by Primo Levi
I had been doing this for a week, exploring the outskirts of Katowice. The sweet weakness of convalescence ran in my veins. Also running in my veins, in those days, were strong doses of insulin, which had been prescribed, found, bought, and injected by the joint treatments of Leonardo and Gottlieb. While I walked, the insulin silently fulfilled its miraculous duty; it circulated with the blood in search of sugar, and saw to its diligent combustion and conversion to energy, distracting it from other, less suitable destinations. But the sugar it found wasn’t much: suddenly, dramatically, almost always at the same time, the supply was exhausted. Then my legs folded under me, I saw everything turn black, and I was forced to sit down on the ground wherever I was, cold and overcome by an attack of furious hunger. Here the works and gifts of my third protector, Marya Fyodorovna Prima, came to my aid: I took out of my pocket a packet of glucose and gulped it down greedily. After a few minutes, the light returned, the sun grew warm again, and I could resume my walk.
Returning to the camp that morning, I found an unusual scene. In the middle of the open space stood Captain Egorov, surrounded by a dense crowd of Italians. In one hand he was holding a large revolver, which, however, he was using only to emphasize with broad gestures the crucial passages of the speech he was making. Of his speech little could be understood. Essentially two words, because he kept repeating them, but those two words were heavenly messages: “ripatriatsiya” and “Odyessa.”
Repatriation by way of Odessa, therefore: return. The whole camp instantly went wild. Captain Egorov was lifted off the ground, revolver and all, and carried in precarious triumph. People roared, “Home! Home!” through the corridors, others packed their bags, making as much noise as they could, and throwing out the windows rags, paper, broken shoes, and all kinds of junk. In a few hours the whole camp emptied, under the Olympian eyes of the Russians; some went to the city to take leave of their girls, some in a pure and simple barrage of merrymaking, some to spend their last zloty on provisions for the journey or in other more futile ways.
With that last program in mind Cesare and I went to Katowice, carrying in our pockets our own savings and those of five or six companions. In fact, what would we find at the border? We didn’t know, but, from what we had seen until now of the Russians and their methods of proceeding, it didn’t seem likely that at the border we would find money changers. Therefore, common sense, along with our happy state of mind, advised us to spend to the last zloty the small sum we had at our disposal: to use it up, for example, by organizing a grand Italian lunch, of spaghetti with butter, which we had been longing for since time immemorial.
We went into a food shop, put all our assets on the counter, and explained our intentions as well as we could to the shopkeeper. I told her, as usual, that I spoke German but was not German; that we were Italians who were leaving, and that we wanted to buy spaghetti, butter, salt, eggs, strawberries, and sugar in the most fitting proportions and for an amount of sixty-three zloty, not one more or one less.
The shopkeeper was a wrinkled old crone, with a crotchety and distrustful expression. She looked at us attentively through tortoiseshell glasses, then said plainly, in excellent German, that in her view we were not Italians at all. First, we spoke German, even if rather badly; then, and principally, Italians have black hair and passionate eyes, and we had neither. At most, she could concede that we were Croatians; in fact, now that she thought about it, she had just met some Croatians who resembled us. We were Croatians, the thing was unquestionable.
I was quite annoyed, and said to her brusquely that we were Italians, whether she liked it or not—Italian Jews, one from Rome and one from Turin—that we came from Auschwitz and were going home, and we wanted to buy and pay, and not waste time in nonsense.
Jews from Auschwitz? The old woman’s look softened, even her wrinkles seemed to relax. Then it was a different situation. She invited us into the back of the shop, had us sit down, offered us glasses of real beer, and without delay she told us proudly her fabulous story: her epic, close in time but already broadly transfigured into a chanson de geste, refined and polished by innumerable repetitions.
She knew about Auschwitz, and everything about Auschwitz interested her, because she had been at risk of going there. She wasn’t Polish, she was German: at one time she kept a shop in Berlin, with her husband. They hadn’t liked Hitler, and maybe they had been imprudent in letting their unusual opinions leak out in the neighborhood: in 1935 her husband was taken away by the Gestapo, and she had never learned anything more about him. It had been a great sorrow, but one has to eat, and she had continued her business until ’38, when Hitler, “der Lump,” had given on the radio the famous speech in which he declared he was going to war.
Then she was angry and had written to him. She had written personally, “To Herr Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of the Reich, Berlin,” sending him a long letter in which she advised him firmly not to go to war because too many people would die, and, further, she showed him that if he did he would lose, because Germany couldn’t win against the whole world, and even a child would understand that. She had signed her name, last name, and address: then she had waited.
Five days later the Brownshirts arrived and under the pretext of doing a search they had ransacked and wrecked her house and shop. What had they found? Nothing, she wasn’t active politically: only the draft of the letter. Two weeks later they called her to the Gestapo. She thought they would beat her and send her to the Lager: instead they had treated her with boorish contempt, told her they should hang her, but were convinced that she was just eine alte blöde Ziege, a stupid old goat, and the noose would be wasted on her. But they had withdrawn her business license and expelled her from Berlin.
She had scraped out a living in Silesia on the black market and by her wits, until, following her predictions, the Germans lost the war. Then, since the whole neighborhood knew what she had done, the Polish authorities had quickly granted her a license for a food store. So now she lived peacefully, fortified by the thought of how much better the world would have been if the powerful of the Earth had taken her advice.
On the eve of departure, Leonardo and I handed over the keys to the clinic and said goodbye to Marya Fyodorovna and Dr. Dancenko. Marya appeared silent and sad; I asked her why didn’t she come to Italy with us, and she blushed as if I had made her a dishonest proposal. Dancenko interrupted; he was carrying a bottle of alcohol and two pieces of paper. First we thought that the alcohol was his personal contribution to the medical supplies for the journey; but no, it was for the farewell toasts, which were dutifully exchanged.
And the paper? We learned to our amazement that the Command expected from us two declarations of thanks for the humaneness and the propriety with which we had been treated at Katowice; Dancenko also begged us to mention explicitly him and his work, and to add to our name the qualification “Doctor of Medicine” when we signed. This Leonardo could do and did; but in my case it would be a lie. I was bewildered, and tried to make Dancenko understand; but he was astonished at my formality and, beating with his finger on the piece of paper, told me irritably not to make trouble. I signed as he wished: Why deprive him of some small help to his career?
But the ceremony wasn’t over yet. In turn, Dancenko drew out two testimonials, written by hand in fine calligraphy on two pieces of lined paper, evidently torn from a school notebook. On the one meant for me, he declared with casual generosity that “The doctor of medicine Primo Levi, of Turin, offered for four months his capable and diligent services to the Infirmary of this Command, and has thereby deserved the gratitude of all the workers of the world.”
The next day, the dream we had had forever became a reality. In the station at Katowice the train awaited us: a long train of freight cars, which we Italians (we were around eight hundred) took possession of with noisy cheer. Odessa, and then a fantastic journey by sea through the gateways of the east, and then Italy.
The prospect of traversing many hundreds of kilometers in those
rough cars, sleeping on the bare floor, didn’t worry us at all, nor did the laughable food supplies delivered to us by the Russians: some bread, and a tin of soy margarine for each car. It was American margarine, heavily salted and hard, like Parmesan cheese: evidently meant for tropical climates, it had ended up in our hands by unimaginable pathways. The rest, the Russians assured us with their habitual carelessness, would be distributed during the journey.
That train filled with hope left in mid-June of 1945. There was no escort, no Russian on board: in charge of the convoy was Dr. Gottlieb, who had spontaneously attached himself to us, and who contained in his person the duties of interpreter, doctor, and consul of the itinerant community. We felt in good hands, far from any doubt or uncertainty; the ship was waiting for us in Odessa.
The journey lasted for six days, and if in the course of it we were not driven by hunger to begging or stealing, and in fact reached its end fairly well nourished, the credit goes exclusively to Dr. Gottlieb. Immediately after our departure it became clear that the Russians of Katowice had sent us off at our peril, without making any provisions or arrangements with their colleagues in Odessa and the intermediate stops. When our convoy stopped in a station (and it stopped often and long, because the regular traffic and military transports had precedence), no one knew what to make of us. The stationmasters and officers in charge of services watched us arrive with astonished and desperate eyes, anxious in turn only to get rid of our inconvenient presence.
But Gottlieb was there, sharp as a sword; there was no bureaucratic tangle, no barrier of negligence, no official obstinacy that he could not defeat in a few minutes, each time in a different way. Every difficulty dissolved into a mist before his boldness, his deep imagination, his saber-like quickness. From each encounter with the monster of a thousand faces, which dwells wherever forms and documents accumulate, he returned to us radiant with victory like a St. George after the duel with the dragon, and he told us about its rapid turns, too conscious of his superiority to glory in it.
The officer in charge at the station, for example, had demanded our travel order, which notoriously didn’t exist; Gottlieb had said that he would get it and had gone into the telegraph office nearby and fabricated one in a few instants, drafted in the most plausible bureaucratic jargon, on an ordinary piece of paper that he had covered thickly with stamps, seals, and illegible signatures, rendering it as holy and venerable as an authentic emanation of Power. Or, again, he had presented himself to the quartermaster of a Kommandantur, and had respectfully notified him that eight hundred Italians were stopped at the station and had nothing to eat. The quartermaster had replied “Nicevò,” his storehouse was empty, he needed authorization, he would take care of it the next day, and had rudely tried to show him the door, like some ordinary annoying petitioner; but Gottlieb had smiled and said, “Comrade, you haven’t understood properly. These Italians have to have food, and today—the order is from Stalin.” And the provisions had arrived in a flash.
But for me that journey was excruciating. I was surely recovered from pleurisy, but my body was in open rebellion, and seemed determined to make a mockery of doctors and medicines. Every night, while I slept, fever furtively invaded me: an intense fever, of an unknown nature, which reached its peak near morning. I woke prostrate, only half conscious, and with a wrist, or an elbow, or a knee immobilized by stabbing pains. I lay like that, on the floor of the train car or the cement of a platform, racked by delirium and pain, until midday; then, in a few hours, everything returned to order and around evening I felt almost normal. Leonardo and Gottlieb looked at me perplexed and powerless.
The train passed through cultivated plains, gloomy cities and villages, dense, wild forests that I thought had disappeared millennia earlier from the heart of Europe: conifers and birches so thick that, to reach the sunlight, by mutual agreement they were forced to push desperately upward, in an oppressive verticality. The train advanced as if through a tunnel, in a green-black shadow, amid the smooth bare trunks, under a high, unbroken vault of thickly interlaced branches. Rzeszów, Przemyśl with its threatening fortifications, L’viv.
In L’viv, a skeleton city devastated by bombing and by war, the train stopped for the night in a downpour. The roof of our car wasn’t watertight: we had to get out and seek shelter. With a few others, we couldn’t find anything better than the railway workers’ underpass: dark, two inches of mud, and fierce drafts. But the fever arrived punctually at midnight, like a compassionate blow to the head, bringing me the ambiguous kindness of unconsciousness.
Ternopol, Proskurov. The train reached Proskurov at sunset, the locomotive was uncoupled, and Gottlieb assured us that we wouldn’t leave until morning. We therefore settled ourselves to spend the night in the station. The waiting room was large: Cesare, Leonardo, Daniele, and I took possession of a corner. Cesare left for the town as the one assigned to provisions, and soon returned with eggs, salad, and a packet of tea.
We lit a fire on the floor (we were not the only ones, or the first: the room was scattered with the remains of innumerable campsites of people who had preceded us, and the ceiling and walls were smoke-blackened like those of an old kitchen). Cesare cooked the eggs, and made a generous and sugary tea.
Now, either that tea was stronger than ours in Italy, or Cesare had mistaken the amounts, for in a short time every trace of sleep and weariness vanished, and we felt instead invigorated by an unusual state of mind—eager, cheerful, tense, lucid, sensitive. Therefore, every event and every word of that night has remained imprinted in my memory, and I can describe it as if it were yesterday.
The daylight disappeared extremely slowly, first rosy, then purple, then gray; the silvery splendor of a warm full moon followed. Next to us, as we smoked and talked animatedly, were two very young girls dressed in black, sitting on a wooden chest. They were speaking to each other: not in Russian but in Yiddish.
“Do you understand what they’re saying?” Cesare asked.
“A few words.”
“Come on, then: start up. See if they’ll go along.”
That night everything seemed easy to me, even understanding Yiddish. With unusual boldness, I turned to the girls, greeted them, and, making an effort to imitate their pronunciation, asked in German if they were Jewish, and I said that we four were, too. The girls (they were perhaps sixteen or eighteen years old) burst into laughter. “Ihr sprecht keyn Jiddisch, ihr seyd ja keyne Jiden!” “You don’t speak Yiddish: so you aren’t Jews!” In their language, the statement had a strict logic.
And yet we really were Jews, I explained. Italian Jews: Jews in Italy and all of Western Europe don’t speak Yiddish.
This, for them, was a great novelty, a comically odd thing, as if someone were to declare that there exist Frenchmen who don’t speak French. I tried to recite to them the beginning of the Shema, the basic Jewish prayer: their incredulity diminished but their merriment increased: who had ever heard Hebrew pronounced in such a ridiculous way?
The older was named Sore: she had a small, keen, mischievous face, full of curves and asymmetrical dimples; our limping and laborious conversation seemed to give her an intense enjoyment, and stimulated her like tickling.
But then, if we were Jews, were all the others, too? she asked, indicating with a circular gesture the eight hundred Italians who filled the room. What difference was there between us and them? The same language, the same faces, the same clothes. No, I explained to her, they were Christians, they came from Genoa, Naples, Sicily; some of them might have Arab blood in their veins. Sore looked around in bewilderment, this was confusing. In her country things were very clear: a Jew is a Jew, and a Russian a Russian, there are no doubts or ambiguities.
They were evacuees, she told me. They were from Minsk, in Belorussia; when the Germans were approaching, their family had asked to be transferred to the interior of the Soviet Union, to escape the massacres of Eichmann’s Einsatzkommandos. The request had been taken literally: they had been sent four thousand kilo
meters away from their city, to Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, to the gates of the Roof of the World, in view of mountains seven thousand meters high. She and her sister were still children; then their mother died and their father was mobilized for some job or other on the border. The two of them had learned Uzbek, and many other basic things: to take life day by day, to travel over continents with one suitcase for two, to live, in short, like birds of the air, who do not spin or weave or care about tomorrow.
Such they were, Sore and her silent sister. Like us, they were on the road of return. They had left Samarkand in March, setting off as a feather abandons itself to the wind. Partly in a truck, partly on foot, they had crossed the Karakum, the Desert of Black Sand; they had arrived by train in Krasnovodsk, on the Caspian Sea, and there had waited until a fisherman ferried them to Baku. From Baku they had continued by any available means, since they had no money, but in exchange a boundless faith in the future and in their neighbor, and an innate and intact love of life.
Everyone around us was sleeping; Cesare restlessly witnessed the conversation, asking me every so often if the preliminaries were over and we had got to the point; then, disappointed, he went outside in search of more solid adventures.
The peacefulness of the waiting room and the story of the two sisters were abruptly interrupted around midnight. A door that by a short corridor connected the waiting room with a smaller one, reserved for soldiers in transit, was brutally flung open, as if by a gust of wind. On the threshold a very young, drunk Russian soldier appeared. He looked around with unfocused eyes, then he set off forward, head down, with frightening tacking maneuvers, as if the floor had suddenly sloped sharply under him. Three Soviet officers were standing in the corridor, engrossed in discussion. The soldier, reaching them, braked, stiffened to attention, saluted militarily, and the three responded decorously to his salute. Then he took off again in semicircles, like a skater, passed precisely through the door to the outside, and we could hear him vomiting and hiccuping noisily on the platform. He came back inside with a slightly less shaky step, again saluted the three impassive officers, and disappeared. After a quarter of an hour, the scene was repeated, identically, as in a nightmare: dramatic entrance, pause, salute, rapid journey obliquely among the legs of the sleepers toward the open air, discharge, return, salute; and so on, an infinite number of times, at regular intervals, without the three ever devoting to him anything but a distracted glance and a correct salute, hand to cap.