by Primo Levi
What was to be done? Wait, let time pass: the only possible solution, yet it was a terrible solution. Wait for the snow to melt, because on bare soil, muddy though it might be, tracks were less obvious. Wait for the scout planes to go hunting elsewhere. Wait in silence for news from the radio: the Germans had evacuated Odessa, but Odessa was far away. Radio silence is as burdensome as losing a limb, as if a human being were gagged at the very moment in which he or she wanted to call for help: along with hunger, a siege mentality had settled into the barracks of Turov. Those men were no strangers to privation, exhaustion, discomfort, and danger, but the isolation and seclusion caught them unprepared. Accustomed to open spaces and the fleeting liberty of forest animals, they endured the debilitating anguish of the trap and the cage.
Ulybin went on drinking: it was a well-known fact, criticized by all with the exception of Zachar, under their breath and not always under their breath. He drank in solitude, but he had lost neither his lucidity nor his bad-tempered authority. Mendel had asked him to explain Dov’s hasty departure, and Ulybin had replied:
“Wounded or sick combatants are given medical care, to the extent possible. Your friend will be given medical care, too, but more than that I can’t tell you. Maybe you’ll find out something about him when the war is over, but the fate of individuals is of no importance.”
Ulybin was too intelligent, and too experienced in partisan life, not to understand that something had to be done; that while tracks might be dangerous, despair was even more dangerous. A single track heading out from the barracks would certainly have led the Germans right to them, but if the track led through the little forest that concealed the barracks the location of the camp would be less immediately obvious. Reluctantly, therefore, Ulybin authorized not one but two provisioning expeditions, which would set out on the same night in opposite directions for different villages.
The teams had just left, and dawn was breaking, when they heard a sound that was new and alarming for the Jews but reassuring and unmistakable for the veterans of Turov. It sounded like the rattling of a motorcycle engine, faint, distant, but drawing closer. It got louder and deeper, like a gramophone record being slowed, it sneezed, and then fell silent. Ulybin’s men were immediately on their feet: “A P-2! It’s landed here, in the clearing! Let’s go see!”
“Perhaps we needn’t have sent out the teams,” said Pyotr.
“What’s a P-2?” asked Mendel.
“The P-2s are partisan aircraft. They’re made of wood, they fly slowly, but they can take off and land anywhere. They fly at night, without lights; they drop grenades on the Germans, and they bring provisions.” A short while later the pilot, stocky and shapeless in his reversed-lambskin flying suit, walked into the barracks. He took off the flying suit, removed the goggles from his forehead, and it became clear that the pilot was a girl, small, plump, with a broad serene face and a domestic way about her. She wore her hair parted in the middle, and pulled back into two short braids tied with black twine. The two men who had gone to meet her carried big bags, as if they were returning from the market. The partisans clustered around her, hugging her and kissing her round cheeks, hard with the cold: “Polina! Good work, Polina! Welcome, dear heart, it’s been such a long time! What have you brought us?”
The young woman, who looked no older than twenty, fended them off, laughing with the lovely shy grace of a peasant girl: “Enough, comrades! They sent me to see how things are going here, and because your radio is silent, but let me go, I have to leave immediately. Would there be a drop of vodka for me? Where is your commander?” She went with Ulybin into his small headquarters room.
“It’s her, it’s Polina Mikhailovna,” said Pyotr, happy and proud. “It’s Polina Gelman, from the Women’s Regiment. Don’t you know about it? They’re all women, they’re the ones who fly the P-2s. They’re all great girls, but Polina is the best of them all. She comes from Gomel, her father was a rabbi and her grandfather was a shoemaker. She’s flown more than seven hundred missions, but she’s only come here once, six months ago. She stayed for a day or two and we became friends, but evidently this time she’s in a hurry. Too bad.”
Polina said farewell and took off in her fragile aircraft. She’d brought them a little food and some medicine, along with some bad news. Movements of troops and armored vehicles were under way; in various villages around Turov units of the German and Ukrainian corps that specialized in fighting partisans were assembling. They were preparing for a concentric roundup, with resources far superior to the Turov camp’s ability to defend itself; there were no other partisan bands in the area. For some reason, the Germans had overestimated the partisans’ numbers; or perhaps it was a large-scale operation, throughout the entire area of the Pripet marshes or in all of Polesie. The Salihorsk ghetto, where the old men and invalids of Novoselky had sought safety, had been surrounded and all the inhabitants had been shot; the garrison of Salihorsk had been reinforced by an SS unit that specialized in tracking down people in hiding, and they were equipped with trained dogs. Many of the men of Turov knew these dogs and feared them more than tanks. In short, they would have to evacuate the camp.
Ulybin summoned Mendel and asked if he had figured out what those devices were that had been found among the matériel dropped by parachute.
“They’re mine detectors,” Mendel replied. “Or to be exact, metal detectors: they can find buried metal objects.”
“So you’re saying that if the Germans are equipped with these devices, they can find our minefields?”
“Yes, they can find them; maybe not immediately, but they’d find them eventually.”
Ulybin gave him a grim look: “But I’m going to mine the barracks all the same, whether the Germans have your mine detectors or not. They’ll find the buried mines, but not the ones that we hide in here. You’ll see, I’ll blow up one or two of those bastards.”
Mendel was frightened. That the commander had been drinking, and perhaps a little more than usual, was unmistakable, but still his tone of voice frightened him.
“What are you saying, Osip Ivanovich? Why are you talking to me this way? Do you think I invented the mine detectors? Do you think I gave them to the Germans?”
“I don’t give a damn who invented them. The fact is we are leaving. You wouldn’t want us to stay here and wait for the tanks and let ourselves be slaughtered wholesale.”
Mendel was upset when he left, but a short while later Ulybin called him back: “Do those devices work?”
“Yes, they work.”
“Take Dimitri and Vladimir and show them how to use them.”
“You want to mine the barracks with the mines that are buried all around here?”
“Aren’t you smart, you guessed it. We don’t have any other mines.”
“You realize that’s not a job for kids. Experts are more afraid of mines than beginners. Plus, the longer they’ve been buried underground, the more dangerous they are.”
“You think you’re important, don’t you? Cut it out, just go and do as I told you. I’m the commander, and I’m not interested in your criticism. You people are all the same anyway. You’re all good at arguing; and you’re all half German, Rosenfeld, Mandelstamm. . . . And you, what’s your name? Daycher, right? Mendel Nachmanovich Daycher: you’re German right down to your name.”
Mendel taught his lesson as diligently as he was able, sent the two young men to get their orders from Ulybin, and withdrew, filled with bitterness. At one time, on the day of forgiveness, the Jews took a goat; the high priest would lay his hands on the goat’s head, listing all the sins committed by his people, and placing them upon it—the guilty one was the goat and the goat only. Then, loaded down with the sins it had not committed, the goat was banished into the desert. The Gentiles think the same way, they, too, have a lamb that takes on the sins of the world. Not me, I don’t believe it. If I’ve sinned, I carry the burden of my own sins, but only those sins, and I have more than enough. I don’t bear the sins of anyone e
lse. I didn’t send the team to get bombed. I didn’t shoot Fedya while he was sleeping. If we have to go out into the desert, we’ll go, but we won’t take with us sins that we have not committed. And if Dimitri and Vladimir are blown up by the mines in their hands, am I, Mendel the watchmaker, responsible?
As it turned out, the two young men did well: eight of the buried mines were unearthed and planted in various locations in the barracks. At the end of April, spring burst forth, heralded by three days of hot dry wind. The snow on the branches of the trees melted in a continuous rain, whose rhythm slowed only at night; the snow on the ground was also melting rapidly, and immediately the first flowers, timid and absurd, poked up through the drenched soil amid the bent stalks of yellowish grass rotted by the long thaw. German scout planes flew overhead more and more often, and one of them, perhaps by chance, or perhaps made suspicious by some movement, briefly strafed the barracks, without causing damage or victims. Ulybin gave the order to get ready to abandon the camp. The sledges, now useless, were burned; there were no wagons, nor was there time to get any. To transport all their baggage they had only two horses and the shoulders of the men: a caravan of porters, not a column of soldiers on the march. Many of the men complained; they would have preferred to stay in the camp and face the Germans, but Ulybin silenced them—staying was out of the question, and for that matter orders had come over the radio to evacuate. The radio had also indicated the best direction to follow in order to get through the encirclement of anti-partisan forces: heading southwest, following the course of the river Stviga, while sticking to the zone of the marshes. With the thaw, and with their maze of isthmuses, narrows, and shallows, the marshes had once again become friendly terrain.
They were supposed to set out on the night of May 2, but that evening the sentinels sounded the alarm: they had heard noises to the north, human voices and dogs barking. Many of the men reached for their weapons, unsure whether to get ready to resist or begin their retreat early, but Ulybin broke in:
“Back to your posts, you idiots, you children! Go on with the packing, tie up the bags, shut the crates. Were you all born yesterday? German dogs don’t bark—if they did what kind of war dogs would they be?”
He spoke to the sentinels:
“Be on your guard, but don’t shoot. These people are probably friendly: they sent the dogs on ahead to find the way through the minefield.”
And in fact the dogs came first: there were only two, and they weren’t war dogs but, rather, humble barnyard dogs, excited and confused. They were barking anxiously, first at the barracks, then at the strangers who were slow to follow them, proud of the duty they had performed, unsure of these new human presences; they alternately wagged their tails and snarled, and even did both simultaneously; they leaped back and forth, dancing in place, front paws extended stiffly, and barked themselves breathless, gulping in air now and again with a convulsive wheeze. Then two cows came into view, driven forward by ragged young men: they made sure that the livestock stayed on the trails blazed by the dogs.
Last of all came the main contingent of the band, some thirty people, men and women, armed and unarmed, weary, tattered, and bold. In their midst was a man with an aquiline nose and a tanned face: on straps over his shoulders hung a submachine gun and a violin. Bringing up the rear was Dov. Mendel muttered under his breath: “Blessed is He who revives the dead.”
A hubbub broke out, with everyone asking questions and no one answering them. In the end two voices prevailed, that of Ulybin and that of the tall man, who was Gedale. Everyone could keep quiet and wait for orders; Ulybin and Gedale withdrew to the cramped room that served as headquarters. Many of the Turov men remembered the quarrel that had broken out between the two at the beginning of winter; what would happen now, in this new meeting? Would the two men make their peace, in the face of this impending threat? Would they reach an agreement?
While everyone waited to learn the outcome, the new arrivals asked if they could go into the now empty barracks; some of them sat on the floor, others stretched out and fell asleep immediately, still others asked for tobacco, or for hot water so they could wash their feet. They asked with the humility of those in need, but with the dignity of those who know they are entitled. They were neither beggars nor wanderers, they were the Jewish partisan band assembled by Gedale, made up of survivors from the communities of Polesie, Volynia, and Belorussia, a wretched aristocracy, the strongest, the most cunning, the luckiest. But some of them came from farther away, along blood-soaked roads; they had fled the pogroms of the Lithuanian plunderers who were willing to kill a Jew to get a bedsheet, the flamethrowers of the Einsatzkommandos, the mass graves of Kovno and Riga. Among them were the few survivors of the Ruzany massacre: they’d lived for months in lairs carved out of the forest, like wolves, and like wolves they hunted silently in packs. There were the peasant Jews of Blizna, their hands calloused by the hoe and the ax. There were workers from the sawmills and textile mills of Slonim who, even before encountering Hitler’s barbarity, had gone on strike against their Polish masters and had experienced repression and prison.
Each one, man or woman, carried a different history, as heavy and scalding as molten lead; each would have been grieving over a hundred dead if the war and three terrible winters had left the time and the leisure to do so. They were weary, penniless, and filthy, but not beaten; the children of merchants, tailors, rabbis, and cantors, they had armed themselves with weapons taken from the Germans, they had won the right to wear those tattered uniforms without insignia or rank, and they had tasted more than once the bitter food of killing.
The Turov Russians looked at them uneasily, as is always the case in the presence of the unexpected. They did not recognize in those gaunt yet determined faces the zhid of their tradition, the foreigner in their home, who speaks Russian to swindle you but thinks in his own strange language, does not know Christ but instead follows his own ridiculous and incomprehensible precepts, who is wealthy and cowardly, his only strength that of his cleverness. The world was turned upside down: these Jews were armed allies like the British, like the Americans, just as Hitler, too, had been an ally, three years earlier. The ideas they teach you are simple and the world is complicated. All right then: allies; comrades in arms. They had to accept them, shake hands with them, drink vodka with them. A few attempted an awkward smile, a timid advance with the disheveled women, bundled up in oversized military outfits, their faces gray with exhaustion and dust. It’s as painful to uproot a prejudice as it is to extract a nerve.
Lack of understanding is a wall with two sides, like any wall, and the lack of understanding can engender awkwardness, discomfort, and hostility; but Gedale’s Jews did not feel, just then, either awkward or hostile. If anything, they were cheerful: in each day’s new adventure in the partizanka, on the frozen steppe, in the snow and in the mud, they had found a new freedom, unknown to their fathers and their grandfathers, a contact with other men, both friends and enemies, with nature and with action that intoxicated them like the wine at Purim, when it is customary to abandon the usual sobriety and drink until you can no longer tell the difference between a blessing and a curse. They were cheerful and ferocious, like animals released from a cage, like slaves rising up to take vengeance. And they had savored it, their vengeance, while paying for it dearly: more than once, in sabotage, in attacks and clashes behind the lines; recently as well, just a few days back and not far away. It had been their finest hour. Alone, they had attacked the garrison of Lyuban, eighty kilometers to the north, where German and Ukrainian troops were converging to carry out their roundup; in the village there was also a small ghetto of artisans. The Germans had been driven out of Lyuban: they weren’t made of steel, they were mortal, and when they could see they were outmatched they fled in disarray, even from Jews. Some of them had dropped their weapons and plunged into the thaw-swollen waters of the river; it had been a sight to rejoice in, a picture to take to the grave. The Jews told the Russians about it, in astonishment. Tha
t’s right, the fair-haired green-uniformed men of the Wehrmacht had fled before them, plunging into the water, trying to clamber onto slabs of ice as they were swept downriver, and the Jews had gone on firing, and they had seen German corpses sinking beneath the water or sailing toward the mouth of the river on their icy catafalques. Their triumph had been short-lived, of course: triumphs are always short-lived and, as it has been written, a Jew’s joy ends in fear. They had retreated into the woods, taking with them those Jews from the Lyuban ghetto who seemed capable of fighting, but the Germans had come back and killed all those who stayed behind in the ghetto. That’s the way their war was, a war in which you don’t look back, in which you don’t count your losses, a war of a thousand Germans against one Jew and a thousand dead Jews against one dead German. They were cheerful because they had no tomorrow and they cared nothing for tomorrow, and because they had seen the supermen thrashing in the icy water like frogs: a gift that no one could ever take away from them.
They also brought other, more useful information. The sweep had already begun, and they had been driven out of their camp, which in any case was a miserable camp of burrows, temporary, certainly not comparable to the Turov camp. But it wasn’t true that it was a major roundup: there were neither tanks nor heavy artillery, and one German prisoner that they had interrogated told them that the weak point in the encirclement should be just where Ulybin thought: to the southwest, along the Stviga River.