by Primo Levi
“Greetings, Italians,” he said. “Ciao, Pisan.” Then there was silence again; we were lying side by side on the sacks, and soon Valerio and I had slipped into a half-sleep swarming with images. You didn’t need to be horizontal for this; in moments of repose you might fall asleep on your feet. Not so Rappoport, who, while he detested the work, had one of those fiery temperaments that can’t bear inaction. He took a knife out of his pocket and began to sharpen it on a rock, spitting on it occasionally; but this wasn’t enough, either. He addressed Valerio, who was already snoring.
“Wake up, kid. What did you dream about—ravioli, right? And wine from Chianti—at the cafeteria on Via dei Mille, six lire fifty. And the steaks, psza crew, steaks from the black market as big as your plate—a great country, Italy. And then Margherita . . .” Here he leered in a jovial fashion and slapped his thigh loudly with one hand. Valerio had awakened, and was curled up, with a curdled smile on his sallow little face. Almost no one ever spoke to him, but I don’t think he could have suffered much from it; Rappoport, however, often talked to him, surrendering to a wave of Pisan memories with true abandon. To me it was clear that, for Rappoport, Valerio represented simply a pretext for those moments of mental vacation; for Valerio, on the other hand, they were pledges of friendship, the precious friendship of someone powerful, bestowed on Valerio, with a generous hand from man to man, if not exactly from equal to equal.
“What, you didn’t know Margherita? You were never together? Then what sort of Pisan are you? That was a woman who could wake the dead: nice and neat during the day, and at night a true artist. . . .” Here a whistle was heard, and then another. The sound seemed to have arisen at a remote distance but bore down on us like locomotives on a mad course; the ground shook, the cement beams of the ceiling vibrated for a second as if they were made of rubber, and finally the two explosions burst, followed by a roar of devastation and, in us, the voluptuous relief from pain. Valerio had dragged himself into a corner, hidden his face in the crook of his elbow as if to protect himself from a slap, and was praying under his breath.
A new, monstrous whistle arose. The younger generations of Europe aren’t acquainted with that hissing sound; it couldn’t have been accidental—someone must have intended it, to give the bombs a voice that expressed their thirst and their threat. I rolled off the sacks and against the wall. The explosion arrived, very close, almost physical, and then the vast breath of the sucking up. Rappoport was roaring with laughter. “You wet your pants, eh, Pisano? Wait, wait, the best is yet to come.”
“You’ve got strong nerves,” I said, and out of high school memory surfaced the bold image of Capaneus—faded, as if from a previous incarnation—who from the depths of Hell challenges Jove and mocks his thunderbolts.
“It’s not a question of nerves but of theory. Of accounts: it’s my secret weapon.”
Now, at that time I was weary; it was an ancient, incarnate weariness, which had become part of my flesh, and which I believed irrevocable. It wasn’t the sort of weariness we all know—the sort that, superimposed on well-being, veils it like a temporary paralysis—but, rather, a definitive void, an amputation. I felt spent, like a gun that has been shot, and Valerio was like me, maybe less consciously, and all the others were like us. Rappoport’s vitality, which under other circumstances I would have admired (and in fact today I do), appeared to me intrusive, insolent: if our skin wasn’t worth two cents, his, although Polish and sated, wasn’t worth much more, and it was irritating that he refused to recognize it. As for that business of theory and accounts, I had no wish to stay and hear it. I had other things to do: sleep, if the masters of the sky would let me; if not, suck on my fear in peace, like every sensible person.
But it wasn’t easy to repress Rappoport, to avoid or ignore him. “What, you’re sleeping? I’m about to make my will and you’re sleeping. Maybe my bomb is already on the way, and I don’t want to miss my chance. If I were free, I’d write a book of my philosophy. For now, I can only tell it to you two wretches. If it’s useful to you, so much the better; if not, and if you make it and I don’t, which would certainly be odd, you’ll be able to circulate it, and maybe it will come at the right moment for someone. Not that I much care about that, though. I don’t have the makings of a benefactor.
“So, as long as I could, I drank, ate, made love, and left flat, gray Poland for your Italy; I studied, learned, traveled, and observed. I kept my eyes open, I didn’t waste a crumb; I was diligent, I don’t think anyone could have done more or better. Things went well for me, I accumulated a large quantity of good, and all that good didn’t disappear, but is in me, safe and sound—I won’t let it fade. I’ve kept it. No one can take it away from me.
“Then I ended up here. I’ve been here for twenty months, and for twenty months I’ve kept my accounts. I’m in the black, and quite a few accounts are still active. It would take many more months of the camp, or many days of torture, to use up my balance. Besides”—and he caressed his stomach affectionately—“with a little initiative, even here, every so often, you can find something good. So, in the regrettable case that one of you survives me, you will be able to say that Leon Rappoport got what was owed him, left neither debts nor credits, did not complain and did not ask for pity. If I meet Hitler in the other world, I’ll spit in his face with every right . . .” A bomb fell not far away, followed by a rumbling like a landslide; one of the storehouses must have collapsed. Rappoport had to raise his voice almost to a shout: “. . . because he didn’t get me!”
I saw Rappoport only once again, only for a few seconds, and his image stayed with me in the almost photographic form of this last appearance. I was sick in the camp infirmary in January 1945. From my cot a stretch of the roadway between two barracks was visible, where a trail was marked in the deep snow. The infirmary workers often passed by there, in pairs, carrying the dead or nearly dead on stretchers. One day, I saw two stretcher bearers, one of whom was striking because of his height, and a peremptory, authoritative obesity, unusual in those places. I recognized Rappoport, and, going to the window, rapped on the glass. He stopped, grimaced at me in a gay and suggestive manner, and raised his hand in a broad gesture of greeting, so that his sad burden tilted indecorously to one side.
Two days later the camp was evacuated, in the terrible circumstances that are well-known. I have reason to think that Rappoport did not survive; and so I consider it my duty to carry out the task that was entrusted to me.
The Juggler
We called them Grüne Spitzen (“green triangles”), common criminals, Befauer (from the abbreviation BV which was their official designation, and which in turn was the abbreviation of something like “prisoners in limited preventive detention”).1 We lived with them, obeyed them, feared and hated them, but we knew almost nothing about them; in fact, not much is known even now. They were the green triangles, Germans already imprisoned in ordinary jails, who had been offered, on the basis of mysterious criteria, the alternative of serving their sentence in a camp rather than in a prison. Generally they were despicable types; many of them boasted that they lived better in the camp than at home, because, besides the pleasure of giving orders, they had a free hand with the rations intended for us; many were murderers in the strict sense of the word. They made no secret of it and showed it in their behavior.
Eddy (probably a stage name) was a green triangle, but he wasn’t a murderer. He had two careers: he was a juggler and, in his spare time, a thief. In June of 1944 he became our vice Kapo, and immediately stood out for several unusual qualities. He had a dazzling beauty. Fair, of average height but slender, strong, and extremely agile, he had fine features and skin so clear that it seemed transparent; he couldn’t have been more than twenty-three. He didn’t give a damn about anything or anyone, the SS, the work, us; he was distinguished by an air of serenity and, at the same time, self-absorption. He became famous the very day of his arrival: in the bathhouse, after carefully washing himself with a bar of scented soap, he stood
, completely naked, and placed the soap on top of his head, which, like ours, was shaved; then he bent forward and, with expert, precise, yet imperceptible undulations of his back, slid the sumptuous soap slowly from his head to his neck, then down along his spine, to the coccyx, where it dropped into his hand. Two or three of us applauded, but he gave no sign of noticing, and went off slowly, distractedly, to get dressed.
On the job he was unpredictable. Sometimes he did the work of ten, but even in the more tedious jobs he was sure to display his professional gift. He would be shoveling dirt, and all of a sudden you’d see him stop, grab the shovel like a guitar, and improvise a song, beating with a rock, sometimes on the handle, then on the blade. He would be carrying bricks and, returning at his dancing, dreamy pace, would suddenly be whirling in a rapid somersault. Other days, he would huddle in a corner without lifting a finger, but, because he was capable of such extraordinary feats, no one dared to say anything to him. He wasn’t an exhibitionist: in his games, he didn’t care at all who was standing around; he seemed, rather, preoccupied with perfecting the performance, repeating, improving, like an unsatisfied poet who never stops correcting. Sometimes we’d see him search through the scrap iron scattered around the worksite, pick up a rim, a rod, a remnant of sheet metal, and attentively turn it over in his hands, balance it on a finger, spin it in the air, as if he wished to penetrate its essence and construct a new game out of it.
One day a freight car arrived full of cardboard tubes, like those which hold rolls of fabric, and our squad was sent to unload them. Eddy led me into an underground storeroom, set up a wooden slide under the window, on which my companions would send down the tubes, showed me how I was to pile them in an orderly fashion against the walls, and left. Through the window, I could see my companions, happy because of that unusually light work, but hesitant and clumsy in their movements, commuting between the freight car and the storeroom, carrying twenty or thirty tubes on each trip. Eddy sometimes carried a few and sometimes a lot, but never at random. On every round, he was studying new structures and architectures, as unstable but as symmetrical as castles of cards; on one trip he twirled four or five tubes in the air, as jugglers do with rubber balls.
In that cellar I was alone, and I was anxious to complete an important job. I had obtained a sheet of paper and a stub of pencil, and for days I had been waiting for an opportunity to write the draft of a letter, in Italian naturally, that I wanted to deliver to an Italian worker so that he could copy it, sign it as his own, and send it to my family in Italy. We were, in fact, strictly forbidden to write, but I was sure that, if I thought about it for a moment, I would find a way to put together a message clear enough for my family and yet so innocent that it wouldn’t rouse the attention of the censors. I mustn’t be seen by anyone, because the sole fact of writing was intrinsically suspicious (for what reason, and to whom, would one of us be writing?), and the Lager and the site were swarming with informers. After an hour of work on the tubes, I felt safe enough to begin the draft; the tubes came down the slide at infrequent intervals and in the cellar no alarming sounds could be heard.
I hadn’t counted on Eddy’s silent footsteps; he was already looking at me when I became aware of him. Instinctively, or, rather, stupidly, I unclasped my fingers; the pencil fell, but the paper wafted to the floor like a dead leaf. Eddy grabbed it, then he knocked me down with a violent slap. And yet as I write the word “slap” I realize that I’m lying, or at least conveying to the reader false emotions and information. Eddy was not a brute, and didn’t mean to punish me or make me suffer; in the Lager a slap had a meaning very different from what it might have for us today, and here. That is, it had a meaning: it was a mode of expression, which in that context meant, approximately, “Watch out, now you’ve done it—you’re putting yourself in danger, maybe without knowing it, and putting me in danger, too.” But between Eddy the German thief and juggler, and me the young inexperienced Italian, bewildered and confused, a conversation like that would have been vain, not understood (if only for linguistic reasons), out of place, tortuous.
For the same reason, punches and slaps passed between us like a daily language, and we had quickly learned to distinguish the “expressive” blows from the others, which were inflicted out of savagery, to cause pain and humiliation, and often led to death. A slap like Eddy’s was like the smack you give a dog, or the whack you give a donkey, to convey to them, or reinforce, an order or a prohibition—little more than a nonverbal communication. Among the many sufferings of the camp, blows of this sort were by far the least painful, which is equivalent to saying that our lives were not very different from those of dogs and donkeys.
He waited for me to get up, and asked who I was writing to. I answered in my bad German that I wasn’t writing to anyone; I had found a pencil by chance, and was writing on a whim, out of nostalgia, out of a dream. I knew very well that writing was forbidden, but I also knew that it was impossible to send a letter. I assured him that I would never have dared to go against the rules of the camp. Certainly Eddy wouldn’t believe me, but I had to say something, if only to arouse pity: I knew that if he reported me to the Political Department, the gallows awaited me, but before the gallows an interrogation (what an interrogation!) to discover who my accomplice was, and perhaps also get from me the address of the person I was writing to in Italy. Eddy gave me a strange look; then he told me not to move, he would be back in an hour.
It was a long hour. Eddy returned to the cellar with three sheets of paper in his hand, one of them mine, and I immediately saw on his face that the worst would not happen. He must not have been inexperienced, this Eddy, or maybe his stormy past had taught him the fundamentals of the grim profession of the cop: he had sought among my companions two (not just one) who knew both German and Italian, and from them, separately, had had my message translated into German, warning that if the two translations did not come out the same he would report to the Political Department not only me but them.
He made me a speech that’s hard to relate. He said that, luckily for me, the two translations were the same and the text was not compromising. That I was mad—there was no other explanation, only a madman could have thought of risking in that way not only his life but the life of the Italian accomplice I surely had, of my relatives in Italy, and also his position as Kapo. He told me that I had deserved that slap, that in fact I should thank him, because it had been a good deed, of the sort that lead to Paradise, and he, Strassenräuber, street criminal, by profession, had a great need to do good deeds. That, finally, he would not make a report, though not even he knew exactly why: maybe just because I was mad, but then Italians are notoriously loony, all they’re good at is singing and getting in trouble.
I don’t think I did thank Eddy, but afterward, though I felt no positive fondness for my green triangle “colleagues,” I sometimes wondered what human substance was packed in behind their symbol, and was sorry that none of their ambiguous brigade have (as far as I know) told their story. I don’t know what happened to Eddy in the end. A few weeks after the incident I’ve recounted, he disappeared for a few days; then we saw him again one evening, standing in the alley between the barbed wire and the electrified fence; hanging around his neck was a sign with Urning written on it, that is, “Pederast,” but he didn’t seem distressed or worried. He witnessed our group returning with a distracted, insolent, lazy look, as if what happened around him had nothing to do with him.
1. In fact, “BV” stands for Berufsverbrecher, or “criminals.”
Lilith
Within a few minutes the sky had darkened and it had begun to rain. Soon the rain increased, until it became a steady downpour, and the thick earth of the worksite turned into a blanket of mud several inches deep; it became impossible not only to shovel but even to stand up. The Kapo questioned the civilian supervisor, then turned to us: we should find shelter wherever we could. There were several large sections of iron pipe scattered around, five or six meters long and a meter in dia
meter. I climbed inside one of these, and halfway along the pipe I ran into Tischler, who had had the same idea and had entered from the other end.
Tischler means “carpenter,” and among us Tischler was not known by any other name. There was also the Smith, the Russian, the Fool, two Tailors (the Tailor and the other Tailor, respectively), the Galician, and the Tall Man; I was for a long time the Italian, and then indifferently Primo or Alberto, because I was confused with someone else.
The Tischler was therefore the Tischler and nothing else, but he didn’t look like a carpenter, and we all suspected that he wasn’t one at all. At that time it was common for an engineer to get himself registered as a mechanic, or a journalist as a typesetter: you might thus hope for a better job than laborer, without inciting the Nazi rage against intellectuals. In any case, the Tischler had been assigned to the carpenters’ bench, and he did the job pretty well. He was unusual for a Polish Jew, in that he spoke a little Italian; he had learned it from his father, who was imprisoned by the Italians in 1917 and interned in a camp, yes, a concentration camp, somewhere near Turin. The majority of his fellow prisoners had died of the Spanish flu, and in fact even today you can see their exotic names—Hungarian, Polish, Croatian, German names—in a vault at the Cimitero Maggiore; the sight, and the thought of those lonely deaths, fills you with pity. His father, too, had got sick, but had recovered.