by Primo Levi
The two Polish girls who carried out (in reality quite badly) the nursing duties were called Hanka and Jadzia. Hanka was a former Kapo, as could be deduced from her unshaved head, and even more certainly from her aggressive ways. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-four; she was of medium height, with an olive complexion and hard, coarse features. In that atmosphere of Purgatory, full of sufferings past and present, of hope and pity, she spent days in front of the mirror, or filing her fingernails and toenails, or parading before the indifferent and ironic Henek.
She was, or considered herself, higher in rank than Jadzia, though in fact it didn’t take much to surpass in authority a creature so withdrawn. Jadzia was a small, timid girl, with a sickly pink complexion; her wrapping of anemic flesh was tortured, lacerated from the inside, ravaged by a continuous secret storm. She wanted, needed, had a compelling necessity for a man, any man, immediately, all men. Every man who passed through the camp attracted her: attracted her physically, heavily, the way a magnet attracts iron. Jadzia stared at him with spellbound, dazed eyes; she got up from her corner, advanced toward him with the uncertain step of a sleepwalker, sought contact with him. If the man moved away, she followed at a distance, silently, for a little way, then, eyes lowered, returned to her inertia; if the man waited for her, Jadzia enveloped him, incorporated him, took possession of him, with the blind, mute, tremulous, slow but sure movements that amoebas demonstrate under the microscope.
Her first and principal objective was, naturally, Henek, but Henek didn’t want her; he mocked her, insulted her. Still, like the practical boy he was, he took an interest in the case, and mentioned it to Noah, his great friend.
Noah didn’t live in our room; rather, he lived in no place and in all places. He was a nomadic, free man, happy in the air he breathed and the earth he walked on. He was the Scheissminister of free Auschwitz, the superintendent of the latrines and black wells; but in spite of this responsibility, like a gravedigger’s (which he had taken on voluntarily), there was nothing base about him, or, if there was, it was overcome and canceled out by the force of his vital strength. Noah was a very young Pantagruel, as strong as a horse, greedy and lewd. As Jadzia wanted all men, so Noah wanted all women: but while the feeble Jadzia was limited to spreading her flimsy nets, like a reef mollusk, Noah, a high-flying bird, cruised through all the streets of the camp, from dawn to dark, on the box of his repulsive cart, cracking the whip and singing lustily. The cart stood at the entrance to every Block, and while his foul stinking henchmen carried out their dirty task, cursing, Noah wandered through the women’s rooms like an oriental prince, wearing a varicolored jacket with an arabesque design, covered with patches and braid. His love meetings were like hurricanes. He was the friend of all the men and the lover of all the women. The flood was over; in the black sky of Auschwitz Noah saw the rainbow shine, and the world was his, to repopulate.
Frau Vitta—rather, Frau Vita (or Life), as everyone called her—loved all human beings with a simple, brotherly love. Frau Vita, with her ravaged body and her sweet open face, was a young widow from Trieste, half Jewish, a survivor of Birkenau. She spent many hours beside my bed, speaking to me of a thousand things at once, with a Triestine talkativeness, laughing and crying; she was in good health, but profoundly wounded, ulcerated by what she had undergone and seen in a year of the Lager, and in those final horrible days. In fact she had been “commanded” to transport corpses, pieces of corpses, wretched anonymous remains, and those last images weighed on her like a mountain; she tried to exorcise them, to wash herself of them, throwing herself headlong into tumultuous activity. She was the only one who took care of the sick and the children; she did it with frenzied compassion, and when she had time left she washed the floors and windows with savage fury, she noisily rinsed the bowls and glasses, she ran through the rooms carrying messages, true or fictitious; she returned out of breath, and sat panting on my bed, her eyes wet—hungry for words, for intimacy, for human warmth. At night, when all the day’s work was done, she jumped out of her bed, incapable of enduring solitude, and danced alone amid the beds, to the sound of her own songs, hugging affectionately to her breast an imaginary partner.
It was Frau Vita who closed the eyes of André and Antoine. They were two young farmers from the Vosges, who had been my companions during the ten days of the interregnum, both ill with diphtheria. It seemed to me that I had known them for centuries. In an odd parallel, they were stricken simultaneously by a form of dysentery that soon proved to be very serious, of tubercular origin; and in a few days the scale of their fate tipped. They were in neighboring beds, they didn’t complain, they endured the atrocious abdominal attacks with clenched teeth, not understanding their fatal nature; they spoke only to each other, timidly, and did not ask anyone for help. André was the first to go, while he was speaking, in the middle of a sentence, the way a candle goes out. For two days no one came to remove him: the children went to look at him with baffled curiosity, then continued playing in their corner.
Antoine remained silent and alone, shut up in a wait that transfigured him. He was reasonably well nourished, but in two days he underwent a poignant metamorphosis, as if sucked up by his neighbor. Along with Frau Vita we managed, after many vain attempts, to get a doctor to come: I asked him, in German, if there was something to do, if there was hope, and urged him not to answer in French. He answered in Yiddish, with a short sentence that I didn’t understand; then he translated it into German: “Sein Kamerad ruft ihn,” his companion is calling him. Antoine obeyed the call that night. They were not yet twenty, and had been in the Lager only a month.
And finally Olga came, on a silent night, to bring me the grim news of the Birkenau camp, and of the fate of the women in my transport. I had been waiting for her for many days: I didn’t know her personally, but Frau Vita, who in spite of the medical prohibitions also visited the sick in the other wards, in search of sufferings to relieve and passionate conversations, had informed us of each other’s presence, and had organized the illicit meeting, in the middle of the night, while everyone was sleeping.
Olga was a Croatian Jewish partisan, who in 1942 had hidden in the region of Asti, and had been interned there; so she belonged to that wave of several thousand foreign Jews who had found hospitality, and a brief peace, in the paradoxical, officially anti-Semitic Italy of those years. She was a woman of great intelligence and culture, strong, beautiful, and wise; deported to Birkenau, she had survived, alone of her family.
She spoke Italian perfectly; out of gratitude and temperament, she had soon become a friend of the Italian women in the camp and, more specifically, of those who had been deported in my convoy. She told me their story with her eyes on the floor, in the light of a candle. The furtive glow drew from the shadows only her face, emphasizing the precocious wrinkles, and transforming it into a tragic mask. A bandanna covered her head; she untied it suddenly, and the mask became macabre, like a skull. Olga’s head was bare, except for a covering of short gray fuzz.
They had all died. All the children and all the old people, immediately. Of the five hundred and fifty people I had lost track of when I entered the Lager, only twenty-nine women had been admitted to Birkenau: of these, only five had survived. Vanda had been gassed, fully conscious, in the month of October; she herself, Olga, had obtained two sleeping pills for her, but they were not enough.
The Greek
Toward the end of February, after a month in bed, I felt not recovered but stable. I had the clear impression that, until I got myself (maybe with an effort) into a vertical position, and put shoes on my feet, I wouldn’t regain health and strength. So on one of the rare examination days, I asked to be discharged. The doctor examined me, or made a show of examining me; he verified that the desquamation of the scarlet fever had stopped; he told me that as far as he was concerned I could go; he urged me ridiculously not to expose myself to fatigue or cold, and wished me good luck.
So I cut myself a pair of walking shoes from a blank
et, grabbed as many cloth jackets and pants as I could find around (since no other garments could be had), said goodbye to Frau Vita and Henek, and left.
I was rather shaky on my feet. Just outside the door, there was a Soviet officer; he photographed me and gave me five cigarettes. A little farther on, I was unable to avoid a fellow in civilian clothes, who was looking for men to get rid of the snow; he grabbed me, deaf to my protests, handed me a shovel, and added me to a team of shovelers.
I offered him the five cigarettes, but he rejected them with irritation. He was an ex-Kapo, and naturally had remained in service: who else would have made people like us shovel snow? I tried to shovel, but it was physically impossible. If I could get around the corner no one would see me anymore, but it was essential to get rid of the shovel; to sell it would have been interesting, but I didn’t know to whom, and to carry it with me, even for a few steps, was dangerous. There wasn’t enough snow to bury it. I finally dropped it through the window of a cellar, and was free.
I went into a Block. There was a guard, an old Hungarian, who didn’t want to let me in, but the cigarettes persuaded him. Inside it was warm, full of smoke and noise and unknown faces; but in the evening I, too, was given some soup. I was hoping for a few days of rest and gradual practice for an active life, but I didn’t know I had been unlucky. Immediately, the next morning, I fell into a Russian transport heading for a mysterious transit camp.
I can’t recall exactly how and when my Greek emerged out of the nothingness. In those days and in those places, shortly after the front passed, a high wind blew over the face of the Earth: the world around us seemed to have returned to a primal Chaos, and was swarming with deformed, defective, abnormal human examples; and each of them was tossing about, in blind or deliberate motion, anxiously searching for his own place, his own sphere, as the cosmogonies of the ancients say, poetically, of the particles of the four elements.
I, too, overwhelmed by the whirlwind, thus found myself many hours before dawn on a freezing night, after a copious snowfall, loaded onto a horse-drawn military cart, along with a dozen companions I didn’t know. The cold was intense; the sky, thick with stars, was growing light in the east, promising one of those marvelous sunrises of the plain that, in the time of our slavery, we watched interminably from Roll Call Square in the Lager.
Our guide and escort was a Russian soldier. He sat on the box singing to the stars at the top of his lungs, and every so often addressed himself to the horses in that strangely affectionate way Russians have, with gentle inflections and long modulated phrases. We had questioned him about our destination, naturally, but without learning anything comprehensible, except that, as it seemed from some rhythmic puffing and a piston-like movement of his elbows, his task was evidently limited to taking us to a railroad.
So in fact it was. When the sun rose, the cart stopped at the foot of a slope; above ran the tracks, severed and torn up for fifty meters by a recent bombardment. The soldier pointed out to us one of the two stumps, helped us get down from the cart (and it was necessary: the trip had lasted almost two hours, the cart was small, and many of us, because of our uncomfortable position and the penetrating cold, were so stiff we couldn’t move), said goodbye to us with cheerful, incomprehensible words, turned the horses, and went off, singing sweetly.
As soon as the sun rose it disappeared behind a veil of fog; from the height of the railroad slope one could see only an endless, flat, deserted countryside, buried in snow, without a roof, without a tree. Hours passed: none of us had a watch.
As I said, we were a dozen. There was a Reichsdeutscher, an ethnic German, who, like many other “Aryan” Germans, after the liberation had assumed relatively courteous and frankly ambiguous manners (this was an amusing metamorphosis, which I had seen happen in others: sometimes progressively, sometimes in a few minutes, at the first appearance of the new bosses with the red star, on whose broad faces it was easy to read a tendency not to be too particular). There were two tall, thin brothers, Viennese Jews in their fifties, silent and cautious like all the old Häftlinge; an officer from the regular Yugoslav Army, who seemed unable to shake off the submissiveness and inertia of the Lager, and looked at us with empty eyes. There was a kind of human wreck, of an indefinable age, who talked to himself without stopping, in Yiddish: one of the many whom the savage life of the camp had half destroyed, leaving them to survive wrapped in (and perhaps protected by) a thick armor of insensitivity or obvious madness. And there was, finally, the Greek, with whom destiny was to join me for an unforgettable vagabond week.
His name was Mordo Nahum, and at first sight he appeared unremarkable, except for his shoes (leather, almost new, of an elegant model: a true miracle, given the time and the place), and the sack that he carried on his back, which had a considerable mass and a corresponding weight, as I was to verify in the days that followed. In addition to his own language, he spoke Spanish (like all the Jews of Salonika), French, a broken Italian but with a good accent, and, I found out later, Turkish, Bulgarian, and a little Albanian. He was forty; he was quite tall, but he walked bent over, with his head forward, as if he were nearsighted. He was red-haired and red-skinned, he had large pale, watery eyes, and a big hooked nose, which gave his entire person an aspect at once rapacious and clumsy, as of a nocturnal bird surprised by the light, or a predator fish out of its natural element.
He was recovering from an unspecified illness, which had caused spells of a very high, debilitating fever; even then, on the first nights of the journey, he sometimes fell into a state of prostration, shivering and delirious. Yet, without feeling particularly attracted to each other, we were brought together by two common languages, and by the fact—very noticeable in the circumstances—that we were the only two Mediterraneans in the little group.
The wait was interminable; we were hungry and cold, and were forced to stand or lie in the snow, because as far as the eye could see there was neither roof nor shelter. It must have been nearly noon when, heralded from a distance by puffing and smoke, the hand of civilization was charitably extended toward us, in the form of a puny little train consisting of three or four freight cars hauled by a small locomotive, of the type that in normal times is used to maneuver cars around a station.
The train stopped in front of us, at the edge of the cut-off track. Some Polish peasants got out, but we couldn’t get any information from them that made sense: they looked at us with blank faces, and avoided us as if we were contagious. In fact we were, probably in the literal sense, and, besides, our appearance could not have been pleasing; but we had deluded ourselves that we would receive a more cordial welcome from the first “civilians” we met after our liberation. We all got into one of the cars, and the little train started up again almost immediately, backward, pushed, rather than pulled, by the toy locomotive. At the next stop two peasant women got on, and, once the initial distrust and the difficulty of the language had been overcome, we learned from them some important geographic facts and some information that, if true, to our ears sounded little less than disastrous.
The break in the tracks was not far from a place called Neu Berun, where a branch line from Auschwitz, since destroyed, had once ended. One of the two trunks that went off from the break led to Katowice (to the west), the other to Kraków (to the east). Both these places were around sixty kilometers from Neu Berun, which, in the frightful condition in which the war had left the line, meant at least two days of travel, with an uncertain number of stops and transfers. The train we were on was traveling toward Kraków: until a few days earlier the Russians had been shunting into Kraków an enormous number of former prisoners, and now all the barracks, the schools, the hospitals, the convents were overflowing with people in a state of acute need. The very streets of Kraków, according to our informants, were swarming with men and women of all races, who in the blink of an eye had been transformed into smugglers, black marketeers, or even thieves and bandits.
For several days now, the former prisoners had been con
centrated in other camps, around Katowice: the two women were very surprised to find us traveling toward Kraków, where, they said, the Russian garrison itself was suffering deprivation. Having heard our story, they consulted briefly with each other, then declared themselves certain that it must have been simply an error of our guide, the Russian cart driver, who, with little experience of the country, had directed us to the eastern stub rather than the western.
This information threw us into a tangle of doubts and anguish. We had hoped for a short and safe journey, toward a camp equipped to welcome us, toward an acceptable surrogate for our homes; and that hope was part of a much larger hope, hope in a right and just world, miraculously reestablished on its natural foundations after an eternity of disruptions, mistakes, and slaughters, after our long time of endurance. It was a naïve hope, like all hopes that rest on sharp divisions between evil and good, between past and future: but we lived on them. That first crack, and the many others, large and small, that inevitably followed, was a cause of suffering for many of us, the more deeply felt because it had not been foreseen: since one does not dream for years, for decades, of a better world without imagining it to be perfect.
Instead no, something had happened that only a very few sages among us had predicted. Freedom, improbable, impossible freedom, so far from Auschwitz that only in dreams had we dared to hope for it, had arrived: but it had not brought us to the Promised Land. It was around us, but in the form of a pitiless, deserted plain. More trials awaited us, more labors, more hunger, more cold, more fears.
I had now been without food for twenty-four hours. We sat on the wooden floor of the train car, close against one another to protect ourselves from the cold; the tracks were uneven, and at every jolt our heads, infirm on our necks, bumped against the wooden sides. I felt exhausted, not only in my body: like an athlete who has run for hours, using up all his resources, the natural ones first, and then the ones that are squeezed out, created from nothing in moments of extreme need; an athlete who arrives at the finish line, and, in the act of collapsing, exhausted, on the ground, is brutally pulled to his feet and forced to start running again, in the dark, toward another finish line, an unknown distance away. I had bitter thoughts: that nature rarely grants compensation, and neither does human society, being timid and slow to diverge from nature’s gross schemes; and such an achievement would represent, in the history of human thought, the ability to see in nature not a model to follow but a shapeless block to carve, or an enemy to fight.