The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Let each one choose his own fate. Dov had three sledges prepared to take back to Salihorsk the twenty-seven citizens who had no military duties and had chosen the way of the ghetto; among them were all the children, but Adam had chosen to stay. There were only two mules, brought by the men from Ozarichi: one mule was therefore forced to pull two sledges. They left in silence, without a word of farewell, bundled up in rags, straw, and blankets, obeying their miserable hopes for a few more weeks of life. Thus, instantly hidden from sight by the curtain of snow, they vanish from this story.

  Dov ordered three bunkers dug, or, really, three burrows in the bare dirt, which, despite the cold, was not yet frozen solid. They were situated about two hundred meters from the monastery, in the direction from which they expected the Germans to arrive. The Germans had established a garrison in the partially destroyed village of Rovnoe. Each burrow could hold two men, and it was camouflaged with brush that was rapidly covered over with snow. “We, too, know how to use shovels,” he said, and sent another team to dig a square pit, two meters deep, across the broadest track that ran from Rovnoe to the monastery. He had them cover it with light boards, and atop those boards he had them lay brush up to the level of the snow on the surrounding terrain: after one night of continuous snowfall, the depression was barely noticeable. Along the track, and over the trap that they had thus laid, he had two men walk back and forth repeatedly, each of them pulling behind him a shovel weighed down with rocks, so as to create the appearance of two recent wheel tracks. He distributed weapons to all, and he positioned the heavy machine gun on the intact turret.

  The manhunters showed up two days later. There were more than fifty of them, so someone must have overestimated the strength of the defenders. They heard the clattering of the caterpillar tracks before anything could be seen through the veil of snow, which continued to fall heavily. A light half-track led the column, following the track that Dov had prepared: it advanced slowly, reached the edge of the trap, teetered on the rim, and fell in, crushing the boards, which cracked loudly. Dov climbed up to the turret, where Mendel was ready with the machine gun. He told him to wait: “Conserve your ammunition, fire only when you see someone trying to get out of the pit.” But no one emerged; perhaps the vehicle had overturned.

  Behind the light half-track came another, heavier one, and behind it a squad of men on foot fanned out across the track and among the trees. The heavy half-track skirted the pit and opened fire; at the same instant, Mendel, too, began to fire short bursts, in the grip of battle fever. He saw a few Germans fall, and at the same time heard two violent explosions beneath him: a pair of anti-tank rockets had hit the monastery’s roof, which collapsed and caught fire. Other direct hits destroyed the building’s outer walls at numerous points. In the midst of all the noise and smoke, Dov shouted into his ear: “Fire full out, now. Don’t try to save ammunition. We’re fighting for three lines in the history books.” Dov, too, was firing downward, with one of the Italian rifles. Suddenly, Mendel saw him stumble; he fell backward, but immediately got up. At the same time, he heard more light-arms fire coming from the bunkers: in accordance with Dov’s orders, the fighters in the bunkers were attacking the Germans from behind. Caught off guard, the Germans broke and ran, turning their backs to the monastery. Mendel rushed down the steps with Dov, amid the rubble in flames. He saw people moving, and shouted at them to follow him; they emerged into the open on the opposite side of the building and were among the trees. Safe, he thought, absurdly. On the other side, fighting had resumed. They heard the sound of mortar shells and commands shouted through a loudspeaker, they saw men and women emerge from the breaches in the walls, arms raised. They saw the manhunters laugh as they searched them, interrogated them, and then lined them up against the wall; but what happened in the courtyard of the monastery of Novoselky will not be recounted. It is not to describe massacres that this story is being told.

  They counted their number. They were eleven: Mendel himself, Dov, Leonid, Line, Pavel, Adam, another woman, whose name Mendel didn’t know, and four of the men from Ozarichi. Adam was losing blood from a wound in his upper thigh, so high up that there was no way to bind it; he stretched out on the snow and died in silence. Dov wasn’t wounded, only stunned. He had a contusion to the temple, perhaps a ricocheting bullet or a rock hurled by one of the explosions. The Germans lingered until nightfall, blowing up what remained of the monastery; they didn’t follow the tracks of the fugitives, already covered by the falling snow, and left, taking with them their dead and the machine gun.

  4

  November 1943–January 1944

  They had few weapons, little ammunition, and nothing to eat. They were dazed and listless, in the grip of the leaden passivity that follows action, that binds both spirit and limbs. The war would go on forever; death, hunting, flight would never come to an end, the snow would never stop falling, day would never dawn. The patch of red blood around Adam’s body would never be washed away, no one would ever again glimpse peace, the gentle happy season, the works of men. The woman whose name Mendel didn’t know, with a sweet fair face and a solid peasant body, sat in the snow and wept quietly. Mendel learned that her name was Sissl and that she was Adam’s daughter.

  The first to recover was Pavel. “Nu, so we’re alive and the Germans have left. We can’t spend the night here. Let’s go down into the cellars: they can’t have blown them all up.” Dov, too, began to recover; certainly, beneath the monastery there was a network of underground corridors of several hundred meters. There were some provisions, and in any case those tunnels could serve as a temporary shelter. There were two trapdoors leading down, but the larger one was covered with a daunting heap of rubble. The smaller one, in the kitchen floor, was almost clear. They felt their way down the ladder, found straw and firewood, and lit a fire. They also found bundles of fir branches; by the light of jury-rigged torches they saw that the supplies of potatoes and corn remained intact, as did the munitions storeroom. They held a meeting.

  “We can stay here for a few days, rest, and eat: then we’ll see,” said Pavel, but Dov and Mendel were opposed. Dov said:

  “The Germans have established a garrison in Rovnoe, and they suffered several dead here. They’ll be back, no doubt about it. They never do things by half. And we have no heavy weaponry, we’re few in number and exhausted, and we can’t live in a cellar like this; we’d die either of cold or of smoke.”

  “We need to join forces with Gedale,” said Mendel. “Where is Gedale?”

  “I don’t know,” Dov replied. “From the last reports I have about him, he was working with a well-organized band, made up of older and experienced partisans: he was the deputy commander. And precisely because they’re experienced, they won’t leave any traces, and it will be hard to find them.”

  “But they must have informants in Rovnoe; they must have heard about the German attack on the monastery, and will send someone to find out what happened,” said Line, who hadn’t spoken until that moment. Mendel turned to look at her, in the flickering torchlight. She was sitting on the ground next to Leonid, small and slender, with dark eyes, black hair cropped short, the gnawed fingernails of a schoolgirl. She’d spoken in a voice that was subdued but firm. Not an easy woman to read, he thought to himself: neither simple nor direct. For Leonid, an unexpected companion; they could either draw strength one from the other, or destroy each other. Then he looked at Sissl and felt all at once the silent burden of solitude: pity the man alone. With a woman at his side, any woman, the road ahead would have been different.

  Pavel agreed with Line’s observation, and added, “And if they do send someone, they’ll do it quickly.”

  The next morning, in fact, they heard a dog barking. Pavel crept out into the open, and through a crack in the wall he saw that Oleg, the old forest ranger, was wandering around the monastery’s ruins. He was a trustworthy person; he’d given proof of that on other occasions, taking advantage of his tours of inspection to maintain contacts among the ban
ds and convey information. Yes, he’d been sent by Ulybin, the commander of Gedale’s band: the band was wintering in a camp near Turov, seventy kilometers west of there. Ulybin was willing to take in trained people in good condition, but no one else; it shouldn’t be hard to catch up with him.

  “Take the forest trails and avoid the roads. It’ll be rougher going, but you won’t run the risk of bumping into a patrol.”

  They followed the forest ranger’s advice, but the march was miserable. The snow was deep and soft. The first in line sank in to his knees, and occasionally stumbled into snow piled deeper by the wind, and then sank in up to his hips; they took turns leading, but even so they couldn’t cover more than two or three kilometers an hour, in part because they were weighed down by the provisions and munitions they’d found in the cellars, and because Dov was forced to stop frequently.

  It was no longer snowing, but the sky was still lowering and ominous, so opaque that there was no way to tell directions: as night fell, there was the same dull gray light to east and west. They did their best to travel in the direction indicated by Oleg by observing the moss on the tree trunks, but the forest consisted mostly of birches, and moss doesn’t grow on the white birch bark. In fact, trees of any kind were becoming rarer; sloped clearings alternated with increasingly vast flatlands, evidently frozen ponds or lakes. None of them were very familiar with the area, and they soon found themselves relying on Pavel. Pavel proved to be strong and confident. He was protective of Dov, who was exhausted by the long march on his wounded knee, and still weakened by the blow he’d taken during the German attack. Pavel helped him walk, supported him, took on most of his load. At the same time, he tended to replace him in making decisions and issuing orders: “This way, right, Dov?”

  Pavel claimed that he could sense north, without knowing how, the way a dowser can feel water. The others displayed mistrust and even annoyance, but in fact the few times they happened on an oak tree the moss was on the side that Pavel had predicted: however approximate, the direction he chose was accurate. They were not only weary; they were thirsty, too. They were all well enough acquainted with the Russian winter to know that eating snow is useless and dangerous: long before you’ve satisfied your thirst, you’ll have an irritated mouth and a swollen tongue. To quench a thirst you need water, not snow or ice; but to get water you need fire, and for fire you need firewood. They found firewood fairly often, piles of it, abandoned by the peasants, but Pavel refused to let them touch it; or, more precisely, he set forth in the form of a command an exchange of views that had taken place among Mendel, Dov, and him.

  “No fires during the daytime, says Dov. Tough it out, tolerate the thirst, you can’t die of thirst in a single day. Smoke can be seen from a long way in the daytime. We’ll start a fire when night falls; you can see fire from a long way off, too, but we’ll build a shelter around it, by piling up snow, or with our own bodies, so that we can also get warm ourselves. But I think we’ll find a shelter before long. In countryside like this, we ought to find an izba.”

  Whether it was intuition, second sight, or some charlatan’s trick, it turned out that Pavel had guessed right. Around evening, they saw a hump on the desolate plain; the spikes of an enclosure emerged from the snow, black and shiny with asphalt, along with the roof of a hut. They cleared the snow away from the door and went in, all of them crowding into the small space. There was nothing inside save for an earthenware stove and a zinc bucket; under the snow was a healthy supply of firewood, stacked against the rear wall. They were able to roast potatoes in the embers of the stove and to melt snow in the bucket. They lit a fire behind the cabin, in a hole dug in the snow, and they boiled corn in their mess kits; they obtained an unpleasant, tasteless gruel, but it warmed them up and eased their hunger and thirst. Then they stretched out to sleep, the men on the floor, the women on the pallet atop the stove; they all fell asleep instantly, except Dov, who was starting to suffer from the old wound in his knee and his shattered bones. He moaned as he drifted into and out of slumber, tossing and turning in search of a position that wouldn’t make the pain worse.

  In the middle of the night, Mendel woke up, too, with a jerk: no sound could be heard, but an intense beam of light shone in through a small window, moving from one corner of the izba to the other, as if exploring it. Mendel drew closer to the window: the beam of light caught him full in the face for an instant and then went out. Once he’d recovered from his dazzlement, he made out three figures in the pale glow of the snow: they were men in white overalls, on skis, and armed. One of them held a submachine gun with a flashlight bound to the barrel: just then, both barrel and flashlight were aimed at the snow. The three men were talking softly, but no sound could be heard from inside the izba. Then the shaft of light penetrated the small window again, a pistol shot was heard, and a voice shouted in Russian:

  “We’ve got you covered. Don’t move; hands on your heads. One of you come out with your hands up and without weapons.” Then the same voice repeated the warning in bad German. Dov made a move to get up and head for the door, but Pavel beat him to it: before Dov was on his feet, Pavel had opened the door and walked out, hands raised.

  “Who are you? Where do you come from and where are you going?”

  “We are soldiers, partisans, and Jews. We’re not from around here, we come from Novoselky.”

  “I also asked you where you’re heading.”

  Pavel hesitated; Mendel stepped out, hands in the air, and stood at his side.

  “Comrade, we were fifty and now ten of us are left alive. We’ve fought and our camp was destroyed. We’re lost and we’re tired, but fit for service; we’re looking for a group that will take us in. We want to continue our war, which is also yours.”

  The man dressed in white replied: “We’ll see later whether or not you’re fit for service. We can’t take in any useless mouths to feed; in our group if you don’t fight you don’t eat. This is our zone, and you were lucky: we saw your women on top of the stove, and so we didn’t shoot. Usually, that’s not what we do. It’s almost never a mistake to shoot on sight.” The man gave a short laugh, and then added: “Almost!”

  Mendel felt his heart lighten.

  Dawn was breaking. Two of the men took off their skis and came into the izba; the third man, the one who had spoken, stayed outside, weapon leveled. He was tall and very young, and had a short black beard; all three wore padded clothing beneath their camouflage overalls, giving them a look of corpulence that seemed out of place with the smooth agility of their movements. The two men, pistols in hand, ordered those in the hut not to make a move, and with quick, expert motions they searched them all, even the two women, offering a few half-serious phrases of apology. They asked them their names and where they came from, piled the weapons and ammunition that they’d found in a corner, and then went back outside and made a quick report to their leader, which was impossible to overhear from inside. The bearded young man lowered his weapon, took off his skis, went in, and sat on the floor in a comradely manner.

  “As far as we’re concerned, you’re not dangerous. My name’s Pyotr. Who is your leader?”

  Dov said: “You can see for yourself, we’re not an integral band. We’re the survivors of a camp of families; among us were old people, children, and people passing through. I was their elder, or their leader, if that’s what you want to call me. I fought with Manuil (Arrow) and with Uncle Vanka, and I was wounded at Bobruysk last February. I was in the air force. Gedale fought with Uncle Vanka, too. We were friends. Do you know Gedale?”

  Pyotr pulled a pipe out of his pocket and lit it. “As far as we’re concerned, you’re not dangerous, but you might become dangerous. You have white hair, boss; you’ve been a partisan—don’t you know that you don’t ask partisans questions?”

  Dov fell silent, humiliated: yes, in wartime, people age quickly. He remained there, head bowed, looking at the large hands dangling inertly from his wrists, every now and then massaging his knee.

  Py
otr resumed: “. . . But we’re not going to abandon you, whether or not you’re fighters. At least not right away—what might happen later, we can’t say, our leaders can’t say, no one can say. Our time runs like rabbits, fast and zigzagging. If you make a plan for the next day, and you can stick to it, congratulations; if you make plans for next week, you’re crazy. Or else you’re a German spy.”

  He smoked calmly for a few more minutes, then he said, “Our camp isn’t far, we’ll be able to get there before nightfall tomorrow. You can keep your weapons, but unloaded: the bullets, forgive us, but we’ll keep them ourselves. For now. Then, once we’ve gotten to know one another, we’ll see.”

  They set out, the three skiers leading the group, the others following behind. The snow was deep and floury, and the weight of the three men wasn’t enough to pack it down; the ten people on foot had a hard time moving through it, sinking in with every step, slowing their progress. The slowest of all was Dov; he never complained, but he was clearly having trouble. Pyotr gave him his ski poles, but they weren’t much help: he was panting and pale, and beaded with sweat, and he had to stop frequently. Pyotr, who was the first in line, turned around every now and then to look back, and was uneasy: the terrain was wide open, without trees or shelter; the frozen marshes alternated with slight barren rises, and from the height of one of these, if you turned to look back, it was possible to see their tracks, deep as a crevasse and straight as a meridian. At the end of their tracks were the thirteen of them, so many ants: if a German reconnaissance plane passed overhead, there would be no escape. Luckily, the sky remained overcast, but it wouldn’t be for much longer. Pyotr sniffed the air like a bloodhound: a light north wind was stirring; in time, it would kick up the snow and cover their trail, but the sky would clear before then. He was in a hurry to get back to camp.