by Primo Levi
The corporal said: “Come with me to headquarters: You can explain it all when you get there.”
Half an hour later, Dov and the corporal came back, accompanied by a lieutenant who wore an NKVD band on his arm; when they saw him, the soldiers fell silent and went back to washing. The lieutenant told Dov to go back down the well and tell all the others who were hidden down there to come out. They came out one by one, under the white light of the sky that threatened more snow, amid the silent astonishment of the Russians. The lieutenant ordered two soldiers to get dressed and get their weapons, and escort the group in the opposite direction of the way they had come with Schmulek during the night; that is, they took them back to the barracks of the Polish camp. Here they found Edek with Marian and almost all their men; Gedale was there, too, with the Gedalists who hadn’t followed Schmulek. Both the Poles and the Jews had been disarmed, and the hut into which they had been ushered was guarded by two Russian sentries.
Nothing happened all day long. At noon, two soldiers came and brought bread and sausage for everyone; in the evening a large pot of hot millet-and-beef soup arrived. There were more than a hundred prisoners, and it was crowded in the hut. They complained to the guards, the corporal came and split them into two groups, one for each hut, which meant he had to double the guards. Neither the corporal nor the soldiers were hostile; some of them seemed curious, others annoyed, still others seemed almost apologetic.
The Poles were uneasy, and humiliated at having been forced to hand over their weapons.
“Be strong, Edek,” said Gedale. “The worst is over. No matter what else, these men aren’t going to treat us the way the Germans did. You saw for yourself, you can reason with them.” Edek said nothing.
In the morning a barrel of ersatz coffee was delivered, and shortly thereafter, the lieutenant arrived, accompanied by a clerk. He seemed to be in a bad mood and in a hurry. He transcribed the personal information of each of them in a school notebook, and he had all of them show him their hands, front and back; he examined them closely. When he finished, he split the prisoners into three groups.
The first group consisted of most of the Poles.
“You are soldiers, and you’re going to go on being soldiers. You’ll be given uniforms and weapons, and you’ll be enlisted in the Red Army.” There was a buzz of commentary, murmurings, some objections; the sentries lowered the barrels of their submachine guns, and the objections died away.
“You’ll be useful to us in another way,” he said, speaking to the second group. This group was very meager: it included Edek with half a dozen former students and office clerks.
“I’m the commander of this platoon,” said Edek, as pale as snow.
“There’s no more platoon and there’s no more commander,” said the lieutenant. “The Armia Krajowa has been disbanded.”
“Disbanded by whom? Disbanded by you!”
“No, no. It disbanded itself, there was no longer any reason for its existence. We are liberating Poland now. Haven’t you heard the radio? No, not our radio, Radio London: it’s been broadcasting a message from your commander for three days now. He sends you his greetings and his thanks, and he says that your war is over.”
“Where are you going to send us?” Edek asked.
“I don’t know, and it’s none of my concern. I simply have orders to send you to local headquarters; there you’ll be given all the information you wish.”
The third group consisted of the Gedalists, plus Schmulek, that is, all the Jews plus Pyotr. Mendel hadn’t noticed before, but he now saw that Pyotr had doffed his worn partisan uniform, the one he’d had ever since the camp at Turov. He was tall and thin, like Gedale, and he wore the civilian clothing that Gedale had worn after the exploit in Sarny.
“As for the rest of you,” said the lieutenant, “for now there are no orders. You’re neither civilians nor soldiers, and you’re not prisoners of war, either; you’re men and women without documents.”
“Comrade lieutenant, we are partisans,” said Gedale.
“Partisans belong to partisan units. No one has ever heard of Jewish partisans, that’s a new entry. You don’t belong to any category. So for now you’ll stay here: I’ve requested further instructions. You’ll be given the same treatment we afford our own soldiers. Then we’ll see.”
Gedale’s band, restored after more than three months to its original state, experienced days of inertia and suspicion. Toward the end of January, looking out the barrack windows in the midst of a heavy snowfall, they saw the Poles of the second group leaving. For the occasion, the lieutenant had barred the doors; they had to be content with waving goodbye to Edek through the glass. As he climbed onto the truck, Edek waved his hand in their direction; the truck took off with a jerk, and Sissl burst into tears.
Unlike the others, Dov, Mendel, Arie, and Pyotr had all belonged to the Red Army, and they would have no difficulty clearing up their situation. Pyotr had no doubts: “They made no distinctions, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s fine. Clearly, the only ones the NKVD is interested in right now are the Poles: Stalin wants no Polish partisans in the way.”
“They took you for a Jew!” said Gedale with a smile. “And, as far as that goes, you deserved it.”
“I don’t know about that. The lieutenant asked me two or three questions, saw that I answered in Russian, and was satisfied.”
“Hm,” said Gedale, “if you ask me, your case hasn’t been settled yet.”
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s over,” Pyotr replied. “I’m staying with you.”
Dov had no doubts, either, but in the opposite sense. His decision remained the same, in fact it had been reinforced by the most recent adventures; he was sick of fighting and wandering, sick of uncertainty and living precariously; he wanted to return home, and he had a home to return to. A distant home, untouched by war, in a land that distance in space and time had rendered magical: the land of tigers and bears, where everyone was like him, hardheaded and simple. In that land, which Dov never tired of describing, the winter sky was purple and green; the aurora borealis trembled overhead, and when he was a child the terrible comet had burst forth from it. Mutoray, with its four thousand political exiles, nihilists and Samoyeds, was unlike anyplace else on earth.
Dov left in silence, sad but not in despair. He asked for a hearing with the Russian headquarters, declared his military position and history, at their request drew up a report in fine handwriting on the circumstances in which he’d been taken from Turov, treated at the hospital in Kiev, and returned to the partisan district, and waited. Two weeks later he said goodbye to them all, and decorously left the scene.
As for Mendel and Arie, they presented no problems of this kind, nor did the Russians create any. The front had quickly moved westward; the NKVD lieutenant stopped coming around, and the barracks were guarded with an increasingly light hand until it was no longer guarded at all. Gedale’s whole band was transferred in early February to a schoolhouse in the nearby town of Wolbrom, and there left to themselves. The Russian garrison, which in any case consisted of only an elderly captain and a few soldiers, ignored them, except to bring them supplies taken from the quartermaster’s storehouse: potatoes, turnips, barley, meat, and salt. The bread arrived from a bakery that had been requisitioned, but otherwise they had to do their own cooking on the site, and there were no utensils in the schoolhouse, nor had the Russians supplied them with any. Gedale made a regulation request, the captain promised, and nothing arrived. “Let’s go into the town and get the utensils ourselves,” said Gedale.
The expedition proved to be easier than expected. The little town was empty and sinister; it must have been bombarded, and then plundered repeatedly, but always in haste. In the wrecked houses, in the cellars, in the attics, in the air raid shelters, they found everything they needed. Not just stock pots but chairs, quilts, mattresses, and furniture of every sort. Other furniture appeared every day in the marketplace that had spontaneously sprung up in the main square. Piles of half-br
oken furniture were sold off for firewood: supply was vast and prices were low. Before long the schoolhouse had been transformed into a livable shelter, however uninviting; but there were no stoves, either in the building or anywhere nearby, and the soup had to be cooked over an open fire in the courtyard, next to the sandpit for the long jump. On the other hand, in one of the classrooms the Gedalists erected a majestic king-sized bed for Rokhele the White and Isidor, surmounted by a canopy that they’d cobbled together from military blankets.
The Russian captain was a weary and melancholy man. Gedale and Mendel went to see him frequently, in an attempt to get some information from him about what the Russian authorities intended to do with them. He was courteous, distracted, and evasive; he knew nothing, no one knew anything, the war wasn’t over, they’d have to wait until it was. In the war he’d lost two sons, and he’d had no news about his wife in Leningrad. They had enough to eat and to keep warm: they could wait, the way everyone else was waiting. He was waiting, too. Maybe the war wouldn’t be over all that soon; no one could really know that, perhaps it would just keep on going, who could say? Against Japan, against America. A permit to leave? He couldn’t issue permits, that was another administrative office; and, for that matter, leave to go where? To head where? There were bands of German and Polish rebels roaming the countryside, as well as bands of brigands; the Soviets had set up roadblocks on all the thoroughfares. They’d better not try to leave the city: they wouldn’t get very far, the troops manning the roadblocks had orders to shoot on sight. He himself avoided going anywhere, unless duty required; it had already happened that Soviet soldiers had fired at one another.
But Gedale didn’t take well to being shut in. He, and not only he, found that way of life to be empty, humiliating, and ridiculous. Men and women took turns cooking and cleaning, and there were still vast amounts of time to kill; paradoxically, in the middle of the city, with a roof over their heads, and a table around which to eat, they experienced a vague unease, an unease that was a longing for the forest and the open road. They felt inept, out of place: no longer at war, not yet at peace. In spite of the captain’s instructions, they went out frequently, in small groups.
In Wolbrom the war was over, but it was still going on relentlessly not far away. Through the small town, and on the dirt road that ran around it, day and night, an endless column of Soviet military units were rumbling toward the Silesian front. During the day, rather than a modern army, it seemed that a horde was passing, a vast migration: men of all races, giant Vikings and stocky Laplanders, bronzed Caucasians and pale-skinned Siberians, on foot, on horseback, in troop trucks, on tractors, in large ox-drawn wagons, some of them even riding camels. There were uniformed soldiers and civilians, women dressed in every style imaginable, cows, sheep, horses, and mules: at night, the units stopped where they were, pitched tents, slaughtered livestock and roasted the meat over campfires. These improvised bivouacs were overrun with children bundled in oversized military uniforms; some of them wore pistols and knives in their belts, all had the red star pinned to enormous fur hats. Who were they? Where did they come from? Mendel and his comrades stopped to question them: they spoke Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish; some of them spoke Yiddish, too, while others simply refused to speak. They were sullen and savage, they were orphans of war. The Red Army, as it advanced through ravaged countries, had swept up thousands of them, from ruined cities or scattered in fields and forests, starving and rootless. The Soviets had no time to place them behind the lines nor did they have vehicles to transfer them farther away: they simply dragged them along, children of one and all; they, too, were soldiers, and in search of prey. They milled around the campfires; some of the soldiers gave them bread, soup, and meat, while others shooed them away in annoyance.
The troops that crossed the city in the hours of darkness were surprisingly different. Mendel, who still had the burning memory of units encircled and smashed to pieces, annihilated, in the huge battles of 1941 and 1942, could barely believe his eyes. There, this was the new Red Army that had broken Germany’s back; a completely different army, unrecognizable. A powerful, well-ordered, modern machine that rolled almost soundlessly down the main street of the blacked-out city. Giant tanks riding on trailers with rubber wheels; self-propelled artillery that they’d never seen or even dreamed of before; the legendary Katyushas, covered with tarpaulins that concealed their shape. Mixed in with the artillery and the armored units, teams of infantry were marching as well, in close order, singing as they went. They were not singing war songs; if anything, they were melancholy and subdued. They weren’t bloodthirsty, like the Germans, but, rather, expressed the grief of four years of massacre.
Mendel, the gunner Mendel, watched them go by with a shaken soul. In spite of everything, in spite of the disastrous and culpable defeat that had forced him to take to the woods, in spite of the contempt and the wrongs to which in other times he had been subjected, in spite of Ulybin, that was the army whose uniform, torn and faded, he still wore. A krasnoarmeetz: that’s what he still was, even if he was a Jew, even if he was on his way to another land. Those soldiers who marched by singing, mild-mannered in peacetime but indomitable in war, those soldiers who looked like Pyotr, they were his comrades. He could feel his chest swell with a storm of conflicting emotions: pride, remorse, resentment, reverence, and gratitude. But one day he heard moans coming from a cellar; he went in with Pyotr, and saw ten soldiers of the Waffen-SS, lying half naked on their bellies: some of them were dragging themselves with their elbows, and each had a bloody cut midway down his back. “That’s how the Siberians do things,” said Pyotr. “When they find them they don’t kill them, they just cut their spines.” They climbed back out to the street and Pyotr added: “I wouldn’t want to be a German. Eh no, in the next few months I wouldn’t want to be a Berliner at all.”
One morning they woke up and found a swastika drawn in tar on the façade of the schoolhouse; underneath it was written: “NSZ—Death to the Bolshevik Jews.” Not long after that, they looked out the second-story window and saw three or four young men talking among themselves and looking up. That same evening, while they were sitting down to dinner, the window glass shattered and a bottle with a burning fuse rolled between the legs of the table. Pyotr was the quickest to take action: in a flash he grabbed the bottle, which was still intact, and threw it back out into the street. There was a thud, and a flaming puddle spread out across the cobblestones and burned for a long time, the smoky flames reaching all the way to their window. Gedale said:
“We need to find weapons and leave.”
Finding weapons, too, was easier than they had expected: in different ways, Schmulek and Pavel took care of it. In his lair there were weapons, said Schmulek: there weren’t many, but they were well kept, they’d been buried under the packed earth. He asked Gedale to send someone with him, set out at nightfall and was back by dawn with an assortment of pistols, hand grenades, ammunition, and a submachine gun. After Jozek’s death, Pavel had taken his place as quartermaster, and he reported that buying weapons in the market was easier than buying butter and tobacco. Everyone was selling them, in broad daylight; the Russians themselves, both soldiers passing through and the civilians who followed in the army’s wake, sold German light weapons they’d found in dumps or on the battlefield; other matériel was offered casually for sale by the Poles of the militias that the Russians had hastily assembled. Many of those Poles, immediately after enlisting, deserted with their weapons and joined bands that were preparing for guerrilla warfare; others sold or bartered their weapons in the marketplace. In just a few days, the Gedalists found themselves in possession of a large number of knives and a dozen mismatched firearms; it wasn’t much, but it might be enough to ward off the Polish right-wing terrorists.
At the end of February, the Russian captain summoned Gedale, and kept him talking for more than an hour.
“He offered me cigarettes and something to drink,” Gedale reported to his comrades. “He’s not as dis
tracted as he seems and, if you ask me, somebody gave him a suggestion. He’d heard about the Molotov cocktail, he says that times are tough and that he’s worried about us. That there’s no way for them to guarantee our safety, and that we would be well advised to see to our own self-defense: in other words, he knows about our weapons and he’s fine with our having them. It’s natural, he must like the NSZ as much as we do. He’s said more than once that this is a nasty place; he said the same thing to me when we talked before, but that time he told me that leaving town was dangerous, while today he asked me why we want to stay on. ‘You’d be free to keep traveling, by now the front has moved on: you could keep going, meet the Allies halfway. . . .’ I told him that we want to go to Italy, and from there we’d try to find a passage to Palestine, and he said that was a good idea, England needs to get out of Palestine, just as it needs to get out of Egypt and India: the colonial empires aren’t long for this world. And that we should go to Palestine, to build a country for ourselves. He told me that many of his friends are Jews, and that he’s even read Herzl’s book. I doubt that’s true, or else he didn’t read it very carefully, because he told me that in the final analysis Herzl was a Russian, too, whereas he was actually Hungarian; but I didn’t contradict him. To sum up: the captain is a sly old dog; the Russians are happy for us to go and annoy the British; and it’s time for us to leave. But no official permits: when that topic came up he immediately changed his tune.”
“We’ll leave without permits,” said Line with a shrug. “When have we ever had permits?”
Bella’s nasal voice was heard: “The members of the NSZ may be a bunch of Fascists and cowards, but there is one point on which we’re in agreement with them and with the Russians: they want to get rid of us, and we want to leave.”
Pavel had developed the habit of leaving the schoolhouse early in the morning and not coming back until nightfall. In the course of just a few days the atmosphere at Wolbrom had changed: now the flow of troops heading into Germany was outweighed by the opposite flow, of soldiers coming back from the front. Some of them were on leave, but the majority were wounded or mutilated soldiers, hobbling along on jury-rigged crutches, sitting on the piles of rubble that lined the roads, with the pale beardless faces of teenagers. Pavel never returned empty-handed from his scouting expeditions: by now you could find anything on the black market. He brought back coffee, powdered milk, soap, and razor blades, powdered puddings, and vitamins, treasures that the Gedalists hadn’t glimpsed in six years or had never seen before. One day he brought back a tall thin fellow with sandy blond hair, who spoke neither Russian nor Polish nor German, and only a few words of Yiddish. He’d found him on the rubble of the Wolbrom synagogue saying the morning prayer; he was a Jewish soldier from Chicago whom the Germans had taken prisoner in Normandy. The Red Army had liberated him. They celebrated together, but the American wasn’t very good at communicating and even worse at drinking: after the first round of vodka he slid under the table, slept until noon the next day, and then left without even saying goodbye. Former prisoners from all countries and of all races drifted along the roads, along with clusters of prostitutes.