by Primo Levi
“They’ll accept us as martyrs: perhaps, afterward, they’ll erect monuments to us in the ghettos, but as allies they won’t accept us,” said Dov.
“We’ll make our own way,” said Gedale, “and decide what to do in each situation, moment by moment.”
The moment to decide came soon. Mendel, along with Dov and Line, understood that crossing the Polish border had brought about a profound shift in Gedale’s plans, or really in the nature of his improvisations. He felt farther from Russia, and not only physically: more vulnerable, more independent, more threatened, but also freer. In short, more responsible. Once again, around August 20, he left the band, but he didn’t bring back gifts nor had he made any purchases. Contrary to his habit, which was to make decisions in chaotic assemblies, he immediately secluded himself with Dov, Mendel, and Line, who had never seen him so tense. He got right to the point: “Twenty kilometers from here there’s a concentration camp, near Chmielnik. It’s not one of the bigger ones: there are only a hundred and twenty prisoners, all of them Jews except for the Kapos. They all work in a plant not far away, where they make precision equipment for the air force. . . .”
“How do you know these things?” asked Mendel.
“I know them. Now the front is getting closer, the plant will be moved to Germany, and all the prisoners will be killed because they know certain secrets. They don’t know whether they’ll be killed there or somewhere else: they got a message out, they’d like to attempt a revolt if they knew they’d be supported. They say that there aren’t many Germans guarding them, ten or twelve.”
“Do the prisoners have weapons?”
“They don’t mention them, so they must not have any.”
“Let’s go see,” said Dov. “We can’t do much, but we can go take a look.”
“Yes, but not all of us,” said Gedale. “We’d be too obvious. This is the first time we’ve split up, but here is where we’re going to have to split up. Six of us can go: we’ll have to count on the element of surprise—without that, we won’t achieve anything, even if there were thirty of us.”
“Can we send them an answer?” Line asked.
“No, we can’t. It would be too dangerous, for them as well as for us. We have to go there: leave immediately.”
“The four of us and who else?” Line asked again, apparently anxious to burn her bridges behind her.
Gedale hesitated. “Not Dov: Dov should stay with the bulk of the band. There are no ranks in our organization, but he’s the de facto deputy commander. And he has more experience than any of us.”
Dov showed no emotion, either in words or with the expression on his face, but it was clear to Mendel that those weren’t the reasons Gedale was leaving him out, and that Dov himself had understood the real reasons and was saddened by them.
“The three of us, Pyotr, Mottel, and Arie,” Mendel suggested.
“Not Arie—he’s lame and he has no military experience,” said Gedale.
“But he’s good with a knife!”
“Mottel’s better than he is. Arie is still too much of a child, I don’t want him. I want Leonid.”
Mendel and Line, nonplussed, both spoke at the same time:
“But Leonid isn’t . . . Leonid’s not well. He’s in no shape to fight.”
“Leonid needs to fight. He needs it the way he needs bread and the air that he breathes. And we need him: he was held prisoner by the Germans, so he knows what a concentration camp looks like from the inside. He’s a paratrooper, he’s had the training, he has experience in sabotage and commando operations. And he’s brave: he proved that recently.”
“It was a strange way to prove it,” said Line.
“All he needs is to be made part of a group and to be given clear orders,” said Gedale with uncharacteristic harshness. “Believe me when I say it. In Kosava we had others like him, and I know what I’m talking about.”
With those words he got to his feet, indicating that the conversation was finished. Dov and Line moved away; to Mendel, who had stayed behind, Gedale said: “You go get ready, too, watchmaker. I have experience in this sort of thing: for desperate enterprises you need desperate men.”
“Desperate enterprises shouldn’t be undertaken at all,” said Mendel. But as he was about to go get ready, as Gedale had ordered, Gedale laid a hand on his shoulder and gave him a light pat, saying, “Ah, Mendel, I’m familiar with your wisdom. Mine is no different, but here it’s out of place. It might have applied a hundred years ago, and it will apply again a hundred years from now, but here it’s as useful as last year’s snow.”
They left in darkness. All six of them were strong hikers, they carried no burden except their weapons, and even their weapons weren’t very heavy: they only wished they were. All the same, it took five or six hours to reach the outskirts of Chmielnik, because none of them were familiar with the countryside, and because they had to avoid roads and inhabited areas. By the light of dawn the town looked dreary, black with smoke and coal dust, surrounded by a horizon of low hills, piles of coal and slag, smokestacks and industrial sheds. They wasted more time looking for the concentration camp; the directions that Gedale had received were sketchy, and the town seemed to be dotted with concentration camps, or at least barbed-wire enclosures. “It’s all one big prison,” Line murmured to Mendel, who was walking right behind her. She had taken advantage of a moment in which Leonid wasn’t walking between them; whether by chance or intentionally, throughout that entire march Leonid had always found a way of walking between Mendel and Line, though without ever speaking to either of them. He walked briskly, and seemed tense and determined.
They found the factory before they found the concentration camp; in fact, it was the factory that pointed the way. Surrounded as it was by all those old kilns, tar distilleries, shed roofs covering scrap heaps, and blackened foundries, it stood out because it was large, new, and clean: they saw from a distance that there was a guard booth next to the front gate. The concentration camp couldn’t be far away, and they found it just three kilometers farther along, concealed in a hollow. It was different from the other enclosures that they had seen. It had a double barbed-wire fence, with a broad corridor between the two enclosures of metal wire; the barracks were painted with camouflage. There were four of them, not particularly large, on each of the four sides of an open area. From the center of the open area a column of black smoke rose into the sky. Outside the wire fences, there were two wooden guard towers and a small white house.
“Let’s get closer,” said Gedale. The hilly amphitheater surrounding the concentration camp was wooded, and they were able to approach without danger. They inched cautiously down; they ran into a rusty barbed-wire fence, followed it for a distance, and spotted a plank guard booth. The door was open, and there was no one inside: “Just cigarette butts,” said Mottel, who had gone in to take a look around. It wasn’t hard to cut the barbed wire; the six of them continued to climb downhill, then suddenly they froze. The wind had shifted, the smoke was blowing toward them, and they had all caught the odor at the same instant: burning flesh. “It’s over. We got here too late,” said Gedale. From where they were now it was possible to make out details more clearly: the column of smoke was coming from a pyre, around which some men were working, not many, perhaps ten.
Mendel let the machine gun he was gripping in one hand slide to the ground, and he himself slid down until he was sitting amid the bushes. He felt oppressed by a wave of weariness unlike anything he could ever remember experiencing. The weariness of a thousand years, accompanied by nausea, rage, and horror. Rage concealed and overwhelmed by horror. Icy, impotent rage, now with no fire from which to draw heat and the will to resist. A desire to stop resisting, to dissolve in smoke, in that smoke. And shame and astonishment: astonishment that his comrades were still standing, weapons in hand, and that they could find voices with which to speak to one another; but their voices came to him as if from a great distance, through the cushion of his nausea.
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��They’re in a hurry, the bastards,” said Gedale. “They’ve left. They don’t want to leave any traces.”
Pyotr said, “They can’t all have left. Some must have stayed behind, to oversee this work, and we need to kill them.” Pyotr is the best one, thought Mendel, hearing his tranquil voice. The only real soldier. I wish I could be Pyotr. Good man, Pyotr. He felt Line looking at him and got to his feet.
“Probably six of them stayed behind,” said Leonid, who was speaking for the first time since they left.
“Why six?” asked Gedale.
“Two guard towers, and three for each tower, each standing a shift. That’s how the Germans do things.” But Mottel and Line, who had the sharpest eyes, said that things might be different: from that distance it was possible to see clearly the little balcony atop the guard towers, and the machine guns aiming down into the concentration camp were gone now. What would a sentry stay behind to accomplish without a machine gun?
“They must be in the house. One guard is enough to supervise the work on the pyre,” said Mottel.
“Certainly, there can’t be many of them left, standing guard over a demobilized camp. We’ll attack them tonight, no matter how many of them there are,” said Gedale. “We’ll see whether they go on with the work at night as well, but I doubt it. We’ll decide accordingly.”
Mendel said, “However we might attack them, the first thing they’ll do is to kill those who are working on the pyre. They want to make sure those people don’t talk.”
“It doesn’t matter whether they’re killed,” said Line.
“Why not?” said Mendel. “They’re people just like us.”
“They’re not like us anymore. They’ll never be able to look themselves in the eye again. They’d be better off dead.” Gedale told Line that it wasn’t up to her to decide the fate of those miserable wretches, and Pyotr told them that they were all talking nonsense. Reluctantly, they ate the small amount of food that they had brought and then prepared to await nightfall; by sunset the bonfire had gone out, but the prisoners were not moved into the house.
They spent a few hours lying on the ground, in an unquiet halt that was neither slumber nor rest. Mendel felt a strange sense of relief when Pyotr said, “Let’s go.” A twofold sense of relief: because the waiting was over, and because the order had come from Pyotr. In spite of the wartime blackout, the house and the concentration camp were lit up by searchlights. Leonid said that the camp in Smolensk, from which he had escaped in January of 1943, was also lit up at night: the Germans were more afraid of escape attempts than of enemy bombing raids. There was only one sentinel, guarding both the house and the camp: he walked a figure eight around the two, at regular intervals, but sometimes in one direction, at other times in the opposite direction. “Go,” Pyotr said to Mottel.
Mottel went down silently and took up a position in the shadows, behind the gate to the house; the five others drew to within thirty or so meters. The sentinel seemed sleepy; he walked with a slow step until he was practically in front of Mottel, then he bent down, perhaps to tie a shoe, and resumed his rounds in the opposite direction. He walked around the concentration camp, vanished behind the house, and wasn’t seen again; instead, Mottel appeared. He had emerged from his hiding place and was waving them forward. They all turned to Gedale with questioning looks, Gedale looked at Pyotr, and Pyotr, too, waved to them to go down. Pyotr was the first to move out: he was holding an Italian hand grenade, one of those attack explosives that produce more noise than damage, but just then the Gedalists had nothing else. Pyotr moved closer to the house, which had three windows on the ground floor, protected by metal grates. Pyotr moved over to the first window, and gestured for Gedale and Line to move over to the other two; he positioned Mendel and Leonid behind a hedge, in front of the main door. Then, slipping the butt of his machine gun through the metal grating, he smashed the glass of the window, tossed in the hand grenade, and bent over; Line and Gedale did the same with the other two windows. There were only two explosions: for some reason Gedale’s grenade didn’t go off. Gedale tossed in a second grenade, then he, Line, Pyotr, and Mottel ran over to take up positions behind the hedge that surrounded the house: it was a low myrtle hedge, and they were all forced practically to lie down.
For a few seconds nothing happened; then they heard the rattling of an automatic weapon. Someone was firing bursts, blindly, down the hallway of the house and out the door. Mendel flattened himself to the ground, and heard bullets whistle through the air right over his head. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Leonid jump to his feet. “Get down!” he hissed, trying to hold him back: but Leonid got away from him, leaped over the hedge, fired an answering burst and lunged, head lowered, toward the door. A single isolated shot came from the house and Leonid fell forward across the threshold.
Two or three more bursts of gunfire came out the door. Mendel, without getting to his feet, moved along the hedge; it was obvious that the German was firing from the far end of the hallway, because the bullets were punching through the hedge in a narrow fan shape. Mendel, from the position he’d taken, was out of range, but it also meant that the German was out of range of his weapon. Mendel still had two hand grenades: he yanked the safety on one and hurled it over his head toward the door. The grenade went off just beyond Leonid’s body, and the German came out with his hands up: he was an SS Scharführer, or squad leader. He didn’t seem to be wounded, and he was looking around, his lips drawn back to reveal his teeth. “Don’t move,” Mendel shouted at him in German. “Keep your hands up. I’ve got you covered.” As he was speaking, he saw Line pass through the hedge, a ridiculously diminutive figure in oversized military garb; calmly, and showing no signs of haste or fear, she walked around behind the German, pulled open his holster, extracted the pistol, put it in her pocket, and went back to Mendel.
Gedale and Pyotr had also gotten to their feet. Gedale spoke briefly with Pyotr, then asked the German:
“How many of you are there?”
“Five; four inside, and one standing sentry.”
“What happened to the three inside?”
“One of them is certainly dead. I don’t know about the others.”
“Let’s go see,” Gedale said to Pyotr and Mendel. They left the German under Line and Mottel’s guard and went around the house, peering in through the windows.
“Wait,” said Pyotr. He pulled off his jacket, tied the sleeves together so that it was a bundle roughly the size of a man’s head, slipped it over the muzzle of his machine gun, and held it up in front of the metal grating, shouting loudly, “Who goes there?” No one answered, nor was there any sign of life. “It’s all right,” said Pyotr. He put his jacket back on and walked into the house. From outside they could hear his footsteps, followed by a single gunshot. Pyotr came back out:
“Two of them were already dead; the third was dying.”
The bullet had gone clean through Leonid’s chest: he must have been killed instantly. The sentry killed by Mottel lay in a pool of blood, his throat cut. Mottel showed off his notorious knife: “If you want to keep someone from screaming, that’s how you do it,” he told Mendel with serious professionalism; “you cut fast, right here, under the chin.” Only then did they notice that someone had been watching the fight: ten or so human figures had emerged from the concentration camp’s barracks, drawn by the din of blasts and gunfire, and now they were standing in silence, watching, from behind the barbed-wire fence.
By the light of the searchlights they appeared wan, tattered in their gray-and-light-blue striped outfits, their faces black with smoke, ill shaven. “We need to liberate them, kill the German, and go,” said Pyotr. Gedale nodded his head in agreement. Mottel moved closer to the fence, but Mendel held him back: “Wait: it might be an electric fence.” He moved closer and saw that between the fence posts and the wire there were no insulators. He wanted to make even more certain: he looked around, found a piece of concrete rebar, stuck it into the ground near the fence, and then pushed the
end of it against the wires with a piece of wood. Nothing happened; Mottel and Pyotr used the butts of their rifles to tear a breach in the fence. The ten prisoners were hesitant about emerging.
“Come out,” said Gedale. “We’ve killed them all, except for this one here.”
“Who are you?” one of them, tall and bent, asked.
“Jewish partisans,” Gedale replied. He tipped his head toward the pyre and added, “We got here too late. Who are you?”
“You can see for yourself,” the tall prisoner replied. “There were a hundred and twenty of us, we worked for the Luftwaffe. They set us aside, the ten of us, and killed all the others. They set us aside to do this work. My name is Goldner, I was an engineer. I’m from Berlin.” The other prisoners had come over, but they were standing behind Goldner and remained silent.
“What can you tell me about that guy over there?” asked Gedale, pointing to the German with his hands up.
“Kill him immediately. It doesn’t matter how you do it. Don’t let him speak. He was the leader; he was the one who gave the orders, and he fired, too, from the guard tower. He enjoyed it. Kill him immediately.”
“Do you want to kill him yourself?” asked Gedale. “No,” Goldner replied.
Gedale seemed undecided. Then he went over to the German, who was still standing with his hands up, covered by Line and Mottel’s guns, and quickly searched his clothing and pockets. “You can put your hands down. Give me your dog tag.”