by Primo Levi
The German fiddled with the chain, but he couldn’t open the clasp; Pyotr came over, tore it off his neck with a jerk, and handed it to Gedale, who pocketed it. Gedale said:
“We’re Jews. I’m not sure why I’m telling you that, it doesn’t change much, but we want you to know it. I had a friend who used to write songs. You took him prisoner, and you gave him half an hour so he could write his last one. It wasn’t you, was it? You don’t write songs.”
The German shook his head no.
“This is the first time that I’ve talked to one of you,” Gedale went on. “If we set you free what would you do?”
The German straightened at the waist: “Enough of this nonsense. Do it fast and do it clean.” Gedale took a step back and lifted his weapon, then he lowered it again and said to Mottel: “The uniform can come in handy. You take care of it.” Mottel shoved the German inside the house and took care of it, fast and clean.
“Let’s go,” said Gedale, but Line asked: “Aren’t we going to leave our signature?” Everyone looked at her in bafflement. The young woman insisted: “We need to say that it was us: otherwise it’s meaningless.”
Pyotr was opposed: “It would be foolish and a pointless risk.” Gedale and Mendel weren’t sure. “We who?” asked Mendel. “The six of us? Or the whole band? Or all those who—” but Mottel cut off the discussion. He ran to the pyre, picked up a piece of charcoal, and wrote on the house’s white plaster wall five large Hebrew letters: VNTNV.
“What did you write?” Pyotr asked.
“‘V’natnu,’ ‘And they will give.’ You see, you can read it from right to left and from left to right: it means that everyone can give and everyone can give back.”
“Will they understand?” Pyotr asked.
“They’ll understand as much as they need to,” Mottel replied.
“Come with us,” Gedale said to Goldner, but his voice lacked conviction.
“Each of us can make his own choice,” said Goldner, “but I’m not coming. We’re not like you, we’re not comfortable with other people.”
The ten prisoners conferred for a moment, then they told Gedale that they all agreed with Goldner, except for one. They would wait for the Russians, hiding in the forest or in the ruins of the villages. The one who said he was willing to come with the Gedalists was a young man from Budapest. He set off with the five who, though weighed down by their new weapons, still marched briskly, but after walking for half an hour he sank down and sat on a rock. He said that he’d rather go back to the other nine.
Mendel hadn’t dreamed in a long time: he couldn’t remember when he had last had a dream; perhaps it was before the war broke out. That night, perhaps because he was tired from the tension and the march, he had a strange dream. He was back in Strelka, in his small watchmaker’s workshop, the one he had built for himself in a closet in his home; it was cramped, but in the dream it was even more so, Mendel couldn’t even spread his elbows to work. All the same he was working: before him were dozens of clocks, all of them stopped, and broken, and he was repairing one, with his watchmaker’s loup screwed into his eye socket and a tiny screwdriver in one hand. Two men came looking for him, and ordered him to follow them; Rivke was against his going, she was furious and afraid, but he went with them all the same. They led him down a staircase, or perhaps it was a mine shaft, and then through a long tunnel. The ceiling was painted black and many clocks were hanging on the walls. These clocks weren’t stopped. You could hear them ticking, but each one showed a different time, and some were actually running backward; Mendel felt vaguely guilty about this. Coming down the tunnel toward him was a man in civilian dress, with a tie and a disdainful air; he was asking him who he was, and Mendel didn’t know what to reply: he could no longer remember his name, or where he was born, nothing at all.
Dov woke him up, and he also woke up Line, who was sleeping at his side. As so often happens after a deep sleep, Mendel had a hard time recognizing where he was. Then he remembered that the night before the band had taken shelter in the cellar of an abandoned glassworks: the ceiling was black, like the one in his dream. Bella and Sissl had made soup, and they were distributing it. Gedale was already awake, telling Dov how the mission had gone:
“. . . the best were Pyotr and Mottel. And Line, yes, of course. Here’s the uniform, with insignia and everything—nicely ironed, even.”
“Do you think we can use it?” asked Dov.
“No, that’s too dangerous a game. We’ll sell it: Jozek can take care of it.”
Jozek was noisily spooning his soup next to Pavel, Pyotr, and Rokhele the White. “. . . but it was the Sabbath,” said Pavel. “After the sun sets on Friday night, it’s already the Sabbath. Isn’t it a sin to kill on the Sabbath?”
Rokhele was on pins and needles. “Killing is always a sin.”
“Even when you kill an SS officer?” Pavel asked, provoking her.
“Even then. Or maybe not: an SS officer is like a Philistine, and Samson killed them. He was a hero because he killed Philistines.”
“But maybe he didn’t kill them on the Sabbath,” said Jozek.
“Well, I couldn’t say. Why do you keep tormenting me? My husband would have known what to say to you. He was a rabbi, and you’re all ignorant unbelievers.”
“What happened to your husband?” asked Pyotr.
“They killed him. He was the first one they killed in our town. They forced him to spit on the Torah and then they killed him.”
“And wasn’t it a member of the SS who killed him?”
“Certainly. He had a death’s-head on his cap.”
“Well, there, you see?” Pyotr concluded. “If Mottel had killed him long ago, your husband would still be alive.” Rokhele said nothing and walked away; Pyotr looked at Pavel with an inquisitive gaze, and Pavel raised both arms slightly and dropped them again.
“And no one talks about him,” Mendel said to Line.
“About who?”
“About Leonid. No one thinks about him anymore. Not even Gedale, and yet he was the one who insisted on sending him. Look at them: it’s as if nothing had happened yesterday.”
The distribution of soup was over; in one corner of the cellar Isidor, equipped with Bella’s scissors, was trimming hair and beard for anyone who wished it. The customers waited in line, sitting on stacks of bricks. The last in line was Gedale; to kill time, he’d taken out his violin, and he was playing a song, faintly, to avoid being heard from outside. It was a comic song that everyone knew, about a miracle-working rabbi who made a blind man run, a deaf man see, and a lame man hear, and in the last verse he walks fully dressed into the water to emerge, miraculously, wet. Even as Isidor went on with his work, he laughed and sang along to the music under his breath; Rokhele the Black, too, sang along softly; she had asked Isidor to cut her hair short like Line’s, and just then she was under the barber’s scissors.
“Gedale has many faces,” said Line. “That’s why it’s so hard to understand him—because there’s not just one Gedale. He tosses everything behind him. The Gedale of today tosses the Gedale of yesterday behind him.”
“He even tossed Leonid behind him,” said Mendel. “But why did he want him to go on the mission at all costs, instead of Arie? I’ve been asking myself that since yesterday.”
“Maybe he did it with good intentions. He wanted to give him a chance; he thought that fighting would do him good, would help him to find himself again. Or else he wanted to test him.”
“I have another idea,” said Mendel. “I think that Gedale didn’t know he wanted it, but he wanted something else. That deep down he wanted to get rid of him. Before we set out, he practically told me so.”
“What did he say to you?”
“That for desperate enterprises you need desperate men.”
Line said nothing, chewing her fingernails. Then she asked, “Did Gedale know why Leonid was desperate?”
Mendel, too, remained silent for a long time, then he said, “I don’t know if
he knew. Probably he did, he must have guessed, Gedale finds things out by sniffing the air, he has no need of evidence, no need to ask questions.” He was sitting on a block of rubble, and with his heel he was drawing signs on the packed-earth floor. Then he added, “It wasn’t the German who killed Leonid, and it wasn’t Gedale, either.”
“Then who did?”
“The two of us.”
Line said, “Let’s go sing with them.”
Three or four others had gathered around Gedale, and to the tune of his violin they were singing other happy songs, about weddings and nights at the tavern. Pyotr was trying to follow the rhythm and to imitate the harsh breathings of the Yiddish, laughing like a child.
“I don’t want to sing,” said Mendel. “I don’t want anything, I don’t know who Gedale is anymore, I don’t know what I want or where I am anymore, and maybe I don’t even know who I am anymore. Last night I dreamed that someone was asking me who I was, and I didn’t know what to say.”
“You can’t treat dreams as if they’re important,” Line said, brusquely. At that moment, Izu, the fisherman of the Gorin, who was standing guard outside, raced down the cone of rubble that led into the cellar:
“Have you lost your minds? Or are you drunk? You can hear everything out there: are you really determined to bring the police down on you?”
Gedale apologized like a schoolboy caught red-handed, and put away his violin. “Everyone come here,” he said. “We have a few things to decide. In June I told you that we’re no longer orphans or stray dogs. That remains the case; but we’re about to get a new master, or if you prefer, we’re about to get a new father. We are part of a vast family, under arms, fighting against the Germans from Norway to Greece. In this family, there are disagreements. There is much discussion about what is to be done once Hitler has been hanged, where the borders are going to run, who the land is going to belong to and who the factories are going to belong to. This family includes Iosif Vissarionovich, that’s right, Arie’s cousin. He may be the firstborn, but he can’t come to an agreement with Churchill about what color Poland should be painted; Stalin wants red, while Churchill has another color in mind, and the Poles have yet another; in fact, to hear them all, five or six different colors. The Poles aren’t all like the puppets of the NSZ; they’re hard-fighting partisans eager to take on the Germans, but they don’t trust the Russians, and they don’t trust us, either.
“We are weak and few in number. The Russians are no longer particularly interested in what we do, now that we’ve crossed the border. They’re going to let us go our way; but our way is exactly what we need to talk about.”
“I’m no cousin of Stalin’s,” said Arie, offended. “He’s nothing more than a compatriot of mine. And, as far as I’m concerned, there’s only one way to go: shoot at the Germans as long as there’s even one left standing, and then go to the land of Israel to plant trees.”
“On that point, I think we’re all in agreement,” said Gedale. “Not you, Dov? Fine, excuse me, we’ll talk it over later; what I wanted to tell you now is that we have a source of support, or at least a compass to guide us, an arrow pointing the way. We are not alone in these woods. There are men here whom everyone respects: they are the ones who fought in the ghettos just as we did, in Warsaw, in Vilna, in the Ninth Fort of Kovno, and the ones who had the courage to mutiny against the Nazis in Treblinka and Sobibór. They are no longer isolated: they’ve joined together into the ZOB, the Jewish Combat Organization, the first such group with the courage to call itself that before the world since Titus destroyed the Temple. They are respected, but they are neither wealthy nor numerous; and the fact that they’re respected doesn’t mean that they’re strong: they have neither fortresses nor airplanes nor artillery. They have few weapons and little money, but with what little they have they have already helped us and will continue to do so. We will preserve our independence, because we fought for it and earned it, but we’ll take into account the instructions they give us. The most important one is this: our path runs through Italy. Once the front has moved past us, if we’re still alive, and if we’re still a band, we’ll try to make our way to Italy, because Italy is like a springboard. That doesn’t mean, however, that it will be easy.”
“Once Hitler is dead, all ways will become easy,” said Jozek.
“They’ll be easier than they are now, but they won’t be all that easy. The English will do everything they can to hinder us, because the last thing they want to do is make enemies of the Arabs in Palestine; the Russians, on the other hand, will help us, because the English are in Palestine, and Stalin will be eager to find ways of weakening them, because he is jealous of their empire. From Italy, already, clandestine ships are setting sail for the land of Israel; some of them make it through, others are stopped, and those who stop them are not the Germans but the English.”
“What if someone tries to stop us?” asked Line.
“That’s the point,” said Gedale. “No one can say when and how the war will end, but it may well be that we’ll need our weapons again. It may be that this band, and other bands like ours, will have to go on fighting even after the rest of the world has returned to peace. That is why God has chosen us among all other peoples, as our rabbis say. That is what I wanted to tell you. Dov, you asked to speak? I’m done; go ahead.”
Dov was brief: “To get across the front while war is raging is impossible, especially for a single man, but if it were possible I’d already have done it. Forgive me, friends, but I’m forty-six years old. I’ll stay with you as long as I can be useful, but when the Russians catch up with us I’ll go with them. I was born in Siberia and I’ll return to Siberia; out there, there’s been no war, and my house is probably still standing. I may have enough strength to work, but I no longer feel like fighting. And the Siberians don’t call you ‘Jew’ and they don’t force you to shout, ‘Long live Stalin.’”
“You do as you see fit, Dov,” said Gedale. “Hitler is still alive, and it’s too early to make certain decisions. You are still useful to us. What do you want, Pyotr?”
Pyotr, to whom Gedale had entrusted the commando operation against the concentration camp, and who had conducted it with intelligence and courage, got to his feet like a schoolboy being examined. Everyone laughed, and he sat back down and said, “I just wanted to know whether in this land of Israel where you want to go they’ll take me in, too.”
“They certainly will,” said Mottel. “I’ll provide you with a recommendation, and there will be no need for you to change your name or get yourself circumcised. Gedale was only kidding, that night in the windmill.”
Then Pavel’s loud voice was heard: “Trust me, Russian: the name doesn’t matter, but get yourself circumcised. Take advantage of the opportunity. It’s not so much a matter of the covenant with God: really, it’s more like how it is with an apple tree. If you prune an apple tree at the right time, then it will grow nice and straight and yield more apples.” Rokhele the Black let out a long nervous burst of laughter; Bella stood up red-faced and declared that she hadn’t walked all these kilometers and run all the risks she had to hear that kind of talk. Pyotr looked around, shy and confused.
Then Line spoke, serious as always. “Of course they’ll take you in, even without Mottel’s recommendation. But tell me: why do you want to come?”
“Eh,” Pyotr began, increasingly confused, “there are so many reasons. . . .” He raised one hand, pinkie extended, the way Russians do when they are starting to count. “First of all . . .”
“First of all?” Dov asked encouragingly.
“First of all, I’m a believer,” Pyotr said, with the relief of someone who’s found a topic.
“Got shenk mir an oysred!” said Mottel. Everyone burst out laughing, and Pyotr looked around, offended.
“What did you say?” he asked Mottel.
“It’s a figure of speech we have. It means: ‘Lord God, send me a good excuse.’ You aren’t trying to tell us that you want to be with us bec
ause you believe in Christ, are you? You’re a partisan and a Communist, and you act as if you believed deeply in Christ; after all, we don’t believe in Christ; in fact not all of us believe in God.”
Pyotr the believer swore a fervent oath in Russian and went on, “You are so good at making things complicated. Well, I don’t know how to explain this to you, but that’s exactly the way it is. I want to stay with you because I believe in Christ, and you can all go hang yourselves with your hairsplitting.” He stood up, looking hurt, and strode briskly toward the door as if he meant to leave, but then he came back.
“. . . and I have ten other reasons to stay with this band of idiots. Because I want to see the world. Because I had a fight with Ulybin. Because I’m a deserter, and if they catch me it will go badly with me. Because I fucked all your whoring mothers, and because—” At this point Dov went running straight at Pyotr as if he were about to attack him; instead he threw his arms around him, and the two men happily pounded each other on the back.
9
September 1944–January 1945
The front had come to a halt and the summer was drawing to an end. The land of the Poles, worn out by five years of warfare and ruthless occupation, seemed to have returned to the chaos of the beginning of creation. Warsaw had been destroyed: not just the ghetto this time but the entire city and, with it, the seeds of a peaceful independent Poland. Just as the Poles had allowed the ghetto uprising in the spring of 1943 to be suppressed, so now the Russians allowed the revolt in Warsaw, planned and supervised by the refugee Polish government in London, to be suppressed; let the Germans take care of punishing the hotheads, now as they had then. And the Germans took care of it; routed on every front of the war, they were instead victorious on the internal fronts, in their daily warfare against the partisans and the helpless civilian population.
From the capital, hordes of refugees spread out across the countryside, without bread and without a roof over their heads, terrified of German reprisals and raids. The Germans were starving not only for vengeance but also for strong labor: country and city folk, men, women, old people, and children, rounded up abruptly everywhere, were all set hastily to work, with shovel and pick, digging anti-tank ditches in the farmland that should have been plowed. Faithful to the Nazi genius for destruction, German wrecking squads dismantled and hauled away everything that could have proved useful to the advancing Red Army: train tracks, electric cables, railroad and tram equipment, lumber, iron, whole factories. The Polish partisans of the Home Army, the old recruits who had been fighting against the Germans ever since their lightning attack of 1939, and the others who had chosen life in the forests either out of love for their own ravaged country or to avoid deportation, down to the last few who had fled Warsaw in its death throes, all went on fighting with desperate determination.