The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  But I was aware only fitfully and indistinctly of all that was happening around me. It seemed that the weariness and the illness, like fierce, vile beasts, had been lying in wait for the moment when I was stripped of every defense to assault me from behind. I lay in a feverish torpor, only half conscious, watched over in a brotherly way by Charles, and tormented by thirst and by acute pain in my joints. There were neither doctors nor medicines. My throat also hurt, and half of my face was swollen: the skin had become red and rough, and stung like a burn; perhaps I was suffering from several illnesses at once. When my turn came to get into Yankel’s cart, I was no longer able to stand up.

  I was hoisted onto the cart by Charles and Arthur, along with a load of dying men from whom I did not feel very different. It was raining, and the sky was low and dark. While the slow pace of Yankel’s horses hauled me toward very distant freedom, the barracks where I had suffered and had grown up passed before my eyes for the last time, along with Roll Call Square, where, side by side, stood the gallows and a giant Christmas tree, and the gateway of slavery, on which the three mocking words, now hollow, could still be read: Arbeit Macht Frei, Work makes us free.

  The Big Camp

  At Buna we didn’t know much about the “Big Camp,” properly known as Auschwitz: the Häftlinge transferred from camp to camp were few, not talkative (no Häftling was), and not easily believed.

  When Yankel’s cart crossed the famous threshold, we were stunned. Buna-Monowitz, with its twelve thousand inhabitants, was a village by comparison: what we entered was a vast metropolis. Not one-story wooden “Blocks” but countless grim square buildings of bare brick, three stories high and exactly the same; between these ran paved streets, straight or at right angles, as far as the eye could see. It was all deserted, silent, crushed under the low sky, a place of mud and rain and abandonment.

  Here, too, as at every turning point of our long journey, we were surprised to be greeted by a bath, when we needed so many other things. But this was not a bath of humiliation, a grotesque-diabolical-ritual bath, a black-Mass bath like the one that had marked our descent into the concentration-camp universe, nor was it a functional, antiseptic, highly technological bath, like that of our passage, many months later, into the hands of the Americans; rather, it was a bath in the Russian manner, on a human scale, extemporaneous and rough.

  I don’t mean to question whether a bath, for us in those conditions, was fitting: it was in fact necessary, and not unwelcome. But in it, and in each of those three memorable washings, it was easy to see, behind the concrete, literal aspect, a great symbolic shadow, the unconscious desire, on the part of the new authority that each time absorbed us into its sphere, to strip us of the vestiges of our former life, to make of us new men, conforming to its models, to impose on us its brand.

  The strong arms of two Soviet nurses removed us from the cart. “Po malu, po malu!” (“Slowly, slowly!”): those were the first Russian words I heard. The two girls were energetic and skilled. They led us into one of the Lager facilities that had been hastily put back in working order, stripped us, indicated that we were to lie down on the wooden lattice that covered the floor, and, with compassionate hands, but without much ceremony, they soaped us, rubbed us, massaged and dried us from head to foot.

  The operation went smoothly and quickly with all of us, apart from some moralistic-Jacobin protests from Arthur, who proclaimed himself libre citoyen, and in whose subconscious the contact of those female hands with his bare skin was in conflict with ancestral taboos. But it met a serious stumbling block when the turn came of the last man in the group.

  None of us knew who he was, because he wasn’t able to speak. He was a phantom, a bald little man, gnarled as a vine, skeletal, crumpled by a horrible contraction of all his muscles. He had been removed bodily from the cart, like an inanimate block, and now he lay on the ground on one side, curled up and rigid, in a desperate position of defensiveness, with his knees pressed against his forehead, his elbows locked to his sides, and his hands in a wedge with the fingers pointed toward his shoulders. The Russian nurses, perplexed, tried in vain to lay him on his back, at which he emitted sharp cries, like a mouse. Besides, it was a futile effort; his limbs yielded elastically under the force, but as soon as they were let go they snapped back to their initial position. Then the women made up their minds and carried him under the shower just as he was; and since they had precise orders, they washed him as well as they could, forcing sponge and soap into the woody knot of that body; at the end, they rinsed him conscientiously, pouring a couple of buckets of tepid water over him.

  Charles and I, naked and steaming, watched the scene with pity and horror. While one of the arms was extended, we saw for an instant the tattooed number: he was a 200000, one from the Vosges. “Bon Dieu, c’est un français!” Charles said, and turned in silence to the wall.

  They gave us a shirt and underpants, and led us to a Russian barber, so that, for the last time in our career, our heads could be shaved. The barber was a dark-skinned giant, with wild, feverish eyes: he was impetuous and violent in the practice of his art, and for reasons unknown to me he carried a machine gun over his shoulder. “Italian Mussolini,” he said to me, glaring, and to the two Frenchmen, “Fransé Laval”; and here one can see how little general ideas help the understanding of individual cases.

  At this point we parted: Charles and Arthur, recovered and relatively healthy, joined the group of Frenchmen, and disappeared from my view. I was sick, and was taken to the infirmary, summarily examined, and rushed to a new Infectious Diseases Ward.

  This infirmary was such in intention, and also because it was in fact teeming with sick people (the Germans in flight had left, in Monowitz, Auschwitz, and Birkenau, only the most seriously ill, and these had all been collected by the Russians in the Big Camp): it was not, nor could it be, a place of care, because there were only a few dozen doctors, for the most part sick themselves, and a complete lack of medicines and medical supplies, while at least three-quarters of the five thousand inmates of the camp needed medical attention.

  The area I was assigned to was an enormous dark room, filled to the roof with suffering and laments. For perhaps eight hundred sick people, there was only one doctor on duty, and no nurse; it was the sick themselves who had to provide for their most urgent needs. I spent a single night there, which I remember as a nightmare; in the morning, the corpses, in the bunks or left in a heap on the floor, could be counted by the dozen.

  The following day I was transferred to a smaller place, which contained only twenty bunks: in one of these I lay for three or four days, oppressed by a very high fever, conscious only at intervals, incapable of eating, and tormented by an atrocious thirst.

  On the fifth day the fever vanished: I felt light as a cloud, hungry, and ice-cold, but my head was clear, my eyes and ears as if sharpened by the enforced vacation, and I was able to resume contact with the world.

  In the course of those few days, an enormous change had taken place around me. It had been the last great swing of the scythe, the closing of accounts: the dying were dead, in everyone else life was beginning to flow tumultuously. Outside the windows, although it was snowing hard, the grim streets of the camp were no longer deserted, in fact they were swarming with a rapid, confused, and noisy coming and going, which seemed an end in itself. Until late at night one heard shouts, cheerful or angry, one heard cries, songs. Nevertheless, my attention, and that of my bunkmates, could rarely escape the obsessive presence, the mortal assertive force of the smallest and most defenseless among us, the most innocent, a child, Hurbinek.

  Hurbinek was a nothing, a child of death, a child of Auschwitz. He appeared to be about three; no one knew anything about him; he didn’t know how to talk and didn’t have a name. That odd name, Hurbinek, had been assigned by us, perhaps by one of the women, who had interpreted with those syllables one of the inarticulate sounds that the child every so often emitted. He was paralyzed from the lower back down, and his thin, st
icklike legs had atrophied; but his eyes, lost in his pinched, triangular face, flashed, terribly alive, full of demand, of insistence, of the will to be unchained, to shatter the tomb of his muteness. The speech that he lacked, that no one had taken care to teach him, the need for speech, persisted in his gaze with explosive urgency: it was a gaze both savage and human, or, rather, mature and judgmental, so charged with force and pain that none of us could sustain it.

  No one except Henek: a strong, healthy Hungarian boy of fifteen whose bed was next to mine. Henek spent half his days beside Hurbinek’s bed. He was maternal rather than paternal: it’s likely that, if our precarious shared life had been extended beyond a month, Hurbinek would have learned to speak from Henek, certainly more than from the Polish girls, who were too tender yet too empty, intoxicating him with caresses and kisses but avoiding intimacy.

  Henek, on the other hand, sat beside the little sphinx, calm and persistent, immune to the sad power that emanated from him; he brought him food, arranged his blankets, cleaned him with skillful hands, devoid of repugnance; and he talked to him, in Hungarian, naturally, in a slow, patient voice. After a week, Henek announced seriously, but without a hint of presumption, that Hurbinek had “said a word.” What word? He didn’t know, a difficult word, not Hungarian: something like “mass-klo,” “matisklo.” At night we strained our ears: it was true, every so often from Hurbinek’s corner came a sound, a word. Not always exactly the same, in truth, but it was certainly an articulated word, or, rather, slightly different articulated words, experimental variations on a theme, a root, maybe a name.

  Hurbinek continued his obstinate experiments as long as he lived. In the following days, we all listened to him in silence, anxious to understand—and there were among us speakers of all the languages of Europe—but Hurbinek’s word remained secret. No, it was certainly not a message, not a revelation: perhaps it was his name, if he had even been blessed with one; perhaps (according to one of our hypotheses) it meant “eat,” or “bread”; or possibly “meat” in Bohemian, as one of us, who knew that language, maintained, with solid arguments.

  Hurbinek, who was three years old and had perhaps been born in Auschwitz and had never seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to his last breath, to gain entrance into the world of men, from which a bestial power had banned him; Hurbinek, nameless, whose tiny forearm had been marked with the tattoo of Auschwitz—Hurbinek died in early March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine.

  Henek was a good companion, and a perpetual source of surprise. His name, too, like Hurbinek’s, was a nickname. His real name, which was König, had been altered to Henek, the Polish diminutive of Henry, by the two Polish girls, who, although they were at least ten years older, felt for Henek an ambiguous friendliness that soon became open desire.

  Henek-König, alone in our microcosm of affliction, was neither ill nor convalescent; rather, he enjoyed splendid health in body and spirit. He was small in stature and had a gentle face, but he was built like an athlete; affectionate and helpful with Hurbinek and with us, he nevertheless harbored calmly bloodthirsty instincts. The Lager, a death trap, a “bone mill” for everyone else, had been for him a good school; in a few months it had made him a quick, shrewd, fierce, and prudent young carnivore.

  In the long hours we spent together, he told me the essential facts of his short life. He was born and lived on a farm in Transylvania, in the woods, near the Romanian border. On Sundays, he often went with his father through the woods, both of them carrying guns. Why guns? To hunt? Yes, to hunt; but also to shoot Romanians. And why shoot Romanians? Because they are Romanians, Henek explained to me, with disarming simplicity. And, every so often, they shot at us.

  He had been captured and deported to Auschwitz with his whole family. The others had been killed immediately: he had declared to the SS that he was eighteen and a mason, although he was fourteen and a student. So he had entered Birkenau; but in Birkenau he had instead insisted on his actual age, had been assigned to the children’s Block, and, being the oldest and strongest, had become its Kapo. The children in Birkenau were like birds of passage: after a few days, they were transferred to the Block for experiments, or directly to the gas chambers. Henek had immediately understood the situation, and as a good Kapo had got “organized,” had established solid relations with an influential Hungarian Häftling, and had survived until the liberation. When there were selections in the children’s Block, it was he who chose. Didn’t he feel remorse? No: why should he? Was there another way to survive?

  During the evacuation of the Lager, he had, wisely, hidden: from his hiding place, through a cellar window, he had seen the Germans empty out the fabled warehouses of Auschwitz in a great hurry, and had noted how, in the confusion of departure, they had scattered on the street a good quantity of canned food. They hadn’t taken the time to retrieve the cans but had tried to destroy them by running over them with their tanks. Many cans were stuck in the mud and snow, undamaged: at night, Henek went out with a sack and collected a fantastic treasure of cans, dented, flattened, but still full: meat, lard, fish, fruit, vitamins. He hadn’t told anyone, naturally: he told me, because my bed was next to his, and I could be useful as a guard. In effect, since Henek spent many hours wandering through the Lager, in mysterious undertakings, while I was unable to move, my work as a guard was quite useful to him. He trusted me. He arranged the sack under my bed, and in the following days he repaid me with a fair recompense in kind, authorizing me to take those extra rations that he considered suitable, in quality and quantity, to my condition as a sick person and to the extent of my services.

  Hurbinek was not the only child. There were others, in relatively good health; they had established a small “club” of their own, very restricted and private, into which the intrusion of adults was evidently unwelcome. They were wild and sensible little animals, who chattered among themselves in languages I didn’t understand. The most authoritative member of the clan was not more than five years old, and his name was Peter Pavel.

  Peter Pavel didn’t talk to anyone and didn’t need anyone. He was a fine, strong, fair-haired child, with an intelligent, impassive face. In the morning he got down from his bunk, which was on the third tier, with slow but sure movements, went to the showers to fill his bowl with water, and washed himself carefully. Then he disappeared for the whole day, making only a brief appearance to collect his soup in that same bowl. Finally he returned for dinner; he ate, went out again, returned shortly afterward with a chamber pot, placed it in the corner behind the stove, sat there for a few minutes, left with the chamber pot, returned without it, climbed slowly up to his place, meticulously arranged the covers and the pillow, and slept until morning without changing position.

  A few days after my arrival, I saw, apprehensively, a known face appear: the pathetic and unpleasant profile of the Kleine Kiepura, the mascot of Buna-Monowitz. Everyone in Buna knew him: he was only twelve and the youngest of the prisoners. Everything about him was irregular, starting with his very presence in the Lager, which normally children did not enter alive: no one knew how or why he had been admitted, and at the same time everyone knew it all too well. His situation was irregular, since he didn’t march to work but sat in semi-seclusion in the officials’ Block; and, finally, his appearance was notably irregular.

  He had grown too fast and awkwardly: very long arms and legs stuck out from his short, stocky upper body, like a spider’s; and beneath his pale face, whose features were not without childish grace, an enormous jaw protruded, more prominent than his nose. The Kleine Kiepura was the attendant and favorite of the Lager-Kapo, the Kapo of all the Kapos.

  No one loved him except his protector. In the shadow of authority, well fed and well dressed, exempt from the work, he had led until the last day the ambiguous and frivolous existence of a favorite, full of gossip, informing, and twisted affections; his name, wrongly, I hope, was always whispered in the most outrageous ca
ses of anonymous denunciations to the political section and the SS. Therefore everyone feared him and avoided him.

  Now the Lager-Kapo, stripped of all power, was marching to the west, and the Kleine Kiepura, recovering from a slight illness, had followed our fate. He had a bed and a bowl, and he inserted himself into our limbo. Henek and I said a few cautious words to him, since we felt toward him distrust and a hostile compassion; but he barely answered us. He was silent for two days; he stayed in his bunk all curled up, with his gaze fixed on emptiness and his fists clenched on his chest. Then he suddenly started to talk, and we missed his silence. The Kleine Kiepura talked to himself, as if in a dream; and his dream was to have worked his way up and become a Kapo. We couldn’t understand if it was madness or a childish, sinister game: relentlessly, from the height of his bed, which was near the ceiling, the boy sang and whistled the marches of Buna, the brutal rhythms that marked our weary steps every morning and every evening; and he shouted imperious commands in German to a mass of nonexistent slaves.

  “Get up, pigs, do you understand? Make the beds, hurry up; clean your shoes. All together, check for lice, check the feet. Show your feet, swine! Dirty again, you, sack of s——. Pay attention, I’m not joking. I catch you again and you’ll go to the crematorium.” Then, shouting in the manner of the German soldiers: “Line up, close ranks, fall in. Collar down: in step, keep time. Hands on the pant seams.” And then, after a pause, in an arrogant, strident voice: “This is not a sanatorium. This is a German Lager, it’s called Auschwitz, and the only way out is through the Chimney. If you like it, that’s it. If you don’t like it, all you have to do is go and touch the electric fence.”

  The Kleine Kiepura disappeared after a few days, to the relief of all. Among us, weak and ill, but filled with timid and fearful joy in our regained freedom, his presence was offensive, like that of a corpse, and the compassion he roused in us was mixed with horror. We tried in vain to wrench him out of his delirium: the infection of the Lager was too far advanced in him.