The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Dov was better, he scarcely limped at all anymore, but he was more bent. His hair, once again neatly combed, had thinned and grayed. Sissl asked if he wanted something to eat, and he answered with a laugh: “A sick man you ask, a healthy man you give,” but he was more eager to tell stories than to eat. A circle of listeners formed around him, both Jews and Russians: not many people came back from the Great Land to partisan territory.

  “How long have those two been talking? An hour? It’s a good sign: the longer they talk the better they’re getting along; and it also means that the Germans are still far away, or that they’ve changed direction. Of course, they took care of me: what did you think had happened? At the hospital in Kiev. It didn’t have a roof anymore, or rather it didn’t have a roof yet, because they’re rebuilding it, and you know who’s doing the work? German prisoners, the ones who surrendered at Stalingrad.

  “There was no roof, there was nothing to eat, and there was no anesthesia, but there were female doctors, and they operated on me immediately: they took something out of my knee, a bone, and they even showed it to me later. In the cellars, was where they operated on me, by the light of an acetylene torch, and then they put me in a ward, an enormous ward, with more than a hundred cots on each side, and in them were the living, the dying, and the dead. It’s no fun to be in the hospital, but it was in that very ward that my good luck reached me: with luck, even a bull can give birth. There was an official visit, an important member of the Politburo, a Ukrainian: a short, fat, bald man, who looked like a peasant, his chest covered with medals. In the midst of all that hurly-burly of stretcher bearers coming and going, he stopped right in front of me. He asked me who I was, where I came from, and where I’d been wounded; with him was a radio crew, and he improvised a speech where he said that all of us, Russians and Georgians and Yakuts and Jews, were sons of our great mother Russia, and that all disputes should come to an end—”

  Pyotr’s voice interrupted: “If he was a Ukrainian, and he was an important man, you should’ve told him to do a little housecleaning back home! They’re miserable people, the Ukrainians: when the Germans invaded, they threw open their doors and offered them bread and salt. Their banderisti are worse than the Germans.” Other voices silenced Pyotr and urged Dov to go on.

  “. . . and he asked me, once I was better, where I wanted to be sent. I told him that my home is too far away, that I had friends among the partisans, and that I wanted to get back to them. Well, as soon as I was declared cured, he got busy. Maybe he wanted to set an example, he tracked down Gedale and his band and had me dropped by parachute close to his camp, along with the crate containing four submachine guns as his own personal gift. Parachuting out of a plane is pretty scary, but I wound up in the mud and I didn’t get hurt a bit.”

  Dov would have had plenty of things still to tell them about what he had seen and heard during his convalescence in the Great Land, but the headquarters door opened, Gedale and Ulybin emerged, and everyone fell silent.

  6

  May 1944

  Ulybin spoke first, in an official tone of voice:

  “My information and the information that this comrade has brought correspond perfectly. The Germans are coming from the Polish border and their forces are not strong: they send their best troops to the front, and when they return they’re no longer the best troops. The Italians and the Hungarians have abandoned them; they no longer trust the Slovaks and the White Poles. They’re trying to encircle these marshes and tighten the circle little by little; the circle’s weak point is to the south, toward Rechytsa and the Ukrainian border. We’ll make an attempt to get through, then we’ll continue on our separate ways; if we were to merge the two bands, we’d no longer have any advantage and we’d be far too visible. For that matter, Comrade Gedale’s unit has received recognition and support from Moscow—”

  “Lots of recognition and not much support!” someone broke in, speaking in Yiddish.

  “Shut up, Jozek!” Gedale said in a flat voice.

  “. . . and can move freely. The Jews in the camp can make their own choice: stay with us, break through the encirclement, and head east to reach the front, or else—”

  “Or else come with us,” Gedale interposed. “We have other orders. We are in no hurry to get home. If we do get out, we’ll head west, to liberate prisoners, to cause disruption behind the German lines, and to settle some accounts. Anyone who wants to join us, come over to this side. Everyone can keep the personal weapons he had when he came from Novoselky.”

  The hut was overcrowded, and the sorting out of the groups took place amid noise and confusion. Mendel, Sissl, Line, and Leonid all chose Gedale’s side without hesitation; around Pavel, on the other hand, there was a ferment of discussion. Pavel would also have liked to go with Gedale, but he wanted to keep his horse; if Ulybin held on to the horse, he’d stay with him. Gedale didn’t understand and asked for an explanation. Over the hubbub, Pavel’s deep voice could be heard:

  “I’m useful to you because I know German, but my horse doesn’t. What would you do with it?”

  Ulybin didn’t laugh, but instead made a face that was hard to read, then said, “Fine, you all can have the horse and its master.” He was less indulgent when he saw that Pyotr, too, had gone to Gedale’s side.

  “What do you have to do with them? What are you thinking? What are you doing over there, on that side?”

  “They all come from far away,” Pyotr replied, “none of them know the terrain around here. After a half-hour march, they’d all drown.”

  “That’s just talk. None of them asked for you as a guide. They can get along fine by themselves. Careful what you do: you wouldn’t want to wind up like Fedya.”

  “He’s the one who asked me, to be a guide,” said Pyotr, pointing to Dov. But it was clear that he was making things up as he went along. Then he added, “And it’s not a case of desertion, comrade commander. This is a band, and that’s a band.” All the same, while they were talking, he left Gedale’s group and went back over to Ulybin’s side, with the face of a child sent to stand in the corner.

  They had lingered too long, and night had fallen; it was time to go. Ulybin ordered the mines hidden in the barracks primed and assembled everyone out front. They had been ordered to remain silent, but an excited murmur could be heard, a buzz of discordant voices, like musicians tuning their instruments before the overture. Discordant, but an attentive ear could have distinguished a single motif, repeated in different keys by Russians and Jews: Pyotr, the pure and daring Pyotr, had fallen head over heels for the eyes of a foreign woman, just like Stenka Razin. Now, whether it was Sissl’s gray eyes or Line’s brown eyes, opinions diverged. Gossip is a force of nature; it makes difficult situations tolerable, and thrives even amid swamps, warfare, and thawing snow.

  They marched all night, in single file, without seeing any trace of the Germans. They halted at dawn to rest in an abandoned warehouse, on the Polish border. Around noon, the men standing guard saw German forces go by on the main road; they all prepared to defend their position, but the column continued on without bothering to inspect the warehouse. When night fell they resumed their march, and on a heath the two bands separated; Ulybin and his men veered to the left to return to Soviet territory, while Gedale’s band headed through fallow fields toward Rechytsa. Gedale reassured them: “The worst is over. One more night’s march and we’ll be out of it.”

  But Mendel and his friends had felt safer before, in the Turov camp, where they suffered neither hunger nor cold, and where they felt over their heads a roof of solid wood beams and a single authority: Ulybin himself, or the messengers who descended from the sky, or a distant power. These Gedalists (as they called themselves) were reckless people, poor and rootless. Jozek, Gedale’s right-hand man, rolled himself an herbal cigarette in a scrap of newspaper, asked Leonid for a match, split it in half lengthwise, lit his cigarette with one half, and slipped the other half into his pocket. The two cows, he said, were plunder of war; they
’d seized them a few days earlier, during the attack on Lyuban, “because in warfare you also need to think about supplies.” They were skinny and balky, and if they found a tuft of grass they’d refuse to go on, stubbornly grazing, indifferent to the tugs, slowing the march. Where there were still patches of snow in the shade of the trees, they plowed the ground with their hooves in search of lichens. “The first chance we get, we’ll sell them,” said Jozek in a pragmatic tone of voice.

  Jozek wasn’t a Russian but a Pole from Bialystok, and a counterfeiter by profession. He told his story to Mendel during the first leg of the journey following the separation; he hadn’t before, because he didn’t know how the Russians would take it.

  “It’s nice work, but it isn’t easy. I started as a boy, in 1928: I was an apprentice lithographer and I printed fake stamps. The Polish police, in those days, had other things to worry about, and it wasn’t particularly dangerous. Still, I didn’t make much money. In 1937 I started doing identity papers, I was especially good at passports. Then the war came, first the Russians arrived in Bialystok, and in 1941 the Germans. I had to go into hiding, but I made a good living: there was plenty of demand for documents, especially ration books for the Poles and Aryan identity cards for the Jews.

  “I could’ve gone on like that till the end of the war, but a competitor turned me in because my rates were too low. I spent three weeks in prison; of course, my personal documents were false, I had supposedly been a Christian for two generations, but they stripped me naked, figured out I was a Jew, and sent me to a concentration camp, at Sachsenhausen, to break rocks.”

  Jozek paused and lit another cigarette with the half-match that he had saved. He had pale blond hair, and was slender, of average height, with a long foxy face and green eyes almost without eyelashes that he kept half closed as if to see better. The band had come to a halt in a clearing; Jozek was stretched out on the dew-damp grass, smoking and talking with pleasure. Many of the men surrounded him, listening: they already knew the story, but they liked hearing it again; others slept. Leonid had secluded himself with Line, and Sissl was listening, off to one side: she’d pulled out needle and thread, and was mending a sock in the uncertain light of dawn.

  “The world is a strange place,” Jozek resumed. “A Jew dies, but a counterfeiting Jew survives. At the end of 1942, they put up a sign in the concentration camp: the Germans were looking for typesetters and lithographers. I applied, and they sent me to a small building at the far end of the camp, and when I walked in I thought I was dreaming. It was a workshop much better equipped than the one I’d had, and a group of Polish, Czech, German, and Jewish prisoners were counterfeiting dollars and pounds sterling, as well as identity documents for spies. Not to boast, but I was the best one there and they gave me the most sensitive jobs; still, it didn’t take me long to figure out that this was a hot operation, it was obvious that none of us would get out alive. And so I set about collecting gold, which is always available in concentration camps, and counterfeiting myself a transfer order.”

  “And why not a release order?” Mendel asked.

  “I can see you don’t know what a concentration camp is. No one’s ever heard of a Jew being released, especially not a Jew like me. I fabricated a transfer order to the concentration camp at Brest-Litovsk, because the best thing for a Pole is to escape in Poland: a regulation transfer order, on SS stationery, with stamps and signatures, in the name of Jozef Treistman, no. 67703, Funktionshäftling, or Prisoner Functionary. I was running a big risk, but having no choice is itself a choice. They put me on a train with two escorts, a couple of elderly soldiers from the Territorial Army. I bribed them with the gold, and they jumped at the chance; I escaped just before we reached Brest, and I lived on the run for two weeks, until I found Gedale.”

  As the days passed and they got to know each other better, it seemed increasingly understandable to Mendel that Gedale and Ulybin had been unable to come to an agreement. Apart from the age-old divide between Russians and Jews, it would have been hard to find two more different men: the only quality they shared was courage, and that was no surprise, because a commander without courage won’t last long. But they even had different kinds of courage: Ulybin’s courage was obstinate and opaque, a dutiful courage that seem to be the product of planning and discipline rather than a natural quality. Every decision he made and every order he issued came as if from heaven to earth, vibrant with authority and unstated threat; often the orders were reasonable, because Ulybin was a shrewd man, but even when they weren’t they sounded peremptory, and it was difficult not to obey them. Gedale’s courage was spontaneous and varied, springing not from a school but from a temperament that was intolerant of chains and had little interest in scrutinizing the future; where Ulybin calculated, Gedale hurled himself forward, as if in a game. Mendel detected in him, thoroughly blended as if in a valuable alloy, very different metals: the logic and impetuous imagination of a Talmudist; the sensitivity of a musician or a child; the comic force of a wandering player; the vitality that is absorbed from the Russian soil.

  Gedale was tall and thin, broad-shouldered but with slender limbs and a shallow chest. His nose was sharp and arched like the prow of a ship, his forehead was low beneath the line of his black hair, his cheeks were hollow and wrinkled, the skin tanned by wind and sun, his mouth was wide and full of teeth. He moved quickly, but he walked with a clumsiness that seemed intentional, like a circus clown. He spoke in a loud ringing voice, even when it wasn’t necessary, as if his chest served as a sound box; he laughed frequently, sometimes at inopportune moments.

  Mendel and Leonid, accustomed to the rigid hierarchy of the Red Army, were both bewildered and alarmed by the Gedalists’ way of doing things. Decisions were made casually, in noisy assemblies: sometimes reckless plans put forth by Gedale, Jozek, or others were adopted without a second thought; in other cases quarrels broke out, though peace was soon restored. Tensions or feuds never seemed to endure long within the band. The members proclaimed themselves Zionists, but from different currents, with all the nuances, ranging from Jewish nationalism, Marxist orthodoxy, and religious orthodoxy to anarchic egalitarianism and even a Tolstoyan return to the earth—the earth that will redeem you if only you redeem it. Gedale, too, declared himself a Zionist. For days on end, Mendel tried to figure out what trend he belonged to, but he finally gave up: the man subscribed simultaneously to an array of ideas, or to none at all, or changed opinion frequently. Certainly Gedale was more inclined to action than to theory, and his objectives were simple: to survive, do the greatest possible damage to the Germans, and go to Palestine.

  Gedale was curious to the point of indiscretion. He never asked new arrivals their name or their place or date of birth, nor did he officially enroll them in the band; instead he insisted on hearing each one’s story, listening with a child’s candid attention. He seemed to feel a fondness for all, to appreciate their virtues and overlook their shortcomings. “L’chaim,” he said to Pavel after listening to his story. “To life. Welcome to our ranks, may your back be blessed. We need backs like yours. You are a Jewish bison: a rare animal, we’ll hold you dear. You may not want to be one, but if you’re born a Jew you stay a Jew, and if you’re born a bison you stay a bison. Blessed be he that cometh.”

  This was the first peaceful halt that the band allowed itself after escaping the encirclement. They had spent the night in the hayloft of an abandoned farmhouse, they’d found clean water in the well, the air was mild and sweet-smelling, all their faces were relaxed, and Gedale was enjoying himself.

  Leonid compressed his story to no more than two or three minutes, but Gedale didn’t seem to mind and asked nothing more. All he said was: “You’re very young. It’s a disease that’s quickly cured, even without medicine, but it can still be dangerous. Until you’re rid of it, take care of yourself.”

  Leonid looked at him with suspicious astonishment: “What did you mean by that?”

  “You shouldn’t take me literally. I have a prop
het’s blood in my veins, like all sons of Israel, and every now and then I play at being a prophet.”

  With Line and Sissl he abandoned his soothsayer pose and put on manners more suitable to light opera. He addressed them as “my noble ladies,” but he insisted on knowing how old they were, whether they were still virgins, and which men had been with them. Sissl replied timidly, Line with grim pride, and both women were clearly eager to put an end to his questioning. Gedale didn’t insist and turned to Mendel. He listened attentively to his story, then said to him: “You’re not acting. You’re still the watchmaker, you’ve donned neither the feathers of the peacock nor those of the hawk. You, too, are welcome, you’ll be useful to us because you’re cautious, you’ll serve as a counterweight. Here among us, caution has to some extent fallen by the wayside. We don’t have much memory to speak of, either, except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?” asked Mendel.

  Gedale solemnly laid his forefinger against his nose:

  “‘Remember what Amalek did to you by the way, when you were come forth out of Egypt; How he met you by the way, and smote the hindmost of you, even all that were feeble behind you, when you were faint and weary; and he feared not God. Therefore it shall be, when the Lord your God has given you rest from all your enemies round about, in the land which the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance to possess it, that you shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; you shall not forget it.’ This, then, is what we will not forget. I’m quoting from memory, but this time it’s entirely pertinent.”

  In mid-May Gedale’s band was camped on the banks of the Gorin River, which were white with lilies of the valley and impatient daisies. Men and women, naked or half naked, were joyfully washing themselves in the river’s slow waters. Jozek, with two armed comrades, had set out for Rechytsa with the two cows and Pavel’s horse: at Rechytsa, close to the Ukrainian border, there was a market. He returned a few hours later; he had traded the cows for bread, cheese, lard, salted meat, and soap: the rest of the payment was in occupation Deutsche marks. The Thrush was striding, glorious and sweaty, under the burden. It almost seemed as if the war were over; in any case the winter was. In the small town, Jozek had seen no sign of Germans: if there were any, they were staying out of sight. He hadn’t been required to give any explanations, or to haggle; the peasants had learned long ago that when it came to partisans (whatever their allegiance) the important thing was to be neither curious nor stingy.