by Primo Levi
They spent the rest of the day sleeping in shifts: toward nightfall, the sound of a train could be heard in the silence of the countryside. All three of them got a good grip on the end of the rope and lay down under the bushes to keep from being seen. There was no pilot engine; the train consisted of thirty or so locked boxcars, and it was moving along rapidly, but when it came within view of the bridge it started to slow down. Mendel suddenly felt an intense urge to pray, but he suppressed it because none of the prayers from his childhood were suited to the situation, and for that matter he couldn’t be sure that the Eternal One, blessed be He, had jurisdiction over railroad lines. The train was moving slowly by the time it came even with the dismantled section of track. “Now,” Leonid ordered: the three men leaped to their feet and jerked hard on the rope. They encountered much stiffer resistance than they expected, then something gave and the rope obeyed their frenzied efforts: but not far, no more than a handsbreadth.
The locomotive screeched as the engineer jammed on the brakes, and sparks sprayed from the wheels: he must have seen something and reversed steam, but it was too late. The front wheel truck tumbled off the rails and onto the gravel of the roadbed, the engine and cars moved another dozen meters or so, propelled by the momentum, in a deafening clatter and a cloud of dust, then everything was still. Only the front truck of the locomotive was stuck on the bridge, and the engine was slightly tilted; it must have hit the parapet, and a jet of steam was issuing from a broken pipe somewhere, with an ear-splitting hiss, so loud that the three men were unable to exchange a word. Leonid, pale as a corpse, gestured to the other two men to follow him toward the first car: perhaps in search of prey. This was crazy! Up and down the length of the train, they could see human figures scurrying back and forth. Mendel stepped in; with Karlis’s help, he dragged Leonid away toward the nearest grove of trees. They stared at one another, panting: a partial derailment, a partial success. The locomotive was damaged, but not destroyed; the line was cut, but it would be repaired in a few days; the bridge and the rail cars were practically untouched. Leonid swore at himself, he should have foreseen that the train would slow down when it got to the bridge. If they’d sabotaged the line a kilometer farther along, they would have done ten times as much damage.
The security detail, no more than half a dozen men, were busying themselves around the locomotive, without bothering to go in search of the saboteurs. The three men waited for nightfall, then they headed back, in no hurry. Leonid seemed depressed, and Mendel did his best to bolster his spirits: it wasn’t his fault, he assured him, they lacked proper equipment, and to some extent they had in fact stopped the train. Leonid said nothing for a long time, with his back turned; then he said:
“You don’t get it. It was supposed to be a gift.”
“A gift? For who?”
“For Line: the girl with the submachine gun, that’s right, the one who stands guard with you. She’s my woman, and has been since the other night. The train was supposed to be a gift for her.”
Mendel felt like laughing and crying at the same time. He was about to tell Leonid that Novoselky wasn’t the place for a love story, but he restrained himself. They continued in silence; in the middle of the night they realized that Karlis had fallen behind and they stopped to wait for him. An hour went by and Karlis didn’t appear: he’d gone his own way. The two men continued back through the thickening shadows.
When they reached the camp, they made their report, and Dov listened without commenting or passing judgment: he knew how those operations went. Karlis’s departure was a problem, but there had been no way to predict or prevent it, and, for that matter, it wouldn’t be the first time; Novoselky wasn’t a concentration camp, and anyone who wanted to leave was free to do so. Would Karlis talk? The reward offered by the police was attractive, ten rubles a head for every Jew reported: the Germans are generous people. On the other hand, Karlis had accounts to settle with the Germans himself, and what’s more they’d always treated him well at the monastery, and he had other ways of making a living. Whatever the case, there was nothing to be done about it: they could only stay alert, especially in the next few days and, if there was an attack, defend themselves.
But no attack came; what did come, around the middle of September, brought by Dov’s mysterious informers, was the news that Italy had capitulated, and the camp was quickly in an uproar. War news, invariably triumphant in nature, was a fundamental feature of life at Novoselky. Not a week passed without the Allies landing in Greece, or Hitler killed by assassins, or the Americans routing the Japanese with some terrifying new weapon. Every new rumor was passed around in feverish excitement, embroidered on, embellished with new details, and served for days at a time as a bulwark against fear; the few who refused to believe in it were looked upon with contempt. Then it would vanish, forgotten without leaving a trace, so that the next piece of news could be accepted uncritically.
But this time was different, and the announcement of Italy’s capitulation was confirmed by two different sources. It was reported on Radio Moscow, and confirmed by Dov in person, who was usually skeptical. The comments were frenzied, and no one talked about anything else. This meant that the Axis forces had been cut in half. Surely now the war would be over within a month, at most two. It was impossible that the Allies would fail to take advantage of the situation: Hadn’t they already landed in Italy? For their armies, Italy would be no more than a step along the way, in three days they’d reach the border and then drive straight into the heart of Germany. But which border? The geography of Europe was passionately reconstructed, through dim memories of school and legendary scraps. Pavel, the only citizen of the marshes who had actually been to Italy, sat like an oracle at the center of a constantly changing knot of listeners.
Pavel Yurevich Levinski was very proud of his patronym, and less so of his inconveniently eloquent surname: he was a Jewish Russian, not a Russian Jew. At the age of thirty-five, he already had a varied career behind him: he’d been a weight lifter, then an actor, both amateur and professional, a singer, and even, for a few months, an announcer on Radio Leningrad. He liked to play cards and dice, he liked wine, and, when necessary, he could swear like a Cossack. In the emaciated community of Novoselky he stood out for his athletic appearance: no one could understand how, on the starvation rations, Pavel was able to find nourishment for his muscles. He was of average height, tough, ruddy. He shaved regularly, and the blue-black shadow of his beard extended up his cheeks almost to his eyes. Only hours after shaving, it was already darkening his face again. His hair and eyebrows were black and bushy. He had a true Russian voice, soft and deep and resonant, but once he finished talking or singing his mouth snapped shut, like a steel trap. His face was made up of sharp contrasts, so many mountains and valleys; his cheekbones were pronounced, the groove that ran from the center of his nose to his upper lip was deep, and two fleshy elevations marked its juncture with the lip itself. He had strong teeth and the eyes of a mesmerist. With those eyes, and with his short, massive hands, he could eliminate various joint pains, backaches, and sometimes, for a few hours, even hunger and fear. He had no inclination for discipline, but he enjoyed a tacit indulgence at the monastery.
His listeners peppered him with questions about Italy.
“Why, of course, I’ve been there. Years and years ago, on the famous tour of the Jewish Theater of Moscow. I was Jeremiah, the prophet of misfortune: I came onstage with a yoke on my shoulders, prophesying the deportation of the Jews to Babylon, lowing like an ox. I wore a purple wig, and lots of padding to make me seem even bigger than I am, and a pair of shoes with soles a handsbreadth high, because prophets are tall. We performed in Hebrew and Yiddish: the Italians, in Milan, Venice, Rome, and Naples, couldn’t understand a single word we said and clapped like mad.”
“So you’ve seen Italy with your own eyes?” Ber, the student rabbi, asked him.
“Of course: from the train. The whole length of Italy is the distance from Leningrad to Kiev, you c
an go from the Alps to Sicily in a day: now that the Italian Army has surrendered, the Allies will be at the German border in the blink of an eye. For that matter, even before they surrendered, the Italians were never serious about being Fascists; in fact, Mussolini himself invited the Theater of Moscow to Rome, and in Ukraine the Italian soldiers didn’t put up much resistance. Italy is a beautiful country, with seas and lakes and mountains, all green and flowering. The people are courteous and friendly, well dressed but given to thieving: in short, it’s an odd country, very different from Russia.”
But what about the borders? How far north would the Allies get? Here it became clear that Pavel Yurevich was on shaky ground; he vaguely remembered a place called Tarvisio, but he no longer knew whether it bordered Germany or Yugoslavia or Hungary. When he did remember was a dark-eyed girl he’d spent a night with in Milan, but that episode did not interest his audience.
October went by; you could feel the cold coming on, and the community’s spirits began to sink. Contradictory reports came in: the Russians had retaken Smolensk, but the German front had not collapsed. There was fighting in Italy, but not at the border, not along the Alps: there was talk of Allied landings in countries nobody had ever heard of. Could it be that the British and the Americans, with all their oil and all their gold, were unable to give the Germans the final clubbing? And the Eternal One, blessed be He, why was He remaining hidden behind the gray clouds of Pripet instead of coming to the aid of His people? “You chose us from all the peoples”: why us in particular? Why do the wicked prosper, why are the helpless slaughtered, why hunger, mass graves, typhus, the SS flamethrowers in lairs packed with terrified children? And why should Hungarians, Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Tartars rob and massacre the Jews, tear their last weapons out of their hands, instead of joining with them to fight the common enemy?
Now winter arrived, friend and ally of the Russian armed forces but a cruel enemy to the trapped inhabitants of Novoselky. The gusting Siberian wind had already drawn a sheet of transparent ice over the black face of the marshes; soon that ice would thicken until it could support the weight of manhunters. The tracks of footsteps in the snow would become legible from the air, or even from the ground, just as clearly as one can read the scrolls of the Holy Scriptures. There was no shortage of firewood, but every hearth was a giveaway; the columns of smoke rising from the monastery chimneys would be visible for dozens of kilometers in all directions, signaling like a forefinger pointing to the ground: “The sacrificial victims are here.” Dov ordered that by day all the citizens exempt from work details should live gathered in a single room and that at night they should all sleep in the same dormitory. That meant lighting only one fire; the chimney pipe was to be extended into the branches of a large oak tree growing close to the wall, thus assuring that the soot would cling to the branches instead of blackening the snow all around. Would all this serve any purpose? Would it be enough? Maybe it would, or maybe it wouldn’t, but the important thing was to make sure that everyone was doing something for the common good, that everyone should have the impression that something was being decided and done. Tanners and cobblers began making boots of all sizes, using all the hides that the peasants were willing to hand over, even dogskin and catskin: rough barbaric boots stitched with twine, furry side in. They were not limited to local consumption; Dov sent a mission to Rovnoe, a village inhabited by Ukrainians of the Baptist faith, to barter an assortment of boots in exchange for provisions and wool. Baptists, too, were despised and persecuted, both by the Germans and by the Russians; they were on good terms with the Jews.
The envoys returned from Rovnoe a few days later, with a substantial cargo of goods and a message for Dov. It was signed by Gedale, the legendary partisan commander, the one who had led the revolt in the Kosava ghetto, and whose life had been saved by a violin. Dov, who by now thought of Mendel as his lieutenant, read him the message and talked it over with him. It contained two points: first of all, Gedale informed Dov that in the Salihorsk ghetto, by now decimated, the Germans had posted a decree of “amnesty,” drafted in their cynically euphemistic jargon: the Umsiedlungen, or forced transfers (they called them transfers!) had been suspended for an unspecified period; the Jews who were hiding in the area, and especially the artisans, were invited to return to the ghetto, they would not be punished for running away, and would receive ration cards. And that Dov, with the onset of winter, should therefore do as he thought best.
Second, Gedale was inviting Dov to a hunting party. They would be hunting the hunters: it was a unique opportunity. Count Daraganov, a former large landowner, had returned to his landholdings in the wake of the German invasion, and he was holding a hunting party for the Germans on his estate, on the shores of Lake Chervonoe, just a day’s walk from Novoselky. A dozen high-ranking Wehrmacht officers would be attending; the report was reliable—it had come from a Ukrainian who collaborated with the partisans and who had been chosen as a beater. The band to which Gedale temporarily belonged was powerful and well organized, made up for the most part of volunteers from the winter of 1941, which is to say, the aristocracy of Soviet partisans. Gedale thought that Jewish involvement in the hunting party would be welcome, advantageous, and possibly rewarded with weapons or something else.
Concerning the first point, Dov chose to put off the decision until later; as for the second, his decision was immediate. It was important to show the Russians that Jews, too, knew how to fight and were eager to do so. Mendel volunteered to go: he was a soldier, he knew how to shoot. Dov thought it over briefly; no, neither Mendel nor Leonid, precisely because they were experienced fighters. The action that Gedale was proposing might be important in propaganda terms, and was really a prank, but militarily speaking it was relatively meaningless, and it was dangerous. Partisan logic was pitiless, and it demanded that the best men be held in reserve for the more serious operations, for diversions, for offense and defense. Instead, he would send Ber and Vadim, two nebbishes, two greenhorns: precisely because they were beginners. “Do you think I get my hands dirty? I do; just like everyone who has to make decisions.”
Ber, the bespectacled young man who stood guard with Leonid, and Vadim set off in high spirits; Vadim, a reckless young man, talkative and giddy, even boasted happily: “We’ll punch holes in those medal-spangled chests!” All they carried with them was a pistol and two hand grenades each. Vadim came back alone, two days later, ashen-faced and exhausted, with a bullet hole in his shoulder, to tell the story. It hadn’t been a game at all, it was a massacre, pure chaos. Everyone was shooting at everyone else, bullets were whistling in from all directions. The Russian partisans, well hidden among the bushes, had been the first to shoot; with a single salvo they had killed four German officers, he couldn’t say whether colonels or generals. Then he’d seen the Ukrainian auxiliary police come out into the open, firing at the partisans, firing into the air, and even firing at one another; one of them, right before his eyes, had killed a German officer with the butt of his rifle. Ber had been killed immediately, impossible to say by whom, perhaps just by accident: he was on his feet, looking around; his eyesight wasn’t particularly good. He, Vadim, had hurled his grenades into the group of Germans, but instead of scattering they had drawn together and closed ranks; one grenade had exploded and the other had not.
Dov sent Vadim to get some rest, but the young man got none. He was shaken by violent bouts of coughing, and he spat a bloody foam. During the night he developed a fever and he lost consciousness; by morning he was dead. Dead why? He was twenty-two years old, Mendel said to Dov, and he couldn’t keep a note of reproof out of his voice. “There’s no saying that we won’t envy him later for the way he died,” Dov replied.
Vadim was buried at the foot of an alder tree, in the middle of an unexpected blizzard. Dov had a cross planted on his grave, because Vadim was a converted Jew; and because no one knew the proper Orthodox prayers, Dov himself recited the Kaddish. “It’s better than nothing,” he said to Mendel. “It’s
not for the dead man but for the living who believe in it.” The sky was so dark that the snow, both the drifts on the ground and the flakes whirling through the air, looked gray.
Dov sent a messenger to Rovnoe, to find Gedale and his band and ask them to send reinforcements immediately, but the messenger returned with no answer. He’d been unable to find anyone; instead what he had seen were the peasants of Rovnoe, men and women alike, hands tied, in the town square. He’d seen an SS platoon, weapons leveled, ordering them into a wagon. He’d seen the men of the auxiliary police, Ukrainians or Lithuanians, taking armfuls of shovels from a hut and loading them onto the wagon, and he’d seen the wagon set off to the valley south of the town, followed by the SS troops, bantering and smoking. There was no more to tell.
There wasn’t a soul in Novoselky, and in all the occupied territories, who did not know the significance of the shovels. Dov told Mendel that he was sorry to have sent Ber into combat:
“If the mission had gone well, with a clear victory, then I would have been right to risk the lives of two men. Instead it turned out pretty badly, and now I am in the wrong. Ber is a Jew, even dead: anyone can see that. I was wrong to choose him. Certainly, his corpse will fall into the hands of the Gestapo. Our participation in the hunt may perhaps improve our standing in the eyes of Gedale’s Russians, but it will also bring a German reprisal down upon us. Karlis running away, the shovels of Rovnoe, Ber: they’re three menacing signals. The Germans won’t take long to find us. The miracle of our immunity is over.”
That’s what the old people of the camp must have thought, when Dov told them about the “amnesty” promised by the Germans. They wanted to return to Salihorsk: they asked to leave, to be taken back to the ghetto. They preferred to cling to Nazi promises rather than face the snow and certain death of Novoselky. They were artisans, they’d have work in the ghetto, and in Salihorsk were their homes, and near their homes was the cemetery. They preferred servitude and the scant bread offered by the enemy: and how could you blame them? A terrible voice from three thousand years earlier came into Mendel’s mind, the lamentations that the Jews pursued by Pharaoh’s chariots had brought against Moses: “Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness? For it had been better for us to serve the Egyptians, than that we should die in the wilderness.” The Lord our God, the Master of the World, divided the waters of the Red Sea, and the chariots were overturned. Who would divide the waters before the Jews of Novoselky? Who would appease their hunger with quails and manna? What was falling from the dark sky was not manna but cruel snow.