by Primo Levi
The train traveled slowly. In the evening, dark, apparently deserted villages appeared; then utter night descended, atrociously frigid, with no lights in the sky or on the earth. Only the jolting of the car kept us from slipping into a sleep that the cold would have rendered fatal. Finally, after interminable hours of traveling, perhaps around three in the morning, we stopped in a small, dark, badly damaged station. The Greek was delirious; none of the others—some out of fear, some out of pure inertia, some in the hope that the train would leave soon—wanted to leave the car. I got out, and wandered in the darkness with my ridiculous baggage until I saw a lighted window. It was the telegraph room, full of people; there was a glowing stove. I went in, wary as a wild dog, ready to vanish at the first threatening gesture, but no one noticed me. I collapsed onto the floor and fell asleep instantly, as one learns to do in the Lager.
I woke some hours later, at dawn. The booth was empty. The telegrapher saw me raise my head, and placed beside me, on the floor, a gigantic slice of bread and cheese. I was stunned (besides being half paralyzed by cold and sleep), and I’m afraid I didn’t thank him. I stuffed the food into my stomach and went outside: the train hadn’t moved. In the car, my companions lay stupefied; seeing me, they roused themselves, all except the Yugoslav, who tried in vain to move. The cold and the lack of movement had paralyzed his legs: if you touched him he screamed and groaned. We had to massage him a long time, and then cautiously move the limbs, the way you clear a rusty machine.
It had been a terrible night for everyone, perhaps the worst of our entire exile. I talked about it with the Greek: we found ourselves in agreement in deciding to form an alliance with the purpose of avoiding by any means another freezing night, which we felt we wouldn’t survive.
I think that the Greek, thanks to my nighttime expedition, in some way overestimated my qualities as a débrouillard et démerdard, as people used, elegantly, to say. As for me, I confess that I counted chiefly on his large sack, and the fact that he was a Salonikan, which, as everyone at Auschwitz knew, was a guarantee of sophisticated mercantile skills, of knowing how to get by in all circumstances. Liking, on both sides, and respect, on one, came later.
The train departed, and by a tortuous and indeterminate route brought us to a place called Szczakowa. Here the Polish Red Cross had established a wonderful hot-food service: a fairly substantial soup was distributed, at all hours of the day and night, to anyone who showed up, without distinction. A miracle that no one of us would have dared dream of in his boldest dreams; in a certain sense, it was the Lager reversed. I don’t remember the behavior of my companions. I proved to be so greedy that the Polish nurses, although accustomed to the starving clientele of the place, made the sign of the cross.
We departed again in the afternoon. The sun shone. Our wretched train stopped at sunset, with engine trouble; in the distance the belltowers of Kraków glowed red. The Greek and I got out of the car, and went to question the engineer, who was standing in the snow, completely dirty, busily contending with jets of steam bursting from some broken pipe. “Maschina kaput,” he answered concisely. We were no longer slaves, we were no longer protected, we had emerged from guardianship. For us the hour of trial had come.
The Greek, restored by the hot soup of Szczakowa, felt in fairly good health. “On y va?” “On y va.” So we left the train and our bewildered companions, whom we would never have to see again, and set off on foot in a dubious search for the Civilized World.
Following his peremptory request, I was carrying the famous load. “But it’s your stuff!” I had tried in vain to protest. “Precisely because it’s mine. I organized it and you carry it. It’s the division of labor. Later, you’ll profit from it, too.” So we walked, he first and I second, on the trampled snow of a street on the outskirts; the sun had set.
I’ve already mentioned the Greek’s shoes; as for me, I wore a pair of odd shoes such as in Italy I’ve seen worn only by priests: of very delicate leather, up to the anklebone, with two large pins and no laces, and two side pieces of an elastic material that were supposed to ensure that they closed and stayed on. I also wore a good four pairs of pants of Häftling material, a cotton shirt, a jacket that was also striped, and that’s all. My baggage consisted of a blanket and a cardboard box in which I had first saved some pieces of bread but which was now empty—all things that the Greek looked at with unconcealed contempt and scorn.
We had been grossly deceived about the distance to Kraków: we would have to go at least seven kilometers. After twenty minutes of walking, my shoes were gone; the sole of one had fallen off, and the other was coming undone. The Greek had until then preserved a meaningful silence. When he saw me put down the bundle, and sit on a stone marker to observe the disaster, he asked me: “How old are you?”
“Twenty-five,” I answered.
“What is your profession?”
“I’m a chemist.”
“Then you’re a fool,” he said calmly. “Anyone who doesn’t have shoes is a fool.”
He was a fine Greek. Few times in my life, before or since, have I felt such concrete wisdom hanging over my head. I could hardly object. The validity of the argument was palpable, obvious: the two formless wrecks on my feet, and the two shining marvels on his. There was no excuse. I was no longer a slave, but, after the first steps on the path of freedom, here I was sitting on a post, with my feet in my hand, clumsy and useless as the broken-down locomotive we had just left. So did I deserve freedom? The Greek seemed dubious.
“. . . But I had scarlet fever, I was in the infirmary: the shoe warehouse was far away, we weren’t allowed to get near it, and then they said it had been ransacked by the Poles. And didn’t I have the right to think that the Russians would provide them?”
“Words,” said the Greek. “Everybody knows how to say words. I had a forty degree fever, and I didn’t know if it was day or night. But one thing I knew, that I needed shoes and other things, so I got up and went to the warehouse to study the situation. And there was a Russian with a machine gun in front of the door; but I wanted shoes, and I walked around it, I broke a window, and I went in. So I had shoes, and also the sack and everything that’s in the sack, which will be useful later. That is foresight; yours is stupidity, it’s not taking account of the reality of things.”
“You’re the one who’s full of words now,” I said. “I may have made a mistake, but now we have to get to Kraków before night, with shoes or without.” And so saying I struggled, with my numb fingers, and with some bits of wire I had found on the road, to at least temporarily tie the soles to the uppers.
“Forget it, you’ll get nowhere like that.” He handed me two pieces of strong cloth he had dug out of his bundle, and showed me how to wrap up shoes and feet, so as to be able to walk as well as possible. Then we continued in silence.
The outskirts of Kraków were anonymous and bleak. The streets were utterly deserted; the shop windows were empty, all the doors and windows were barred or smashed. We reached the end of a tram line. I hesitated, since we had no way to pay for a ride, but the Greek said, “Get on, then we’ll see.” The car was empty; after a quarter of an hour the driver appeared, and not the conductor (from which you see that once again the Greek was right; and, as will be seen, he was right in all the affairs that followed, except one); we left, and during the journey we found with joy that one of the passengers who got on was a French soldier. He explained to us that he was billeted in an ancient convent, which the tram would soon pass; at the next stop, we would find a barrack requisitioned by the Russians and full of Italian soldiers. My heart rejoiced: I had found a home.
In reality everything did not go so smoothly. The Polish sentinel on guard at the barrack first invited us curtly to go away. “Where?” “What do I care? Away from here, anywhere.” After much persistence and prayer, he was finally induced to call an Italian marshal, evidently the one who made decisions on admitting other guests. It wasn’t simple, he explained to us: the barrack was already full
to overflowing, the rations were limited; that I was Italian he could admit, but I wasn’t a soldier; as for my companion, he was Greek, and it was impossible to have him come in among former combatants in Greece and Albania—certainly scuffles and brawls would break out. I responded with my greatest eloquence, and with genuine tears in my eyes: I guaranteed that we would stay only one night (and thought to myself: once inside . . .), and that the Greek spoke Italian well and anyway would scarcely say a word. My arguments were weak and I knew it; but the Greek knew how all the military services of the world function, and while I was talking he was digging in the sack hanging on my shoulders. Suddenly he pushed me aside and silently placed under the nose of the Cerberus a dazzling can of pork, adorned with a multicolored label, and with futile instructions in six languages on the right way to handle the contents. So we won a roof and a bed in Kraków.
It was now night. Contrary to what the marshal wished us to believe, inside the barrack the most sumptuous abundance reigned: there were lighted stoves, candles and carbide lamps, food and drink, and straw to sleep on. The Italians were arranged ten or twelve to a room, but we at Monowitz had been two per cubic meter. They wore good military clothes, padded jackets, many had wristwatches, all had hair shiny with brilliantine; they were noisy, cheerful, and kind, and overwhelmed us with attentions. As for the Greek, he was practically carried triumphantly. A Greek! A Greek is here! The news spread from room to room, and soon a festive crowd had gathered around my stern ally. They spoke Greek, some fluently, these veterans of the most pitiful military occupation that history records: they recalled with vivid sympathy places and events, in tacit, gallant recognition of the desperate valor of the invaded country. But there was something more, which opened the way for them: mine was not an ordinary Greek, he was visibly a master, an authority, a super Greek. In a few minutes of conversation, he had performed a miracle, had created an atmosphere.
He possessed the right equipment: he could speak Italian, and (what was more important, and is lacking in many Italians themselves) he knew what to talk about in Italian. He astonished me: he proved to be an expert in girls and spaghetti, in Juventus and opera, war and gonorrhea, wine and the black market, motorcycles and dodges. Mordo Nahum, with me so laconic, quickly became the center of the evening. I saw that his eloquence, his successful effort at captatio benevolentiae were not motivated only by opportunistic considerations. He, too, had fought in the Greek campaign, with the rank of sergeant: on the other side, of course, but this detail at this moment seemed negligible to everyone. He had been at Tepelenë, as had many Italians, too; he had, like them, suffered cold, hunger, mud, and bombardments; and at the end he, like them, had been captured by the Germans. He was a colleague, a fellow soldier.
He told curious war stories. Once, after the Germans broke through the front, he, along with six of his soldiers, had been ransacking the second floor of a bombed, abandoned villa in search of provisions, and had heard suspicious noises on the floor below; he had cautiously gone down the stairs with the machine gun on his hip, and had run into an Italian sergeant who with six soldiers was doing the same job on the ground floor. The Italian had leveled his gun, in turn, but the Greek had pointed out that in those conditions a gun battle would be especially stupid, that they were both, Greeks and Italians, in the same soup, and that he didn’t see why they couldn’t make a small separate local peace and continue searching in their respective occupied territories—a proposal that the Italian had readily agreed to.
For me, too, it was a revelation. I knew he was nothing but a somewhat shady merchant, expert in scams and without scruples, egotistical and cold, and yet I felt that, encouraged by the sympathy of his listeners, a new warmth flowered in him, an unsuspected humanity, singular but genuine, and rich in promise.
Late at night, from somewhere or other, a flask of wine appeared. It was the final blow: for me everything was celestially shipwrecked in a warm purple haze, and I barely managed to crawl on all fours to the bed of straw that the Italians, with maternal care, had made in a corner for the Greek and me.
Day had barely broken when the Greek woke me. Alas, disappointment! Where had the jovial guest of the night before gone? The Greek who was before me was hard, secretive, taciturn. “Get up,” he said in a tone that admitted no response. “Put on your shoes, get the sack, and let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“To work. To the market. Do you think it’s right to let someone support us?”
To this argument I felt completely resistant. It seemed to me that, apart from being comfortable, it was extremely natural for someone to support me, and also right. I had found the previous night’s explosion of national solidarity—rather, of spontaneous humanity—wonderful, thrilling. Besides, full of self-pity as I was, it seemed to me just, and good, that the world should finally feel compassion for me. In any case, I didn’t have shoes, I was sick, I was cold, I was tired; and finally, in the name of heaven, what in the world could I do at the market?
I set out these considerations, which to me were obvious. But “C’est pas des raisons d’homme,” he answered, in irritation: I had to realize that I had insulted an important moral principle of his, that he was seriously shocked, that on that point he was not disposed to negotiate or discuss. Moral codes, all of them, are rigid by definition: they do not admit nuances, or compromises, or mutual contamination. They are accepted or rejected entire. This is one of the main reasons that man is a herd animal, and more or less consciously seeks proximity not to his neighbor in general but only to one who shares his deep convictions (or his lack of such convictions). I had to realize, with disappointment and amazement, that such precisely was Mordo Nahum: a man of profound convictions, which, moreover, were very far from mine. Now, we all know how difficult it is to have business relations—indeed, to live together—with an ideological opposite.
Fundamental to his ethic was work, which he felt as a sacred duty but which he understood in a very broad sense. Work was that and only that which leads to gain without limiting freedom. The concept of work thus also includes, for example, besides certain legal activities, smuggling, theft, fraud (not robbery: he wasn’t a violent man). On the other hand, he considered reprehensible, because humiliating, all activities that do not involve initiative or risk, or that assume discipline and hierarchy: that is, any employee relationship, any providing of services, which, even if it was well compensated, he considered altogether “servile work.” But it wasn’t servile work to plow one’s own field, or sell fake antiquities to tourists at the port.
As for the loftier activities of the spirit, creative work, I quickly understood that the Greek was divided. These were a matter of delicate judgments, to be made case by case: it was permissible, for example, to pursue success in itself, even by selling fake paintings or bad literature, or anyway by harming one’s neighbor, but it was reprehensible to persist in following an unprofitable ideal, and sinful to withdraw from the world in contemplation. Permissible, however, in fact commendable, was the path of the man who devotes himself to meditation and acquiring wisdom, provided he doesn’t believe that he should receive his bread for nothing from the civilized world: even wisdom is goods, and can and should be exchanged.
Since Mordo Nahum was not a fool, he understood clearly that his principles could not be shared by individuals of different origin and upbringing, and in particular by me; but he was firmly convinced of them, and it was his ambition to translate them into acts, to show me their general validity.
In conclusion, my proposal to sit calmly and wait for bread from the Russians could only appear to him detestable: because it was “bread not earned”; because it involved a relationship of subjugation; and because every kind of order, of structure, was for him suspect, whether it led to a loaf every day or a pay envelope every month.
So I followed the Greek to the market, not so much because I was convinced by his arguments as through inertia and curiosity. The evening before, while I was navigating in a sea
of vinous fogs, he had diligently informed himself of the location, customs, tariffs, demands, and supplies of the free market of Kraków, and duty called him.
We left, he with the sack (which I carried), I in my decrepit shoes, by virtue of which every single step became a problem. The market of Kraków had grown up spontaneously, right after the front passed by, and in a few days had occupied an entire neighborhood. You could buy or sell anything, and the whole city made its way there: bourgeois residents sold furniture, books, paintings, clothes, and silver; peasants padded like mattresses offered meat, chickens, eggs, cheese; children, their noses and cheeks reddened by the frigid wind, sought smokers for the rations of tobacco that the Soviet military administration distributed with peculiar generosity (three hundred grams a month for everyone, even newborns).
I was overjoyed to meet a small group of fellow countrymen: skilled types, three soldiers and a girl, cheerful and openhanded, who in those days were doing excellent business with hot pancakes, made with strange ingredients in a doorway not far away.
After a first general survey, the Greek decided on shirts. Were we partners? Well, he would contribute capital and mercantile experience; I, physical work and my (tenuous) knowledge of German. “Go,” he said, “and take a look at all the stalls where shirts are sold, ask how much they cost, say it’s too much, then come back and report. Don’t attract too much attention.” I prepared unwillingly to carry out this market research: I harbored in myself old hunger and cold, and inertia, and at the same time curiosity, carelessness, and a new, piquant desire to start conversations, to open human relations, to flaunt and waste my boundless freedom. But the Greek, behind the backs of my interlocutors, followed me with a harsh eye: hurry up, damn it, time is money, business is business.