by Primo Levi
How pleasing, on the other hand, how equalizing and reassuring is the opposite case, of the man who remains himself in what he writes! Even if he’s not brilliant, our sympathy immediately goes out to him: here is neither pretense nor transfiguration, neither muses nor quantum leaps, the mask is the face, and the reader seems to look down at a clear stream and see the multicolored pebbles on the streambed. I had this impression when, several years ago, I read the German manuscript of an autobiography that later appeared in Italian, in 1973, under the title Sfuggito alle reti del Nazismo (Escape from the Nazi Dragnets); the publisher is Mursia, the author’s name is Joel König, and, not coincidentally, the first chapter is entitled “Tired of Disguises.” König is not a writer by profession; he’s a biologist, and he took up the pen only because it seemed to him that his story was too interesting not to be told.
Joel, a German Jew born in 1922 in Heilbronn, in Swabia, narrates with candor, and with the failings of the nonprofessional, often expanding on the superfluous and neglecting essential facts. He’s a bourgeois, the son of a provincial rabbi, and from childhood practiced the complex Jewish rituals without any sense of constriction, rebellion, or irony; rather, he felt that he was reliving an ancient, joyful tradition, filled with symbolic poetry.
His father taught him that each of us has received from God a single soul, but that on Saturday God grants every pious man a second, which enlightens and sanctifies him from sunset to sunset, and so on Saturday he doesn’t work, or even touch tools, neither hammer, scissors, nor pen, still less money, in order not to defile the Sabbath soul. And children can’t catch butterflies, because that comes under the category of hunting, and that into the broader category of work, and, further, because Saturday is the day of freedom for all, even for animals. Besides, animals, too, honor the Creator, and when chickens drink they raise their beaks to the sky to thank Him for every single drop.
In 1933, the black shadow of Hitler begins to extend over this “Swabian idyll.” The father, meanwhile, has been transferred (still as a rabbi) to a small city in Upper Silesia, not far from Auschwitz, but Auschwitz, at that time, was merely an ordinary border town. The way Joel and his father react to the new climate is very instructive, in the sense that it teaches us essential things about the Germany of then and of now.
The rabbi taught his son that, after original sin and the destruction of the Temple by Titus, the Treaty of Versailles was the most catastrophic event in the history of the world, but that nevertheless the German Jews should not oppose injustice with violence: “To suffer unjustly is better than to act unjustly.” In the years of the economic crisis, he voted for the Catholics of the Center Party, “because they fear God,” but in 1933 the Catholics voted full powers to Hitler; and he recognized in the Nuremberg Laws the warning hand of God and a punishment for the transgressions of the Jews.
Did they do business on Saturday? Now their shops are boycotted. Did they marry Christian women? The new, prudent laws forbid mixed marriages.
The nets of Nazism tighten around the German Jews, and a few foresighted ones attempt to flee to neutral countries, or seek a precarious refuge in hiding. The majority, like Joel’s parents, live from day to day, bewildered, feeding on absurd illusions and false information, while every day, with refined, progressive cruelty, with deliberate intent to inflict humiliation and suffering, law after law is promulgated.
In an impious parody of the ritual rules, instead of the words of the Lord Jews have to wear a yellow star next to their hearts and on the doors of their houses; they cannot own bicycles or telephones, telephone in public places, subscribe to newspapers. They have to hand over woolen clothes and furs, and they receive starvation rations of food; a few at a time, the transfers “to the East” begin: people think of ghettos, of forced labor, no one suspects the slaughter, and yet even children and the sick are deported. . . .
Like many other youths, Joel finds refuge in a farm school organized by Zionists for the purpose of training boys and girls for agricultural work and communal life, in view of an increasingly less likely emigration to Palestine. The Gestapo tolerates this, because workers are scarce and the business (the youths are not paid) is profitable. But little by little the farm becomes a Lager in miniature; Joel tears off his yellow star and escapes to Berlin.
Soon afterward, his parents are deported, and Joel finds himself alone in an enemy city, devastated by bombardments and swarming with spies, police, and foreign workers of all races. He has destroyed his documents marked with the “J,” the first letter of Jude, and has no ration card: he’s an outlaw. Well, one might say that only in this situation of extreme marginalization does the youth in love with order in heaven and on earth discover himself, and become aware of his own extraordinary resources.
He becomes a Chaplin-like hero, both innocent and astute, ready for fantastic improvisation, never desperate, radically incapable of hatred and violence, lover of life, of adventure and joy. He passes through all perils miraculously: as if God’s pact with the people of Israel had found, in him and for him, a practical application; as if God Himself, in whom he believes, had laid a hand on his head, as He is said to do with children and drunks.
He finds a first insecure refuge with an old shoemaker, who offers to take him in not so much out of generosity as out of stupidity: he doesn’t realize that to give lodging to a Jew in the Berlin of the Gestapo might cost him his life, but Joel knows, and, in order not to compromise an innocent, he once again goes off. Where to spend the nights in the harsh winter of 1942–43? In the control cab of a crane, in sheds for firefighting equipment, in the body of a Soviet tank displayed in a square as a monument? Joel chooses at random, and it always works out.
He wanders through Berlin, a desert of ruins separated from the sky by endless camouflage nets, and temporarily settles in an abandoned latrine, two square meters, but better than nothing. A lover of cleanliness, he carefully examines the bomb-damaged buildings and finds hot water heaters that are still functioning, if missing a fourth wall: with the proper precautions, maybe the help of an accomplice, he can take a hot bath. It’s a delight, and, in addition, the strangeness of the invention produces in Joel a sharp childish pleasure that adds spice to the danger.
A police check could be a deadly trap. Joel needs papers, of any sort, because in the tide of foreign workers the police can’t be too particular, and he gets them in the most unexpected way. Giving an “Aryan” name, he applies to enroll at the Fascist headquarters in Berlin, where Italian classes are held for German soldiers and civilians. He goes to the lessons, a clandestine Jew amid fellow students who are mainly soldiers of the SS, and obtains what he wants, an ID card in the name of “Wilhelm Schneider,” with his picture, an enormous Fascist symbol, and a lot of stamps; it’s not perfect, an intelligent cop would discover the ruse with a few questions, but, again, it’s better than nothing. Trusting in the tenuous protection of the card, Joel fills the interminable days wandering around and trying to come up with a plan of flight.
Fortune helps him: he happens to meet an engineer, a former Social Democrat, who gives Joel’s vague ideas concrete form. He will be able to reach Vienna, and from there a smuggler will get him into Hungary.
Joel is twenty-one, but he looks seventeen, and his face doesn’t have Jewish features; it seems to him logical to disguise himself in the uniform of the Hitler Youth, the equivalent of our Fascist youth organizations of the time. The Hitler Youth aren’t of military age, so it’s one less check, and, besides, he has always liked “playing soldier”; his brother Leon, too, hiding in the city like him, goes around in a false uniform, and maybe it’s not a bad idea.
The Hitler Youth Joel König–Wilhelm Schneider leaves for Vienna in May 1943; he has in his suitcase, among other things, a Hebrew Bible, a Hungarian grammar and phrase book, an Arabic grammar. He’s an educated traveler, and foresees that in Budapest he’ll have little time for purchases; and how could he “live in Palestine without being able to speak with the i
nhabitants of the place in their language?”
He keeps the yellow star in a pocket; it will be useful in Vienna in order to be recognized as a Jew. In the suitcase, foolishly suspect, he has not forgotten to place his two “timing switches,” for turning on the lights and the electric stove on Saturday evening, because a pious Jew is prohibited from manually lighting a fire or its modern equivalents; it’s a servile job, which would profane the sacred day. During the baggage inspection, at the crucial moment of leaving Berlin, Joel distinctly perceives the ticking of one of the devices, which the jolts have set off: the clerk at the window will hear it, and think it’s a deadly bomb! But yet again Fortune protects the bold, and no one notices anything.
Here, unexpectedly, the book ends. The rest of Joel’s adventures are condensed into two pages of epilogue, but I heard them many years later, in detail and in person, from Joel himself. He told me about going from one to another of the last Jews left in Vienna, now resigned to their fate. They are frightened by the appearance of the Hitler Youth who knocks at their door, and he has trouble proving that he is who he is. They give him money generously; for them, by now, it is of no use.
In Vienna, Joel is distrusted by everyone, and no one is willing to put him up permanently; he goes to the Jewish Community, depopulated by the deportations but still functioning, thanks to the self-sacrifice of some surviving employees. In the evening he’s shut in, and he spends the night in the toilet, locked from the inside; but during the day, as an attentive and curious tourist, he makes sure to see the city. When he asks the Viennese for directions to the monuments, they answer rudely: Do they realize that he’s Jewish? Or do they not like his uniform? No, it’s his German accent they find disagreeable. Joel is happy to hear them murmur behind his back, Saupreuss, “Prussian pig.”
The first smuggler betrays and robs him; on the second attempt he gets to Hungary, feels himself a free man, and strips off the uncomfortable uniform, but in March of ’44 he has to put it on again, because the German tanks appear there, too. He crosses the border into Romania with no trouble, and manages to embark secretly on a Turkish ship that carries him, in wartime, to the Land of his Fathers, at that time a British Mandate. And here, most ironically, the English secret service doesn’t believe his story, which is in fact unbelievable, and finally throws him in prison, suspected of spying, the young blond with the German accent, the Joel König who had crossed all of Nazi Europe at war without the Gestapo’s touching a hair of his head.
But Joel will not write this story. He got a degree and married, and settled in Holland; he loves and admires the Dutch, who are tenacious and peace-loving, as he is. He is tired, tired of fictions and disguises: that’s why, writing about his extraordinary adventure, he didn’t try to pretend, to represent himself as different from what he is and always has been.
The Return of Cesare
Many years have passed since I recounted the adventures of Cesare, and still more since the time, now obscured by distance, when those adventures took place. In some I also took part, for example in the purchase-conquest of a chicken in the marshes of Pripet; in others Cesare was alone, like the time he took on the job of selling fish for a syndicate of clients but was so moved by the hunger of three children that instead of selling the fish he gave it to them.
Until now I hadn’t recounted the boldest of his undertakings because Cesare had forbidden it: he had returned to Rome and to orderliness, he had constructed around himself a family, he had a respectable job and a modest bourgeois house, and did not willingly recognize himself in the resourceful vagrant I described in The Truce. Today, however, Cesare is neither the inspired, ragged, and indomitable veteran of Belorussia 1945 or even the spotless bureaucrat of Rome in 1965; incredibly, he is a retired man of sixty, fairly peaceful, fairly wise, harshly tried by fate, and he released me from the ban, authorizing me to write “before the desire to do so passes.”
So before the desire passes, I will here set about telling how Cesare, on October 2, 1945, fed up with the arabesques and interminable halts of the troop train that was carrying us to Italy, and impatient to put into action his creative abilities and the monstrous freedom that destiny had bestowed on us after the trials of Auschwitz, abandoned us, because he had decided to return home by airplane. Maybe after us, but not like us: not starving, tattered, weary, in a herd escorted by the Russians, on an exhausting snail-train. He wanted a glorious reentry, an apotheosis. He saw the dangers of it, but O a Napoli in carozza o in machina a fa’ carbone—“To Naples in a carriage or to the coal mines.”
Our troop train, with its variegated burden of fourteen hundred Italians tortuously returning home, had been stuck for six days in the rain and mud of a small town on the border between Romania and Hungary, and Cesare was enraged by the forced idleness and by impotence-impatience. He invited me to join him, but I refused, because the undertaking frightened me; so he made some cursory arrangements with Signor Tornaghi, said goodbye to everyone, and left with him.
Signor Tornaghi was a mafioso from the north, a fence by profession. He was a ruddy and affable Milanese of forty-five; in our earlier wanderings he had been distinguished by his almost elegant style of dress, which was for him a habit, a symbol of social status and a necessity imposed by his profession. Until a few days before, he had even flaunted a coat with a fur collar, but then hunger had compelled him to sell it. Such a companion suited Cesare very well; Cesare never made a fuss about caste or class. The two took the first train leaving for Bucharest, that is, in the opposite direction to ours, and in the course of the journey Cesare taught Signor Tornaghi the main Jewish prayers, and was in turn taught by him the Our Father, the Credo, and the Ave Maria, because Cesare already had in mind the outlines of a plan for the first stage in Bucharest.
They arrived in Bucharest without incident, but had used up all their meager resources. In the war-ravaged city, uncertain of its fate, the two spent several days begging, impartially, in the convents and in the Jewish Community; they introduced themselves alternately as Jews who had escaped the slaughter, or as Christian pilgrims fleeing ahead of the Soviets. They didn’t collect much but divided the proceeds and invested in clothes: Tornaghi to restore the honest appearance required by his profession, and Cesare to provide a front for the second stage of his plan. That done, they separated, and no one heard anything more about what happened to Signor Tornaghi.
Cesare, wearing a jacket and tie after a year with a shaved head and convict-striped clothing, was in a daze at first, but he quickly found the confidence necessary for the new role that he intended to assume, which was that of the Latin lover: for Romania (Cesare soon realized) is a country much less neo-Latin than the textbooks tell us. Cesare didn’t speak Romanian, obviously, or any language apart from Italian, but the difficulties of communication were not a hindrance. In fact they were a help, because it’s easier to tell lies when you know you’ll be misunderstood, and, besides, in the techniques of courtship eloquent language has a secondary function.
After a few attempts that came to nothing, Cesare met a girl who responded to his requirements: she was from a wealthy family and didn’t ask too many questions. Concerning the putative father-in-law, the information provided by Cesare is vague; he was an owner of oil wells in Ploiesti, and/or the director of a bank, and lived in a villa whose gate was flanked by two marble lions. But Cesare is a fish who swims in all waters, and it doesn’t surprise me that he was welcomed into that well-to-do bourgeois family, which surely was already frightened by the imminent political upheavals of the country; who knows, maybe a married daughter in Italy could be seen as a future bridgehead.
The girl went along. Cesare was introduced, invited to the villa with the lions, brought bouquets of flowers, and was officially engaged. Summoned to an interview with the future father-in-law, he didn’t hide the fact that he had been in the Lager. He mentioned that, at the moment, he was short of cash: a small loan would be useful, or an advance on the dowry, to establish himself in the
city in some way in anticipation of the marriage documents and finding a job. The girl continued to go along. She was flawless; she had immediately understood everything, and went from being a victim of the scam to an accomplice. The exotic adventure was to her taste, even if she knew it would soon be over, and she didn’t care about her father’s money.
Cesare got the money and vanished. A few days later, around the end of October, he boarded a plane for Bari. So he was victorious; true, he got home after us (who crossed the Brenner on the 19th of the month), and that scam cost him something, in the form of compromises of conscience and a broken-off love affair, but he returned by airplane, like a king, as he had promised himself and us when we were mired in the Romanian mud.
That Cesare descended from the sky in Bari there is no doubt. He was seen by numerous witnesses, who had rushed to wait for him, and they never forgot the scene, because as soon as Cesare set foot on the ground he was stopped by the carabinieri, at that time still the Royal Carabinieri. The reason was simple: after the plane took off from Bucharest, the airline officials realized that the dollars that Cesare had got from the father-in-law, and with which he had paid for the flight, were counterfeit, and they had immediately sent a telegram to the airport at Bari. It’s not clear if the equivocal Romanian father-in-law had acted in good faith, or if he had had a hint of the trick and taken preventive revenge, punishing Cesare and at the same time getting rid of him. Cesare was interrogated, sent to Rome with an expulsion order and provisions of bread and dried figs, again interrogated, and then released for good.