by Primo Levi
We returned to the train for the night; during that night, with much jolting and screeching, we traveled a few kilometers and found that we had moved to another depot, Vienna-Jedlersdorf. Beside us another train emerged from the fog, or, rather, the tortured corpse of a train: the engine was vertical, absurd, its nose pointed to the sky as if it wanted to climb up; all the cars were burned. We approached, driven by the instinct for plunder and by a mocking curiosity; we expected a malicious satisfaction in putting our hands on the ruins of those German things. But mockery was answered by mockery: one car contained shapeless metal debris that must have been parts of burned musical instruments, and a hundred clay ocarinas, the sole survivors; another, service guns molten and rusted; a third, a tangle of curved sabers, which the fire and the rain had welded in their sheathes for all the centuries to come—vanity of vanities, and the cold taste of perdition.
We went on and, wandering aimlessly, found ourselves on the banks of the Danube. The river was in flood, muddy, yellow, and swollen with threat; at that point its course is almost straight, and we could see, one behind the other, in a misty perspective like a nightmare, seven bridges, all broken exactly in the center, all with their stumps submerged in the swirling water. As we returned to our traveling home, we were startled by the rattle of a tram, the only living thing. It was running madly on its battered tracks, along the deserted streets, without stopping at the stops. We glimpsed the driver in his place, pale as a ghost; behind him, delirious with excitement, were the seven Russians of our escort, and no other passenger: it was the first tram of their lives. While some were hanging out the windows, shouting “Hurrah, hurrah!” others were urging and threatening the driver to go faster.
On a big square a market was being held; yet again a spontaneous and illegal market, but much more wretched and stealthy than the Polish ones that I had gone to with the Greek and with Cesare; from close up it reminded me, instead, of another scene, the Market of the Lager, indelible in memory. There were no stalls, but only people standing, cold, restless, in small groups, ready to flee, with purses and suitcases in hand and bulging pockets; they exchanged tiny bits of junk, potatoes, slices of bread, loose cigarettes, ordinary, used household rubbish.
We returned to the train with heavy hearts. We had felt no joy in seeing Vienna destroyed and the Germans defeated: pity, rather; not compassion but a broader pity, which mingled with our own wretchedness, with the heavy, looming sensation of an irreparable and ultimate evil, present everywhere, hidden like a cancer in the bowels of Europe and the world, the seed of future harm.
The train seemed unable to detach itself from Vienna; after three days of halts and maneuvers, on October 10 we were still in Nussdorf, another suburb, hungry, wet, and sad. But on the morning of the 11th the train headed decisively westward, as if it had suddenly found the lost path: with unusual speed it went through St. Pölten, Loosdorf, and Amstetten, and that evening, along the road that ran parallel to the railroad tracks, appeared a sign, portentous in our eyes like the birds that announce the approach of land to sailors. It was a vehicle new to us: a stocky, clumsy military vehicle, flat as a box, that bore painted on its side a white star, not red—a Jeep, in other words. A black man was driving; one of the occupants waved at us and shouted in Neapolitan, “We’re going home, guys!”
The line of demarcation was therefore close; we reached it at St. Valentin, a few kilometers from Linz. Here we got out, we said goodbye to the young barbarians of the escort and the well-deserving engineer, and passed all together into the hands of the Americans.
The shorter the average duration of a stay at a transit camp, the less well organized it is; at St. Valentin people stopped only for a few hours, a day at most, so it was a very dirty and primitive camp. There was neither light nor heat nor beds; you slept on the bare wooden floor, in extremely temporary barracks, surrounded by several inches of mud. The only efficient facilities were those for baths and disinfection; under that guise, of purification and exorcism, the West took possession of us.
Several giant and silent GIs were assigned to the priestly task; they were unarmed but adorned with myriad devices whose meaning and use escaped us. For the bath, everything went smoothly; there were maybe twenty wooden cabins, with a warm shower and bathrobes, a luxury never seen before. After the bath, they led us into a vast brick hall, divided by a cable from which hung ten odd pieces of equipment, vaguely resembling pneumatic hammers; you could hear a compressor pulsing outside. All fourteen hundred, as many as we were, were crowded to one side of the partition, men and women together. Here ten officials with an unearthly aspect entered the scene, enveloped in white overalls, with helmets and gas masks. They grabbed the first of the herd, and without ceremony inserted the hoses of the hanging contrivances gradually into all the openings of their clothes: the collar, the waist, the pockets, up into the pants, under skirts. The machines were a kind of pneumatic bellows, which blew in insecticide: and the insecticide was DDT, an absolute novelty for us, like Jeeps, penicillin, and the atomic bomb, of which we heard soon afterward.
Cursing or laughing because of the tickling sensation, everyone adjusted to the treatment, until it came the turn of a Navy officer and his beautiful fiancée. When the hooded people put their hands, which were chaste but rude, on her, the officer energetically intervened. He was a robust and determined youth; anyone who tried to touch his woman was in trouble.
The perfect mechanism stopped short; the uniformed men consulted briefly among themselves, with inarticulate nasal sounds, then one of them took off mask and overalls and planted himself in front of the officer with fists clenched, like a guard. The others made a neat circle around them, and a boxing match began. After a few minutes of silent, gallant fighting, the officer fell down with a bloody nose; the girl, pale and upset, was dusted all over according to the prescriptions, but without anger or a wish for reprisal, and everything returned to American orderliness.
The Reawakening
Austria has a border with Italy, and St. Valentin is no more than three hundred kilometers from Tarvísio; and yet on October 15, the thirty-first day of our journey, we crossed a new border and entered Munich, suffering from an inconsolable railroad weariness, an utter nausea for tracks, for sleeping precariously on wooden boards, for jolting movement, for stations; and so the familiar smells, common to all the railroads in the world—the piercing odors of wet ties, of hot brakes, of burning coal—afflicted us with a profound disgust. We were tired of everything, tired especially of crossing useless borders.
But, in another way, the fact of feeling for the first time, beneath our feet, an edge of Germany—not of Upper Silesia or Austria but of Germany itself—superimposed on our weariness a complex state of mind made up of impatience, frustration, and tension. It seemed to us that we had something to say, enormous things to say, to every single German, and that every German should have something to say to us. We felt an urgency to sum up, ask, explain, and comment, like chess players at the end of a match. Did “they” know about Auschwitz, about the silent, daily slaughter, a step from their doors? If yes, how could they go along, return home, and look at their children, cross the threshold of a church? If not, they had to listen, they had a sacred duty to listen, to learn from us, from me, everything, immediately. I felt the number tattooed on my arm burning like a wound.
As I wandered through the rubble-filled streets of Munich, around the station where yet again our train was stranded, it seemed to me that I was walking among swarms of insolvent debtors, as if each one owed me something and refused to pay. I was among them, in Agramante’s camp, among the master race, but the men were few, many were mutilated, many dressed in rags like us. It seemed to me that each one should interrogate us, read in our faces who we were, and listen humbly to our tale. But no one looked us in the eye, no one accepted the challenge; they were deaf, blind, and mute, locked in their ruins as in a fortress of deliberate ignorance, still strong, still capable of hatred and contempt, still prisoners of
the ancient knot of pride and fault.
I caught myself seeking among them, in that anonymous crowd of sealed faces, other faces, well defined, many provided with a name: of those who could not not know, not remember, not respond; of those who had ordered and obeyed, killed, humiliated, corrupted. A vain and foolish attempt—because not they, but others, the few righteous men, would answer in their stead.
If in Szob we had taken on a guest, after Munich we realized that we had taken on an entire litter; we were no longer sixty cars but, rather, sixty-one. At the tail end of the train, traveling with us toward Italy, was a new car, crowded with young Jews, boys and girls from all the countries of Eastern Europe. None of them looked more than twenty, but they were extremely determined and confident; they were young Zionists, they were going to Israel, taking any route they could and by any means they could. A ship awaited them in Bari. They had bought the train car and to hook it up to our train had been the simplest thing in the world, they hadn’t asked permission from anyone—they had simply hooked it up. I was amazed, but they laughed at my amazement. “Is Hitler not dead?” their leader asked me, with the intense gaze of a hawk. They felt immensely free and strong, masters of the world and of their destiny.
By way of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, we arrived that evening, in incredible disarray, at the transit camp of Mittenwald, in the mountains on the Austrian border. There we spent the night, and it was our last cold night. The following day the train descended to Innsbruck, and here it filled up with Italian smugglers, who, in the absence of proper authorities, welcomed us on behalf of our homeland, and generously distributed chocolate, grappa, and tobacco.
In the ascent toward the Italian border the train, wearier than we were, broke in two like a rope stretched too far; several people were injured, and that was the last adventure. After dark we passed the Brenner, which we had crossed into exile twenty months before—our less tested comrades in cheerful tumult, Leonardo and I in a silence charged with memory. Of six hundred and fifty, the number who had left, three of us were returning. And what had we lost, in those twenty months? What would we find at home? How much of ourselves had been eroded, extinguished? Did we return richer or poorer, stronger or weaker? We didn’t know; but we knew that on the thresholds of our homes, for good or for ill, a trial awaited us, and we anticipated it with fear. Flowing through our veins, with the weary blood, we felt the poison of Auschwitz. Where would we draw the strength to resume living, to knock down the barriers, the hedges that grow up on their own during all absences, around every abandoned house, every empty den? Soon, even tomorrow, we would have to join battle, against still unknown enemies, within and outside us. With what weapons, what energy, what will? We felt centuries old, oppressed by a year of ferocious memories, emptied and defenseless. Although the months just passed, of wandering at the edge of civilization, were harsh, they now seemed to us a truce, an interlude of unlimited openness, a providential gift of destiny, never to be repeated.
We spent the first night in Italy pondering these thoughts, which kept us from sleeping, as the train slowly descended the deserted, dark valley of the Adige. On October 17 the camp of Pescantina, near Verona, took us in, and there we were released, each to his own fate, but not until the evening of the following day did a train depart in the direction of Turin. In the frenzied confusion of thousands of refugees and veterans we saw Pista, who had already found his way: he wore the white-and-yellow armband of the Pontificia Opera di Assistenza, the Vatican relief organization, and was contributing eagerly and happily to the life of the camp. And then a figure came toward us, rising a full head above the crowd: a known face, the Moor of Verona. He came to greet us, Leonardo and me; he had reached home first of all, since Avesa, his town, was a few kilometers away. And he blessed us, the old blasphemer; he raised two enormous gnarled fingers, and blessed us with the solemn gesture of popes, wishing us a safe return and all good things. We were grateful for the good wishes, since we felt the need of them.
I reached Turin on October 19, after thirty-five days of travel; the house was standing, all the family alive, no one expected me. I was swollen, bearded, and ragged, and had difficulty in making myself recognized. I found friends full of life, the warmth of secure meals, the concreteness of daily work, the liberating joy of recounting. I found a wide, clean bed, which at night (an instant of terror) yielded softly beneath my weight. But only after many months did I lose the habit of walking with my gaze fixed on the ground, as if to look for something to eat or put in my pocket quickly and sell for bread; and a dream filled with fear has not ceased to visit me, at intervals now close, now rare.
It’s a dream within another dream, varying in its details, unique in its substance. I am at the table with my family, or friends, or at work, or in a verdant countryside—in a serene, relaxed setting, in other words, apparently without tension and pain—and yet I feel a subtle, profound anguish, the definite sensation of a looming threat. And in fact, as the dream proceeds, little by little or brutally, each time in a different way, everything collapses and is destroyed around me, the scene, the walls, the people, and the anguish becomes more intense and more precise. Everything has now turned into chaos; I am alone at the center of a gray and murky void, and, yes, I know what this means, and I also know that I have always known it. I am again in the Lager, and nothing outside the Lager was true. The rest was a brief holiday, or a trick of the senses, a dream: the family, nature in flower, the house. Now this internal dream, the dream of peace, is over, and in the external dream, which continues coldly, I hear the sound of a well-known voice: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, “Wstawa.”
Turin, December 1961–November 1962
Contents
The Mnemagogs
Censorship in Bitinia
The Versifier
Angelic Butterfly
Cladonia Rapida
Order at a Good Price
Man’s Friend
Some Applications of the Mimete
Versamine
Sleeping Beauty in the Refrigerator: A Winter’s Tale
The Measure of Beauty
Quaestio de Centauris
Full Employment
The Sixth Day
Retirement Package
. . . Si ne le croyez, je ne m’en soucie, mais un homme de bien, un homme de bon sens croit tousjours ce qu’on luy dit, et qu’il trouve par escrit. Ne dit Salomon, Proverbiorum XIV: “Innocens credit omni verbo, etc.”?
. . . De ma part, je ne trouve rien escrit es Bibles sainctes qui soit contre cela. Mais, si le vouloir de Dieu tel eust esté, diriez vous qu’il ne l’eust pu faire? Ha, pour grâce, n’embure-lucoquez jamais vos esprits de ces vaines pensées. Car je vous dis que à Dieu rien n’est impossible. Et, s’il vouloit, les femmes auroient dorenavant ainsi leurs enfants par l’oreille. Bacchus ne fut il pas engendré par la cuisse de Jupiter?
. . . Minerve nasquit elle pas du cerveau par l’oreille de Jupiter?
. . . Castor et Pollux, de la coque d’un oeuf pont et esclos par Leda?
Mais vous seriez bien davantaige esbahis et estonnés si je vous exposois presentement tout le chapitre de Pline, auquel parle des enfantements estranges et contre nature. Et toutesfois je ne suis point menteur tant asseuré comme il a esté. Lisez le septiesme de sa Naturelle Histoire, chap. III, et ne m’en tabustez plus l’entendement.
—RABELAIS, GARGANTUA, I–VI
. . . I don’t care if you believe it, but an honest man, a man of good sense, always believes what he is told, and what he finds written down. Does not Solomon say, in Proverbs XIV, “The simple believeth every word, etc.”?
. . . For my part I find nothing written in the Holy Bible which contradicts it. If this had been the will of God, would you say that He could not have performed it? For goodness’ sake do not obfuscate our brains with such an idle thought. For I say to you that to God nothing is impossible. If it had been His
will, women would have produced their children in that way, by ear, forever afterwards. Was not Bacchus begotten by Jupiter’s thigh?
. . . Was not Minerva born from Jupiter’s brain by way of his ear?
. . . Castor and Pollux from the shell of an egg laid and hatched by Leda?
But you would be even more flabbergasted if I were now to expound for you the whole chapter of Pliny in which he speaks of strange and unnatural births; and, anyhow, I am not such a barefaced liar as he was. Read chapter Three of the seventh book of his Natural History, and don’t tease my brain any more on the subject.
(TRANS. J. M. COHEN)
The Mnemagogs
Dr. Morandi (but he wasn’t yet used to hearing himself called “Doctor”) got off the bus intending to remain incognito for at least a couple of days, but he soon realized that this would be impossible. The owner of the Café Alpino gave him a neutral welcome (evidently she was either not curious enough or not keen enough); but from her smile, a combination of deferential, maternal, and slightly mocking, he understood that he had already been identified as “the new doctor” and had no chance of a reprieve. My degree must be written all over my face, he thought; tu es medicus in aeternum, and, what’s worse, everyone will notice. Morandi found irrevocable things distasteful and, at least for the moment, he was disposed to see the entire matter as an enormous and perpetual nuisance. “Something akin to the trauma of birth,” he concluded to himself, nonsensically.
. . . In the meantime, as the first consequence of his lost anonymity, he needed to go and find Montesanto without delay. He returned to the café in order to retrieve the letter of introduction from his suitcase, and then began, under the merciless sun, to search the deserted town for the nameplate on Montesanto’s door.