by Primo Levi
The Germans were more afraid than we were of the bomb attacks: we, irrationally, weren’t afraid because we knew they were directed not against us but against our enemies. In seconds I was alone in the laboratory; I put all the cerium in my pockets and went outside to join my Kommando. The sky was already filled with the buzzing of the bombers, and falling from them, fluttering softly, yellow leaflets that bore atrocious words of mockery:
Im Bauch kein Fett,
Acht Uhr ins Bett;
Der Arsch kaum warm,
Fliegeralarm!
In your belly no fat,
At eight you go to bed;
When your ass is warm,
Air-raid alarm!
We were not allowed to enter the air-raid shelters: we gathered in the vast spaces that had not yet been built up, on the periphery of the worksite. As the bombs began to fall, and I lay on the frozen mud and sparse grass, fingering the cylinders in my pocket, I reflected on the strangeness of my destiny, of our destinies as leaves on a branch, and of human destinies in general. According to Alberto, a flint for a lighter was worth a ration of bread, that is, a day of life; I had stolen at least forty cylinders, from each of which could be made three finished flints. In total, a hundred and twenty flints, two months of life for me and two for Alberto, and in two months the Russians would have arrived and liberated us: and in the end the cerium would have liberated us. It was an element that I knew nothing about, apart from its single practical application, and that it belongs to the equivocal and heretical family of the rare earth elements, and that its name has nothing to do with wax, and evokes not its discoverer but, rather (great modesty of the chemists of the past!), the dwarf planet Ceres, the metal and the star having been discovered in the same year, 1801. And perhaps this was an affectionate and ironic homage to alchemical coupling: as the Sun was gold and Mars iron, so Ceres had to be cerium.
At night I brought out the cylinders, Alberto a piece of metal with a round hole in it: this was the stipulated caliber to which we would have to trim the cylinders in order to transform them into flints and hence into bread.
What followed should be judged with caution. Alberto said that we had to reduce the cylinders by scraping them with a knife, secretly, so that no competitor could steal the secret. When? At night. Where? In the wooden barrack where we slept, under the covers and on top of our pallets filled with shavings; that is, we risked starting a fire and, more realistically, risked hanging, since this was the punishment to which those who, among other things, lit a match in the barracks were sentenced.
One always hesitates to judge rash actions, one’s own or others’, after these have had a good outcome: perhaps they were not, then, so rash? Or perhaps it’s true that there is a God who protects children, fools, and drunkards? Or perhaps again such actions have more weight and heat than the innumerable actions that come to a bad end, and so are recounted more willingly? But we did not then pose these questions: the Lager had given us a crazy familiarity with danger and with death, and to risk the noose for more to eat seemed to us a logical choice, indeed obvious.
While our companions slept, we worked with our knives, night after night. The scene was so grim you could weep: a single electric bulb weakly illumined the big wooden shed, and in the shadowy light, as in a vast cavern, the faces of our companions were visible, overcome by sleep and by dreams: tinged with death, they wiggled their jaws, in dreams of eating. Many had a bare, skeletal arm or leg hanging off the edge of their pallet; others groaned or talked in their sleep.
But the two of us were alive and did not succumb to sleep. We kept the blanket raised with our knees, and under that improvised tent we scraped the cylinders blindly, by feel; at every cut a faint squeak could be heard, and a sheaf of tiny yellow stars could be seen rising. At intervals, we tested the cylinder to see if it fit through the sample hole: if it didn’t, we continued to scrape; if it did, we broke off the pared-down trunk and put it carefully aside.
We worked for three nights; nothing happened, no one was aware of our activity, neither the covers nor the pallet caught fire, and in this way we won the bread that kept us alive until the Russians arrived, and took comfort in the trust and friendship that united us. What happened to me is written elsewhere. Alberto left on foot with the majority when the front was near: the Germans made them walk for days and nights in the snow and cold, killing all who could not continue; then they loaded them onto open train cars, which carried the few survivors to a new chapter of slavery, at Buchenwald and Mauthausen. No more than a quarter of those who left survived the march.
Alberto did not return, and of him no trace remains; for some years after the war ended, someone from his town, half visionary and half swindler, lived by peddling to his mother, for a price, false consoling news.
Chromium
The main course was fish, but the wine was red. Versino, the petty despot of maintenance, said that was all nonsense, provided the wine and the fish were good: he was sure that most supporters of the orthodoxy would not have been able to distinguish a glass of white from a glass of red with their eyes closed. Bruni, from the Nitro Department, asked if anyone knew why fish goes with white: various joking comments were heard, but no one could answer in a comprehensive way. Old Cometto added that life is full of customs whose root can no longer be traced: the blue color of the paper of a package of sugar, buttoning on different sides for men and women, the shape of a gondola prow, and the innumerable alimentary compatibilities and incompatibilities, of which the one under debate was a particular case: but why, for example, was ham obligatory with lentils and cheese with macaroni?
I took a rapid mental survey to make sure that none of those present had yet heard it, then began telling the story of the onion in boiled linseed oil. This, in fact, was a cafeteria for paint makers, and it’s well-known that for many centuries boiled linseed oil (ölidlinköit, pronounced in the dialect of Piedmont) constituted the primary material of our art. It’s an ancient art, and therefore noble: the most remote testimony is in Genesis 6:14, where it is told how, in accordance with precise instructions from the Almighty, Noah (likely using a brush) covered the Ark, inside and out, with molten pitch. But it’s also a subtly fraudulent art, one that aims at hiding the substrate, endowing it with the color and appearance of what it is not: in this guise it’s a relative of cosmetics and adornment, which are equally devious arts and almost equally ancient (Isaiah 3:16 ff.). Given these multimillennial origins, then, it’s not so very strange that the job of making paints contains in its recesses (in spite of the innumerable stimuli it has received in modern times from other, related technologies) rudiments of customs and procedures long since abandoned.
To return, then, to boiled linseed oil, I told the diners that in a book of formulas printed around 1942 I had found the instruction to introduce into the oil, near the end of the heating, two slices of onion, without any comment on the purpose of this curious additive. I had mentioned it in 1949 to Signor Giacomasso Olindo, my predecessor and teacher, who was then over seventy and had been making paints for fifty years, and he, smiling benevolently under his thick white whiskers, had explained to me that, in effect, when he was young and heated the oil himself, thermometers had not yet come into use: one judged the temperature by observing the smoke, or spitting in the oil, or, more rationally, dipping into it a slice of onion stuck on the tip of a skewer: when the onion began to brown, the heating was done. Evidently, with the passing of the years, what had been a crude method of measurement had lost its meaning, and been transformed into a mysterious and magical practice.
Old Cometto recounted an analogous episode. Not without nostalgia, he evoked his own good old days, the days of copals: he told how at one time the ölidlinköit was combined with these legendary resins to make fabulously durable and shiny paints. Their fame and their name survive now only in the expression scarpe di coppale, “patent-leather shoes,” which alludes to a “paint” for leather that at one time was widespread but fell into disuse
at least half a century ago; today the locution itself is almost extinct. Copals were imported by the English from remote and savage countries, from which they got their names, distinguishing one variety from another: Madagascar copal, Sierra Leone copal, Kauri copal (whose deposits, incidentally, ran out around 1967), the famous and noble Congo copal. Copals are fossil resins of vegetal origin, with a rather high melting point, and, in the state in which they’re found and sold, insoluble in oils: to make them soluble and compatible, they were subjected to a violent, half-destructive heating, in the course of which their acidity diminished (they decarboxylated) and their melting point was reduced. The operation was carried out by hand in modest boilers of two or three quintals that could be heated over a direct flame and, having wheels, were movable; they were weighed at intervals during the heating, and when the resin had lost 16 percent of its weight in smoke, water vapor, and carbon dioxide, it was judged to be soluble in oil. Around 1940, the archaic copals, expensive and difficult to get during the war, were replaced by suitably modified phenolic and maleic resins, which, besides costing less, were directly compatible with the oils. Well, Cometto told us how, until 1953, in a factory whose name I will not mention, a phenolic resin, which replaced Congo copal in a formula, was treated exactly like copal itself, that is, it was heated on a flame, amid pestilential phenolic fumes, until it was 16 percent consumed and had achieved the solubility in oil that it already had.
Here I pointed out that languages are full of images and metaphors whose origin is being lost, along with the art they were derived from: since equitation has declined to the status of an expensive sport, by now the expressions “belly to the ground” and “champ at the bit” are unintelligible and sound strange; with the disappearance of mills using grindstones, also called palmenti, where for centuries grain was ground (and so were paints), the phrase macinare (“grind”) or mangiare a quattro palmenti, “to eat heartily,” has lost any reference, but is still mechanically repeated. In the same way, since Nature, too, is a conserver, we carry in our coccyx what remains of a vanished tail.
Bruni told us about a matter in which he himself was implicated, and as he was speaking I was overwhelmed by faint, sweet sensations that I will try to explain later: I should preface this by saying that from 1955 to 1965 Bruni worked in a big factory on the shore of a lake, the same place where I had learned the rudiments of paint-making in the years 1946–47. He said that, when he was in charge of the Synthetic Paints Department there, he had come upon a formula for an anti-rust agent for chromates that contained an absurd component: no less than ammonium chloride, the old alchemical sal ammoniac of the temple of Ammon, which is much more liable to corrode iron than to preserve it from rust. He had asked his superiors and the old people in the department: surprised and somewhat outraged, they answered that the salt “had always been there,” in that formula, which corresponded to at least twenty or thirty tons of production a month and had existed for at least ten years, and who did he think he was, so young in years and employment, to criticize the experience of the factory, and to look for trouble by asking the why and the wherefore. If ammonium chloride was in the formula, that was a sign that it was useful in some way; what it was useful for no one knew any longer, but he should be careful about getting rid of it, because “you never know.” Bruni is a rationalist, and he was disappointed; but he is also a prudent man and had accepted the advice, and so in that formula, and in that lakeshore factory, in the absence of further developments, ammonium chloride is still added; and yet today it is totally useless, as I can declare with full knowledge of the case, because I was the one who introduced it into the formula.
The episode cited by Bruni, about the rust preventative for chromates and ammonium chloride, hurled me back in time, to the harsh January of 1946, when meat and coal were still rationed, nobody had a car, and never in Italy had there been so much hope and so much freedom in the air.
But I had been back from prison for three months, and I found life hard. The things I had seen and suffered burned inside me; I felt closer to the dead than to the living, and guilty for being a man, because men had built Auschwitz, and Auschwitz had swallowed up millions of human beings, many of them my friends, and a woman who was dear to me. It seemed to me that I would be purified by telling, and I felt like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who grabs the wedding guest on the way to the wedding, to inflict on him his story of evil. I wrote short, bloody poems, I told my story giddily, speaking and writing, so that little by little a book was born: writing, I found a brief peace and I felt myself become a man again, a man like all men, neither martyr nor villain nor saint, one of those who start a family and look to the future rather than to the past.
Since one cannot survive on poems and stories, I looked anxiously for work, and found it in the big lakeshore factory, still damaged by the war, and besieged in those months by mud and ice. No one paid much attention to me: colleagues, director, and laborers had other things to think about, the son who hadn’t returned from Russia, the stove without wood, the shoes without soles, the warehouses without supplies, the windows without glass, the cold that burst the pipes, inflation, want, and virulent local feuds. I had kindly been granted a rickety desk in the laboratory, a noisy, drafty workplace full of people coming and going with rags and cans, and had been assigned no definite task; unoccupied as a chemist and in a state of complete alienation (though it was not called that at the time), I wrote, in no order, page after page of the memories that were poisoning me, and my colleagues looked at me stealthily, as if I were a harmless lunatic. The book grew in my hands almost spontaneously, without plan or system, intricate and crowded as a termite nest. Every so often, driven by professional conscience, I got in touch with the director and asked for a job, but he was too busy to worry about my scruples: I should read, study. In the matter of paints I was still, if he might say, illiterate. Was I not employed? Well, I should praise God and stay in the library: if I really had the urge to make myself useful, here, there were articles to translate from German.
One day he called me in and with an oblique light in his eyes announced that he had a small job for me. He led me into a corner of the courtyard, near the boundary wall: there, piled up every which way, were thousands of square blocks, of a vivid orange color, the ones at the bottom crushed by those on top. He told me to touch them: they were gelatinous and soft, and had the unpleasant consistency of butchered guts. I said to the director that, apart from the color, they seemed to be livers, and he praised me: that was what was written in the paint manuals! He explained to me that the phenomenon that had produced them was in English called just that, “livering,” and in Italian impolmonimento, “lung-ing”; under certain conditions, certain paints go from a liquid state to a solid state with the consistency of a liver or lung, and have to be thrown away. Those parallelepiped bodies had been cans of paint: the paint had “livered,” the cans had been cut off, and the contents had been thrown onto the garbage pile.
That paint, he told me, had been produced during the war and immediately afterward; it contained a basic chromate and an alkyd resin. Perhaps the chromate was too basic or the resin too acid: those are precisely the conditions under which livering can happen. Here, he was giving me that pile of ancient sins; I was to think about it, conduct tests and examinations, and be able to tell him specifically why the problem had occurred, what to do so that it wasn’t repeated, and whether it was possible to salvage the damaged product.
Laid out like that, half chemical and half detective work, the problem attracted me: I was considering it that evening (it was a Saturday), as one of the cold, smoky freight trains of the time was hauling me toward Turin. Now, it happened that the following day destiny had reserved for me a different and unique gift: a meeting with a young woman, of flesh and blood, warm against my side through our coats, cheerful amid the damp fog of the avenues, patient, knowing, and confident as we passed through streets still lined with ruins. Within a few hours we knew that we belonged
to each other, not for a meeting but for a lifetime, as in fact it has been. Within a few hours I felt new and full of new powers, washed clean and cured of the long illness, finally ready to enter life with joy and strength; likewise, the world around me was suddenly cured, and the name and face of the woman who had descended to hell with me and had not returned were exorcised. My writing itself became a different adventure, no longer the painful journey of a convalescent, no longer a beggar seeking compassion and friendly faces, but a lucid construction, and no longer solitary: the work of a chemist who weighs and divides, measures and judges on solid evidence, and does his best to respond to the whys. Along with the liberating relief that belongs to the veteran who tells his story, I felt in writing a complex, intense new pleasure, similar to that of the student who penetrates the solemn order of differential calculus. It was exhilarating to seek and find, or create, the right word, that is, fitting, concise, and strong; to draw things out of memory and describe them with the greatest rigor and the least mass. Paradoxically, my baggage of atrocious memories became a wealth, a seed; it seemed to me that, as I wrote, I was growing like a plant.
In the freight train the following Monday, crushed in the sleepy crowd and muffled in scarves, I felt happy and intent as never before or since. I was ready to challenge everything and everyone, just as I had challenged and defeated Auschwitz and solitude: prepared, in particular, to do joyful battle with the bulky pyramid of orange livers that awaited me on the shore of the lake.