by Primo Levi
So that memorable night passed until the fever overwhelmed me; then I lay on the floor, shivering. Gottlieb came, bringing with him an unusual drug: half a liter of raw vodka, a clandestine distillate that he had bought from some peasants in the neighborhood. It smelled of mold, vinegar, and fire. “Drink,” he said, “drink it all. It will do you good, and besides we don’t have anything else here for your illness.”
I drank the infernal potion, not without effort, burning my jaws and throat, and soon fell into nothingness. When I woke the next morning, I felt oppressed by a great weight, but it wasn’t the fever or a bad dream. I lay buried under a layer of other sleepers, in a kind of human incubator: people who had arrived during the night and had found no other place except on top of those who were already sleeping on the floor.
I was thirsty: thanks to the combined action of the vodka and the animal warmth, I must have lost many liters of sweat. The singular treatment was completely successful; the fever and the pain disappeared for good, and did not return.
The train left again, and in a few hours we reached Zhmerynka, a railroad hub 350 kilometers from Odessa. Here a great surprise and a fierce disappointment awaited us. Gottlieb, who had conferred with the military commander of the place, made his way through the train, car by car, and told us that we all had to get out: the train would not continue.
Wouldn’t continue why? And how and when would we arrive at Odessa? “I don’t know,” Gottlieb answered, embarrassed. “No one knows. All I know is we have to get out of the train, arrange ourselves somehow on the platforms, and wait for orders.” He was very pale and obviously disturbed.
We got out, and spent the night in the station; Gottlieb’s defeat, his first, seemed to us a bad sign. The next morning, our guide, along with his inseparable brother and brother-in-law, had disappeared. They had vanished into thin air, with all their considerable baggage; someone said he had seen them whispering with the Russian railway workers, and during the night get on a military train traveling from Odessa to the Polish border.
We remained in Zhmerynka for three days, oppressed by worry, frustration, or fear, according to our temperaments and the scraps of information we managed to extort from the Russians in the place. These showed no surprise about our fate and our forced sojourn, and answered our questions in the most disconcerting ways. One Russian told us that yes, several ships had left from Odessa with English and American soldiers who were going home, and we, too, sooner or later, would be embarked: we had food, Hitler was gone, why complain? Another told us that the week before a convoy of Frenchmen, traveling to Odessa, had been stopped at Zhmerynka and rerouted to the north “because the tracks were cut off.” A third informed us that he had seen with his own eyes a transport of German prisoners heading to the Far East; according to him, the situation was clear, were we not allies of the Germans? Well, they would send us, too, to dig trenches on the Japanese front.
To complicate things, on the third day another convoy of Italians arrived in Zhmerynka, from Romania. These had an appearance very different from ours: there were some six hundred men and women, well dressed, with suitcases and trunks, some with cameras around their necks: like tourists. They looked down at us, as if we were poor relations; they had traveled here on a regular train, with passenger cars, paying their fare, and were in order—with passports, money, travel documents, timetable, and collective travel permit—for Italy by way of Odessa. If we could only get the Russians to include us with them, then we, too, would reach Odessa.
With much condescension, they gave us to understand that they, in fact, were important people: they were civilian and military officials from the Italian legation in Bucharest, and also various people who, after the Armir5 was disbanded, had remained in Romania with diverse duties, or to fish in the troubled waters. There were among them entire families, husbands with genuine Romanian wives, and numerous children.
But, unlike the Germans, the Russians do not possess the slightest talent for distinctions and classifications. A few days later, we were all traveling north, toward an imprecise goal that was, in any case, a new exile. Italian-Romanians and Italian-Italians, all in the same freight cars, all with a heavy heart, all at the mercy of the indecipherable Soviet bureaucracy, an obscure and gigantic power, not malevolent toward us but suspicious, careless, ignorant, contradictory, and in its effects as blind as a force of nature.
5. The Armir, or Armata Italiana in Russia, was the unit of the Italian Army that fought in Russia during the Second World War.
Heading North
In the few days we spent in Zhmerynka we were reduced to begging, which, in those conditions, had nothing particularly tragic about it, compared with the much more serious prospect of an imminent departure for an unknown destination. Deprived as we were of Gottlieb’s talent for improvisation, we had immediately felt the full impact of the superior economic power of the “Romanians”: they could pay five or ten times as much as we could for any goods, and they did so, because they, too, had exhausted their food supplies, and they, too, guessed that we were leaving for a place where money would count for little, and it would be difficult to save it.
We were camped at the station, and we often went into the inhabited area. Low, lopsided houses, constructed with a curious and amusing indifference to geometry and standards: façades almost aligned, walls almost vertical, angles almost straight; but here and there a pilaster that looked like a column, with a showy scrolled capital. Thick roofs of straw, dark smoky interiors, where you glimpsed the enormous central stove and on it the straw pallets for sleeping, the black icons in a corner. At one intersection a storyteller was singing, a white-haired, barefoot giant; he stared at the sky with unseeing eyes, and at intervals bent his head and made the sign of the cross with his thumb on his forehead.
On the main street, nailed to two stakes stuck in the muddy ground, was a wooden tablet with Europe painted on it, and now faded by the suns and rains of many summers. It must have been used for following bulletins from the war, but it had been painted from memory, as if seen from an extreme distance: France was definitely a coffeepot, the Iberian peninsula a head in profile, with the nose sticking out from Portugal, and Italy an authentic boot, on a very slight angle, with the sole and the heel smooth and aligned. In Italy only four cities had been marked: Rome, Venice, Naples, and Dronero.
Zhmerynka was a large agricultural village, in former times a marketplace, as one could deduce from the vast central square, of beaten earth, with numerous parallel rows of iron bars for tying up the beasts by the halter. Now it was absolutely empty: only, in one corner, in the shadow of an oak, a tribe of nomads was camped, a vision arising from long-ago millennia.
Men and women, they were covered by goatskins, tied to their limbs by leather straps; on their feet they wore sandals of birch bark. There were several families, twenty people, and their house was an enormous cart, massive as a tank, made of roughly squared interlocking beams, resting on powerful solid wooden wheels; the four large shaggy horses that could be seen grazing a little beyond must have had a hard time hauling it. Who were they, where had they come from, and where were they going? We didn’t know; but at the time we felt them singularly close, like us tossed by the wind, like us entrusted to the changeability of a distant and unknown arbiter, who was symbolized by the wheels that transported us and them, in the stupid perfection of a circle without beginning and without end.
Not far from the square, along the railroad tracks, we ran into another fateful apparition. A stockpile of tree trunks, heavy and rough like everything in that country where the subtle and the refined have no place: among the trunks, lying facedown in the sun, burned by the sun, were a dozen stray German prisoners, in a feral state. No one watched them, no one commanded them or took care of them; from every appearance, they had been forgotten, simply abandoned to their lot.
They were dressed in faded rags, in which the proud uniforms of the Wehrmacht could still be recognized. Their faces were gaunt, bewildere
d, savage; accustomed to live, to work, to fight within the rigid framework of Authority, their support and their nourishment, when that authority ceased they became impotent, weak, lifeless. Those good subjects, good executors of all orders, good instruments of power, possessed in themselves not a parcel of power. They were emptied and inert, like dead leaves piled by the wind in hidden corners; they hadn’t sought safety in flight.
They saw us, and some moved toward us with uncertain steps, like automatons. They asked for bread: not in their language but, rather, in Russian. We refused, since our bread was precious. But Daniele didn’t refuse: Daniele, whose strong wife, whose brother, parents, and no fewer than thirty relatives the Germans had killed; Daniele, who was the sole survivor of the raid on the ghetto of Venice, and who since the day of the liberation had fed on his grief, took out some bread, and showed it to those specters, and placed it on the ground. But he demanded that they come to get it, crawling on the earth: which they did docilely.
That groups of former Allied prisoners had embarked at Odessa months earlier, as some Russians had told us, must have been true, since the station in Zhmerynka, our temporary and hardly intimate residence, still bore signs of them: a triumphal arch made of branches, now withered, that bore the slogan “Long live the United Nations”; and enormous horrible portraits of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, with quotations celebrating the victory against the common enemy. But the short season of harmony among the three great allies must now be reaching its end, since the portraits were faded and washed out by the bad weather, and were taken down during our stay. A painter arrived; he put up a scaffolding along the façade of the station, and canceled out under a layer of plaster the slogan “Workers of all the world, unite!” in place of which we saw, with a faint chill, another, very different one appear, letter by letter: “Vperèd na zapàd,” “On toward the west.”
The repatriation of the Allied soldiers was now over, but other convoys arrived and departed southward right before our eyes. They were also Russian transports, but very distinct from the glorious homely military transports that we had seen passing through Katowice. These were the transports of Ukrainian women who were returning from Germany: women only, since the men had gone as soldiers or partisans, or the Germans had killed them.
Their exile had been different from ours, and from that of the prisoners of war. Not all, but in large part, they had abandoned their country “willingly.” A coerced, blackmailed willingness, distorted by lies and by subtle, heavy Nazi propaganda, which threatened and blandished through manifestos, newspapers, radio: yet a willingness, an assent. Hundreds of thousands of women, from sixteen to forty, peasants, students, workers, had left the ruined fields, the closed schools, the ravaged workshops, for the bread of the invaders. Not a few were mothers, and for bread they had left their children. In Germany they had found bread, barbed wire, hard labor, German order, slavery, and shame; and bearing the weight of the shame they were now coming home, without joy and without hope.
Russia the conqueror had no indulgence for them. They returned home in freight cars, often open, and divided horizontally by a wooden partition so that the space could be better employed: sixty, eighty women in a car. They had no baggage: only the threadbare, faded dresses they wore. Youthful bodies, still strong and healthy, but closed and bitter faces, furtive eyes, a disturbing, animal-like humiliation and resignation; no voice came from those tangles of limbs, which unknotted lazily when the convoys stopped in the station. No one was waiting for them, no one seemed aware of them. Their inertia, their isolation, their painful lack of modesty were those of humiliated and tamed animals. We alone watched with pity and sadness their passing, new testimony and a new aspect of the pestilence that had devastated Europe.
We left Zhmerynka at the end of June, oppressed by a heavy anguish arising from disappointment and from the uncertainty of our fate, and finding an obscure resonance and confirmation in the scenes we had witnessed there.
Including the “Romanians,” we were fourteen hundred Italians. We were loaded into some thirty freight cars, which were attached to a train heading north. No one in Zhmerynka knew or wished to explain our destination; but we went north, away from the sea, away from Italy, toward prison, solitude, darkness, winter. In spite of everything, we considered it a good sign that provisions hadn’t been distributed for the journey: maybe it wouldn’t be long.
We traveled in fact only for two days and a night, with very few stops, through a majestic and monotonous landscape of desert steppes, forests, remote villages, slow, wide rivers. Crammed into the freight cars, we were uncomfortable: the first night, taking advantage of a stop, Cesare and I got out to stretch our legs and look for a better arrangement. We noted that at the front of the train were various passenger cars and an infirmary car: it appeared empty. “Why not get in?” Cesare proposed. “It’s prohibited,” I said foolishly. Why in fact should it be prohibited, and by whom? Besides, we had already observed on various occasions that the Western (and in particular German) religion of the differentiating ban does not have deep roots in Russia.
The infirmary car was not only empty but offered sybaritic refinements. Functioning washrooms, with water and soap; a very gentle suspension that muffled the jolting of the wheels; marvelous little beds hung on adjustable springs, complete with white sheets and warm blankets. At the head of the bed I had chosen, I found an extra gift of fate, a book in Italian: The Boys of Via Paal, which I had never read as a child. While our companions had declared us lost, we spent a dreamlike night.
The train crossed the Berezina at the end of the second day of the journey, while the sun—as red as a pomegranate, sinking obliquely amid the trees in an enchanted slow motion—clothed in bloody light the waters, the woods, and the epic plain, still scattered with the remains of weapons and baggage wagons. The journey ended a few hours later, in the middle of the night, at the peak of a violent storm. We were made to get out in the downpour, in absolute darkness, broken here and there by lamps. We walked for half an hour, Indian file, through the grass and the mud, each gripping like a blind man the man who preceded him, and I don’t know who was leading the leader; finally, soaked to the bone, we approached an enormous dark building, half destroyed by bombs. The rain continued, the floor was muddy and wet, and more water fell through the holes in the roof: we waited for day in a laborious, passive waking sleep.
A splendid day dawned. We went outside, and only then realized that we had spent the night in the orchestra seats of a theater, and that we were in an extensive complex of damaged and abandoned Soviet barracks. All the buildings had been ransacked and plundered in the meticulous German manner. The German armies in retreat had carried off everything that could be carried off: windows and doors, grates, railings, the entire systems of lighting and heating, water pipes, even the fence stakes. The walls had been stripped down to the last nail. From an adjacent railroad junction the rails and the ties had been torn up—with a machine just for the purpose, the Russians told us.
More than a sack, in other words: the genius of destruction, of counter-creation, here as at Auschwitz; the mystique of the void, beyond any requirement of war or impulse to plunder.
But they had not been able to carry off the unforgettable frescoes that covered the walls inside: the work of some anonymous poet-soldier, naïve, strong, and crude. Three giant horsemen, equipped with swords, helmets, and clubs, stopping on a height, and gazing over a boundless horizon of virgin lands to conquer. Stalin, Lenin, Molotov, reproduced with reverent affection in intent, with sacrilegious audacity in effect, and recognizable principally and respectively by the mustache, the little beard, and the eyeglasses. A foul spider, at the center of a spiderweb as big as the wall: it has a black tuft between the eyes, a swastika on its back, and underneath is written, “Death to Hitler’s invaders.” A tall, fair-haired Soviet soldier in chains raises a manacled hand to judge his judges; and these, hundreds of them, all against one, sitting on the benches of a courtroom-amphitheater,
are disgusting man-insects, with pinched, crushed, gray and yellow faces, ghoulish as skulls, and they draw back, one against the other, like lemurs who flee the light, driven into the void by the prophetic gesture of the hero-prisoner.
In these spectral barracks, and under the open sky, in vast courtyards invaded by weeds, thousands of foreigners were camped, in transit like us, belonging to all the nations of Europe.
The kind warmth of the sun began to penetrate the damp earth, and everything around us was steamy. I walked a few hundred meters away from the theater, heading into the thick grass of a meadow where I intended to undress and dry in the sun: and right in the middle of the meadow, as if he were waiting for me, whom should I see but Mordo Nahum, my Greek, almost unrecognizable for his magnificent plumpness and the improvised Soviet uniform he wore. And he looked at me with pale owl’s eyes, lost in his rosy, round, red-bearded face.
He welcomed me with fraternal cordiality, ignoring a malicious question of mine about the United Nations that had managed things so badly for them, the Greeks. He asked how I was: Did I need anything? food? clothes? Yes, I couldn’t deny it, I needed many things. “It will be provided,” he answered, mysterious and magnanimous. “I count for something here.” He paused briefly, and added, “Do you need a woman?”