The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  But the Ferrari was treated by his colleagues with open contempt, and was thus relegated to an enforced solitude. He was a short man of around forty, thin and yellow, almost bald, with an absent expression. He spent his days lying on his cot, and was an indefatigable reader. He read whatever came to hand: Italian, French, German, Polish newspapers and books. Every two or three days, during the examination, he said to me, “I finished that book. Do you have another to lend me? But not in Russian, you know I don’t understand Russian well.” He wasn’t a polyglot; in fact, he was practically illiterate. But he “read” every book just the same, from the first line to the last, identifying with satisfaction the individual letters, pronouncing them in a whisper, and laboriously reconstructing words, whose meaning he didn’t care about. To him it was enough: the way, at different levels, others find pleasure in doing crossword puzzles, or solving differential equations, or calculating the orbits of asteroids.

  So he was a singular individual, and his story confirmed it. He willingly told it to me, and I repeat it here.

  “For many years I went to the school for thieves in Loreto. There was a mannequin with bells and a wallet in his pocket. You had to get the wallet out without the bells ringing, and I never succeeded. So I was never authorized to steal; they had me act as a lookout. I was a lookout for two years. You don’t earn much and you’re at risk. It’s not a nice job.

  “I racked my brains, and one fine day I thought that, license or not, if I wanted to earn my bread I had to set off on my own.

  “There was the war, the evacuation, the black market, a crowd of people on the trams. It was on the 2, at Porta Lodovica, because around there no one knew me. Near me there was a lady with a big purse; in her coat pocket, you could feel by touch, was the wallet. I got out the saccagno, very slowly . . .”

  I must here insert a brief technical aside. The saccagno, the Ferrari explained to me, is a precision tool that you get by breaking in two the blade of an ordinary razor, freehand. It’s used to cut purses and pockets, so it has to be very sharp. It’s also used occasionally, in matters of honor, to disfigure; and that’s why people with scarred faces are called saccagnati.

  “. . . slowly, and I started to cut the pocket. I had almost finished when a woman, not the one with the pocket, but another one, started shouting, ‘Stop thief, stop thief.’ I wasn’t doing anything to her, she didn’t know me, and she didn’t know the one with the pocket. She wasn’t even from the police, she was someone who had nothing to do with it. The fact is, the tram stopped, they caught me, I ended up in San Vittore, from there to Germany, and from Germany here. You see? That’s what can happen if you take the initiative.”

  From then on, the Ferrari had taken no initiative. He was the most submissive and most docile of my clients: he immediately stripped without protesting, he presented his shirt with the inevitable lice, and the morning after submitted to the disinfection without acting like an offended prince. But the next day the lice, who knows how, were there again. He was like that: he took no initiatives, he put up no resistance, not even to lice.

  • • •

  My professional activity brought at least two advantages: the propusk and better food.

  The kitchen of the camp at Bogucice was, to tell the truth, quite generous; we were assigned the Russian military ration, which consisted of a kilo of bread, two soups every day, one kasha (that is, a plate with meat, lard, millet, or other vegetables), and Russian-style tea, diluted, abundant, and sugary. But Leonardo and I had to make up for the damage caused by a year in the Lager: we were still racked by an uncontrollable hunger, largely psychological, and the ration wasn’t enough for us.

  Marya had authorized us to have our midday meal in the infirmary. The infirmary kitchen was managed by two Parisian maquisardes, working-class women, no longer young, who were also veterans of the Lager, where they had lost their husbands; they were silent and sorrowful, and on their prematurely aged faces sufferings both long-past and recent were as if dominated and contained by the energetic moral conscience of political fighters.

  One, Simone, worked in our dining hall. She ladled the soup once, and a second time. Then she looked at me, almost with apprehension. “Vous répétez, jeune homme?” I timidly nodded yes, ashamed of that animal voracity. Under Simone’s severe gaze, I rarely dared to répéter a fourth time.

  As for the propusk, it constituted more a sign of social distinction than a specific advantage. In fact, anyone could easily go out through the hole in the fence, and go into the city as free as a bird in the air. And, for example, many of the thieves did, to go and practice their art in Katowice or even farther away; they didn’t return, or came back to the camp after several days, often giving different personal information, amid the general disinterest.

  However, the propusk allowed one to go to Katowice without having to make the long journey through the mud that surrounded the camp. With the return of health and good weather, I, too, felt with increasing intensity the temptation to go on a cruise through the unknown city: what was the use of being free if we still spent our days within a frame of barbed wire? Besides, the population of Katowice regarded us with sympathy, and had allowed us free passes on the trams and to the cinemas.

  I talked about it one night with Cesare, and we decided on a general program for the next days, during which we would combine the useful with the pleasant, that is to say, business with vagabonding.

  1. The Todt was created in Germany in 1940 for the recruitment of foreign workers.

  2. An army made up of ex-soldiers who in wartime were enlisted for auxiliary services behind the lines and inside the country.

  3. A woman doctor.

  Cesare

  I had met Cesare in the last days of the Lager, but it was a different Cesare. In the Buna camp abandoned by the Germans, the ward for infectious diseases, in which the two Frenchmen and I managed to survive and to establish a semblance of civilization, represented an island of relative well-being; in the neighboring ward, for patients with dysentery, death prevailed uncontested.

  Through the wooden wall, a few centimeters from my head, I heard Italian spoken. One evening, mobilizing the little energy I had left, I decided to go and see who was living back there. I walked down the dark, frigid corridor, opened the door, and was plunged into a realm of horror.

  There were a hundred bunks: half were occupied by corpses that had frozen in the cold. Only two or three candles broke the darkness; the walls and ceiling were lost in shadow, so that you seemed to be entering an enormous cave. There was no heat, except for the infected breath of the fifty patients who were still alive. In spite of the cold, the stench of feces and death was so intense that it took your breath away and you had to do violence to your own lungs to force them to take in that polluted air.

  Yet fifty were still alive. They were huddled under the covers; some groaned or cried, others struggled out of their bunks to evacuate on the floor. They called out names, prayed, cursed, begged for help in all the languages of Europe.

  I groped my way along one of the aisles between the bunks, stumbling and staggering in the dark on the layer of frozen excrement. At the sound of my footsteps, the cries redoubled: clawlike hands emerged from under the covers, held me by my clothes, coldly touched my face, tried to bar my path. Finally I reached the dividing wall, at the end of the aisle, and found the men I was looking for. They were two Italians in a single bunk, entangled with each other to protect themselves from the cold: Cesare and Marcello.

  I knew Marcello well: he came from Cannaregio, the ancient ghetto of Venice; he had been at Fòssoli with me, and had crossed the Brenner in the freight car next to mine. He was healthy and strong, and until the last weeks of the Lager he had held on, valiantly enduring hunger and toil; but the winter cold had subdued him. He no longer spoke, and, in the light of the match I lit, I had trouble recognizing him: a yellow face, all nose and teeth, a black beard; his eyes shining and dilated by delirium, staring into space. For him there
was little to be done.

  Cesare, on the other hand, I scarcely knew, since he had come to Buna from Birkenau a few months earlier. He asked for water, before food: water, because he had had nothing to drink for four days, and the fever was burning him and the dysentery emptied him. I brought it to him, along with the remains of our soup; and I didn’t know that I was thus bringing the basis of a long and singular friendship.

  His capacity for recovery must have been extraordinary, because I found him in the camp of Bogucice, two months later, not only recovered but practically glowing with health, and lively as a cricket; and yet he was the veteran of a further adventure that had put to an extreme test the natural qualities of his character, strengthened in the hard school of the Lager.

  After the arrival of the Russians, he, too, had been admitted into Auschwitz among the sick, and since his illness wasn’t serious, and his constitution strong, he was soon cured—in fact, a little too soon. Around the middle of March, the German armies in retreat had been concentrated around Breslau, and had tried a last desperate counteroffensive in the direction of the Silesian mineral basin. The Russians were taken by surprise: perhaps overestimating the adversary’s initiative, they had rushed to prepare a defensive line. A long anti-tank trench was required, which would block the valley of the Oder between Oppeln and Gleiwitz: hands were scarce, the job colossal, the need urgent, and the Russians acted as they usually did, in an extremely brusque and hasty manner.

  One morning around nine, Russian soldiers had suddenly blocked some of the main streets in Katowice. In Katowice, and throughout Poland, there was a shortage of men: the male population of working age had disappeared, imprisoned in Germany and Russia, scattered in partisan bands, slaughtered in battle, in bombings, in reprisals, in the Lagers, in the ghettos. Poland was a country in mourning, a country of old men and widows. At nine in the morning there were only women in the street: housewives with their bags or carts, in search of food and coal in the shops and the markets. The Russians had lined them up four abreast with their bags and everything, led them to the station, and sent them to Gleiwitz.

  At the same time—that is, five or six days before I arrived with the Greek—they had surrounded the camp in Bogucice, yelling like cannibals, and shooting into the air to intimidate anyone who tried to escape. They had silenced without ceremony their peaceful colleagues in the Kommandantur, who had timidly tried to intervene, had entered the camp with their machine guns leveled, and forced everyone out of the barracks.

  In the central area of the camp a sort of caricatural version of the German selections had taken place. A far less bloody version, since it meant going to work, not to death; on the other hand, improvised and much more chaotic.

  While some of the soldiers went through the barracks to flush out the recalcitrant, and then pursued them in a mad race, like a great game of hide-and-seek, others stood at the threshold and examined one by one the men and women who were gradually presented to them by the hunters, or who presented themselves of their own accord. The judgment bolnoy or zdorovy (sick or healthy) was pronounced collegially, by acclamation, not without noisy disputes in controversial cases. The bolnoy were sent back to the barracks, the zdorovy lined up in front of the fence.

  Cesare had been among the first to grasp the situation (“to catch the drift,” as he said), and, acting with admirable astuteness, had just missed getting away: he had hidden in the woodshed, a place no one had thought of, and stayed there until the hunt was over, quiet and still under the logs, pulling down a pile on top of himself. And then some idiot, in search of a hiding place, had plunged in, along with the Russian who was pursuing him. Cesare had been fished out and declared healthy, purely out of reprisal, because he had emerged from the woodpile looking like Christ on the Cross, or, rather, a half-witted cripple, who would have moved a stone to pity: he was trembling, foaming at the mouth, and walking all lopsided, dragging one leg, his eyes crossed and wild. They had added him just the same to the line of the healthy; after a few seconds, with a sudden inversion of tactics, he had tried to take to his heels and return to the camp through the hole in the fence. But he had been caught, had got a slap and a kick in the shins, and had resigned himself to defeat.

  The Russians had sent them to Gleiwitz on foot, more than thirty kilometers; there they had settled them as well as possible in stalls and haylofts, and had forced them to live a dog’s life. Little to eat, and sixteen hours a day of pick and shovel, rain or shine, a Russian always standing there with his machine gun pointed: the men in the trench, and the women (those from the camp and the Polish women found in the streets) peeling potatoes, cooking, and cleaning.

  It was hard; but in Cesare the humiliation burned more than the work and the hunger. To get caught like that, like a kid, he who had had a stall at Porta Portese! All Trastevere would have laughed at him. He had to rehabilitate himself.

  He worked for three days: on the fourth, he traded his bread for two cigars. One he ate; the other he soaked in water and kept in his armpit all night. The next day he was ready to report sick: he had everything necessary, a very high fever, horrendous stomach pains, vertigo, vomiting. They put him to bed, he stayed there until the poison had cleared out, then at night he slipped away easily, and returned to Bogucice in stages, with a tranquil conscience. I found a way of settling him in my room, and we were not separated again until the journey home.

  • • •

  “Here we go again,” Cesare said, putting on his trousers, his face grim, when, a few days after his return, the nighttime quiet of the camp was dramatically shattered. It was pandemonium, an explosion. Russian soldiers were running up and down the halls, banging on the doors of the rooms with the butt of their machine guns, shouting agitated and incomprehensible orders; soon afterward the general staff arrived, Marya with her hair in tangled locks, Egorov and Dancenko half dressed, followed by accountant Rovi, dazed and sleepy but in full uniform. We were to get up and get dressed immediately. Why? Had the Germans returned? Were they moving us? No one knew anything.

  We finally managed to capture Marya. No, the Germans hadn’t broken through the front, but the situation was equally serious. Inspektsiya: that very morning a general was arriving, from Moscow, to inspect the camp. The entire Kommandantur was in the grip of panic and desperation, as if the day of reckoning had arrived.

  Rovi’s interpreter galloped from room to room, shouting orders and counterorders. Brooms, rags, buckets appeared; everyone was mobilized, wash the windows, remove trash piles, sweep the floors, polish the knobs, clear out the spiderwebs. Everyone set to work, yawning and cursing. Two, three, four o’clock passed.

  Around dawn, we began to hear talk of ubornaya: the camp latrine in fact presented a nasty problem.

  It was a brick building, situated right in the middle of the camp, and conspicuous, impossible to hide or to disguise. For months no one had seen to cleaning or maintaining it: inside, the floor was submerged by an inch of stagnant filth, so that we had set down on it large stones and bricks, and to enter you had to jump from one to the next in precarious balance. From the doors and cracks in the walls the sewage overflowed outside, crossed the camp in the form of a fetid rivulet, and disappeared downhill amid the fields.

  Captain Egorov, who was sweating blood and had completely lost his head, chose a crew of ten men and sent them into the place with brooms and buckets of chlorine, with the job of cleaning up. But it was clear to a child that ten men, even if provided with proper equipment, and not just brooms, would need at least a week; and as for the chlorine, all the perfumes of Arabia would not have been enough to decontaminate the place.

  A clash between two necessities frequently produces foolish decisions, where it would be wiser to let the dilemma resolve itself on its own. An hour later (and the entire camp was buzzing like a disturbed beehive), the crew was called back, and all twelve of the Territorials from the Command arrived, with wood, nails, hammers, and rolls of barbed wire. In the blink of an eye all the doo
rs and windows of the scandalous latrine were closed up, barred, sealed with boards of fir three inches thick, and all the walls, up to the roof, were covered by an inextricable knot of barbed wire. Decency was safe: the most diligent of inspectors would not have been physically able to set foot there.

  Noon came, evening came, and of the general no trace. The next morning it was talked about a little less; the third day no one talked about it at all, the Russians of the Kommandantur returned to their habitual and benevolent carelessness and neglect, two boards were taken down from the back door of the latrine, and everything returned to order.

  An inspector did come, however, some weeks later; he came to check the functioning of the camp and, more precisely, the kitchens, and he wasn’t a general but a captain who wore an armband bearing the initials of the NKVD, with its slightly sinister reputation. He came, and he must have found his duties particularly pleasant, or the girls of the Kommandantur, or the air of Upper Silesia, or the neighborhood of the Italian cooks: because he didn’t leave, and stayed to inspect the kitchen every day until June, when we left, without evidently practicing any other useful activity.

  The kitchen, managed by a barbaric cook from Bergamo and an indefinite number of fat, shiny volunteer assistants, was situated just inside the enclosure, and consisted of a shed filled almost entirely by the two large cooking pots, which rested on a concrete stove. You entered by going up two steps, and there was no door.

  The inspector did his first inspection with great dignity and seriousness, taking notes in a notebook. He was a very tall and lanky Jew of around thirty, with a handsome, ascetic face, like Don Quixote. But on the second day he unearthed, from who knows where, a motorcycle, and was struck by such an ardent love that from then on they were never seen apart.