by Primo Levi
“That in the Holy Cross Mountains there was a prison, and the Germans were starving their prisoners to death.” In fact, in the fort’s cellars they found hallways and cells, their wooden doors broken open. Mendel found words scrawled with charcoal on a wall, and he asked Edek to decipher them.
“They’re three lines from a poem by one of our poets,” said Edek. “This is what it says:
“Mary, don’t have your baby in Poland,
Unless you want to see your son
Nailed to the cross as soon as he’s born.”
“When did this poet write those lines?” asked Gedale.
“I don’t know. But for my country any century is as good as any other.”
Mendel was silent, and felt vast and tangled thoughts sweeping through him. We’re not alone, then. The sea of suffering has no shores, has no bottom, no one can plumb its depths. Here they are, the Poles, fanatics of the cross, the ones who stabbed our fathers and invaded Russia to throttle the revolution. And Edek, too, is Polish. And now they’re dying just like us, alongside us. They’ve paid, aren’t you happy? No, I’m not happy, the debt hasn’t been reduced, it’s only grown, no one will ever be able to pay it off. I just wish no one would die anymore. Not even the Germans? I don’t know. I’ll think about it later, when it’s all over. Maybe killing Germans is no different from when a surgeon performs an operation: cutting off an arm is a horrible thing, but if it has to be done you do it. Let the war end, Lord God in whom I do not believe. If you’re there, end the war. Soon and everywhere. Hitler’s already been beaten, these deaths are no good to anyone.
Standing next to him on the blood-spattered, rain-drenched heath, an ashen-faced Edek was looking at him.
“Are you praying, Jew?” he asked: but coming from Edek the word “Jew” had no venom. Why not? Because everyone is someone else’s Jew, because the Poles are the Jews of the Germans and the Russians. Because Edek is a gentle man who learned to fight; he made a choice just as I did, and he is my brother, even if he is a Pole who has studied, and I’m a village Russian and a Jewish watchmaker. Mendel didn’t answer Edek’s question, and Edek went on: “You should be. I should be praying, too, but I’m no longer capable of it. I don’t believe it’s of any use, for me or anyone else. Perhaps you’ll live and I will die, and if so tell others what you saw in the Holy Cross Mountains. Try to understand, tell others, try to make them understand. These men who died with us are Russians, but the ones who tear the rifles from our hands are also Russians. Tell others, you who are still awaiting the Messiah; perhaps he will come for you, but for the Poles he came in vain.”
It was as if Edek were answering the questions that Mendel was asking himself, as if he were reading the depths of his mind, in the secret bed where thoughts are born. But that’s not so strange, thought Mendel; two good clocks will tell the same time, even if they’re different brands. As long as they’re wound at the same time.
Edek and Gedale called the roll; four of the Poles were missing, and one of the Jews, Jozek, the counterfeiter. He hadn’t died a counterfeiter’s death. They found him at the bottom of a ravine, with his belly torn to shreds: he might have called for a long time but no one had heard him. Should they bury the dead? “Either everyone or no one,” said Edek, “and we can’t bury them all. Let’s just remove the identification papers and the dog tags on those who have them.” The bodies of many of the young men were without identification papers, and Edek and Marian recognized them as members of the Polish Peasant Battalions. They returned to the camp in silence, heads down, like an army in defeat. They were no longer in a hurry, and they marched in scattered order, by night, through fields and woods. In the forest of Sobków they realized that they had lost their way; the only compass that the platoon possessed had been left in the pocket of Zbigniew, one of the dead Poles: no one had remembered to retrieve it. Reluctantly, Edek decided to wait for dawn, and then to follow one of the trails until they reached some village, where they could ask the peasants to show them the way. But in the foggy dawn Arie found a little bird, stiff with cold amid the roots of an ash tree, and said that the bird would show them the way. He scooped it up, warmed it by holding it against his chest beneath his shirt, gave it a few breadcrumbs that he’d softened with his spit, and when the bird had recovered he let it fly away. The bird vanished into the fog heading in a clear direction, without hesitation: “Is that south?” asked Marian. “No,” Arie replied, “that’s a starling, and when winter comes, starlings fly west. “I wish I were a starling,” said Mottel. They got back to camp without further trouble, and Arie’s prestige was enhanced.
Weeks of tension and inertia followed. The weather had turned cold, the freeze hardening the mud, and roads both big and small were soon filled with German convoys marching toward the front or heading back behind the lines. Motorized artillery units went past, along with “Tiger” tanks, already camouflaged in white in expectation of snow, troop trucks full of German soldiers, and Ukrainian auxiliary troops in trucks or on foot; there were offices staffed by military police or Gestapo in all the villages, and it became much more difficult for the partisans to maintain communications. German patrols halted all the young men they encountered and hustled them off to dig anti-tank pits, ramparts, and trenches: the messengers, men and women, moved around only at night. The sole channel of communication that Edek’s unit had with the rest of the world was the radio, but the radio was silent, or it issued unsettling and contradictory reports.
Radio London was triumphant and ironic. It dismissed the Germans and the Japanese as defeated, but at the same time admitted that the Germans had attacked in force in the Ardennes forest: where on earth was the Ardennes? Would it all start over again, with the Germans flooding into France? The German radio was triumphant, too, the Führer was invincible, the real war was just beginning now, and Greater Germany possessed new weapons, secret and absolute, against which there was no defense.
Christmas passed, New Year’s Day of 1945 went by. In the Polish camp uncertainty and discouragement, the partisans’ two fiercest enemies, were growing. Edek felt abandoned: he was receiving neither orders nor information, he no longer knew who was around him. Some of his men had vanished; they just left, silently, with or without their weapons. Within the camp, too, discipline grew slack; arguments broke out, and frequently degenerated into brawls. For the moment, friction between Poles and Jews had not yet appeared, but muttered words and sidelong glances suggested they could not be far off. In spite of Edek’s orders, vodka had reappeared, hidden at first, but eventually in broad daylight. Lice were spreading too, a bad sign: defending against them was not easy, powders and medicines were lacking, and Edek was at a loss. Marian, sanguine and bullish, once a marshal in the Polish Army, held a public demonstration: he lit a small wood fire inside one of the huts, on a piece of sheet metal, and showed that if you hang your clothes a certain distance from the flames, the lice explode without weakening the fabric. But it was a vicious circle: lice are born of demoralization, and create further demoralization.
Line broke up with Mendel. It was sad, like all breakups, but no one was surprised: it had been in the air for a while, ever since the attack on the concentration camp in Chmielnik. Mendel suffered, but it was a dull, gray kind of suffering, without the arrow of despair. Line had never belonged to him, except in the flesh, nor had Mendel ever belonged to her. They had satiated each other frequently, with pleasure and with rage, but they talked only rarely, and their conversations almost inevitably got tangled up in misunderstanding or discord. Line never had doubts, and she refused to tolerate Mendel’s doubts: when these surfaced (and they surfaced precisely at moments of weariness and truth, when their bodies were dissolving away from one another), Line grew harsh and Mendel felt afraid of her. He was also obscurely ashamed of himself, and it’s difficult to love a woman who provokes shame and fear in you. In some confused and indistinct way, Mendel sensed that Line was right. No, she wasn’t right, she was in the right, on the part of the
right. A partisan, whether Jewish or Russian or Polish, a combatant must be like Line, not like Mendel. He or she must never doubt: doubt will resurface in the sights of your rifle, and, worse than fear, it will ruin your aim. There, Line killed Leonid and she feels no guilt. She’d kill me, too, if I’d been flayed alive the way he was, if I didn’t have a thick skin, an armor. Not gleaming, resonant, but opaque and tenacious; blows reach me, but blunted. They dent without wounding. All the same, Line awakened his desire, and Mendel was hurt when he learned that she had become Marian’s woman. Hurt, and at the same time offended, and maliciously satisfied, and hypocritically indignant. A shiksa, after all, a woman who’ll go with anyone, even with Polish men. Shame on you, Mendel, this isn’t why you became a partisan. A Pole is as good as you; in fact, perhaps better than you, if Line chose Marian. Rivke would never have done that. No, in fact, she wouldn’t have, but Rivke’s no longer alive, Rivke’s in Strelka buried beneath a meter of lime and a meter of dirt, Rivke is not of this world. She belonged to the world of order, to the world of the right things done at the right time: she cooked, she kept the house clean, because in those days men and women lived in a house. She did the accounting, even for me, and she encouraged me when I needed it: she even encouraged me the day that war broke out and I left for the front. She wasn’t so particular about washing, the modern girls in Strelka washed more often than she did, she washed only once a month, as is prescribed, but we were a single flesh. A balebusteh, she was: the queen of the house. She commanded, and I didn’t even notice.
With an indifferent eye, Mendel saw other casual and fleeting relationships develop in the camp. Sissl and Arie: fine, good for them, happiness and prosperity to them; let’s hope he doesn’t beat her, Georgians beat their wives, and Arie is more a Georgian than a Jew. Their bones are solid, and not just their bones: they’ll have beautiful children, good chalutzim, excellent colonists for the land of Israel, if we ever get there. Let’s also hope that no Pole looks at Sissl too intently, because Arie is quick with a knife.
Rokhele the Black and Pyotr. They were fine, too, this had been developing for quite a while. Pyotr, among the Poles, was even more isolated than the Jews, and a woman is the best remedy against loneliness. Or even half a woman: the situation was unclear, and in any case Mendel had no interest in investigating, but it seemed that the Black was also leading on the radio operator, Mietek. Too bad about Edek, more than any of the others Edek would have benefited from having a woman, or at least some kind of company, someone to share his suffering: but instead Edek seemed to be trying to isolate himself, to dig a burrow for himself, to build a wall between himself and the world.
Bella and Gedale: no one had anything to say against this couple. They’d been a couple forever, an incredibly stable couple, though no one could understand the reason. Gedale, so free in his words and deeds, so unpredictable, seemed solidly moored to Bella, like a ship tied up to a wharf. Bella wasn’t beautiful, she looked much older than Gedale, she didn’t fight, she participated in the band’s everyday activities lazily, grudgingly, criticizing the others (especially the women), fairly or unfairly. She brought along with her incongruous scraps of her previous bourgeois existence, about which no one knew anything: awkward, even physically cumbersome remnants, customs that everyone else had given up but which Bella intended to keep. It often happened, almost ritually, that when Gedale began to take flight, with a program, a plan, or even just an imaginative and cheerful line of conversation, Bella would bring him back to earth with an observation as dull as it was obvious. Then Gedale would speak to her with feigned irritation, as if they were both playing improvised parts: “Bella, why do you clip my wings?” After close to eight months of living together, and after many shared experiences, Mendel couldn’t stop wondering what it was that kept Gedale so closely tied to Bella. For that matter, this was only one of the many aspects of Gedale that were hard to fathom, just as his actions were impossible to predict. Perhaps Gedale knew that he lacked internal brakes, and needed to find them outside of himself; perhaps he felt that embodied in Bella, at his side, he had the virtues and joys of peacetime, security, common sense, frugality, and comfort. Modest, colorless joys, but everyone, whether aware of it or not, missed them and hoped to find them again, once the slaughter and the journey were over.
Gedale was uneasy, but he hadn’t given in to the wave of disappointment that, starting with the Poles, had swept through the Gedalists as well, to a greater or lesser degree. He reminded Mendel of the starling that Arie had found: like it, he was impatient to get moving again. He wandered through the camp, tormenting the radio operator, arguing with Edek, Dov, Line, and even Mendel. He still played the violin, but without his former transport: at times with boredom, at times with frenzy.
Rokhele the White was neither uneasy nor discouraged. She was no longer alone: ever since the band had found refuge in the Polish camp, she was increasingly unlikely to be found far from Isidor’s side. At first, no one was surprised; after all, Isidor had a tendency to get himself in trouble, or at least to do foolish things, and it seemed natural that the White would act as a mother. Before that, it was Sissl who had looked after Isidor, and in fact a faint hint of rivalry had arisen between the two women, but now Sissl had other things to think about. As for the White herself, she seemed to need someone who needed her. She kept an eye on the boy, making sure that he dressed warmly and kept himself clean, and when necessary scolding him with maternal authority.
Now, from early December on, both the two of them and the relationship that bound them together underwent a change that was hard to define but still visible to all. Isidor spoke less and better; he no longer ranted about impossible acts of vengeance, no longer carried a knife stuck in his belt, and instead he had asked Edek and Gedale to let him take part in target practice. His gaze had become more attentive, he tried to make himself useful, his stride had become brisker and more confident, and even his shoulders seemed to have broadened somewhat. He asked questions: few in number, but none of them foolish or childish. As for Rokhele, she seemed to have both matured and become more youthful. Or rather: before, she had seemed ageless, now she had an age; it was surprising and welcome to watch her return day by day to her twenty-six years, which had until then been mortified by shyness and mourning. She no longer kept her eyes turned toward the ground, and everyone noticed that she had beautiful eyes: large, brown, affectionate. Elegant she certainly was not (none of the five women could claim to be), but she was no longer a shapeless bundle, either; she could be seen with a needle, by lamplight, altering to fit her better the uniforms she’d worn for months without paying attention. Now the White, too, had hair, legs, breasts, a body. When a person ran into the two of them, walking around the camp barracks, Isidor was at Rokhele’s side, no longer behind her; taller than her, he tilted his head imperceptibly in the woman’s direction, as if to shelter her.
One night when Isidor was on the cleaning squad, the White took Mendel aside: she wanted to speak to him secretly.
“What do you want, Rokhele? What can I do for you?” asked Mendel.
“I want you to marry us,” said the White, blushing.
Mendel opened his mouth, shut it again, and then said:
“What on earth are you thinking? I’m not a rabbi, and I’m not a mayor, either; you have no documents, as far as I know you could already both be married. And Isidor’s only seventeen. Does this strike you as the right time to get married?”
The White said: “I know this is hardly the normal thing; I know that there are problems. But age doesn’t count: a man can already be married at thirteen, it says so in the Talmud. And everyone knows that I’m a widow.”
Mendel didn’t know what to say. “It’s complete nonsense, a narishkeit! A whim that you’ll have forgotten by tomorrow. And why did you come to me of all people? Above all, I’m not even a pious Jew. It makes no sense, it’s as if you’d asked me to fly or to cast a spell.”
“The reason I came to you is that
you’re a just man, and because I’m living in sin.”
“If you’re living in sin, there’s nothing I can do about it: that’s something that has to do with the two of you. What’s more, if you ask me, what you are doing isn’t sin, sin is what the Germans are doing. And whether I’m a just man, that remains to be seen.”
Rokhele wouldn’t give up: “It’s like when you’re on a ship or on an island: if there’s no rabbi, anyone can perform the marriage. If it’s a just person all the better, but it could be anyone at all. In fact, he has to do it, it’s a mitzvah.”
Mendel drew on memories untouched for centuries:
“For the marriage to be valid we’ll need the Ketubah, the contract: you’ll have to promise to bring Isidor a dowry, and he’ll have to guarantee that he can support you. Support you—him, Isidor. Do you take that seriously?”
“The Ketubah is a formality, but marriage is a serious thing; and Isidor and I love each other.”
“Let me at least think it over until tomorrow. A matter of this sort costs me neither effort nor money, but it strikes me as a fraud: it’s as if you were to say to me, ‘My dear Mendel, please cheat me,’ do you see what I mean? And if I agree to do it, I’m the one committing the sin. Couldn’t you wait until the war is over? Then you could find a rabbi, and you could do things properly. I wouldn’t even know what words to say: I’d need to say them in Hebrew, right? And I’ve forgotten Hebrew: if I get it wrong you’ll think you’re a bride but instead you’ll still be unmarried.”
“I’ll dictate the words, and it makes no difference whether they are in Hebrew: any language will do, the Lord understands them all.”
“I don’t believe in the Lord,” said Mendel.
“That doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Isidor and I believe in him.”
“Still, I don’t understand why you’re in such a hurry.”
Rokhele the White said, “I’m pregnant.”