by Primo Levi
In today’s atlases there exists no city with the name of Litzmannstadt, but a General Litzmann was and is known in Germany for having broken through the Russian front near Lodz, in Poland, in 1914; in Nazi times, in honor of this general the city of Lodz was rechristened Litzmannstadt. In the last months of 1944, the last survivors of the Lodz Ghetto were deported to Auschwitz; I must have found that coin on the ground, in Auschwitz, right after the liberation: certainly not before, because nothing that I had with me then was I able to keep.
In 1939, Lodz had around 750,000 inhabitants, and was the most industrial city in Poland, the most “modern,” and the ugliest: it was a city that lived on the textile industry, like Manchester and like Biella, dependent on the presence of numerous factories, big and small, most of which had been founded several decades earlier by German and Jewish industrialists and were already largely obsolete. The Nazis were quick to establish a ghetto in Lodz, as in all the cities of a certain importance in occupied Eastern Europe, reviving the conditions of the ghettos of the Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation, but made worse by modern savagery. The Lodz Ghetto, established in February 1940, was the first in time and the second, after that of Warsaw, in number; it eventually held more than 160,000 Jews, and was liquidated only in the autumn of 1944. It was therefore also the longest-lived of the Nazi ghettos, and that should be ascribed to two causes: its economic importance for the Germans, and the disturbing personality of its president.
His name was Chaim Rumkowski. He had been the co-owner of a velvet factory in Lodz; it failed, and he had made several trips to England, perhaps to deal with his creditors. He had then established himself in Russia, where he somehow became wealthy again; ruined by the 1917 Revolution, he returned to Lodz. In 1940, he was nearly sixty; he had been twice widowed and had no children; he was known as the director of Jewish charitable institutions, and as an energetic, crude, and authoritarian man. The position of president (or elder) of a ghetto was intrinsically frightening, but it was a position, it meant recognition, it elevated one by a degree, and conferred authority. Now, Rumkowski loved authority. How he came to be appointed is not known: perhaps as a joke, in the malicious Nazi style (Rumkowski was, or seemed to be, a fool with an appearance of respectability; in other words, an ideal dupe); maybe he himself schemed to obtain it, so fierce, apparently, was his desire for power.
The four years of his presidency, or, rather, of his dictatorship, proved to be a surprising tangle of megalomaniac dream, raw energy, and real diplomatic and organizational ability. He soon came to see himself in the role of an absolute but enlightened monarch, and certainly he was encouraged in this path by his German masters, who undoubtedly manipulated him, but appreciated his talents for administration and order. From them he received authorization to mint money, both coins (the coin I had) and bills, on watermarked paper that was officially provided; the exhausted workers of the ghetto were paid in this money, and could spend it in the shops to buy their food rations, which amounted on average to 800 calories a day.
Since he had at his disposal a starving army of excellent artists and craftsmen, ready at a nod to do his bidding for a quarter of a loaf, Rumkowski had stamps designed and printed that bore his image, his hair and beard illuminated by the light of Hope and Faith. He had a carriage drawn by a bony nag, and in this he drove through the streets of his tiny kingdom, which were teeming with beggars and petitioners. He had a regal cloak, and surrounded himself with a court of flatterers, lackeys, and assassins; from his poet-courtiers he commissioned anthems celebrating his “firm and powerful hand,” and the peace and order that, thanks to him, reigned in the ghetto. He instructed that the children in the abominable schools, their numbers continually diminished by death from starvation and German raids, be assigned themes in exaltation and praise of “our wise and beloved President.” Like all autocrats, he quickly organized an efficient police force, nominally to maintain order, in fact to protect his person and impose discipline; it was made up of six hundred agents armed with clubs, and an unspecified number of informers. He made many speeches in an unmistakable style, some of which have been preserved. He had adopted (deliberately? knowingly? or had he unconsciously identified with the model of the providential man, the “necessary hero,” that was dominant in Europe at the time?) the oratorical technique of Mussolini and Hitler, of the inspired monologue, the pseudo-conversation with the crowd, the creation of approval through praise and blame.
And yet his figure was more complex than it might appear. Rumkowski was not only a traitor and an accomplice. In some measure, apart from making others believe it, he must gradually have convinced himself that he was a mashiach, a messiah, a saviour of his people, whose good—at times, anyway—he must have desired. Paradoxically, alongside his identification with the oppressor, or maybe alternating with it, was an identification with the oppressed, since man, as Thomas Mann says, is a confused creature; and he becomes more confused, we might add, when he is subjected to extreme pressure, and so he eludes our judgment, the way a compass goes wild at the magnetic pole.
Although he was despised and derided, and sometimes beaten, by the Germans, Rumkowski probably thought of himself not as a servant but as a master. He must have taken his authority seriously: when, without warning, the Gestapo seized some of “his” advisors, Rumkowski rushed courageously to their aid, exposing himself to the sneers and slaps of the Nazis, which he bore with dignity. On other occasions, he tried to bargain with the Germans, who were demanding more and more cloth from the slaves assigned to the looms, and larger and larger contingents of useless mouths (the old, the sick, children) to send to the gas chambers. The harshness with which he quickly repressed movements of insubordination among his subjects (there existed, in Lodz as in other ghettos, nuclei of stubborn, bold political resistance, with Zionist or Communist roots) derived not so much from servility toward the Germans as from lèse majesté, indignation at the insult inflicted on his royal person.
In September 1944, as the Russians were approaching, the Nazis began the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto. Tens of thousands of men and women who until then had managed to endure hunger, grueling work, and disease were deported to Auschwitz, anus mundi, the ultimate drainage point of the German universe, and almost all of them died there, in the gas chambers. A thousand men remained in the ghetto, to disassemble and dismantle the precious machinery and to erase the traces of the slaughter; they were freed by the Red Army shortly afterward, and to them we are indebted for the information reported here.
Of Chaim Rumkowski’s final destiny two versions exist, as if the ambiguity under whose sign he lived had been extended to envelop his death. According to the first version, during the liquidation of the ghetto he sought to oppose the deportation of his brother, from whom he did not want to be separated; a German officer proposed that he leave voluntarily with him, and Rumkowski accepted. According to another version, Hans Biebow, another character shrouded in duplicity, attempted to rescue Rumkowski from German death. This shady German industrialist was the official responsible for the administration of the ghetto, and at the same time the overseer of the factories; he had an important and delicate task, because the ghetto factories were working for the German armed forces. Biebow wasn’t a brute; he wasn’t interested in causing suffering or in punishing the Jews for the crime of being Jews. Rather, he wished to make money as a supplier. The torture of the ghetto touched him, but only indirectly. He wanted the slave laborers to work, and yet he didn’t want them to die of hunger; his moral sense stopped there. In fact, he was the true boss of the ghetto, and was bound to Rumkowski by that client-supplier relationship which often leads to a rudimentary friendship. Biebow, a small jackal too cynical to take seriously the demonizing of the race, would have liked to put off the dissolution of the ghetto, which for him was a good business, and save his friend and ally Rumkowski from deportation, and so we see that very often a realist is better than a theorist. But the theorists of the SS were of the opposite opinio
n, and were stronger. They were gründlich, fundamentally thorough, and radical. Out with the ghetto and out with Rumkowski.
Unable to make any other arrangements, Biebow, who had good connections, handed Rumkowski a sealed letter addressed to the commander of the camp he was assigned to, and assured him that it would protect him and guarantee favorable treatment. Rumkowski obtained permission from Biebow to travel to Auschwitz with the dignity that suited his rank, that is, in a special car, at the tail end of a convoy of freight cars crammed with deportees who had no privileges; but a single fate awaited Jews in German hands, whether they were cowards or heroes, humble or proud. Neither the letter nor the car could save Chaim Rumkowski, king of the Jews, from the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
• • •
A story like this is not self-contained. It is pregnant, it raises more questions than it satisfies, and leaves us hanging; it cries—shouts—out to be interpreted, because we glimpse a symbol in it, as in dreams and signs from heaven, but it isn’t easy to interpret.
Who is Rumkowski? He’s not a monster, but he’s not a man like other men, either; he is like many, like the many frustrated men who taste power and are intoxicated by it. In numerous respects, power is like a drug: the need is a mystery to those who haven’t tried it, but after the initiation, which can be accidental, the “addiction” is born, the dependency, the need for higher and higher doses, and, along with this, the denial of reality and a return to childish dreams of omnipotence. If the hypothesis of a Rumkowski intoxicated by power is valid, we have to admit that this intoxication developed not because of but in spite of the ghetto environment; in other words, it is so powerful that it prevails even in conditions that might seem such as to extinguish any individual will. In fact, the well-known syndrome of enduring, uncontested power was clearly visible in him: the distorted vision of the world, the dogmatic arrogance, the convulsive grip on the levers of command, the view of himself as above the law.
All this does not exempt Rumkowski from responsibility. That a Rumkowski existed grieves and torments us; it’s likely that, had he survived his tragedy, and the tragedy of the ghetto—which he polluted, superimposing on it his second-rate actor’s figure—no court would have absolved him, and we certainly cannot absolve him on the moral plane. There are, however, some extenuating circumstances: a lower order, like National Socialism, exercises a frightening power of seduction, which it’s hard to guard against. Rather than honor its victims, it debases and corrupts them, assimilates them, surrounds itself with complicities great and small. To resist it, a solid moral structure is needed, and the one available to Chaim Rumkowski, the merchant of Lodz, was frail. His is the shameful and disturbing story of the Kapos, of the petty officials behind the lines, of the bureaucrats who sign everything, of those who shake their heads but assent, of those who say, “If I didn’t do it, someone worse than me would.”
It’s typical of regimes where all the power comes from the top—and no critic can ascend from below—to weaken and confuse the capacity for judgment, and to create a broad band of gray consciences that stands between the potentates of evil and the pure victims; in this band Rumkowski should be placed. Whether higher up or lower down it’s hard to say: he alone would be able to clarify it if he could speak to us, even if he were lying, as perhaps he always lied. He would help us understand, as every defendant helps his judge, helping even if he doesn’t want to, even if he lies, because the capacity of man to play a part is not unlimited.
But all this is not enough to explain the sense of urgency and threat that this story exudes. Perhaps its meaning is different and wider. In Rumkowski we are all reflected: his ambiguity is ours, that of hybrids kneaded of clay and spirit; his fever is ours, that of our Western civilization that “descends into hell with trumpets and drums”;1 and his wretched trappings are the distorted image of our symbols of social prestige. His folly is that of the presumptuous and mortal Man as Isabella describes him in Measure for Measure:
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.
Like Rumkowski, we, too, are so dazzled by power and money that we forget the fragility of our existence: we forget that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is fenced in, that outside the fence are the lords of death, and a little way off the train is waiting.
1. The expression “hell with trumpets and drums” is taken from Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.
A Tranquil Star
Once upon a time, somewhere in the universe very far away from here, lived a tranquil star, which moved tranquilly in the immensity of the sky, surrounded by a crowd of tranquil planets about which we have not a thing to report. This star was very big and very hot, and its weight was enormous; and here a reporter’s difficulties begin. We have written “very far,” “big,” “hot,” “enormous”; Australia is very far, an elephant is big and a house is bigger, this morning I had a hot bath, Everest is enormous. It’s clear that something in our lexicon isn’t working.
If in fact this story must be written, we must have the courage to eliminate all adjectives that tend to excite wonder: they would achieve the opposite effect, that of impoverishing the narrative. For a discussion of stars our language is inadequate and seems laughable, as if someone were trying to plow with a feather. It’s a language that was born with us, suitable for describing objects more or less as large and long-lasting as we are; it has our dimensions, it’s human. It doesn’t go beyond what our senses tell us. Until two or three hundred years ago, small meant the scabies mite; there was nothing smaller, nor, as a result, was there an adjective to describe it. The sea and the sky were big, in fact equally big; fire was hot. Not until the thirteenth century was the need felt to introduce into daily language a term suitable for counting “very” numerous objects, and, with little imagination, “million” was coined; a little later, with even less imagination, “billion” was coined, with no care being taken to give it a precise meaning, since the term today has different values in different countries.
Not even with superlatives does one get very far: how many times higher than a high tower is a very high tower? Nor can we hope for help from disguised superlatives, like “immense,” “colossal,” “extraordinary”; to relate the things that we want to relate here, these adjectives are hopelessly unsuitable, because the star we started from was ten times as big as our Sun, and the Sun is “many” times as big and heavy as our Earth, whose size so overwhelms our own dimensions that we can represent it only with a violent effort of the imagination. There is, of course, the slim and elegant language of numbers, the alphabet of the powers of ten, but then this would not be a story in the sense in which this story wants to be a story; that is, a fable that awakens echoes, and in which each of us can perceive distant reflections of himself and of the human race.
This tranquil star wasn’t supposed to be so tranquil. Maybe it was too big: in the far-off original act in which everything was created, it had received an inheritance too demanding. Or maybe it contained in its heart an imbalance or an infection, as happens to some of us. It’s customary among the stars to quietly burn the hydrogen they are made of, generously giving energy to the void, until they are reduced to a dignified thinness and end their career as modest white dwarves. The star in question, however, when some billions of years had passed since its birth, and its companions began to rarefy, was not satisfied with its destiny and became restless—to such a point that its restlessness became visible even to those of us who are “very” distant and circumscribed by a “very” brief life.
Of this restlessness Arab and Chinese astronomers were aware. The Europeans no: the Europeans of that time, which was a time of struggle, were so convinced that the heaven of the stars was immutable, was in fact the paradigm and kingdom of immutability, that they considered it pointless
and blasphemous to notice changes in it; there could be none, by definition there were none. But a diligent Arab observer, equipped only with good eyes, patience, humility, and the love of knowing the works of his God, had realized that this star, to which he was very attached, was not immutable. He had watched it for thirty years, and had noticed that the star oscillated between the fourth and the sixth of the six magnitudes that had been described many centuries earlier by a Greek, who was as diligent as he, and who, like him, thought that observing the stars was a route that would take one far. The Arab felt a little as if it were his star: he had wanted to place his mark on it, and in his notes he had called it Al-Ludra, which in his dialect means “the capricious one.” Al-Ludra oscillated, but not regularly: not like a pendulum; rather, like someone who is at a loss between two choices. It completed its cycle sometimes in one year, sometimes in two, sometimes in five, and it didn’t always stop in its dimming at the sixth magnitude, which is the last visible to the naked eye; at times it disappeared completely. The patient Arab counted seven cycles before he died: his life had been long, but the life of a man is always pitifully brief compared with that of a star, even if the star behaves in such a way as to arouse suspicions of its eternity.