by Primo Levi
Vladek, who was covered with bruises and scrapes, stood there like a post, his eyes blank; the onlookers laughed till they cried, and Otto, frowning as if he were doing a precision job, addressed to Vladek some crude words of the sort that blacksmiths use so that the horse doesn’t move as it’s being shoed. It really was a comical sight, which made you forget your hunger and was something to tell your companions from the other barracks. At the end Otto lifted Vladek bodily out of the vat and muttered something in his dialect about the soup that remained; Vladek was so clean that he had changed color and was barely recognizable.
We went away concluding that this Otto was not among the worst: someone else, in his place, would have used cold water, or would have transferred Vladek to the Penal Squad, or would have beaten him, because certainly fools, in the Lager, do not enjoy particular indulgences. Rather, they run the risk of being officially categorized as such, and (by virtue of the German national passion for labels) given a white bracelet with the word Blöd, “fool,” written on it. This indication, especially if coupled with the red triangle, constituted for the SS an inexhaustible source of amusement.
We soon had confirmation that Otto was not among the worst. A few days later was Yom Kippur, the day of atonement and purification, but naturally we worked anyway. It’s hard to say how the date leaked out in the Lager, given that the Jewish calendar is lunar and doesn’t coincide with the common calendar; maybe one of the more religious Jews had kept a precise count of the passing of the days, or maybe the news had been brought by one of the new arrivals, since there were always new arrivals to fill the empty spots.
The evening before, we had lined up to get our soup, as we did every evening; in front of me was Ezra, a watchmaker by trade, a cantor on Saturdays, in a remote Lithuanian village. From exile to exile, by paths that I couldn’t describe, he had reached Italy, and in Italy had been captured. He was tall and thin, but not bent; his eyes, which had an oriental shape, were mobile and lively; he spoke seldom and never raised his voice. When he stood in front of Otto he didn’t hold out his pail, but said to him instead, “Mr. Head of the Barrack, for us today is a day of atonement, and I cannot eat the soup. I ask you respectfully to save it for me until tomorrow evening.”
Otto was as tall as Ezra, but twice as heavy. He had already scooped the ration of soup from the vat, and he stopped suddenly, with the ladle raised halfway: his jaw slowly lowered, without lurching, and his mouth hung open. In all his years in the Lager he had never met a prisoner who refused food. For some instants he was undecided whether to laugh or to slap that tall, skinny stranger: was the man mocking him? But he didn’t seem the type. He told Ezra to stand aside, and to come and see him when he had finished ladling the soup.
Ezra waited without impatience, then knocked at the door. Otto told him to enter, and ordered his courtiers and parasites to leave the room: he wanted to be alone for that conversation. Thus freed from his role, he spoke to Ezra in a voice that was a little less harsh and asked him what this business of atonement was. Maybe he was not as hungry that day as on other days?
Ezra answered that of course he was just as hungry; that on the day of Yom Kippur he was also supposed to refrain from work, but he knew that, if he did that, he would be reported and killed, and so he would work, since the Law allows one to disobey almost all precepts and prohibitions in order to save a life, one’s own or that of others; that in any case he intended to observe the prescribed fast, from that evening until the following one, because he wasn’t certain that it would result in his death. Otto asked what the sins were that he had to atone for, and Ezra answered that he knew some of them, but that he might have committed others without being aware of it; and that, besides, in the opinion of some wise men, which he shared, atonement and fasting were not a strictly personal matter. It was likely that they helped gain forgiveness from God for the sins committed by others.
Otto was increasingly puzzled, caught between astonishment, laughter, and another feeling, which he couldn’t name, and which he had thought was dead, killed by the years of devious, savage life in the Lagers, and even before that by his political militancy, which had been strict. In a low voice, Ezra spoke, and explained to him that, on the day of Yom Kippur, it is customary to read from the book of the prophet Jonah: yes, the one who was swallowed by the whale. Jonah was a stern prophet; after the story of the whale, he had preached repentance to the king of Nineveh, but even when the king repented of his sins and those of his people, and published a decree that imposed fasting on all the Ninevites, including the animals, Jonah continued to suspect a trick, to distrust and argue with the Eternal, who, however, was inclined to forgive—yes, to forgive even the Ninevites, although they were idolaters and couldn’t distinguish the right hand from the left. Otto interrupted him.
“What are you trying to tell me with this story of yours? That you’re fasting for me, too? And for everyone . . . even for them? Or that I should fast, too?”
Ezra replied that although he, unlike Jonah, was not a prophet but a cantor from the countryside, he insisted on asking the head of the barrack for this favor: to save his soup for the following night, and the next morning’s bread, too. But there was no need for the soup to be kept hot, Otto should let it get cold. Otto asked why, and Ezra said that there were two reasons, one sacred, one profane. In the first place (and here, maybe unintentionally, he began to speak in a singsong, and his chest swayed slightly, forward and back, as is customary in discussions of ritual subjects), according to some commentators it was inadvisable to light a fire, or its equivalents, on the day of atonement, even if it was done by Christian hands; in the second, and more simply, the Lager soup tended to turn sour quickly, especially if it was kept warm; all the prisoners preferred to eat it cold rather than sour.
Otto objected that the soup was very liquid, in other words more water than anything else, and so it was a question of drinking rather than of eating: and he rediscovered, in saying this, another long-lost taste, for the stubborn dialectical controversies at meetings of his party. Ezra explained to him that the distinction wasn’t relevant: on days of fasting you don’t eat or drink anything, not even water. However, you don’t incur divine punishment if you swallow food whose total volume is less than that of a date or a drink whose volume is less than what can be held between one cheek and your teeth. In this calculation, food and drink don’t count.
Otto grumbled something incomprehensible, in which the word meshugge recurred, which means “crazy” in Yiddish but is understood by all Germans; yet he took Ezra’s pail, filled it, and put it in the personal closet that he, as an official, was entitled to, and told Ezra that he could come and get it the following night. To Ezra it seemed that the ration of soup was particularly generous.
I wouldn’t have learned the details of this conversation if Ezra himself had not reported them, in bits and pieces, one day when we were carrying bags of cement together from one warehouse to another. Now, Ezra was not really meshugge; he was the heir to an ancient, sorrowful, and strange tradition, whose core consists in holding Evil in abomination, and in “making a hedge around the Law,” so that Evil does not flood in through gaps in the hedge to drown that very Law. In the course of millennia, this core has become encrusted with a vast proliferation of maniacally subtle comments, deductions, distinctions, and with further precepts and prohibitions; and in the course of millennia many have acted like Ezra, through migrations and slaughters without number. This is why the history of the Jewish people is so ancient, sorrowful, and strange.
1. The Spartacists were a radical left-wing group; they joined a revolt against the German government in January 1919.
The Story of Avrom
You often hear people say, these days, that they’re ashamed of being Italian. In fact we have good reasons to be ashamed: most important, we have been incapable of producing a political class that represents us, and for thirty years have tolerated one that does not represent us. On the other hand, we have virtues
that we are unaware of, or at least we don’t know how rare they are in Europe and the world. I think of those virtues whenever I tell the story of Avrom (as I’ll call him), a story I happened to hear. For now, it survives just like that, as a saga transmitted from mouth to mouth, at risk of distortion or elaboration, of being taken for a romantic invention. It’s a story I like because it contains an image of our country seen by innocent, foreign eyes, in the strong light of salvation, and seen in its finest hour. I’ll relate it here, with apologies for possible inaccuracies.
Avrom was thirteen in 1939; he was a Polish Jew, the son of a poor hatmaker in L’viv. When the Germans entered Poland, Avrom understood right away that it was best not to sit at home and wait for them; his parents had decided to stay, and were immediately captured and had vanished. Avrom, left alone, blended into the background of the small local underworld, living by petty thefts, minor smuggling, the black market, and vague and precarious occupations, sleeping in the cellars of bombed houses, until he found out that there was a barrack of Italians in L’viv. It was probably one of the bases of the Armir, the Italian Army in Russia; in the city the rumor immediately spread that the Italian soldiers were different from the Germans, that they were good-hearted, went with the girls, and were not too fussy about military discipline, about permissions and prohibitions. At the end of 1942, Avrom was living permanently, and semiofficially, in that barrack. He had learned some Italian and tried to make himself useful by doing various jobs, such as interpreter, shoeshine, porter. He had become the barrack mascot, though he was not alone: a dozen other boys or children who had been abandoned, without relatives, without a home and without means, lived like him. They were Jews and Christians; for the Italians it didn’t seem to make any difference, and Avrom never got over his amazement at that.
In January 1943, the Armir was routed; the barrack filled with stragglers and then was demobilized. All the Italians returned to Italy, and the officers let it be understood that if someone wanted to bring those boys, the children of no one, they would close an eye. Avrom had made friends with an alpino, a member of the Alpine troops from the Canavese: they crossed the Tarvisio in the same troop train and the Fascist government confined them together to a quarantine camp in Mestre. In name it was a medical quarantine, and, for that matter, they all had fleas; in fact it was a political quarantine, because Mussolini didn’t want those veterans to tell too many stories. They remained there until September 12, when the Germans arrived, as if they were pursuing him, Avrom, tracking him down in all the hiding places of Europe. The Germans sealed off the camp and loaded the inmates onto freight trains to carry them to Germany.
Avrom, in the freight car, said to the alpino that he would not go to Germany, because he knew the Germans and what they were capable of; it would be better to jump off the train. The alpino said that he had seen what the Germans did in Russia, but he didn’t have the courage to jump off. If Avrom escaped, the alpino would write a letter for his relatives in the Canavese, saying that Avrom was a friend of his, that they should give him his bed and treat him exactly as if Avrom were he. Avrom jumped out of the train with the letter in his pocket. He was in Italy, but not the glossy, slick Italy of picture postcards and geography textbooks. He was alone, on the track bed of the railroad, without money, in the middle of the night, amid German patrols, in an unknown land, somewhere between Venice and the Brenner Pass. He knew only that he had to reach the Canavese. Everyone helped him and no one reported him; he found a train for Milan, then one for Turin. At Porta Susa he took the Canavesana, the local train, got off at Cuorgné, and on foot followed the road to his friend’s village. At this point Avrom was seventeen.
The parents of the alpino welcomed him, but they didn’t say much. They gave him clothes, food, and a bed, and since two young arms were useful, they put him to work in the fields. In those months Italy was full of displaced people—English, Americans, Australians, Russians—who had escaped on September 81 from the prison camps, and so no one paid much attention to a foreign boy. No one asked questions; but the parish priest, talking to him, realized that he was bright, and told the parents of the alpino that it was too bad not to let him go to school. So they sent him to the priests’ school. He, who had seen so much, liked school and studying; it gave him a sense of tranquility and normality. But he found it funny that he had to learn Latin: why did Italian boys have to learn Latin, since Italian was almost the same? But he studied diligently, he had very good grades in all his subjects, and in March the priest called on him to serve at Mass. This business, of a Jewish boy serving at Mass, seemed to him even funnier, but he was careful not to say that he was Jewish, because you never know. In any case, he had quickly learned to make the sign of the cross and all the Christian prayers.
In early April, a truck full of Germans descended on the village square, and all the inhabitants ran away. But then they realized that these were odd Germans: they didn’t yell orders or threats, they spoke not German but a language that had never been heard before, and they tried politely to make themselves understood. Someone had the idea of calling Avrom, who was, after all, a foreigner. Avrom arrived, and he and those Germans understood one another very well, because they weren’t Germans at all; they were Czechs whom the Germans had recruited by force into the Wehrmacht, and now they had deserted, stealing a military truck, and they wanted to join the Italian partisans. They spoke Czech and Avrom answered in Polish, but they understood one another just the same. Avrom thanked his Canavesan friends and went off with the Czechs. He didn’t have well-defined political ideas, but he had seen what the Germans did to his country, and it seemed to him right to fight them.
The Czechs were attached to a division of Italian partisans who operated in the Valle dell’Orco, and Avrom stayed with them as an interpreter and courier. One of the Italian partisans was Jewish and he told everyone; Avrom was astonished, but still he didn’t tell anyone that he, too, was Jewish. There was a roundup, and his group had to go up the valley to Ceresole Reale, where they explained to him that it was called Reale—royal—because the king of Italy came there to hunt chamois, and they also showed him, with binoculars, the chamois, on the ridges of the Gran Paradiso. Avrom was dazzled by the beauty of the mountains, the lake, and the woods, and it seemed to him absurd to come there to wage war; at that point, he, too, was armed. The partisans fought the Fascists who came up from Locana, then withdrew into the valleys of Lanzo through the Colle della Crocetta. For the boy who came from the horror of the ghetto, and from monotonous Poland, that passage across the rugged, solitary mountain and the many others that followed was the revelation of a splendid new world, which contained experiences that intoxicated and overwhelmed him: the beauty of Creation, the freedom and trust of his companions. Battles and marches followed one after another. In the autumn of 1944, his group descended the Val Susa, from village to village, as far as Sant’Ambrogio.
By now Avrom was an experienced partisan, brave and tough, disciplined by his strong nature, but quick with machine gun and pistol, polyglot, and sly as a fox. An American secret service agent got to know him, and entrusted him with a radio transmitter: it was in a suitcase, and he had to carry it with him, shifting it constantly so that it wouldn’t be detected by a radio direction finder, and staying in contact with the armies that were coming north from southern Italy, especially the Poles under General Wladyslaw Anders. Moving from one hideout to the next, Avrom reached Turin. He had been given the address of the parish of San Massimo and the password. April 252 found him hiding in the belfry with his radio.
After the liberation, the Allies summoned him to Rome to legalize his position, which in fact was rather confused. They put him in a Jeep, and, traveling over the bumpy roads of the time, through cities and villages filled with ragged, cheering people, he reached Liguria and, for the first time in his short life, saw the sea.
The undertaking of the eighteen-year-old Avrom, an innocent soldier of fortune, who, like many distant Nordic travelers, dis
covered Italy with a virgin eye and, like many heroes of the Risorgimento, fought for the freedom of all in a country that wasn’t his, ends here, before the splendor of the Mediterranean in peacetime.
Avrom now lives in Israel, on a kibbutz. He, a polyglot, no longer has a language that is really his own: he has almost forgotten Polish, Czech, and Italian, and hasn’t yet fully mastered Hebrew. In this language new to him he set down his memories, in the form of spare, modest notes, obscured by distance in space and time. He is a humble soul, who wrote not with the ambitions of the literary man or the historian but with the thought of his children and grandchildren, so that some memory of the things he saw and experienced might survive. Let’s hope they find someone who can restore to them the broad, pure spirit that they potentially contain.
1. On September 8, 1943, an armistice was signed between the government led by Marshal Pietro Badoglio and Allied forces in Italy.
2. April 25, 1945, is the date on which Italy was liberated from the Nazis and Fascists.
Tired of Fictions
Those who have had the opportunity to compare the real image of a writer with the one that can be deduced from his writings know how frequently these do not coincide. The subtle investigator of mental states, vibrating like an oscillator circuit, turns out to be an arrogant oaf, pathologically full of himself, eager for money and flattery, blind to the sufferings of his neighbor; the orgiastic, magniloquent poet, in Pan-like communion with the universe, is an abstinent and abstemious little man, not by aesthetic choice but by doctor’s orders.