by Primo Levi
When I arrived with Mordo Nahum, the camp was occupied by an extremely mixed population, of about four hundred people. There were French, Italians, Dutch, Greeks, Czechs, Hungarians, and others; some had been civilian workers in the Todt Organization,1 others interned soldiers, still others former Häftlinge. There were also about a hundred women.
In fact, the organization of the camp was entrusted largely to individual or group initiatives, but nominally it was subject to a Soviet Kommandantur, which was the most picturesque example of a Gypsy band one can imagine. There was a captain, Ivan Antonovich Egorov, a little man no longer young, with a rough and aloof manner; three “old lieutenants”; an athletic and jovial sergeant; a dozen members of the Territorial Army2 (among whom was the sentinel described above); a quartermaster; a doktorka;3 a doctor, Pyotr Grigorievich Dancenko, who was very young, a great drinker, smoker, and lover, and indifferent to the job; a nurse, Marya Fyodorovna Prima, who quickly became my friend; and an undefined group of girls, as solid as oaks. It was hard to tell if these girls were military or militarized or auxiliaries or civilians or looking for something to do. Their duties were various and vague: as laundresses, cooks, typists, secretaries, waiters, current lovers of this one or that, occasional fiancées, wives, daughters.
The entire caravan lived in harmony, without a schedule or rules, near the camp, housed in the rooms of an abandoned elementary school. The only one who paid attention to us was the quartermaster, who seemed to be the highest in authority, if not in rank, of the entire command. On the other hand, the hierarchical relations were all indecipherable: the Russians talked to one another for the most part with friendly simplicity, like a large temporary family, without military-style formalities; sometimes furious quarrels and fistfights broke out, even between officers and soldiers, but they ended rapidly without disciplinary consequences and without rancor, as if nothing had happened.
The war was about to end, the long, long war that had devastated their country; for them it was already over. It was the great truce, for the hard time that was to follow hadn’t yet begun, nor had the cursed name of the cold war been uttered. They were cheerful, sad, and tired, and were satisfied with food and wine, like the companions of Ulysses after beaching their ships. And yet, under the careless and anarchic appearance, it was easy to discern in them, in each of those coarse, open faces—in the good soldiers of the Red Army, the capable men of Russia old and new, gentle in peace and fierce in war, strong with an inner discipline born of goodwill, mutual love, and love of country—a discipline that was stronger, precisely because it was internal, than the mechanical and servile discipline of the Germans. It was easy to understand, living among them, why the former, and not the latter, had ultimately prevailed.
One of the barracks in the camp was inhabited exclusively by Italians, almost all of them civilian workers, who had moved to Germany more or less voluntarily. They were masons and miners, no longer young, calm, sober, hardworking people, and kindhearted.
The Italian in charge, to whom I was directed to be “registered,” was, however, very different. The accountant Rovi had not been elected by the others or invested by the Russians but had appointed himself camp chief; in fact, although he was an individual of rather meager intellectual and moral qualities, he possessed to a conspicuous degree the virtue that, under every sky, is most essential for gaining power, and that is love of power itself.
Witnessing the behavior of a man who acts not according to reason but according to his own deep impulses is a spectacle of great interest, similar to that enjoyed by the naturalist who studies the activities of an animal with complex instincts. Rovi had won his post by acting with the same atavistic spontaneity with which the spider constructs its web, since, like the spider without a web, Rovi couldn’t survive without a position. He had immediately begun to weave; he was basically a fool, and didn’t know a word of German or Russian, but from the first day he secured the services of an interpreter and presented himself ceremoniously to the Soviet command as a plenipotentiary for the interests of the Italians. He had organized a desk, with forms (written by hand, in beautiful writing with flourishes), stamps, pencils of various colors, and a ledger; although he wasn’t a colonel, or in fact even a soldier, he had hung outside the door a large sign that read “Italian Command—Colonel Rovi”; and he had surrounded himself with a small court of dishwashers, scribes, sacristans, spies, messengers, and bullies, whom he remunerated in kind, with provisions purloined from the rations for the community, and exempted from any work for the common good. His courtiers, who, as always happens, were much worse than him, ensured (even by force, though it was seldom necessary) that his orders were carried out, served him, gathered information for him, and flattered him intensely.
With surprising foresight, which is to say by means of a highly complex and mysterious mental process, he had understood the importance, indeed the necessity, of possessing a uniform, since he had to deal with people in uniform. He had got one that was quite imaginative, in fact theatrical, with a pair of Soviet boots, a Polish railway worker’s cap, and jacket and pants found I don’t know where, which seemed to be made of thick wool and perhaps they were. He had insignia sewn on the lapels, gold threads on the cap, stripes and chevrons on the sleeves, and a chest full of medals.
On the other hand, he wasn’t a tyrant, or a bad administrator. He had the good sense to keep oppression, extortion, and abuse within modest limits, and possessed an undeniable vocation for paperwork. Now, since those Russians were curiously sensitive to the fascination of paperwork (even if its possible rational significance escaped them), and seemed to love bureaucracy with the platonic and spiritual love that does not achieve possession and doesn’t desire it, Rovi was benevolently tolerated, if not exactly admired, in the environs of the Kommandantur. Further, he was bound to Captain Egorov by a paradoxical, improbable bond of sympathy between misanthropes: for both were sad, dutiful, disgusted, dyspeptic individuals, and in the general euphoria sought isolation.
In the Bogucice camp, I found Leonardo, who was already valued as a doctor, and was besieged by an unremunerative but numerous clientele; he came, like me, from Buna, and had arrived in Katowice several weeks earlier, following less tortuous paths. Among the Häftlinge in Buna there was an excess of doctors, and very few (in practice, only those who had mastered German, or were very skilled in the art of survival) had managed to be recognized as such by the medical chief of the SS. So Leonardo had not enjoyed any privilege; he had been subjected to the most severe manual labor and had lived his year in the Lager in an extremely precarious way. He didn’t tolerate hard work and cold well, and had been admitted to the infirmary many times, for swellings on his feet, infected wounds, and general debility. Three times, in three selections in the infirmary, he had been chosen to die in the gas chambers, and three times the solidarity of his colleagues in charge had riskily saved him from his fate. Besides luck, however, he possessed another virtue essential in those places: an unlimited capacity to endure, a silent courage, not innate, not religious, not transcendent, but deliberate and willed hour by hour, a manly patience, which sustained him miraculously at the edge of collapse.
The Bogucice infirmary was set up in the same school that housed the Russian Command, in two small, fairly clean rooms. It had been created out of nothing by Marya Fyodorovna. Marya was a military nurse around forty, like a forest cat, with oblique, wild eyes, a short nose with flared nostrils, and agile, silent movements. In fact, she came from the forest: she was born in the heart of Siberia.
Marya was an energetic, gruff, disorderly, and impatient woman. She obtained medicines partly by normal administrative means, collecting them from the Soviet military stores, partly through the multiple channels of the black market, and partly (and it was the largest part) by actively cooperating in ransacking the warehouses of the former German Lagers and abandoned German infirmaries and pharmacies, whose stock, in turn, was the result of previous looting carried out by the Germans i
n all the nations of Europe. Thus every day the infirmary of Bogucice received supplies without plan or method: hundreds of boxes of specialized pharmaceutical products, bearing labels and instructions for use in all the languages, which had to be sorted and catalogued for possible use.
Among the things I had learned in Auschwitz, one of the most important was that it is essential to avoid being “ordinary.” All paths are closed to those who seem useless, all are open to one who performs a function, even the most inane. So, after consulting with Leonardo, I introduced myself to Marya, and offered my services as a polyglot pharmacist.
Marya Fyodorovna examined me with an eye expert in weighing males. Was I doktor? Yes, I was, I maintained, aided in the misunderstanding by the strong linguistic overlap. The Siberian did not in fact speak German, but (although she wasn’t Jewish) she knew a little Yiddish, learned who knows where. I didn’t have a very professional or attractive appearance, but maybe I would do in the back room. Marya drew from her pocket a creased and crumpled piece of paper, and asked me my name.
When to “Levi” I added “Primo,” her green eyes lit up, suspicious at first, then questioning, finally benevolent. Then we’re practically relatives, she explained: I was Primo and she Prima—Prima was her surname, her família, Marya Fyodorovna Prima. Very good, I could start work. Shoes and clothes? Well, it wasn’t a simple matter, she would talk to Egorov and certain of her acquaintances, maybe later something could be found. She scribbled my name on the piece of paper, and the next day solemnly handed me my propusk, a permit with a rather homemade look, which authorized me to enter and leave the camp at any hour of the day or night.
I lived in a room with eight Italian laborers, and every morning I went to work in the infirmary. Marya Fyodorovna handed me hundreds of multicolored little boxes to sort, and gave me small friendly presents: packets of glucose (very welcome); licorice and mint lozenges; shoelaces; sometimes a packet of salt or pudding mix. One evening, she invited me to have tea in her room, and I noticed that on the wall over her bed hung seven or eight photographs of men in uniform, most of them portraits of known faces, that is, of soldiers and officers of the Kommandantur. Marya called them all familiarly by name, and spoke of them with affectionate simplicity; she had known them for many years now, and they had all been through the war together.
After a few days, since my job as pharmacist left me plenty of free time, Leonardo called on me to help in the clinic. The Russians intended it to serve only the inhabitants of the Bogucice camp; in reality, since the treatment was free and there was nothing formal about it, Russian soldiers, civilians from Katowice, people passing through, beggars, and dubious types who wanted nothing to do with the authorities also showed up to ask for an examination or for medicines.
Neither Marya nor Dr. Dancenko found anything to object to in this state of affairs. (Dancenko never found anything to object to in anything; he didn’t care about anything except courting the girls, with gallant charm, like a grand duke in an operetta, and early in the morning, when he arrived for a rapid inspection, he was already drunk and happy.) A few weeks later, however, Marya summoned me, and with a very officious expression informed me that, “by orders from Moscow,” the activity of the clinic had to be checked scrupulously. Thus I was to keep a record, and note down every evening the name and age of the patients, their illness, and the type and quantity of medicines administered or prescribed.
In itself, the thing didn’t seem unreasonable, but certain practical details had to be decided, which I discussed with Marya. For example, how would we verify the identity of the patients? Marya considered that objection negligible: if I wrote down the stated personal information, “Moscow” would certainly be satisfied. A more serious difficulty emerged, however: in what language should the record be kept? Not in Italian or French or German, which neither Marya nor Dancenko knew. In Russian, then? No, I didn’t know Russian. Marya thought about it, perplexed, then she brightened and exclaimed, “Galina!” Galina would resolve the situation.
Galina was one of the girls attached to the Kommandantur; she knew German, so I would be able to dictate the reports to her in German and she would translate them into Russian on the spot. Marya immediately sent for Galina (Marya’s authority, although of an ill-defined nature, appeared to be great), and so began our collaboration.
Galina was eighteen, and was from Kazatin, in Ukraine. She was dark-haired, pretty, and vivacious; she had an intelligent face with sensitive, delicate features, and among all her companions she was the only one who dressed with a certain elegance, and whose shoulders, hands, and feet were of acceptable dimensions. She spoke German reasonably well; with her help the famous reports were laboriously compiled evening after evening, with a stub of a pencil, in a file of grayish paper that Marya had given me, like a holy relic. How do you say “asthma” in German? and “ankle”? and “sprain”? and what are the corresponding Russian terms? At every lexical obstacle we were forced to stop, overcome by doubt, and resort to complicated gestures, ending in squeals of laughter on the part of Galina.
Much more rarely on my part. In front of Galina I felt weak, ill, and dirty; I was painfully conscious of my wretched appearance, of my crudely shaved beard, of my clothes from Auschwitz; I was acutely aware of Galina’s gaze, which was still almost childlike, and in which a tentative pity was accompanied by a definite repulsion.
Still, after several weeks of working together, we had established an atmosphere of tenuous mutual confidence. Galina gave me to understand that the business of the reports was not so serious after all, that Marya Fyodorovna was “old and crazy,” and we had only to give the pages back to her covered with writing; and that Dr. Dancenko was busy with completely other business (known to Galina in an astonishing abundance of detail), with Anna, with Tanja, with Vassilissa, and the reports interested him “like last year’s snow.” So the time devoted to the grim bureaucratic gods diminished, and Galina took advantage of the pauses to tell me her story, in bits and pieces, as she smoked.
Two years earlier, in the middle of the war, in the Caucasus, where she had taken refuge with her family, she had been recruited by this very Kommandantur: recruited in the simplest way, that is to say stopped in the street and taken to the Command to type some letters. There she had gone and there remained; she hadn’t managed to break away (or, more likely, I thought, she hadn’t even tried). The Kommandantur had become her real family; she had followed it for tens of thousands of kilometers, through the devastated areas behind the lines and along the endless front, from the Crimea to Finland. She didn’t have a uniform, or even a status or a rank: but she was useful to her fighting companions, she was their friend, and so she followed them, because there was the war, and each one had to do his duty; and then the world was big and varied, and it’s wonderful to travel through it when you’re young and without a care.
Galina had no cares, not even the shadow of one. You would meet her in the morning going to the washhouse, with a sack of laundry balanced on her head, and singing like a lark; or in the offices of the Command, barefoot, pounding on the typewriter; or on Sunday walking on the ramparts, arm in arm with a soldier, never the same one; or at night on the balcony, romantically rapt, while a shabby Belgian suitor serenaded her on a guitar. She was a sharp, ingenuous country girl, a bit flirtatious, very lively, not especially well educated, not especially serious; and yet you felt the same virtue operating in her, the same dignity, as in her companion-boyfriends, the dignity of someone who works and knows why, who fights and knows he is right, who has his life before him.
In the middle of May, a few days after the end of the war, she came to say goodbye to me. She was leaving; they had told her she could go home. Did she have a travel order? Did she have money for the train? “No,” she answered laughing, “nye nada, there’s no need, these things always arrange themselves.” And she disappeared, sucked up by the emptiness of the Russian space, into the pathways of her boundless country, leaving behind a bitter scent of
earth, of youth, of joy.
I also had other duties: to help Leonardo in the clinic, naturally; and to help him in the daily inspection for lice.
This last job was necessary in those places and those times, when epidemic typhus spread, fatally. The job was not very pleasant: we had to go through all the barracks, and ask each person to strip to the waist and show us his shirt, in whose folds and seams the lice customarily nested, and suspended their eggs. This type of lice have a red spot on their back: according to a joke that was tirelessly repeated by our clients, that spot, observed under strong enough magnification, would reveal itself to be formed by a tiny hammer and sickle. They are also called “the infantry,” whereas fleas are the artillery, mosquitoes the air force, bedbugs the parachutists, and cockroaches the sappers. In Russian they’re called vshi; I learned that from Marya, who had given me a second file, in which I was to mark the number and name of those who had lice that day, and underline recidivists in red.
Recidivists were rare, with the single notable exception of the Ferrari. The Ferrari, to whose name the article was added because he was Milanese, was a marvel of inertia. He was part of a small group of common criminals, formerly detained in the San Vittore Prison, who in 1944 had been offered the choice between prison in Italy and work in Germany, and who had chosen the latter. There were about forty, almost all thieves or fences; they were a colorful, rowdy, self-contained microcosm, a perpetual source of trouble for the Russian Command and for accountant Rovi.