by Primo Levi
Lily, sent to death by a cold wave of the hand of her Kapo, who suspects she is her rival in love. Maria, who enters the Lager without revealing her pregnancy, binding her abdomen to hide it, because she wants the baby to come into the world. And, indeed, the baby is born, in the nocturnal bedlam of the filthy, crowded barracks, with no light, no water, not a clean cloth, amid the collective madness and the reawakened compassion of the most hardened prisoners; this may be the most memorable page of the book. However, the roll call is sacred, no one can miss it, the woman giving birth and the baby are losing blood, and by the end of the roll call they are dead.
Bruna rediscovers Pinin, her adolescent son, in an adjoining Lager; they embrace across the electrified wire fence and are electrocuted. The Russian Zina loses her life to help Ivan escape. She doesn’t know him, but she perceives an imaginary likeness between Ivan and her husband, Grigori, killed by the Nazis. Two Dutch sisters, one of whom chooses the path to the brothel, while the other rejects it, stoically refusing her sister’s gifts. The loving wife, torn apart by two possible destinies: to remain faithful to her husband, and starve to death, or to give in, dishonoring herself but surviving for him.
From each of these human journeys through an inhuman world comes an aura of lyrical sadness, uncontaminated by anger or unseemly lamentation, and a painful knowledge of the world, demonstrating that the author did not suffer in vain.
La Stampa, June 29, 1979
1. The English translation is Smoke Over Birkenau (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991).
That Train to Auschwitz
Dear Rosanna,1
Although I haven’t (so far) had the pleasure of meeting you, I feel I am a friend of yours and in many ways close to you. You are asking, for Gli Altri, for testimony about the time when I, too, like all the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, was defined as “other,” that is, was condemned to the condition of an outsider—more than that, of an enemy. I think that this punishment, which implies expulsion from the society of those who are “normal,” always comes from the outside, as no one, or almost no one, feels or becomes “other” spontaneously; therefore it is always painful. For the Italian Jews that punishment was very painful, although initially less tragic than elsewhere, precisely because they neither were nor felt “other”: they had been integrated into the rest of the nation for hundreds or thousands of years, they had the same customs, language, flaws, and strengths of other Italians. In particular, they had reacted to fascism, like everyone else, which means that they accepted it with resignation or skepticism and, in a few cases, enthusiasm. In 1938, when the racial laws were promulgated in Italy, I was a nineteen-year-old student: the separation from those of my age and my friends who weren’t Jews was painful, but not (at least for me) humiliating. The accusations made in the papers against all Italian Jews were too grotesque to be believed and in fact were given little credence by the public, including die-hard Fascists. From this point of view, the Italian people proved disinclined to accept the certification of superiority over Jews that was freely granted to them by the racial laws. Like many in my position, I reacted to the silly allegations of the propaganda by building, more or less consciously, a minority awareness, or, rather, a sense of pride that I hadn’t possessed before.
Things got suddenly worse in September 1943, when northern Italy was occupied by German troops. A real manhunt was unleashed in every Italian city: German and, unfortunately, also Italian police squads searched the refuges where Jews who couldn’t or wouldn’t emigrate were hiding, often relying on reports by paid informers. Of the approximately 35,000 Jews who lived in Italy, they found 8,000, and those were precisely the most defenseless and incautious, the poor, the sick, the old people without assistance. In this, the Nazi persecution was truly of an unprecedented cruelty: in the absurd inclusiveness of the slaughter, which didn’t stop even at the dying or at children.
I was arrested as a partisan, in Valle d’Aosta, but was immediately recognized as a Jew. I was taken first to the transit camp of Fòssoli, near Modena, and from there, in late February 1944, to Auschwitz: but this name, dreadful as it is today, wasn’t known to anyone at the time. Our train, made up of freight cars, carried 650 people, 50 in each car; the journey lasted five days, during which food was distributed, but no water. At our destination, we were made to get off; in a rapid selection three groups were formed: the men and, respectively, the women fit for work (96 men and 29 women) and everybody else, that is, the elderly, the sick, children, and women with children. Everyone in that group, numbering 525, was sent directly to the gas chambers and the crematoriums, without even being registered in the camp. As I learned later in the Lager, this ratio of about one to four was nearly the same for all the trains: one Jew to work versus four to death. The slaughter was therefore more important than economic exploitation.
My personal fate, which I described in my book If This Is a Man, was quite different from that of a typical Auschwitz prisoner: the typical prisoner died of exhaustion, or of diseases due to hunger or vitamin deficiencies, within a few weeks or months. It’s enough to say that the official food ration was about 1600 calories daily, which is barely enough for a man at absolute rest, while prisoners were forced to work hard, in a cold climate, and with insufficient and inadequate clothes. I repeat: each of us survivors was favored by fortune. My fortune was manifold: during a year of captivity I was never ill, and on the other hand I became ill at the right time, when the Lager was abandoned by the Germans, who for obscure reasons failed or forgot to exterminate the sick prisoners unable to follow them in their flight before the advancing Red Army. I met a “free” Italian mason who for many months secretly brought me soup and bread. Finally, in the last, and coldest, months of 1944, I was able to make use of my training as a chemist to be assigned to a less demanding and uncomfortable job in a testing laboratory.
Of the 96 men who entered the camp with me 15 survived, and of the 29 women 8 survived. Thus, among the 650 deportees on our train there were 23 survivors, that is, 3.5 percent. But that was a lucky train because it left Italy a little less than a year before the liberation: almost no one survived two or three years of prison. The overall total, which I learned only upon my return to Italy, but which matches what I lived and saw personally, stands at around six million victims: a figure given by the Nazi perpetrators themselves who couldn’t escape justice. About three and a half million of those victims were killed in Auschwitz.
This is my experience, and it marked me deeply. Its symbol is the tattoo that I still carry on my arm: my name when I had no name, the number 174517. It marked me, but it didn’t take away my wish to live. On the contrary, it strengthened it, because it gave a purpose to my life: to bear witness so that nothing like this will ever happen again. This is the purpose of my books.
Gli Altri, Second Quarter, 1979
1. Rosanna Benzi (1948–1991) was an Italian writer who contracted polio as a teenager and lived her entire adult life in an iron lung. An advocate for the rights of the disabled, in 1976 she launched the magazine Gli Altri (The Others).
Europe in Hell
From the distance of forty years that separates us from August 1939, our state of mind and behavior of that time can’t help rousing astonishment, even in us. By “us” I mean the Jewish minority in Italy, which was artificially cut out of the rest of the country through the racial laws, and which for two years had been the target of an incessant propaganda campaign, insulted, banished to the margins of society, slandered, humiliated. Of course, this is an antihistorical astonishment, the kind of optical illusion whereby, when the future has become the past, we pretend that already at that time—when it was still an authentic future—it could be deciphered and deduced like the past itself. It is, precisely, hindsight, and the phenomenon whereby, after the facts, everybody feels retrospectively farsighted and accuses everyone else of having not been.
When I think of the deliberate blindness that kept (and still keeps) the Germans from probing th
e depths of the dark abyss of Nazism, I notice a paradoxical analogy with the parallel blindness of many European Jewish communities: both the perpetrators and the victims rejected the truth.
The reasons for this rejection were certainly not the same. The Germans preferred to close their eyes to the bitter end in order to avoid feeling like accomplices in Nazi crimes: they stubbornly denied the evidence until the end of the war, and some of them still deny it. The Jews threatened by the Nazi invasion often refused to acknowledge this danger for a variety of reasons, different from country to country. If we limit ourselves to the Italian situation at the time, we can observe that the lack of zeal with which the Fascist government applied the racial laws was disastrous for many. The winks, the leniency easily bought, the complicity, the corruption made most Italian Jews believe that it would continue indefinitely that way—asserting and denying, prohibiting and permitting, in a lax atmosphere reinforced by fascism’s gradual loss of credibility. This way of seeing and foreseeing events was not without logic; it was not illogical to expect that Fascist Italy, obviously unprepared for war, would behave with ambiguous prudence, as, in fact, Franco’s Spain did later.
There were additional reasons for this deliberate lack of acknowledgment. Most Italian Jews had neither the means nor the courage necessary to emigrate and, as often happens, the sense of impotence that derived from this condition was repressed, or, rather, distorted: “I can’t” became “I don’t want,” as with Phaedrus’ fox, which couldn’t reach the grapes. Also: integration with the Catholic majority was deep and centuries old, and had led to a mutual acceptance probably unique in the modern world. Finally: Italian Jews censored and repressed the news about the atrocities already taking place in Germany (we had learned of Kristallnacht in the Fascist press) precisely because of the intrinsic horror, as many people do when confronted with incurable diseases.
At the time, I was just twenty years old, and was morally and politically unprepared: I was not equipped to fight this dangerous blindness either in myself or in others, friends and relatives. News of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, and, immediately afterward, of England and France entering the war and of the swift German advance into Poland, caused a brutal and painful awakening. Only then did we realize that we could soon turn from spectators to protagonists—as members of the Resistance or as victims—which in fact is what happened immediately after the armistice of September 8, 1943. I remember very clearly my reaction, irrational and symbolic, to the news of the war broadcast on the radio. My family, with my father gravely ill, was vacationing in the upper Lanzo Valley. We decided to return to Turin, but I, instead of waiting for the very slow bus, grabbed my bike and hurtled down along the sharp bends of the steep descent, like someone who is trying to run away from his destiny.
La Stampa, August 27, 1979
One Night
It was very cold and still. The sun had set a few minutes earlier, sinking obliquely behind a horizon that, in the clarity of the air, appeared close, and leaving a luminous yellow-green trail that extended almost to the zenith. Meanwhile in the east the sky was opaque, purplish, obscured by large gray cumuli that seemed to weigh on the frozen land like deflated balloons. The air was dry and smelled like ice.
There was no human trace on the whole plateau except for the train tracks that stretched straight as far as the eye could see and appeared to converge at the point where the sun had just vanished; in the opposite direction they disappeared into the farthest edge of the woods. The land was slightly rolling and covered with small oaks and beeches that the prevailing wind had tilted to the south, bending some of the treetops all the way to the ground. But that day was completely calm. Calcareous rocks whittled by rain and encrusted with fossilized shells appeared on the surface of the ground: rough and white, they looked like the bones of buried animals. From the cracks protruded sticks carbonized by a recent fire. There was no grass, just yellow and red stains of lichen stuck to the rock.
The roar could be heard before the train was visible: in the silence of the plateau, the sound was transmitted through the rock and the ice like underground thunder. The train was fast, and soon one could discern that it was made up of only three boxcars in addition to the engine. When it got closer, the high-pitched drone of the racing diesels could be heard, along with the whistle of air lacerated by its forward motion. The train overtook the observation point in a flash, and both drone and whistle decreased by a tone; it hurtled on between birch trees and the occasional beech on the edge of the woods. Here the tracks were covered by a thick layer of dry, fragile brown leaves. The wave of rushing air collided with the leaves before the train even touched them, lifting them in a scattered cloud—higher than the highest trees, stirred by the gusts of wind like a swarm of bees—that accompanied the train on its course and made it visible from afar. The leaves were light but their mass was large: in spite of its momentum, the train was obliged to slow down.
A shapeless pile of leaves formed in front of the locomotive, which it split in two like a prow: some of the leaves ended up crushed between the tracks and the wheels, increasing the work of the engine and forcing it to slow down even more. At the same time, the friction between the train and the leaves—both the leaves in the piles and the ones that circled about—electrified the air, the train, and the leaves themselves. Large purple sparks streaked from the train to the ground, creating a tangle of luminous fragments against the dark backdrop of the woods. The air was heavy with ozone and the acrid odor of burned paper.
The mass of leaves in front of the locomotive grew thicker and the wheels’ grip on the tracks grew weaker until the train stopped, though the engines continued to churn at their maximum strength. The locomotive’s wheels, spinning in vain, grew red hot, and even the section of track beneath each wheel became almost incandescent; waves of fire, originating from these incandescent points, rippled over the leaves on the ground, but were spent after a few meters. There was a click, the engines were turned off, and everything was silent again. The face of the engineer appeared at the window of the locomotive, wide and pale: he stared into space, motionless. All the leaves had fallen to the ground. Nothing happened for a long time, but the light crackling of the leaves in front of the locomotive could be heard as they settled back into their position of repose: the pile slowly increased in volume, like rising dough.
Fascinated by the train, some crows had come to rest, and they pecked spitefully at the rocks and the leaves, croaking softly. Just before nightfall they became silent, then all together they took flight; something must have scared them. In fact, from among the trees came a rhythmic rustling, subdued but widespread: from the woods emerged a group of cautious little people. They were men and women of short stature, slim, in dark clothes; on their feet they wore coarse felt boots. They approached the train hesitantly, consulting one another in whispers. They didn’t seem to have a leader: nevertheless, determination prevailed over doubt. They gathered around the cars, and soon the creaking of their weight was followed by a metallic rustling like that of an anthill that has been disturbed. The little men and women busied themselves around the train; they must have had various implements hidden under their padded jackets, because the indistinct murmur was punctuated by dry crashes and the screech of saws.
Toward sunrise, the steel plates and wood that the cars were made of had been removed, piece by piece, and stacked up beside the tracks, but some of the people, not contented, attacked the stacks furiously in small groups, with hacksaws, shears, and hammers: they tore apart, broke up, and destroyed, as if all order and all structure conflicted with some ideal they shared. A pile of bits of wood had been set ablaze and the demolishers took turns standing near it to warm their hands. Meanwhile, others were occupied with the beams and girders of the framework; a single individual would not have seen the end of it in a year, but they were many and they were resolute, and their numbers grew by the hour. Intent and silent they labored, and the work progressed rapidly: when someone proved unable to d
estroy a piece, another, more capable or stronger, would push him aside and take his place. Often two would quarrel over a piece, tugging on it from opposite ends. The frames demolished, they busied themselves with the trucks, the shafts, and the wheel discs; it was astonishing how, with such primitive instruments, they managed to get on with their work. They would not abandon a part until it was bent, split, sawed into two unequal parts, splintered, or otherwise rendered unusable.
Demolishing the engine appeared to be more difficult. They worked on it for several hours, taking turns in no apparent order. Many, perhaps to rest, had crammed into the engineer’s cab, where a little of the heat from the engines still lingered, but others pulled them out to continue with the work. Soon they formed a chain, starting inside the cab and beside the piles of already removed fragments, and ending in the woods. The unrecognizable segments of the body, of the framework, of the engines, of the electrical system were passed from hand to hand in the uncertain light of dawn; thus, too, the inert body of the engineer. Once the engine, with all its delicate mechanisms, had been dismantled and destroyed, the little people attacked the rails and demolished about a hundred meters in each direction, while others, with great effort, extracted the ties from the frozen ground and split them with axes.
When the sun rose, nothing remained of the train, but the crowd did not disperse; the most vigorous, with those same axes, attacked the bases of the nearest birch trees, felled them, and stripped them of their branches; others, in pairs or in groups, flung themselves against one another with deliberate blows. Some were seen blindly striking themselves.