by Primo Levi
This is the story of how Cesare fulfilled his vow, and in writing it here I, too, have fulfilled a vow. It may be imprecise in some details, because it’s based on two memories (his and mine), and over long distances human memory is an erratic instrument, especially if it isn’t reinforced by material souvenirs, and is instead drugged by the desire (this, too, his and mine) for the story that’s told to be a good one. But the detail of the counterfeit dollars is true, and meshes with facts of European history in those years. Around the end of the Second World War, counterfeit dollars and pounds circulated in abundance, throughout Europe and especially in the Balkan countries; among other things, they were used by the Germans to pay the double agent Cicero, in Turkey, whose story has been recounted many times and in various ways, and so they were here in Italy, too, in response to a scam.
The proverb says that money is the devil’s excrement, and never was money more excremental or diabolical than the counterfeit. It was printed in Germany, to inflate the circulation of money in the enemy camp, to sow distrust and suspicion, and to make “payments” of the type just mentioned. Starting in 1942, these bank notes were produced mainly in the camp at Sachsenhausen, where the SS had gathered some hundred and fifty special prisoners: they were draftsmen, lithographers, photographers, engravers, and counterfeiters, who constituted Operation Bernhard, a small, very secret camp of experts within the greater camp, a version of the Stalinian saraski described by Solzhenitsyn in The First Circle.
In March 1945, before the arrival of the Soviet troops, Operation Bernhard was moved, en masse, first to Schlier-Ridl-Zipf, then (on May 3, 1945, a few days before the surrender) to Ebensee; both were auxiliary camps of Mauthausen. It seems that the counterfeiters worked until the last day, and then the plates were heaved to the bottom of a lake.
The Return of Lorenzo
I’ve also spoken of Lorenzo elsewhere, but in deliberately vague terms. Lorenzo was still alive when I was writing If This Is a Man, and the task of transforming a living person into a character ties the writer’s hands. This happens because such a task, even when it’s carried out with the best intentions, and in the case of a loved and respected person, verges on private violence, and is never painless for the one who is the object of it. Each of us constructs, consciously or not, an image of ourself, but it is fatally different from the image, or, rather, images—different, in turn, from one another—that are constructed by those who are near to us; and to find ourself portrayed in a book with features that are not the ones we attribute to ourself is traumatic, as if the mirror suddenly reflected the image of someone else—maybe more noble than ours, but not ours. For this reason, and for others more obvious, it’s a good rule not to write a biography of a living person, unless the author openly chooses one of the two opposing paths of hagiography or propaganda, which diverge from reality and are not disinterested. What, then, is our “true” image is a meaningless question.
Now that Lorenzo has been dead for many years, I feel released from the constraints that hindered me before, and it seems instead that I ought to try to reconstruct the image I’ve kept of him, in these stories of the present perfect that assemble what was left out of my first two books. I met Lorenzo in June of 1944, after a bombing raid that had devastated the big site where both of us worked. Lorenzo wasn’t a prisoner like us; in fact he wasn’t a prisoner at all. Officially, he was one of the volunteer civilian workers whom Nazi Germany was swarming with, but his choice had hardly been voluntary. In 1939, he was employed as a mason by an Italian firm that did work in France. The war broke out, and all the Italians in France were interned, but then the Germans came, reorganized the firm, and moved the whole operation to Upper Silesia.
These workers, although not soldiers, lived like soldiers: they were quartered in barracks in a camp not far from ours, they slept on cots, they had Sundays off and a week or two of holidays, they were paid in marks, they could write and send remittances to Italy, and from Italy they could receive clothes and packages of food.
That bombardment, one of the first, had damaged the buildings, and this damage could be repaired; but fragments and debris had also struck the delicate machinery that would start up when the enormous complex of Auschwitz Buna-Werke entered the production phase, and here the damage was much greater. The factory management had arranged for the most valuable machines to be protected by thick brick walls, and had entrusted their construction to Lorenzo’s firm. My squad, at that time, had the job of fetching and carrying at the same underground site where the Italian masons were working, and, by pure chance, our Kapo sent me to be the helper for two masons whom I had never seen before.
The wall that the two men were putting up was already high, and they were working on a scaffolding. I was on the ground, waiting for someone to tell me what to do. They laid bricks energetically, without speaking, so that at first I didn’t realize they were Italian. Then one of them, who was tall and slightly bent, with gray hair, said to me in bad German that the mortar was about to run out and that I should bring up the bucket. A full bucket is heavy and unwieldy, and if you hold it by the handle it hits your legs; you have to hoist it onto your shoulder, but that isn’t easy. The skilled helpers do it like this: they spread their legs, grab the handle with both hands, lift the bucket, and give it a swing backward, that is, between the legs; taking advantage of the momentum thus gained, they bring the load forward and heave it up to their shoulder. I tried, with wretched results; the impetus wasn’t sufficient and the bucket fell, dumping half the mortar on the ground. The tall mason snorted, and, turning to his companion, said, in Italian, “Oh well, of course, with people like this . . .” Then he prepared to come down from the scaffolding. I hadn’t been dreaming: he had spoken in Italian, and with a Piedmontese accent.
We belonged to two different orders of the Nazi universe, and so in speaking to each other we were committing a crime; but we spoke just the same, and it came out that Lorenzo was from Fossano, that I was from Turin, but that I had distant relatives in Fossano whom Lorenzo knew by name. I don’t think we said much more, either then or later: not because of the prohibition but because Lorenzo almost never spoke. He seemed to have no need to speak; the little I know of him came in small part from his few hints, and in larger part from what his fellow workers told me there and his relatives in Italy later. He wasn’t married, he had always been alone; his work, which was in his blood, possessed him to the point that it hindered human relations. At first he had been a mason in his town and the surrounding area, changing bosses often, because he didn’t have an easygoing character; if a supervisor reprimanded him, even in the kindest way, he wouldn’t answer, but put on his hat and took off. In winter, he often went to work in France, on the Côte d’Azur, where there was always a job; he had neither passport nor papers, he went on foot, by himself, he slept wherever he happened to be, and crossed the border over the passes used by smugglers. In spring he returned the same way.
He didn’t speak, but he understood. I don’t think I ever asked him for help, because at the time I didn’t have a clear idea of the way these Italians lived or what was available to them. Lorenzo did everything on his own; two or three days after our encounter, he brought me an Alpine division mess pail (the aluminum kind, which holds around two liters) full of soup, and told me to bring it back empty before evening. From then on, the soup was always there, sometimes along with a piece of bread. He brought it to me every day for six months: as long as I worked as a laborer for him, there was no difficulty about handing it over, but after a few weeks he (or I, I don’t remember) was transferred to another part of the site, and then the danger increased. That danger was that we would be seen together: the Gestapo had eyes everywhere, and any of us seen talking to a “civilian” for reasons not justified by work risked a trial for spying. In reality, the Gestapo was afraid of something else: it feared that through the civilians the secret of the gas chambers at Birkenau would be leaked to the external world. The civilians were at risk, too; any o
f them who turned out to be guilty of illegal contact with us would end up in our camp. Not for an indefinite period, like us: a fixed time, a few months only, for the purpose of Umschuling, reeducation. I myself had warned Lorenzo of this danger, but he had shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.
I shared Lorenzo’s soup with my friend Alberto. Without it we could not have survived until the evacuation of the camp; in the end, that extra liter of soup served to make up the balance of our daily calories. The food in the Lager provided us with about 1600 calories, which is not enough to live on if you’re working. That soup provided another four or five hundred: still insufficient for a man of medium build, but Alberto and I were small and thin to begin with, and our need was less. It was a strange soup. We found in it plum pits, salami casings, once even the wing of a sparrow with all its feathers; another time a scrap of an Italian newspaper. I learned the origin of these ingredients later, when I saw Lorenzo in Italy: he had told his comrades that among the Jews in Auschwitz there were two Italians, and every evening he made the rounds to collect their leftovers. They, too, were hungry, even if not as hungry as we were, and many managed to do a little private cooking for themselves, with stuff stolen in the camps or found lying around. Later, Lorenzo figured out a way of stealing directly from the camp’s kitchen what remained in the cooking pots, but to do it he had to go to the kitchen secretly, at three in the morning, when everyone was sleeping; and he did it for four months.
To avoid being seen together, we decided that when Lorenzo arrived at his worksite in the morning he would leave the pail in an agreed-upon hiding place, under a pile of boards. This system worked well for a few weeks; then evidently someone must have seen me and followed me, because one day I found in the hiding place neither pail nor soup. Alberto and I were humiliated by this blow, and also frightened, because the pail belonged to Lorenzo, and his name was incised in it. The thief could report us, or, more likely, blackmail us.
Lorenzo, to whom I immediately reported the theft, told me that he didn’t care about the pail, he would get another, but I knew that wasn’t true; it had been his tin since he was in the Army, and he had carried it on all his travels; certainly it was dear to him. Alberto meanwhile went around the camp until he identified the thief, who was much stronger than us, and shamelessly carried around that rare and beautiful Italian pail. He had an idea: to offer Elias three rations of bread, in installments, if he would take on the job of recovering the pail, by any means possible, from the hands of the thief, who, like him, was a Pole. Elias was the Herculean dwarf I described in If This Is a Man and mentioned in the story “Our Seal,” in this collection. We flattered him, praising his strength, and he accepted; he liked showing off. One morning, before the roll call, he confronted the Pole and ordered him to give back the stolen pail. The man naturally refused: it was bought, not stolen. Elias attacked him without warning; they fought for ten minutes, then the Pole fell in the mud and Elias, applauded by the audience attracted by the unusual spectacle, triumphantly brought us the pail. From then on, he was our friend.
Alberto and I were astonished by Lorenzo. In the violent and depraved atmosphere of Auschwitz, a man who helped other men out of pure altruism was incomprehensible, alien, like a saviour fallen from the sky: but he was a sullen saviour, with whom it was difficult to communicate. I offered to have a sum sent to his sister, who was in Italy, in compensation for what he was doing for us, but he refused to give us her address. Still, in order not to insult us by this refusal, he accepted a compensation more suitable for the place. His leather work shoes were worn out, in his camp there was no cobbler, and in the city of Auschwitz repair was very expensive. In our Lager, however, anyone who had leather shoes could have them repaired free, because (officially) none of us could keep money. So one day he and I exchanged shoes; he walked and worked for four days in my wooden shoes, and I had his repaired by the shoemakers of Monowitz, who in the meantime had given me a pair of temporary shoes.
At the end of December, shortly before I got sick with scarlet fever, which saved my life, Lorenzo returned to work near us, and I could get the pail directly from his hands. I saw him arrive one morning in the snow, wrapped in his gray-green cape, at the worksite devastated by the nighttime bombardments. He walked with long, sure, slow steps. He handed me the pail, which was bent and dented, and told me that the soup was a little dirty. I asked him why, but he shook his head and went off, and the next time I saw him was a year later, in Italy. In fact there was dirt and stones in the soup, and not until the year later did he tell me, almost in apology, that that morning, while he was making his collection round, his camp had suffered an air strike. A bomb had fallen near him and exploded in the soft ground; it had buried the pail and burst an eardrum, but he had the soup to deliver and had come to work just the same.
Lorenzo knew that the Russians were about to arrive, but he was afraid of them. Maybe he wasn’t wrong; if he had waited for them he would have got back to Italy much later, as in fact happened to us. On January 1, 1945, when the front was close, the Germans freed the Italians’ camp—they could go where they wanted. Lorenzo and his comrades had an extremely vague idea of the geographical location of Auschwitz, and even of the name, which he didn’t know how to write, and which he pronounced “Suíss,” maybe associating it with Switzerland. But he set out just the same, along with Peruch, the fellow worker who had been with him on the scaffolding. Peruch was Friulano, and was to Lorenzo like Sancho to Don Quixote. Lorenzo moved with the natural dignity of those who are indifferent to danger; Peruch, short and stocky, was nervous and uneasy, and was constantly turning his head, with a little jerk. He was cross-eyed; his eyes diverged strongly, as if, in his permanent fear, he were struggling to look in front of him and to both sides at the same time, the way chameleons do. He had also brought bread to Italian prisoners, but secretly and irregularly, because he was too afraid of the incomprehensible and sinister world into which he had been catapulted. He brought food and immediately ran away, without even waiting for thanks.
The two left on foot. They had taken from the station in Auschwitz a railroad map, one of those distorted schematic maps on which only the stations are indicated, joined by the straight lines of the tracks. They walked at night, heading toward the Brenner Pass and guiding themselves by this map and the stars. They slept in haylofts and ate potatoes that they stole from the fields; when they were tired of walking, they stopped in villages, where there was always a job for two masons. Working, they rested; they were paid in money or in kind. They walked for four months. They arrived at the Brenner precisely on April 25, encountering the flood of German divisions fleeing northern Italy; an armored tank opened fire on them with a machine gun, but missed. Once they had crossed the Brenner, Peruch was almost home, and headed to the east. Lorenzo continued on foot, and in twenty days reached Turin. He had the address of my family, and found my mother, to whom he intended to bring news of me. He was a man who didn’t know how to lie; or maybe, having seen the abomination of Auschwitz and the destruction of Europe, he thought that lying was futile, ridiculous. He told my mother that I would not return: the Jews of Auschwitz had all died, in the gas chambers, at work, or finally killed by the Germans as they fled (which was almost literally true). Further, he had learned from my companions that at the moment the camp was evacuated I was sick. It was better for my mother to resign herself.
My mother offered him money so that he could take the train at least for the last stage, from Turin to Fossano, but Lorenzo didn’t want it, he had walked for four months and who knows how many thousands of kilometers, it wasn’t really worth his while to take the train. He met his cousin in a cart, a little beyond Genola, six kilometers from Fossano: the cousin invited him to climb in, but by now it really would have been a sin, and Lorenzo arrived home on foot; besides, he had always traveled on foot, all his life. Time meant little to him.
When I returned myself, five months later, after my long journey through Russia, I went to Fossano
to see him and bring him a sweater for the winter. I found a weary man: not weary of the road but mortally weary, a weariness from which there was no recovering. We went to have a drink together at the tavern, and from the few words I managed to get out of him I understood that his margin of love for life had narrowed, had almost disappeared. He had stopped working as a mason, he traveled among the farmhouses with a cart, buying and selling scrap iron. He could no longer tolerate rules or bosses or schedules. The little he earned he spent at the tavern; his drinking wasn’t a vice—he drank to get away from the world. He had seen the world, he didn’t like it, he felt it was going to ruin; living no longer interested him.
I thought he needed to change his environment, and I found him a job as a mason in Turin, but Lorenzo refused it. By now he was living like a nomad, sleeping wherever he happened to be, even, in the harsh winter of 1945–46, outside. He drank, but he was lucid; he wasn’t a believer, he didn’t know much about the Gospels, but then he told me something that at Auschwitz I hadn’t suspected. I wasn’t the only one he had helped there. He had had other dependents, Italians and others, but it had seemed to him right not to tell me: we are in the world to do good, not to boast of it. In “Suíss” he had been a rich man, at least compared to us, and had been able to help us, but now it was over, and he had no more opportunities.
He got sick; thanks to doctor friends I was able to get him into the hospital, but he couldn’t have any wine and he left. He was confident and consistent in his rejection of life. Lorenzo was found nearly dead a few days later, and he died in the hospital, in solitude. He who was not a survivor of the camps died of the illness of survivors.
The King of the Jews
On my return from Auschwitz I found in my pocket a curious coin of an aluminum alloy, which is reproduced here. It’s scratched and corroded; on one side it bears the Jewish star (the Shield of David), the date 1943, and the word getto, which is pronounced ghetto in German, and, on the other, the words quittung über 10 mark and der älteste der juden in litzmannstadt, respectively, “Value of 10 Marks” and “Elder of the Jews of Litzmannstadt.” For many years I forgot about it; for a time I carried it in my wallet, maybe unconsciously attributing to it the value of a good-luck charm, then I left it lying at the bottom of a drawer. Recently, information I’ve received from various sources has allowed me, at least in part, to reconstruct its history, and it’s an unusual, fascinating, and sinister history.