The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  The idea came from Mottel. He had gone to ask for water at an isolated farmhouse, perhaps a kilometer from the village of Zborz, and there he had found an old woman, all alone, lying on the straw in a stable, but the stable was empty of livestock. The old woman could barely move, she had a broken leg that no one had treated. She told Mottel to go to the well, and take all the water he wanted, and would he bring a little for her as well. But she asked him to bring her something to eat, too: anything at all. She hadn’t eaten for three days; every once in a while someone from the village would remember her and bring her a bit of bread. And yet in the fields just outside there was enough rye to feed a large family, but the minute the first rains came it would rot because there was no one to harvest it.

  Mottel reported to Gedale, and Gedale decided immediately.

  “We must help these people. Our war consists of this as well. This is our chance to make them understand that we come as friends, not enemies.”

  Jozek made a face. “They’ve never liked us around here; before the Germans burned their houses, they were burning ours. They don’t like Jews, and they don’t like Russians, either, and many of us are both Jews and Russians. They know what happened to the Russian peasants in the twenties, and they’re afraid of collectivization. Let’s help them, but let’s be careful about how we do it.”

  But all the others agreed eagerly: they were tired of destruction, tired of the stupid and negative work that war forces people to undertake. The most enthusiastic were Pyotr and Arie, both of them experienced in farm work. Mottel had told them that “his” old woman’s roof had fallen in, and Pyotr said:

  “I’ll fix it. I’m good at fixing thatched roofs, it’s something I used to do back home, and people paid me for it. But now, for the privilege of fixing your old woman’s roof, I’d give as many rubles as they used to give me; that is, if I had the money, of course, because in fact I don’t.”

  The old woman accepted the offer. Pyotr got to work, with Sissl’s help, and a few days later an elderly man with a drooping mustache was noticed wandering around nearby. He acted as if he were there for other business: he straightened fence posts, checked the walls of the irrigation ditches even though they were desperately dry, but he was clearly watching the two as they worked. One day he spoke to Pyotr, asking a series of questions in Polish; Pyotr pretended not to understand and went in search of Gedale.

  “I am the Burmistrz, the mayor of the village,” the old man said, in a dignified tone, though he had the appearance of a beggar. “Who are you? Where are you going? What do you want?”

  Gedale had shown up for the meeting unarmed, in shirtsleeves, wearing faded and tattered civilian britches, with the straw hat that he had bought on his head. He spoke Polish without the slightest Yiddish accent, and it would have been hard for anyone to place him with precision. At first he was cautious:

  “We’re a group of refugees, men and women. We come from different towns, and we’re not here to do you any harm. We’re just passing through, we’re going somewhere far away, we’re not here to bother anyone, but we don’t want to be bothered ourselves. We’re tired, but our arms are strong: perhaps we can be useful to you in some way.”

  “Such as?” asked the mayor, suspiciously.

  “Such as harvesting the rye before it rots.”

  “What do you want in exchange?”

  “Part of the harvest, as much as you think fair; and then water, a roof over our heads, and your agreement to say little about us.”

  “How many of you are there?”

  “Forty or so; five are women.”

  “Are you the leader?”

  “I am.”

  “There’s fewer of us than there are of you: less than thirty, if you include the children. Believe me, we’ve never had money, we no longer have livestock, and there aren’t any young women, either.”

  “Too bad about the young women,” Gedale said, laughing, “but that’s not our main concern. As I told you, all we want is water, silence, and if possible a roof over our heads so we can get a few nights’ sleep. We’re tired of war and of walking, we yearn for peacetime occupations.”

  “We, too, are tired of war,” said the mayor, and then hastened to add: “But do you know how to harvest?”

  “We’re out of practice, but we’ll do all right.”

  “There’s a mill in Opatów,” said the mayor, “and I hear it’s in operation. We have plenty of sickles, they left us those. You can start tomorrow.”

  All the men from Blizna and Ruzany went to harvest, and, with them, Arie, Dov, Line, and Rokhele the Black, joined by Pyotr once he had finished repairing the roof: twenty or so in all. Arie was the most experienced, and he taught the others how to stand up the sheaves of grain and how to sharpen the sickle, first with a hammer and then with a whetstone. Pyotr, too, proved to be skillful and hardworking. Line amazed everyone: slender as she was, she harvested from dawn to dusk without the slightest sign of exhaustion, and she tolerated with no trouble heat, thirst, and the cloud of horseflies and mosquitoes that immediately gathered. It wasn’t the first time she’d done this work: she’d done it a thousand years before, near Kiev, on a collective farm where young Zionists were preparing to immigrate to Palestine, in that distant past when being a Zionist and a Communist had not yet become an absurd contradiction. Dov was a good worker, though the years and his wounds weighed on him. It wasn’t an entirely new experience for him, either: he’d harvested sunflowers when he was exiled to Vologda, where summer days were eighteen hours long and they’d had to work all eighteen of them.

  The other members of the band, including Mendel, Leonid, Jozek, and Isidor, spread out into the village to do the various jobs that the mayor had identified: there were chicken coops to be repaired, more thatched roofs to fix, gardens to hoe. Once they had overcome the villagers’ mistrust, they learned that there were also potatoes to be dug up, and it was the potatoes that served to cement a bond between the wandering Jews and the starving Polish peasants, at night, beneath the summer stars, sitting in the farmyard on the earth still warm from the sun.

  8

  July–August 1944

  While the potatoes were boiling in the pot, and other potatoes were roasting in the embers, the mayor looked around, studying the strangers’ faces in the reddish light of the fire. Next to him in the circle was his wife, broad-faced, with high cheekbones and an impassive expression. She wasn’t looking at the Gedalists; she looked at her husband, as if she were afraid for him, wanted to protect him, and at the same time prevent him from saying something imprudent.

  “You’re Jews,” the old man said suddenly, in a calm voice. His wife spoke rapidly into his ear, and he replied to her:

  “Calm down, Seweryna; you never let me talk.”

  “This one’s a Russian,” said Gedale, pointing to Pyotr. “The rest of us are Jews, Russian and Polish Jews. How did you recognize us?”

  “From your eyes,” said the mayor. “There were Jews who lived among us, and their eyes were just like yours.”

  “What are our eyes like?” asked Mendel.

  “They’re uneasy. Like the eyes of hunted animals.”

  “We aren’t hunted animals anymore,” said Line. “Many of our people died fighting. Our enemies are your enemies, the same ones who destroyed your houses.”

  The mayor fell silent for a few minutes, chewing his ration of potatoes, then said:

  “Girl, things aren’t so simple here. In this village, for instance, the Jews and the Poles lived together for I don’t know how many centuries, but they never really got along. The Poles labored on the land, while the Jews were artisans and merchants, collecting taxes for the landlords, and the priest in church told us it was the Jews who sold Christ and crucified Him. We never shed their blood, but when the Germans came in 1939, and the first thing they did was to start stripping the Jews of their possessions, mocking them, beating them, and locking them up in ghettos, I have to tell you the truth—”

  Here
Seweryna broke in again, whispering something into her husband’s ear, but he shook her off and went on.

  “. . . I have to tell you the truth, we were happy about it, and I was happy about it, too. We didn’t like the Germans, either, but we assumed that they’d come to do justice, or anyway to take the Jews’ money away from them and give it to us.”

  “So were the Jews of Zborz really that rich?” asked Gedale.

  “Everybody said they were. They were shabbily dressed, but people said that that was just because they were misers. And people said other things as well: that the Jews were Bolsheviks, that they wanted to collectivize the land, just like in Russia, and kill all the priests.”

  “But that makes no sense!” Line broke in. “How could they be simultaneously rich, misers, and Bolsheviks?”

  “Yes, it does make sense. One Pole said that all the Jews are rich, and another Pole said that they’re all Communists. And yet another Pole said that one Jew is rich, and another one is a Communist. You see that it’s no simple matter. But things got even more complicated later, when the Germans gave rifles to the Ukrainians so that they could help massacre the Jews, but instead the Ukrainians shot us and took our livestock, and when the Russian partisans started disarming and taking away the Polish partisans. I changed my mind about you people when I saw with my own eyes what the Germans did to the Jews of Opatów.”

  “What did they do?” asked Mendel.

  “They dragged them out of the ghetto and locked them all up in the movie theater: even the children, the old people, and the dying, more than two thousand of them in a movie theater that would seat five hundred. Seven days without giving them any food or water, and they shot at those among us who felt pity and tried to hand them something through the windows; and they also shot others among us who took them water but demanded their last pennies in exchange. Then they opened the doors and ordered them to come out. Only a hundred or so emerged alive, and they killed them in the square, and ordered us to bury them all, the ones in the square and the ones who were still in the movie theater. Well, when I saw children who’d died like that, I started to understand that the Jews are people like us, and that the Germans would eventually do to us what they’d done to them; but I have to tell you the truth, not everyone has understood that. And I’m telling you these things because when a person makes a mistake it is right for that person to acknowledge his error, and also because you harvested the rye and gathered the potatoes.”

  “Mayor,” said Gedale, “the things you’ve told us aren’t new, but we have new things to tell you. Perhaps we seem strange to you: you should know that a living Jew is a strange Jew. You should know that what you saw in Opatów happened everywhere the Germans got a foothold, in Poland, Russia, France, and Greece. And you should also know that if the Germans kill one out of every five Poles with weapons or hunger, they don’t leave one Jew alive.”

  “None of this is news, the things that you tell me. We don’t have a radio, but the news gets to us all the same. We know what the Germans have done, and what they continue to do, here and everywhere.”

  “You don’t know everything. There are other things, so horrible that you wouldn’t believe them: and yet they’re happening not far from here. The only ones of us who will survive are the ones who’ve chosen our path.”

  “I noticed this right away, too. That you people are armed.”

  “Was that from our eyes, too?” Gedale asked, laughing.

  “No, not from your eyes, from the fact that the left shoulder of all your jackets is shiny from the rifle strap. Please, let me ask you, for the sake of your God, for the sake of ours and all the saints, don’t attack the Germans here. Move along, go where you want, but don’t make trouble here, otherwise it will be pointless for you to have done anything for us. Why don’t you just hide in the woods and wait for the Russians to arrive? They’re not that far now, they may already be right outside Lublin; when the wind is blowing the right way, you can hear the sound of their artillery.”

  “Things aren’t so simple with us, either,” said Gedale. “We’re Jews and we’re Russians and we’re partisans. As Russians, we’d like to wait for the front to pass, then get some rest, and go try to find our homes, but our homes are gone now, and so are our families; and if we did go back, maybe no one would want us, like when you pull a wedge out of a log, and the gap in the wood closes up. As partisans, we fight a war different from the soldiers’, and you know it; we don’t fight on a front, we fight behind the enemy’s back. And as Jews we have a long road ahead of us. What would you do, mayor, if you found yourself all alone, a thousand kilometers from your home, and you knew that your town, and your fields, and your family no longer existed?”

  “I’m an old man, and I think I’d hang myself from a rafter. But if I were younger I’d go to America. That’s what my brother did, but he’s braver than me, and more farsighted.”

  “You said it; there are Jews who have relatives in America, and who wish to join them. But no one in this band has relatives in America: our America isn’t that far away. We’re going to fight until the end of the war, because we believe that waging war is a horrible thing, but that killing Nazis is the most just thing that a person can do these days on the face of the earth; and then we’ll go to Palestine, and we’ll try to build the homes that we’ve lost, and start to live again, the way other people live. That’s why we’re not going to stay here, and we’re going to continue westward—to stay behind the Germans, and to find our path toward our America.”

  When they finished the potatoes, Gedalists and peasants went to sleep; the only ones left in the farmyard were Gedale, Mendel, Line, the mayor, and his wife. The mayor sat staring into the embers with a rapt expression, then he said, “What are you going to do in Palestine?”

  “We’re going to farm the land,” said Line. “In Palestine the land will belong to us.”

  “Are you going to be peasants?” the mayor asked. “It’s a good thing you’re going far away from here, but it’s a bad idea to become peasants. Being peasants is hard.”

  “We’ll go live like all other people,” said Line, who had laid her hand on Mendel’s arm. Mendel added, “We’ll do all the work there is to do.”

  “. . . except collecting taxes for the landlords,” Gedale added. The wind had dropped, you could see fireflies dancing around the edges of the farmyard, and in the silence of the night they discovered that the old man had been telling the truth: from far away, from some unidentified point, perhaps from a number of different points, came the subdued rumble of the front, full of hope and menace. The mayor got laboriously to his feet and said it was time to go to sleep now:

  “I’m glad I met you. I’m glad you harvested for us. I’m glad I talked with you as friends, but I’m also glad that you’re leaving.”

  It had been easier to maintain contact and gather news from the rest of the world in the marshes and forests of Polesie than it was in the densely inhabited land through which Gedale’s band moved in August of 1944. To move only by night and avoid inhabited areas had become a strict rule, but, even though they adopted these obvious precautions, every street to be crossed and especially every bridge constituted a risk and a challenge. The district was swarming with Germans: no longer just their increasingly unreliable and demoralized collaborators but authentic Germans, from the army and the police, in all the towns, frantically coming and going along the streets and railroad lines. The Russians had broken through at Lublin, crossed the Vistula near Sandomierz, and established a strong bridgehead on the river’s left bank, and the Germans were preparing a counterattack.

  Contacts with the peasants, so necessary to obtaining supplies, had been reduced to a strict minimum; Gedale didn’t want to be talked about, nor, for that matter, did the peasants, who were terrorized and disoriented, wish to talk. In these conditions, paradoxically, the main sources of information were newspapers, found on rare occasions in farmhouses, more often recovered, tattered and filthy, from dumps, occ
asionally purchased recklessly by Jozek at a newsstand. From newspapers they had learned that the Allies, after landing in Normandy, were advancing on Paris; that on July 20 an assassination attempt on Hitler had been unsuccessful; that there had been an uprising in Warsaw (the Völkischer Beobachter minimized the event, mentioning “traitors, subversives, and bandits”). But they’d learned other news as well, and this did not come from newspapers. Behind the lines, there were all sorts of people, not only Germans, and, like the Gedalists, many of them avoided the light of day: they were Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Tartars from the German auxiliary corps who had sniffed the wind and had deserted, and were now living underground, as black marketeers or as bandits; they were partisans from the various Polish formations who had lost touch with their units and had found shelter with peasants. Moreover, there were professional smugglers, highway robbers, and spies for the Germans and the Russians who concealed themselves under the garb of all the categories mentioned above. From these people Gedale had received confirmation of the rumors that he’d heard earlier, and which he’d mentioned to the mayor of Zborz: the Germans had dismantled their first death camps, Treblinka, Sobibór, Belzec, Majdanek, and Chelmno, but had replaced them with just one, which matched them all, and where they had profited from the experience of all the others—Auschwitz, in Upper Silesia. Here they had killed and burned Poles and Russians and prisoners from all over Europe, but especially Jews; and now they were exterminating, train by train, all the Jews of Hungary. Finally, the Gedalists learned an unsettling piece of news from a Ukrainian deserter: the bands of Russian partisans, who had been air-dropped behind the lines or who had escaped from German concentration camps, were not all behaving the same way. Some commanders had liberated Jewish labor camps, saving and protecting the survivors that they’d found there, and offering to take them into their ranks. Others, in contrast, had attempted to break up by force groups of Jewish partisans they’d encountered in the forest: there had been fighting and killing. Other Jews had been disarmed or killed by more or less regular units of Polish partisans.