by Primo Levi
“But don’t think that there’s any reliable service. Not all the drops and landings are successful, and not all the partisan bands are willing to share with us. Many partisan leaders consider us useless mouths to feed because we don’t fight. That’s why we have to make ourselves useful, and there’s lots of ways to do that. In the first place, here anyone who can walk and shoot must be considered a partisan, contribute to the common defense, and, if requested, go and fight with the partisans. In fact, there’s a constant exchange between the bands and the monastery, and the monastery itself, as long as the Germans don’t find it, is a good shelter for wounded or tired partisans, too. But there’s more that can be done, and we make sure we do it. We patch their clothing, we wash their linen, we tan hides with oak bark, and we use the leather to make boots. That’s right, that smell is from the tanning vats. And we make birch-bark tar to keep the boot leather soft and waterproof.” He turned to Mendel. “Do you have a trade?” he asked.
“I was trained as a watchmaker, but I worked as a mechanic on a kolkhoz.”
“Good, we can find you work immediately. What about you, Muscovite?”
“I studied accounting.”
“That’s of less use to us.” Dov laughed. “I wish we could keep accounts here, but that’s out of the question. We can’t even count the people who come and who leave. Here we get Jews who’ve miraculously survived SS massacres; we get peasants in search of protection; we get questionable types we have to keep an eye on. They could even be spies, but what can we do about it? We can’t rely on their faces, the way I trust yours now: we don’t have an intelligence service of our own. Many come here, others leave or die. The young people leave, with or without my permission: they’d rather join the partisans outright than waste their days in this republic of hunger and fear. The old and the sick die off; but healthy young ones die, too, of despair. Despair is worse than any disease: it descends upon you in the days of waiting, when there is no news, no contacts, when you hear about movements of German troops or Ukrainian and Hungarian mercenaries. Waiting can be as fatal as dysentery. There are only two defenses against despair, working and fighting, but they aren’t always enough. There’s also a third, which is to tell one another lies: we all fall into it eventually. Well, my little speech is done; it’s a fine thing that you showed up armed, but if you’d brought a working two-way radio it would have been even better. Too bad, you can’t have everything, not even at Novoselky.”
They were immediately assigned shifts standing guard; it was the most important duty in the community, and the monastery’s two old turrets served that purpose well. As a rule, every able-bodied refugee was required to perform twelve hours of work, eight hours of rest, and four hours of guard duty, split up into two two-hour shifts; this led to complications, but Dov had an exacting schedule and he expected it to be followed. That very night Mendel stood guard with the slight young woman he’d glimpsed in the dormitory, each of them in one of the turrets; she told him that her name was Line, but not much more. At the end of their shift, he asked her, “I have a rip in my trousers. Could you please mend it for me?” Line answered dryly, “I’ll give you needle and thread, and you can do it yourself: I don’t have time.” She raised her lantern and peered into Mendel’s face, with an attention that verged on insolence: “Where did you get that scar?” Mendel replied, “At the front.” Line asked nothing more and went off to sleep. Leonid, on the other hand, shared his shift with Ber, bespectacled and still childlike, likewise parsimonious with words.
Work in the tannery, to which they were both assigned, took place in the midst of disgusting fumes, and a silence broken only by the sloshing of the basins and brief whispers. With grim faces, men and women scraped the pelts to eliminate scraps of flesh and hair: they were the skins of rabbits, dogs, cats, and goats. Nothing could be wasted, the fleshy residue from the most recent pelts was carefully set aside for use as grease. Other workers boiled tree bark or stretched the skins on wooden frames.
They soon adapted to that way of life and the obsessive, paradoxical neatness, which was maintained by each with the effort and determination of every minute. There were no community meals: at midday and in the evening they lined up in front of the kitchen cook pots, then each went to a secluded corner to eat what had been given in silence: it was usually a meager herb soup with the occasional chunk of potato, more rarely a scrap of meat or cheese, a spoonful of blueberries, a glass of milk.
Adam, perhaps because he was the eldest, was the only one who had not forgotten the pleasure of telling stories:
“Dov? He’s one who never shirks his duty. We’d be in trouble if he weren’t around to settle arguments and disputes. He’s seen his share of things, Dov has, and he comes from far away. He comes from a village in the middle of nowhere in the highlands of central Siberia, I never remember the name: his nihilist grandfather was deported there, back in the days of the tsars, and his father was born out there, and so was he. When war broke out, he was drafted into the air force. He was taken prisoner immediately, in July of 1941; the Germans locked them up in a prison camp that was nothing more than a couple of hectares of bare ground surrounded by barbed wire, and nothing else, no barracks, no shelters, just ten thousand exhausted, wounded soldiers, starving and thirsty. In the chaos, no one noticed he was a Jew, so he wasn’t killed. After a few days they loaded him with a thousand others onto a freight train; he realized that the boards that made up the floor of his boxcar were rotten, he kicked through them and dropped out the bottom of the moving train: he was the only one, none of the other eighty men in his car had the nerve to follow. He broke a leg, but he still managed to make it away from the tracks and get to a farmhouse where the peasants hid him for months without reporting him, and they splinted his leg for him, too. As soon as he was able to walk, he went to join the partisans, but last winter he was wounded in the knee, and since then he’s limped. The partisans helped him, and he came here with a handful of other Jews. He’s a hardheaded Siberian, and in just a few months he and the others transformed this monastery, which was just a pile of rubble, into a place that’s livable.”
For the whole month of August, nothing noteworthy happened in the republic of the marshes. Nine Red Army soldiers who’d been separated from their units arrived from Ozarichi; on their own initiative they’d burned and looted a German warehouse. They were leading two mules loaded with sacks of potatoes, four Italian rifles, twenty hand grenades, and a piece of news that was worth all the rest put together: the Russians had retaken Kharkov. An impassioned argument immediately broke out among the residents of Novoselky about how far they were from Kharkov: some said five hundred kilometers, others six hundred, still others eight hundred. The latter accused the former of naïveté; the former considered the latter defeatists, in fact, traitors.
The men from Ozarichi had even brought a doctor with them, and a doctor, for Novoselky, would have been invaluable; but this one, a Jewish captain, about forty years old, was very sick. He had a fever, and for the last few legs of the trip he’d barely been able to drag himself along, and now and again they’d had to let him ride the mule. As soon as he reached the monastery, he had to lie down, because he could no longer stay on his feet; purplish patches had appeared on his face, and he was scarcely able to speak, he could only move his lips, as if his tongue were paralyzed. He diagnosed himself: he said that he had epidemic typhus fever, that he was about to die, and that the only thing he wanted was not to infect anyone else and to die in peace. Dov asked him what treatment he could be given, and he replied that there was no treatment; he asked for a little water, then he stopped talking. They stretched him out on the ground, outside the building, and covered him with a blanket. The next morning he was dead. They buried him, taking care to avoid all contact; Ber, the young man with glasses, who had been a student in a rabbinical academy, came to say Kaddish over his grave. What could be done to prevent the disease from spreading? Or perhaps typhus was only transmitted by lice? No one knew;
to avoid all risk, Dov had all the objects that had come into contact with the sick man burned, including the precious blanket.
September came, the first rains fell, the first leaves began turning yellow. Mendel realized that something was changing in Leonid. At the beginning of their stay in Novoselky he hadn’t strayed from his customary behavior, which consisted of long glowering silences and explosions of wrath directed exclusively against him: as if it had been Mendel who signed the pact with the Germans, who started the war, who unleashed terror across the country. As if Mendel and no one else had enrolled him in the parachute corps and had then hurled him into the midst of the swamps. But now Leonid came looking for Mendel less and less frequently; indeed, it seemed as if he were avoiding him entirely, and when he was unable to avoid him he was careful not to look him in the eye. The day came when Mendel no longer saw him working around the tanning vats: he was told that Leonid could no longer stand the smell, and had asked Dov to transfer him to the building where Line and two other girls distilled birchwood to turn it into tar. Another day came when Dov complained to Mendel that his friend hadn’t showed up for work, and this was a serious transgression, which Dov couldn’t understand. Mendel replied that he wasn’t responsible for what Leonid did or didn’t do, but as he spoke he noticed something like an itch around his heart, because he’d realized that the words that had come out of his mouth were the ones that Cain said to the Lord when He asked him about Abel. What foolishness! Was Leonid his brother? He was no brother: he was an unfortunate like him and like all of them, a foundling picked up off the street. Of course not, Mendel wasn’t his keeper, much less had he spilled his blood. He hadn’t killed him out in the field. And yet the itch wouldn’t go away: maybe that’s the way it really is, perhaps each of us is the Cain to some Abel, and murders him out in the field without even knowing it, by the things that we do to him, the things that we say to him, and the things that we ought to say to him but don’t.
Mendel told Dov that Leonid had had a hard life, but Dov replied with a single syllable, looking him straight in the eye: “Nu?” At Novoselky that wasn’t a justification. Who didn’t have a hard life behind him? There were no excuses for partisanzchina, Dov said harshly. What was partisanzchina? Partisan anarchy, Dov explained: the lack of discipline. A serious danger. Being outlaws doesn’t mean that you have no laws. To save yourself from Fascist death, it was necessary to accept a discipline even stricter than that imposed by the Fascists themselves: stricter, but also more just, because it was voluntary. Anyone who is unwilling to accept it is free to leave. Mendel and Leonid should think it over. In fact, they’d have to think it over immediately, because there was a job for them to do: an urgent, important job, and it wasn’t even all that dangerous. The order had come down to sabotage a railroad line. Well, that was the perfect job for them, a way to gain citizenship in the republic; for that matter, that was the partisan way, to ask new arrivals to do a trial job, just as when you start work at a factory.
The next day Dov summoned Leonid, too, and went into the details:
“The Brest–Rivne–Kiev line has been disrupted, the line that supplied the German front in southern Ukraine. From now on, all the wartime traffic will be funneled through Brest–Gomel: now, that line runs just south of Novoselky, about thirty or so kilometers away; it runs on a single track. We need to disrupt that line as quickly as we can. That’s the job you’ll have to do: do you have any ideas?”
“Do you have any explosives?” asked Mendel.
“We do, but not much, and not particularly suitable: we extracted it from a few mortar shells that landed in the marshes without exploding.”
Leonid interrupted him, shooting Mendel an insolent glance:
“Excuse me, chief: for this type of work, explosives do more harm than good. Sabotaging railroads is a job I know about: they explained all the methods during my paratrooper training. A wrench is much better for the job—it’s safer, it makes no noise, and it leaves no traces.”
“During your training course,” Mendel asked with some annoyance, “did they teach you practice, or only theory?”
“I’ll take full responsibility for this operation. For once, why don’t you mind your own business.”
“Fine,” Mendel replied, enunciating the words carefully, “I have nothing against that. I’m better at fixing things than at blowing them up.”
Dov listened as if he were amused at the skirmishing.
“Hold on a minute,” he said, “it would be a good idea not only to sabotage the tracks but also to derail a train; damaged tracks can be repaired in just a few hours, while an overturned train is not only a complete loss but also blocks the line for several days. Of course, the Germans know this, too: for some time now, if it’s an important train, they’ve had a pilot engine running ahead of it.”
There followed a short technical discussion between Dov and Leonid, which resulted in the final plan. It would have been reckless to sabotage the railroad line near Koptsevichi, that is to say, the stretch directly to the south of Novoselky: it would be like giving the Gestapo a useful hint to the camp’s location. Better to work farther away; not far from Zhitkovichi, which lay fifty kilometers to the west, the railroad runs over a bridge spanning a canal: there, the best location would be there.
“Get ready,” said Dov, “you’ll leave in two hours. You’ll have a guide who’s familiar with that area. Don’t bring weapons. As for how you sabotage the line, you’ll have to come to an agreement yourselves; Leonid, if you’ve learned some particular form of mischief, all the better. But I’m warning you, no arguments on the mission. They’re making the wrenches at the forge: two of them, just the right size.”
Mendel would gladly have done without a guide like this one, but there was no question: the man really did know the area, especially the fords. His name was Karlis, he was Latvian, he was twenty-two years old, tall, skinny, and fair-haired, and he moved with noiseless agility. How on earth should he, born so far away, know the Pripet marshes so well? He’d got to know them under the Germans, Karlis replied; he spoke pretty bad Russian. In his country they preferred Germans to Russians, and he had felt the same way, at least at the beginning. He’d gone over to the German side, and they had taught him how to hunt partisans. That’s right, here, in this territory: he’d been here for almost a year, and he knew every inch of the land. But he wasn’t stupid, after Stalingrad he’d understood that the Germans were bound to lose the war and he’d deserted a second time: he gave a half-smile, in search of complicity. It’s always better to be on the winning side, isn’t it? But now he had to take care not to fall into the hands of either Hitler or Stalin. Was that why he had taken refuge at Novoselky? Leonid asked. Sure, that’s why: he, personally, had nothing against the Jews.
“We need to be careful ourselves,” Mendel whispered to Leonid, “this fellow has on his hands Dam Israel, the blood of Israel.”
Karlis smiled his off-kilter smile again: “It won’t do you any good to speak Yiddish: I understand it, and I understand German, too.”
“So you think that the Jews of Novoselky will be victorious?” asked Mendel.
“I didn’t say that,” the Latvian replied. “Look out, the water gets very deep right there. Let’s keep more to the right.”
They emerged from the marshes at dawn, and continued walking for several hours through pastures and barren land. They rested until the early afternoon, and reached the railroad in the middle of the night. According to Karlis they would have to follow the tracks westward for eight or ten kilometers before reaching the canal; prudence dictated that they not walk on the track bed, but instead stay parallel to the tracks at a distance of several hundred meters, while still keeping them within sight. The moon was out: it made the march easier, but without it the three men would have been less apprehensive. By now they were tired; all the same, Leonid forced his pace and tended to take the lead. In contrast, the Latvian maneuvered to be last in line; this irritated Mendel, who finally told hi
m curtly, “You get moving, I’ll be last.”
Leonid spotted the bridge at sunrise. It wasn’t the ideal time to start work, but not a soul could be seen, and the bridge—which was after all only a few meters long—wasn’t guarded. It was clear that Leonid was eager to direct the operation: he gave orders in a voice that was subdued but also excited and anxious. With Mendel’s help, he unbolted the fishplates right at the junction of the two sections of track, practically at the beginning of the bridge, and then all the screws that fastened the plates to the ties; the wooden ties were rotten and the screws were easy to loosen. Karlis had made a bland offer to help, but was happy to stand watch and make sure no one approached. Once the two rails were unfastened, Leonid, instead of moving them, tied them together with a rope laid laterally, about thirty meters in length: unfortunately, that was the longest rope to be found in Novoselky. The free end of the rope was buried under clods of dirt and brush. Done, Leonid announced proudly; now all they had to do was wait for the next train. Let the pilot engine go by and then, right before the engine ran over the track, pull hard on the rope and jerk the rails out of line. Not too soon, or the engineer would be bound to notice the sabotage.