by Primo Levi
I came back from my tour with some prices for reference, which the Greek made a mental note of, and with a certain number of disjointed philological notions: that “shirt” is said something like kosciúla; that Polish numerals resemble Greek ones; that “how much is it” and “what time is it” are said approximately ile kostúie and ktura gogína; a genitive ending in -ego that made clear to me certain Polish curses often heard in the Lager; and other shreds of information that filled me with a silly, childish joy.
The Greek calculated in his head. One shirt could be sold for between fifty and a hundred zloty; an egg cost five or six zloty; with ten zloty, according to the information of the Italians with the pancakes, one could get soup and main course at the soup kitchen for the poor, behind the cathedral. The Greek decided to sell one of the three shirts he had, and to eat at that soup kitchen; the rest he would invest in eggs. Then we would see what to do.
So he handed me the shirt, and told me to display it, and to shout, “Shirt, gentlemen, shirt.” For “shirt” I already had the information; for “gentlemen” I thought the correct form was panowie, a word that I had heard used a few minutes earlier by my competitors, and that I interpreted as the vocative plural of pan, sir. On the latter term, besides, I had no doubts: it appears in an important dialogue in The Brothers Karamazov. It must have been the right word, because several clients spoke to me in Polish, asking me incomprehensible questions about the shirt. I was embarrassed: the Greek intervened authoritatively, pushed me aside, and conducted the negotiations directly; they were long and laborious but ended happily. At the invitation of the buyer, the exchange of property took place not in the public square but in a doorway.
Seventy zloty, equal to seven meals or a dozen eggs. I don’t know about the Greek: I for fourteen months had not had at my disposal such an amount of foodstuffs, all at once. But was it really at my disposal? That seemed dubious: the Greek had pocketed the sum in silence, and with his whole attitude gave me to understand that he intended to administer the proceeds himself.
We made the rounds of the egg sellers’ stalls, where we learned that, for the same price, hard-boiled and raw eggs could be acquired. We bought six, to dine on: the Greek made his purchase with extreme care, choosing the largest after minute comparisons and after many perplexities and second thoughts, utterly indifferent to the critical gaze of the seller.
The soup kitchen was behind the cathedral: it remained to find out which, among the many beautiful churches of Kraków, was the cathedral. Whom to ask, and how? A priest went by: I would ask the priest. Now, that priest, young and with a kind face, understood neither French nor German; as a result, for the first and only time in my post-scholastic career, I got some use out of years of classical studies by initiating in Latin the strangest and most tangled of conversations. From the first request for information (“Pater optime, ubi est mensa pauperorum?”) we talked confusedly about everything, about my being a Jew, about the Lager (“castra”? “Lager” was better, unfortunately understood by anyone), about Italy, about the inadvisability of speaking German in public (which I came to understand later, through direct experience), and about countless other things, to which the unusual guise of the language gave a curious flavor of the pluperfect.
I had completely forgotten hunger and cold, since the need for human contact should truly be numbered among the elemental needs. I had even forgotten the Greek; but he hadn’t forgotten me, and showed up brutally after a few minutes, ruthlessly interrupting the conversation. Not that he was against human contact, and not that he didn’t understand the good of it (he had shown it the night before in the barrack): but these were things outside of working hours, for holidays, accessories, not to be mixed with that serious and strenuous business that is daily work. He responded to my weak protests only with a harsh look. We set off; the Greek was silent for a long time, then, in conclusive judgment of my assistance, he said to me thoughtfully, “Je n’ai pas encore compris si tu es idiot ou fainéant.”
Guided by the priest’s valuable information, we reached the soup kitchen, which was a very depressing place, but warm and full of delicious smells. The Greek ordered two soups and a single portion of beans with lard: it was the punishment for the unsuitable and foolish way I had behaved that morning. He was angry; but once he had swallowed the soup he softened noticeably, so much that he left me a good quarter of his beans. Outside it had begun to snow, and a savage wind was blowing. Maybe it was pity for my striped garments, or indifference toward the rules; for a large part of the afternoon, the kitchen staff left us alone, thinking, and making plans for the future. The Greek’s mood seemed to have changed: maybe the fever had returned, or maybe, after the solid business of the morning, he felt on vacation. He felt, in fact, in a benevolently pedagogical mood. Gradually, as the hours passed, the tone of his conversation imperceptibly warmed, and at the same time the relationship that bound us was changing: from master–slave at noon, to boss–employee at one, to master-disciple at two, to older brother–younger brother at three. The conversation returned to my shoes, which neither of us, for different reasons, could forget. He explained to me that to be without shoes is a very grave offense. In war, there are two things you must think of above all: in the first place shoes, in the second food, and not the other way around, as the populace maintains—because someone who has shoes can go around looking for food, while the opposite is not true. “But the war is over,” I objected; and I thought it was over, like many in those months of truce, in a more universal sense than one dares to think today. “There is always war,” Mordo Nahum answered, memorably.
We all know that no one is born with a set of rules, that each of us constructs his own along the way or, ultimately, on the store of his experiences, or those of others, similar to his; and so the moral universe of each of us, properly interpreted, coincides with the sum of our previous experiences, and thus represents a condensed version of our biography. The biography of my Greek was linear: that of a strong, cold man, solitary and logical, who had moved from childhood within the rigid meshes of a mercantile society. He was (or had been) open also to other aspirations: he wasn’t indifferent to the sky and the sea in his country, the pleasures of home and family, dialectic encounters. But he had been conditioned to push all this to the margins of his day and of his life, so that it did not disturb what he called the travail d’homme. His had been a life of war, and he considered cowardly and blind anyone who rejected that universe of iron. The Lager had come to us both: I had perceived it as a monstrous distortion, an ugly anomaly of my history and the history of the world, he as a sad confirmation of well-known things. “There is always war,” man is a wolf toward man: an old story. Of his two years in Auschwitz he never spoke to me.
He talked to me, instead, eloquently, about his many activities in Salonika, of the batches of goods bought, sold, smuggled by sea, or at night across the Bulgarian border; of the scams shamefully endured and those gloriously perpetrated; and, finally, of the happy, tranquil hours passed on the shore of the gulf, after the day of work, with his merchant colleagues, in certain cafés on stilts that he described with unusual abandon, and of the long conversations that were held there. What conversations? About money, about customs, about freight charges, naturally; but also about other things. What is to be understood by “knowledge,” by “spirit,” by “justice,” by “truth.” What is the nature of the fragile tie that binds the soul to the body, how it is established at birth and released at death. What is freedom, and how to reconcile the conflict between freedom of the spirit and fate. What follows death, too; and other grand Greek things. But all this in the evening, of course, when the trafficking was done, with coffee or wine or olives, a brilliant game of intellect among men active also in idleness: without passion.
Why the Greek told me these things, why he confessed to me, isn’t clear. Maybe, in front of me, who was so different, so foreign, he felt alone, and his conversation was a monologue.
We left the soup kit
chen in the evening, and returned to the Italians’ barrack. After much insistence, we had got permission from the Italian colonel in charge to stay in the barrack one more night, only one. No ration, and we were not to attract any attention—he didn’t want to have trouble with the Russians. The next morning, we would have to leave. For dinner each of us had two of the eggs acquired in the morning, saving the last two for breakfast. After the events of the day, I felt much “younger” compared with the Greek. When it came to the eggs, I asked if he knew how to distinguish between a raw egg and a hard-boiled one from the outside (you spin the egg rapidly, on a table, for example; if it’s hard it spins for a long time, if it’s raw it stops almost immediately): it was a minor skill I was proud of. I hoped that the Greek didn’t know it, and so I would be able to rehabilitate myself in his eyes, if in a small way.
But the Greek looked at me with his cold, wise serpent’s eyes: “What do you take me for? Do you think I was born yesterday? You think that I never dealt in eggs? Come on, tell me some item I’ve never dealt in!”
I had to make my retreat. The episode, in itself negligible, was to return to my mind many months later, in the middle of summer, in the heart of White Russia, on the occasion of my third and last encounter with Mordo Nahum.
We left the following morning, at dawn (this is a tale interwoven with cold dawns), with Katowice as our goal: it had been confirmed that there actually existed various transit centers for scattered Italians, French, Greeks, and so on. Katowice was only about eighty kilometers from Kraków: little more than an hour by train in normal times. But in those days there wasn’t a twenty-kilometer section of track without a transfer, many bridges had been blown up, and because of the terrible state of the line the trains proceeded very slowly during the day and at night didn’t run at all. It was a labyrinthine journey, which lasted three days, with nighttime stops in places ridiculously far from the junction between the two ends: a journey of cold and hunger, which brought us the first day to a place called Trzebinia. Here the train stopped, and I went out onto the platform to stretch my legs, which were stiff with cold. Maybe I was among the first dressed in “zebra stripes” to appear in that place called Trzebinia: I was immediately at the center of a dense circle of the curious who questioned me volubly in Polish. I answered as well as I could in German; and in the middle of the group of workers and peasants a middle-class man came forward, in a felt hat, with eyeglasses and a leather portfolio in his hand—a lawyer.
He was Polish, he spoke French and German well, he was polite and kind; in short, he possessed all the qualities that enabled me finally, after the long year of slavery and silence, to recognize in him the messenger, the spokesman from the civilized world—the first I had met.
I had an avalanche of urgent things to tell the civilized world, my own but belonging to everyone, things of blood, things that, it seemed to me, would shake every conscience to its foundations. The lawyer really was polite and kind: he questioned me, and I spoke dizzily of my so recent experiences, of Auschwitz, nearby and yet, it seemed, unknown to all, of the massacre I alone had escaped, everything. The lawyer translated into Polish for the public. Now, I did not know Polish, but I knew how to say “Jew,” and how to say “political”; and I quickly realized that the translation of my account, although heartfelt, was not faithful. The lawyer described me to the audience not as an Italian Jew but as an Italian political prisoner.
I asked for an explanation, surprised and almost offended. He answered, embarrassed, “C’est mieux pour vous. La guerre n’est pas finie.” The words of the Greek.
I felt the warm wave of feeling free, of feeling myself a man among men, of feeling alive, recede into the distance. I was suddenly old, wan, tired beyond any human measure: the war isn’t over, war is forever. My listeners trickled away; they must have understood. I had dreamed something like that, we all had, in the Auschwitz night: to speak and not be listened to, to find freedom again and remain alone. Soon, I remained alone with the lawyer; after a few minutes, he, too, left me, apologizing urbanely. He urged me, as the priest had, to avoid speaking German. When I asked why, he answered vaguely, “Poland is a sad country.” He wished me good luck and offered me some money, which I refused; he seemed to me moved.
The locomotive whistled its departure. I got back in the freight car, where the Greek was waiting for me, but I didn’t tell him what had happened.
It wasn’t the only stop: others followed, and at one of these, at night, we realized that Szczakowa, the place where there was hot soup for everyone, was not far. It was in fact north, and we were supposed to go west, but since at Szczakowa there was hot soup for all, and we had no plan other than to satisfy our hunger, why not head to Szczakowa? So we got out, waited for the right train, and showed up many more times at the Red Cross counter; I believe that the Polish nurses recognized me easily, and remember me still.
As night fell, we settled ourselves to sleep on the floor, right in the middle of the waiting room, since all the places along the sides were occupied. Perhaps made compassionate or curious by my outfit, a few hours later a Polish gendarme arrived, whiskered, ruddy, and corpulent. He questioned me in vain in his language; I answered with the first sentence one learns in any unknown language, and that is Nie rozumiem po polsku, I don’t understand Polish. I added, in German, that I was Italian, and that I spoke a little German. At which, a miracle! the gendarme began to speak Italian.
He spoke a terrible Italian, guttural and aspirated, studded with new, invented curses. He had learned it, and this explains everything, in a valley near Bergamo, where he had worked some years as a miner. He, too, and he was the third, urged me not to speak German. I asked why: he answered with an eloquent gesture, passing his index and middle fingers, like a knife, between chin and larynx, and adding cheerfully, “Tonight all Germans kaput.”
Certainly it was an exaggeration, and yet an opinion-hope. But in fact the next day we met a long train of freight cars, closed from the outside; it was headed east, and through the peepholes many human faces could be seen, in search of air. That sight, strongly evocative, roused in me a knot of confused and opposing feelings, which even today I would have a hard time sorting out.
The gendarme, very kindly, proposed to the Greek and me that we spend the rest of the night in the warmth of the guardroom; we accepted willingly, and in the unusual environment did not wake until late in the morning, after a restorative sleep.
We left Szczakowa the next day, for the last stop on the journey. We reached Katowice without incident; there really did exist a transit camp for Italians, and one for Greeks. We separated without many words; but at the moment of farewell, in a fleeting yet distinct way, I felt a solitary wave of friendship move in me toward him, veined with faint gratitude, contempt, respect, animosity, curiosity, and regret that I wouldn’t see him again.
I did see him again, in fact: twice. I saw him in May, in the glorious and turbulent days of the end of the war, when all the Greeks in Katowice, a hundred, men and women, filed past our camp singing, headed to the station: they were leaving for their country, for home. At the head of the column was he, Mordo Nahum, lord among the Greeks, and he was holding the white-and-blue banner: but he put it down when he saw me, left the crowd to greet me (a little ironically, since he was leaving and I was staying: but it was right, he explained, because Greece belonged to the United Nations), and with an unusual gesture he extracted from his famous sack a gift: a pair of pants, of the type used in Auschwitz in the last months, and that is with a large “window” on the left hip, held together by a piece of striped fabric. Then he disappeared.
But he was to reappear one more time, many months later, against the most unlikely background and in the most unexpected incarnation.
Katowice
The transit camp of Katowice, which welcomed me, hungry and tired, after the week of wandering with the Greek, was situated on a small rise, in an outlying neighborhood called Bogucice. In its time, it had been a tiny German L
ager, and had housed the miner slaves employed in a coal mine that opened in the vicinity. It was made up of a dozen small brick single-story barracks; the double fence of barbed wire was still in place, though by now purely symbolic. The gate was guarded by a Soviet soldier, with a sleepy, lazy air. On the other side of the camp there was a big hole in the fence, through which one could go out without even ducking; the Russian command didn’t seem to be worried about it in the least. The kitchens, the dining room, the infirmary, the washhouses were outside the fence, so the gate was the site of continuous traffic.
The sentinel was a gigantic Mongol of around fifty, armed with machine gun and bayonet; he had enormous gnarled hands, a drooping gray mustache like Stalin’s, and eyes of fire, but his fierce, barbaric appearance was utterly incongruous with his innocuous duties. He had no replacement, and so he was dying of boredom. His behavior toward those who entered and exited was unpredictable: at times he demanded one’s propusk—that is to say, a pass—at other times he asked only one’s name and, at still others, a little tobacco, or even nothing. On some days, however, he rejected everyone ferociously, but he made no objection if he then saw someone going out through the hole at the back, which was certainly visible. When it was cold, he tranquilly left his guard post, went into one of the rooms where he could see a smoking stove, threw his machine gun down on a cot, lit his pipe, and offered vodka if he had some, or if he didn’t asked around for it, and cursed disconsolately if he didn’t get any. Sometimes he even handed the machine gun to the first of us who happened by, making it clear by means of gestures and shouts that he was to replace him at the guard post; then he napped near the stove.