

  “Dis donc, Primo, on est dehors!”

  It was true; for the first time since the day of my arrest I found myself free, without armed guards, without fences between me and my home.

  Perhaps four hundred meters from the camp were the potatoes—a treasure. Two extremely long trenches, full of potatoes and covered by alternate layers of soil and straw to keep them from freezing. No one would die of hunger anymore.

  But getting them out was by no means easy work. Because of the cold, the surface of the earth was as hard as iron. Strenuous work with a pickax made it possible to break the crust and lay bare the store; but the majority preferred to climb into holes abandoned by others and continue to dig them deeper, handing the potatoes to their companions standing outside.

  An old Hungarian had been surprised there by death. He lay frozen in the posture of a starving man: head and shoulders under a pile of earth, belly in the snow, hands outstretched toward the potatoes. Somebody who came later moved the body about a meter, unblocking the hole, and continued the work.

  From then on our food improved. Besides boiled potatoes and po
tato soup, we offered our patients potato pancakes, from Arthur’s recipe: rub together raw potatoes with boiled, soft ones, and roast the mixture on a red-hot iron plate. They tasted of soot.

  But Sertelet, steadily getting worse, was unable to enjoy them. Besides speaking in an ever more nasal tone, that day he was unable to force down any food; his throat had somehow closed up, and every mouthful threatened to suffocate him.

  I went to look for a Hungarian doctor who had been left as a patient in the barracks opposite. When he heard talk of diphtheria he pulled back and ordered me to leave.

  For pure propaganda purposes I gave everyone nose drops of camphorated oil. I assured Sertelet that they would bring him some relief; I even tried to convince myself.

  JANUARY 24. Liberty. The breach in the barbed wire gave us its concrete image. If you thought about it carefully, it signified no more Germans, no more selections, no work, no beatings, no roll calls, and perhaps, later, return home.

  But it took an effort to convince ourselves, and no one had time to enjoy the thought. All around lay destruction and death.

  The pile of corpses in front of our window had by now overflowed the pit. Despite the potatoes, everyone was extremely weak: in the camp none of the sick got better, while many became ill with pneumonia and diarrhea. Those who were unable to move, or lacked the energy to do so, lay lethargic in their bunks, stiff with cold, and nobody noticed when they died.

  The others were all incredibly tired: after months and years of the Lager a man needed more than potatoes to regain his strength. When, with the cooking done, Charles and I had dragged the twenty-five liters of the daily soup from the washhouse to our room, we threw ourselves panting on our bunks, while the meticulous, domestic-minded Arthur divided the soup, taking care to save the three rations of rabiot pour les travailleurs and a little from the bottom of the pot pour les italiens d’à côté.

  In the second room of the Infectious Disease ward, also next to ours, and occupied mainly by tuberculosis patients, the situation was quite different. All those who were physically able to had gone to settle in other barracks. Their weaker and more seriously ill comrades died, one by one, in solitude.

  I went there one morning to try and borrow a needle. A sick man was gasping for breath in one of the upper bunks. He heard me, raised himself to sitting, then fell, dangling headfirst over the edge toward me, with his chest and arms stiff and his eyes white. The man in the bunk below automatically reached his arms up to support the body and then realized that he was dead. He slowly withdrew from under the weight, and the other slid to the floor and remained there. Nobody knew his name.

  But in Barrack 14 something new had happened. It was occupied by patients recovering from operations, some of them in fairly good condition. They organized an expedition to the English prisoner-of-war camp, which it was assumed had been evacuated. It was a fruitful undertaking. They returned dressed in khaki, with a cart full of wonders never seen before: margarine, custard powder, lard, soybean flour, brandy.

  That night there was singing in Barrack 14.

  None of us felt strong enough to walk the two kilometers to the English camp and return with a load. But indirectly the successful expedition proved advantageous to many. The unequal distribution of goods caused industry and commerce to flourish once more. In our small room, with its lethal atmosphere, we started a candle factory: the candles, poured into cardboard molds, had wicks soaked in boric acid. The wealthy occupants of Barrack 14 bought up our entire production, paying us in lard and flour.

  I myself had found the block of beeswax in the Elektromagazin; I remember the look of disappointment among those who saw me carry it away and the dialogue that followed:

  “What do you intend to do with that?”

  It was inadvisable to reveal a trade secret. I heard myself replying with the words I had often heard spoken by the old inmates of the camp, expressing their favorite boast: that they were “good prisoners,” adaptable types, who always managed to get by—“Ich verstehe verschiedene Sachen. . . .” I can do a lot of different things. . . .

  JANUARY 25. It was Sómogyi’s turn. He was a Hungarian chemist, about fifty years old, thin, tall, and taciturn. Like the Dutchman, he was recovering from typhus and scarlet fever. But something new occurred: he was running a high fever. He had not spoken for perhaps five days. That day he opened his mouth and said in a firm voice:

  “I have a ration of bread under the mattress. Divide it among the three of you. I won’t be eating anymore.”

  We couldn’t find anything to say, but for the time being we didn’t touch the bread. Half his face was swollen. As long as he remained conscious, he was closed in a bitter silence.

  But in the evening, and for the whole night, and for two days, without interruption, the silence was broken by his delirium. Following a last, interminable dream of submission and slavery, he began to murmur “Jawohl” with every breath, regularly and continuously like a machine, “Jawohl,” every time his poor rib cage subsided, thousands of times, so that you wanted to shake him, suffocate him, or at least make him change the word.

  I never understood so clearly as at that moment how laborious is the death of a man.

  Outside there was still the vast silence. The number of crows had increased considerably and everyone knew why. Only at long intervals did the dialogue of the artillery reawaken.

  We all said to one another that the Russians would arrive soon, at once; we all proclaimed it, we were all sure of it, but at bottom nobody really believed it. Because in the Lager one loses the habit of hope, and even of faith in one’s own reasoning. It is useless to think in the Lager, because events happen for the most part in an unpredictable manner; and it is harmful, because it keeps alive a sensitivity that is a source of pain, and which some providential natural law dulls when suffering passes a certain limit.

  As one tires of joy, fear, and pain itself, so, too, one can tire of waiting. By January 25, eight days after breaking our ties with that ferocious world which nonetheless was a world, most of us were too exhausted even to wait.

  In the evening, around the stove, Charles, Arthur, and I felt ourselves become men again. We could speak of everything. I was fascinated by Arthur’s account of how Sundays were spent in Provenchères, in the Vosges, and Charles almost cried when I told him the story of the armistice in Italy, of the grim and desperate beginning of the partisan Resistance, of the man who betrayed us and our capture in the mountains.

  In the darkness, behind and above us, the eight invalids did not miss a syllable, even those who did not understand French. Only Sómogyi implacably confirmed his dedication to death.

  JANUARY 26. We were lying in a world of dead men and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the Germans in triumph, had been brought to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat.

  It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; he who shares his bed with a corpse, having lost all restraint, is not a man. He who has waited for his neighbor to die in order to take his piece of bread is, albeit blameless, farther from the model of thinking man than the most primitive pygmy or the most vicious sadist.

  Part of our existence lies in the feelings of those near us. This is why the experience of someone who has lived for days during which man was merely a thing in the eyes of man is non-human. We three were for the most part immune, and for this we owe one another gratitude; it is why my friendship with Charles will endure.

  But thousands of meters above us, in the gaps between the gray clouds, the complicated miracles of aerial duels were unfolding. Above us, exposed, helpless, and unarmed, men of our time sought mutual death with the most refined of instruments. One movement of a finger could cause the destruction of the entire camp, could annihilate thousands of men; while the sum total of all our efforts and exertions would not be sufficient to prolong by a minute the life of a single one of us.

  The saraband stopped at
night and the room was once again filled with Sómogyi’s monologue.

  In utter darkness I woke with a start. “L’ pauv’ vieux” was silent; he had finished. With the last gasp of life, he had fallen to the floor from his bunk: I heard the thud of his knees, of his hips, of his shoulders, of his head.

  “La mort l’a chassé de son lit,” Arthur described it.

  We certainly could not carry him out during the night. There was nothing to do but go back to sleep.

  JANUARY 27. Dawn. On the floor, the shameful disorder of skin and bones, the Sómogyi thing.

  There are more urgent tasks: we cannot wash, we cannot touch him until we have cooked and eaten. And, besides, “. . . rien de si dégoutant que les débordements,” Charles said justly; the latrine had to be emptied. The living are more demanding; the dead can wait. We began to work as we did every day.

  The Russians arrived as Charles and I were carrying Sómogyi a little distance outside. He was very light. We overturned the stretcher onto the gray snow.

  Charles took off his cap. I was sorry that I didn’t have a cap.

  Of the eleven men in the Infektionsabteilung, Sómogyi was the only one to die in the ten days. Sertelet, Cagnolati, Towarowski, Lakmaker, and Dorget (I have not spoken of him until now; he was a French industrialist who, after an operation for peritonitis, fell ill of nasal diphtheria) died some weeks later in the temporary Russian hospital in Auschwitz. In April, at Katowice, I met Schenck and Alcalai in good health. Arthur has happily rejoined his family and Charles has returned to his profession as a teacher; we have exchanged long letters and I hope to see him again one day.

  Avigliana–Turin, December 1945–January 1947

  Appendix