by Primo Levi
It was never clear who was seeing to our provisions: very likely the Russian guards, who randomly collected, from every military or civilian storehouse they happened on, the most disparate foodstuffs, or maybe the only ones available. When the train stopped and was divided, each car sent two delegates to the Russians’ car, which had been gradually transformed into a chaotic traveling bazaar, and the Russians, following no rule, distributed food to the respective cars. It was a daily game of chance: as for quantity, the rations were sometimes scant, sometimes cyclopean, sometimes none; and as for quality they were unpredictable, like everything Russian. We got carrots, and more carrots, and still more carrots, for days in a row; then the carrots disappeared and beans appeared. They were dried beans, as hard as gravel: to cook them, we had to soak them for hours in makeshift containers, mess tins, cans, pots hanging from the ceiling of the car: at night, when the train braked abruptly, that suspended forest shook violently, water and beans rained onto the sleepers, causing quarrels, laughter, and chaos in the darkness. Potatoes arrived, then kasha, then cucumbers, but without oil; then oil, half a tin per person, when the cucumbers were finished; then sunflower seeds, an exercise in patience. One day we received an abundance of bread and sausage, and we all breathed easier; then there was grain for a whole week in a row, as if we were chickens.
Only the family cars had stoves: in all the others, we managed by cooking on the ground, over campfires, lit in a hurry as soon as the train stopped, and dismantled midway through the cooking, amid arguments and curses, when the train started up again. We cooked frantically, furiously, ears cocked for the train whistle, one eye on the starving tramps who immediately swarmed on us from the countryside, attracted by the smoke like bloodhounds by the scent. We cooked like our ancestors, on three rocks; since there often weren’t any, each car ended up having its own hoard. Spits and ingenious supports appeared; Cantarella’s pots resurfaced.
The problem of wood and water was urgent. Necessity simplifies: private woodpiles were ransacked in an instant; the anti-snow barriers, which in those towns were piled up along the tracks in the summer months, were stolen; fences were demolished, railroad ties, and once (for lack of anything else) an entire damaged freight car. Providential, in our car, was the presence of the Moor and his famous ax. For water, in the first place suitable containers were needed, and every car had to get a bucket, through trade, theft, or purchase. We found at the first trial that our bucket, bought legitimately, had a hole in it: we repaired it with a bandage from the infirmary, and it stood up to the cooking miraculously as far as the Brenner, where it fell apart.
It was generally impossible to stock up on water at the stations. At the fountain (when there was one) an endless line formed within seconds, and only a few pails could be filled. Some people crept stealthily up to the tender, which contained the supply meant for the locomotive; but if the engineer noticed, he flew into a rage and bombarded the daredevils with curses and glowing coals. Nevertheless, sometimes we managed to draw hot water from the belly of the engine itself; it was slimy, rusty water, unsuitable for cooking but adequate for washing.
The best resource was country wells. The train often stopped in the midst of fields, at a red signal, for a few seconds or for hours—it was impossible to predict. Then we all rapidly took off our belts, which, tied together, made a long rope; after that the fastest in the car took off at a run, with the rope and the bucket, in search of a well. The fastest in my car was me, and I was frequently successful in the enterprise; but once I seriously risked missing the train. I had already lowered the bucket and was laboriously raising it, when I heard the engine whistle. If I had abandoned bucket and belts, precious community property, I would be dishonored forever, so I pulled with as much strength as I had, grabbed the bucket, dumped out the water, and ran, impeded by the knotted belts, toward the train, which was already moving. A second’s delay could be a month’s delay; I ran flat out, for my life, I climbed over two hedges and the fence, and hurled myself onto the tremulous gravel of the roadbed while the train rolled by in front of me. My car had already passed; merciful hands reached toward me from others, grabbed the belts and the bucket, other hands clutched me by the hair, the shoulders, the clothes, and hoisted me bodily onto the floor of the last car, where I lay, nearly fainting, for half an hour.
The train continued to proceed northward; it advanced along a valley that became increasingly narrow, crossed the Transylvanian Alps through the pass of Predeal on September 24, amid harsh, bare mountains, in piercing cold, and descended to Braşov. Here the engine was detached, the guarantee of a halt, and the usual ceremony began to unfold: people with a furtive and fierce look, hatchets in hand, roaming through the station and outside; others with buckets, fighting over the scant water; still others stealing straw from haystacks, or making deals with the locals; children scattered around in search of trouble or minor thefts; women washing or washing themselves in public, exchanging visits and news from car to car, rekindling the quarrels brooded on during the trip and inciting new ones. Fires were immediately lit, and cooking began.
Beside our convoy a Soviet military transport was stationed, loaded with small trucks, armored vehicles, and fuel tanks. It was guarded by two robust female soldiers, in boots and helmets, muskets over their shoulders and bayonets fixed; they were of an indefinable age and had a hard, unfriendly look. When they saw the fires being lit right under the fuel tanks, they became justly indignant at our carelessness, and, shouting “Nelzya, nelzya,” ordered us to put them out immediately.
Everyone obeyed, cursing, with the exception of a small group of Alpinists, tough veterans of the Russian campaign, who had organized a goose and were roasting it. They discussed it soberly, while the two women raged behind them; then two of them, designated by the majority, rose to their feet, with the severe and resolute look of someone who is consciously sacrificing for the common good. They confronted the soldiers and spoke to them in a whisper. The negotiations were surprisingly brief; the women put down their helmets and weapons, and the four of them, serious and dignified, left the station, made their way into an alley, and disappeared from view. They returned a quarter of an hour later, the women in front, a little less hard and slightly flushed, the men behind, proud and serene. The cooking was done: the four squatted on the ground with the others, the goose was carved and divided peaceably, then, after a short respite, the Russians took up their weapons and their duties.
From Braov the route turned west again, toward the Hungarian border. Rain arrived, to make the situation worse; it was hard to light the fires, we had a single wet garment to wear, there was mud everywhere. The roof of our car wasn’t watertight, and only a few square meters of the floor remained habitable; everywhere else water dripped mercilessly. Interminable fights and altercations arose the moment we lay down to sleep.
It’s an old observation that every human group contains a predestined victim: one who is always picked on, whom everyone mocks, about whom stupid, malicious gossip is spread, upon whom all the others, by mysterious agreement, unload their bad moods and their wish to do harm. The victim in our car was the Carabiniere. It would be arduous to establish why, if a why even existed; the Carabiniere was a young carabiniere from Abruzzo, polite, meek, helpful, and good-looking. He wasn’t even especially obtuse; rather, he was quite touchy and sensitive, and so he suffered acutely from the persecution he was subjected to by the other soldiers in the car. But he was a carabiniere: and it’s well-known that between the carabinieri and the other armed forces there’s a certain amount of bad blood. The carabinieri are rebuked, perversely, for their excessive discipline, seriousness, chastity, honesty; their lack of humor; their uncritical obedience; their customs; their uniform. Fantastic, grotesque, and foolish legends circulate about them, handed down in the barracks from generation to generation: the legend of the hammer, the legend of the oath. I will not mention the first, which is too well-known and vile; according to the other, as I learned, the young recruit
is obliged to take a secret, monstrous, diabolical oath, under which, among other things, he pledges solemnly “to kill his father and his mother”; and every carabiniere either has killed them or will kill them, otherwise he doesn’t get past corporal. The unhappy young man couldn’t open his mouth: “Shut up, you, you killed papa and mama.” But he never rebelled; he absorbed this and a hundred other insults with the adamantine patience of a saint. One day he took me aside, as neutral, and assured me “that the business of the oath wasn’t true.”
We traveled through the rain, which made us angry and sad, almost without stopping, for three days, halting only for a few hours in a mudfilled town with the glorious name of Alba Iulia. On the night of September 26, having traveled more than eight hundred kilometers in the land of Romania, we were at the Hungarian border, near Arad, in a village called Curtici.
I’m sure that the inhabitants of Curtici still remember the scourge of our passage; it’s credible in fact that it entered into the local traditions, and will be spoken of for generations, around the fire, as elsewhere they still speak of Attila and Tamerlane. Even this detail of our journey is fated to remain obscure; according to the evidence, the Romanian military or railway authorities didn’t want us anymore, or had already “dumped” us, while the Hungarian authorities didn’t want to accept us, and hadn’t “taken responsibility” for us. In effect, we remained stuck in Curtici, we and the train and the guards, for seven exhausting days, and we devastated the town.
Curtici was an agricultural village of perhaps a thousand inhabitants, and it had very little; we were fourteen hundred, and we needed everything. In seven days, we drained all the wells; exhausted the stock of wood, and caused serious damage to everything combustible that the station held; as for the latrines it’s best not to mention them. We caused a frightening rise in the price of milk, bread, corn, poultry; after that, with our buying power reduced to zero, there was thieving at night and then even in the daytime. The geese, which appeared to constitute the principal local resource, and initially wandered free through the muddy alleys in solemn orderly squads, completely disappeared, in part captured, in part shut up in pens.
Every morning we opened the doors, in the absurd hope that the train had moved without our noticing, while we slept. But nothing had changed, the sky was always dark and rainy, we were still looking at the mud houses, the train was inert and powerless, like a ship that has run aground; and the wheels, those wheels that should be carrying us home, we bent over to examine them—no, they hadn’t moved a millimeter, they were as if soldered to the tracks, and rusting in the rain. We were cold and hungry, and we felt abandoned and forgotten.
On the sixth day, Cesare, more exhausted and enraged than anyone, deserted us. He declared that he had had enough of Curtici, of the Russians, of the train, and of us; that he didn’t want to go mad, or die of hunger, or be knocked off by the Curticesi; that a smart fellow can manage better by himself. He said that if we were disposed to we could also follow him: but, let’s be clear, he was tired of living in misery, he was ready to run some risks, but he wanted to get it over, make some money quickly, and return to Rome in an airplane. None of us felt like following him, and so Cesare left: he took a train to Bucharest, had many adventures, and succeeded in his goal, that is, he returned to Rome in an airplane, although later than us; but that is another story, a story de haulte graisse, which I will not relate, or will relate in another place, and only if and when Cesare gives me permission.
If in Romania I had felt a delicate philological pleasure in tasting names like Galaţi, Alba Iulia, Turnu Severin, on first entering Hungary we encountered instead Békéscsaba, followed by Hódmezövásárhely and Kiskunfélegyháza. The Magyar plain was soaked with water, the sky was leaden, but what saddened us most of all was the absence of Cesare. He had left a painful void; in his absence no one knew what to talk about, no one could overcome the boredom of the interminable journey, the nineteen-day ordeal of train travel that now weighed on our shoulders. We looked at one another with a vague sense of guilt: why had we let him go? Yet in Hungary, in spite of the impossible names, we felt we were now in Europe, under the wing of a civilization that was ours, safe from alarming apparitions like the camel in Moldavia. The train was heading toward Budapest, but did not enter the city: it halted several times in Ujpest and other points on the periphery on October 6, offering spectral visions of ruins, of temporary barracks and deserted streets; then it advanced again across the plain, amid rain showers and veils of autumn fog.
It stopped at Szob, where it was market day; we all got out, to stretch our legs and spend the little money we had. I had nothing more, but I was hungry, and I traded my Auschwitz jacket, which I had jealously preserved until then, for a noble meal of fermented cheese and onions, whose sharp aroma had entranced me. When the engine whistled, and we got back in the car, we counted, and we were two more.
One was Vincenzo, and no one was surprised. Vincenzo was a difficult boy, a Calabrian shepherd of sixteen; who could say how he had ended up in Germany. He was as wild as the Velletrano, but in a different way: timid, closed, and contemplative as the other was violent and fiery. He had wonderful blue eyes, almost feminine, and a delicate, mobile, ethereal face; he almost never spoke. He was a nomad in his soul, restless, drawn by the forest in Starye Doroghi as if by invisible demons; and on the train, too, he had no fixed residence, but wandered through all the cars. We immediately understood the reason for his instability; as soon as the train left Szob, Vincenzo fell to the floor, his eyes white and his jaw locked, like a rock. He roared like a beast and thrashed about, stronger than the four Alpinists who restrained him: an epileptic fit. Certainly he had had others, at Starye Doroghi and before; but each time, when he noticed the warning signs, Vincenzo, driven by a savage pride, had taken refuge in the forest so that no one would know about his illness; or maybe he fled before the evil, like birds before a storm. On the long journey, since he couldn’t stay on the ground, he changed cars when he felt an attack coming. He stayed with us for a few days, then disappeared. We found him perched on the roof of another car. Why? He answered that up there he could see the countryside better.
The other guest, too, for different reasons, turned out to be a hard case. No one knew him; he was a strong barefoot boy, wearing the jacket and pants of the Red Army. He spoke only Hungarian, and none of us could understand him. The Carabiniere told us that while he was sitting on the ground eating bread, the boy had come up to him and held out his hand; he had given him half his food, and from then on had been unable to get rid of him; as we hurried to get into the car he must have followed us without anyone’s noticing.
He was welcomed kindly; another mouth to feed was not a concern. He was cheerful and intelligent: as soon as the train started moving, he introduced himself with great dignity. His name was Pista and he was fourteen. Father and mother? Here it was harder to understand: I found a stub of pencil and a scrap of paper and drew a man, a woman, and a child in the middle; I pointed to the child, saying “Pista,” then waited. Pista turned serious, then he drew a picture of terrible evidence: a house, an airplane, a falling bomb. Then he crossed out the house and next to it drew a large smoking mass.
But he wasn’t in the mood for sad things; he crumpled up that piece of paper, asked for another, and drew a cask, with singular precision. The bottom, in perspective, and all the staves visible, one by one; then the hoops, and the hole with the plug. We looked at one another in bewilderment: what was the meaning of the message? Pista laughed, happily: then he drew himself next to it, with a hammer in one hand and a saw in the other. We still didn’t get it? It was his trade, he was a cooper.
Everyone immediately became fond of him; besides, he was eager to make himself useful, he swept the floor every morning, he washed the pots enthusiastically, he fetched water, and he was happy when we sent him to “do the shopping” among his compatriots at the various stops. At the Brenner, he could already speak comprehensible Italian. He sang lovel
y songs of his country, which no one understood, then sought to explain them with gestures, making everyone laugh and laughing heartily himself first of all. He was fond of the Carabiniere like a younger brother, and little by little washed away the original sin: the Carabiniere had indeed killed father and mother, but basically he must have been a good son, given that Pista had followed him. He filled the void left by Cesare. We asked him why he had come with us, what he was looking for in Italy, but we never found out, in part because of the difficulty of understanding but principally because he himself seemed not to know. For months he had been wandering from station to station like a wild dog; he had followed the first human creature who looked at him with compassion.
We hoped to cross from Hungary to Austria without trouble at the border, but it wasn’t to be: on the morning of October 7, the twenty-
second day of the train journey, we were in Bratislava, in Slovakia, in view of the Beskids, the very mountains that obstructed the grim horizon of Auschwitz. Another language, another currency, another path: would we close the circle? Katowice was two hundred kilometers away; would we begin another vain, exhausting circuit through Europe? But in the evening we entered German territory; on the day of the 8th we were stuck in the freight yard of Leopoldau, a station on the outskirts of Vienna, and we felt almost home.
The outskirts of Vienna were ugly and had grown up haphazardly, like those of Milan and Turin, familiar to us, and, like those, in the last views that we remembered of them, pummelled and devastated by bombs. The passersby were few: women, children, old people, no men. Paradoxically, their language, too, sounded familiar to me; some even understood Italian. We exchanged at random the money we had for the local money, but it was in vain; as in Kraków in March, all the stores were closed, or sold only rationed goods. “What can one buy in Vienna without a ration card?” I asked a girl, no more than twelve. She was dressed in rags, but wore shoes with high heels and was gaudily made up. “Überhaupt nichts,” she answered derisively.