by Primo Levi
“Say goodbye to them and wish them a safe journey; be as polite as you know how, and God forbid they think of searching us.”
“But what if they do think of searching us?”
“Then we’ll let them: you certainly aren’t suggesting we get in a fight with the Russians. We’ll see how things look and what lies to tell them.”
Things immediately looked bad, and there wasn’t even an opportunity to tell any lies. As soon as he set foot on the ground, and without a word, the corporal gestured to his soldiers, and once again they surrounded the truck. They made the entire band get out and they rummaged through the back of the truck, immediately finding the weapons concealed beneath the blankets, but not the pistols and knives that the Gedalists were carrying. There was no point in objecting or begging; the corporal wouldn’t listen, he broke them up into two groups and assigned them to each of the trucks, under heavy guard; then he sent one of his men to drive the Lancia 3 Ro and gave the signal to depart.
“Where are you taking us?” Pavel dared to ask.
“Didn’t you say you wanted to go to Glogau?” the corporal replied. “Well, that’s where we’re taking you. You should be pleased.” And all the way to Glogau he remained silent and refused to answer their questions.
Glogau, surmounted by a squat, dark fortress, was the first German city that the band had encountered. It was (and is) a mining town, and it struck them as grim, black with coal dust, surrounded by dozens of mine shafts, each of which had been transformed by the Germans into a small concentration camp. The Russians had occupied Glogau only a few weeks earlier; they had done nothing to change its appearance, nor had they altered its use, but now it was German prisoners of war, transferred in just a few hours from fighting on the front to working in the mines, who descended the shafts, rather than the slave laborers of the Nazi concentration camps. In these miniature concentration camps, the Russians gathered in wholesale all the displaced or suspicious people the Red Army found in the area.
They didn’t bother with details where the Gedalists were concerned. It was over in five minutes: they didn’t search them, much less interrogate them, the Lancia 3 Ro vanished, and for the first time the fighting men and women of Kosava, Lyuban, and Novoselky experienced the humiliating siege of barbed wire. The enclosure to which they had been assigned already contained fifty or so prisoners—Polish, German, French, Dutch, and Greek Jews whom the Russians had liberated from the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. The barracks were heated, the Russians provided them with food at irregular intervals but invariably in large amounts, the front was moving farther away and by now the days were quickly growing longer, yet these former prisoners never emerged from their isolation. They spoke seldom and always in an undertone, and only rarely did they lift their eyes from the ground. The Gedalists tried unsuccessfully to establish a rapport with them: once their primary needs had been satisfied, they seemed to have no further wishes or interests or curiosity. They never asked questions, nor did they answer them. There were women among them: they still wore the striped suits and wooden clogs, and their hair had just started to grow back. As their second night in the camp was ending, Mendel left the barracks to visit the latrine. As he stepped across the threshold, he bumped into a human body and felt it sway, inert; it was still warm, and it swung on a noose from the rafters. The same thing happened over and over in the days that followed, like a silent obsession.
Schmulek left the Gedalists and joined the ranks of the former prisoners. In contrast, little by little, first Sissl, and then the other women of the band, and in the end all the Gedalists, managed to overcome the resistance of one of the women from the concentration camp. Her name was Francine and she came from Paris, but her journey had been a long one: first she had been deported to Auschwitz, and from there to a smaller concentration camp near Wrocław; finally, when the Russians were drawing closer, and the Germans had evacuated all the concentration camps in the area, subjecting the prisoners to a senseless march on foot toward a new prison, she had managed to escape. Francine was a doctor, but she had been unable to practice her profession in the concentration camp because she did not speak German well; all the same, she had learned enough to be able to tell what she had seen. She had been lucky: any Jew who was alive was a lucky person. But she’d been lucky in other ways as well; she still had her hair, which they had not cut because she was a doctor—the Germans have very precise rules.
Francine claimed to be a Jew, but she was different from any Jew the Gedalists had ever met before. In fact, they wouldn’t even have believed her if they hadn’t considered that there is no advantage to claiming to be a Jew if you’re not. She didn’t speak Yiddish, she couldn’t understand it, and she said that when she was in Paris she hadn’t even known that it was a language; she had vaguely heard it mentioned, and she thought that it was a variety of broken Hebrew. She was thirty-seven years old; she had never been married, she had lived first with one man, then another; she was a pediatrician, and she liked the work she did, she had a clinic right in the heart of Paris, and in her day she had taken some magnificent vacations, Mediterranean cruises, trips to Italy and Spain, skiing and ice skating in the Dolomites. Of course, she had been in Auschwitz, but she preferred to talk about other things, about her life before that. Francine was tall and slender, and she had chestnut hair and a stern and ravaged face.
Her encounter with Gedale’s band was full of reciprocal astonishment. Yes, in the concentration camp she had become reasonably well acquainted with Jewish women from Eastern Europe, but none of them were like the band’s five women. She hadn’t particularly cared for her companions, they had seemed foreign to her, a hundred times more alien than her French Christian girlfriends. She’d felt annoyance and compassion for their passivity, their ignorance, their primitive ways, the mute resignation with which they had gone into the gas—
Into the gas? That word was new. Francine had had to explain it, and she did so in simple words, without looking the Jewish fighters in the face as they questioned her, almost like judges. Into the gas, certainly, how could they not know about it? By the thousands, by the millions; she didn’t even know how many, but the women in the concentration camp melted around her, day by day. In Auschwitz it was the rule to die, to live was an exception, and she in fact was an exception, every living Jew was a lucky person. But what about her? How had she survived?
“I don’t know,” she said. Francine, too, like Schmulek, like Edek, lowered her voice whenever she spoke about death. “I don’t know: I met a Frenchwoman who was a doctor in the infirmary, she helped me, she gave me food, and for a while she got me work as a nurse. But that alone would not have been enough, many women ate more than me and died all the same, they let themselves sink to the bottom. I held out, and I don’t know why; perhaps it was because I loved life more than they did, or because I thought that life had some meaning. It’s a strange thing: it was easier to believe that there than it is here. In the concentration camp no one committed suicide. There was no time for that, there were other things to think about, bread, boils. Here we have time, and people kill themselves. Partly out of shame.”
“What shame?” Line asked. “You feel ashamed when you’ve done something wrong, and they did nothing wrong.”
“Shame that they weren’t dead,” said Francine. “I have it, too: it’s stupid but I have it. It’s hard to explain. It’s a feeling that the others died in your stead; as if you were alive free of charge, out of some privilege you never earned, out of some abuse you did to the dead. Being alive is not a crime, but we feel it as a crime.”
Gedale never left Francine’s side; Bella was jealous of her, and he ignored Bella’s jealousy.
“Oh sure,” Bella said, “that’s just what he does, it’s second nature to him. He likes foreign women, he’s always chasing after the last one he’s met.”
Francine answered the questions that Gedale and the others asked her with irritable volubility. She’d been a nurse, that’s right; she felt
compassion for the sick women in her care, and yet she beat them sometimes. Not because she wanted to hurt them, it was more as a way of protecting herself, she couldn’t explain it, protecting herself from their demands, their complaints. She knew about the gas, all the veterans knew about it, but she never told the new arrivals, it wouldn’t have done any good. Escape? That would have been crazy: escape where? And she, who spoke only bad German and no Polish?
“Come with us,” Sissl said to her, “now that it’s all over, you can be our doctor.”
“And in a few months a baby will be born. My son,” Isidor added.
“I’m not like you,” Francine replied, “I’m going back to France, that’s my country.” She saw that Bella was holding a novel in her hands, read the name Victor Hugo, and took it from her with a cry of joy: “Oh, a French book!” But she immediately saw the Polish title, indecipherable, and handed the book back to Bella, who resumed reading it with a great show of coldness. For a few days, Pavel did his best to court Francine, with all the charm of a bear; but she laughed at the French he’d picked up in the cabarets, and Pavel withdrew in undramatic defeat, indeed, boasting faintly between clenched teeth: “She wasn’t really my type, I tried to make her understand. Too refined, too delicate: a bit of a meshuggeneh, probably the result of the trouble she’s been through, but all she thinks about is food. I saw her myself, all the crumbs she finds she sticks in her pocket. And she washes too much.”
In the camp in Glogau, time passed in an odd way. The days were empty, all alike, and they slipped away boring and long, but in memory they flattened out, becoming short and blending one into the other. The weeks went by, the Russians were distracted, and frequently also drunk, but they issued no permits to leave the camp. Within the enclosure people were constantly coming and going: there was a steady arrival of prisoners of all nationalities and walks of life, other prisoners were released in accordance with indecipherable criteria. The Greeks were released, then the French, and Francine with them; the Poles and the Germans were left. The camp commander was kind, but he shrugged his shoulders: he knew nothing, it wasn’t up to him, he simply executed the orders that he received from headquarters. Kind but firm; clearly, the war was won, but fighting was still going on, and not far away, either: around Wrocław, as well as in the mountains of the western Sudetenland. Orders were strict, no one was to clog up the roads.
“Just be patient for a few more days, and don’t ask me for things that I can’t give you. And don’t try to escape; I’m asking you this as a favor.”
Kind, firm, and curious. He called Gedale into his office, and then all the others one by one. He’d lost his left hand, and on his chest he wore a silver medal and a bronze one; he looked to be about forty, he was skinny and bald, with a dark complexion and bushy black eyebrows; he spoke in a tranquil and courteous voice and appeared very intelligent.
“If you ask me, Captain Smirnov hasn’t been called Smirnov for very long,” Gedale declared when he came back from his interview.
“What do you mean?” asked Mottel, who had not yet been summoned.
“I mean that he managed to change his name. That he is a Jew, but that he doesn’t want anyone to know that. You can see what you think, when your turn comes, but take care.”
“What should we say and what should we not say?” asked Line.
“Say as little as possible. That we’re Jews is obvious. That we were armed is not something we can deny; if he asks you about it, admit that we are partisans, that’s always better than being taken for bandits. Insist on the fact that we fought against the Germans: say where and when. Remain silent about Edek’s band and on our contacts with the Jewish Combat Organization. Silence, if possible, about the truck, too, because there we were clearly in the wrong; if worse comes to worst, say that we found it broken down and we fixed it. As for the rest, it’s best to remain vague: where we’re going and where we come from. Those of you who were in the Red Army should keep that to themselves: especially you, Pyotr; come up with a story that’ll hold together. But I don’t think he’s with the police, I think he’s curious on his own account, and he finds us interesting.”
Mendel’s turn came at the end of April, when the buds were already opening on the birch trees and the driving rain had washed the roofs of the barracks clean of coal dust. The war news was triumphant: Bratislava and Vienna had fallen, the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front were already fighting in the suburbs of Berlin. On the western front as well, Germany was in its death throes, the Americans were in Nuremberg, the French in Stuttgart and Berchtesgaden, and the British on the river Elbe. In Italy, the Allies had reached the Po, and in Genoa, Milan, and Turin the Italian partisans had expelled the Nazis even before the liberating troops could arrive.
Captain Smirnov was elegant in his neatly pressed uniform, and spoke unaccented Russian; he detained Mendel for almost two hours, offering him Irish whiskey and Cuban cigars. The fairy tale that Mendel had concocted, which was for that matter fairly implausible, proved to be unnecessary: Smirnov knew a great deal about him, not merely his first name, patronymic, and surname. He knew where and when he had gone missing, knew about what had happened in Novoselky and Turov. But he asked him a lot of questions about his encounter with Venyamin’s band. Who had informed him? Ulybin himself? Polina Gelman? The two messengers in the airplane? Mendel was unable to find out.
“So it was this Venyamin who sent you all away? And why?”
Mendel kept things vague:
“I don’t know. I couldn’t say: a partisan commander has to be cautious and mistrustful, and all sorts of people were wandering around in those woods. Perhaps he didn’t think we were fit to join his band, after all we didn’t really know the area. . . .”
“Mendel Nachmanovich, or perhaps I should say, Mendel ben Nachman,” said Smirnov, emphasizing the Hebrew patronymic, “you can speak freely with me. I’d like you to understand that I am not an inquisitor, even if I do gather information and ask questions. You see, I’d like to write your story, to make sure that it isn’t lost. I’d like to write the stories of all of you, of all the Jewish soldiers of the Red Army who made the same choices as you, and who remained Russians and Jews even when the Russians made it clear to them, in words or through their actions, that they had to decide, that it was impossible to be both. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that, and even if I do write this book I don’t know if I’ll be able to publish it. Times can change, perhaps for the better, perhaps for the worse.”
Mendel fell silent, astonished, perplexed, torn between reverence and suspicion. Out of age-old habit, he was mistrustful of those who showed benevolence and asked questions. Smirnov went on, “You don’t trust me, and I can hardly blame you. I, too, know the things that you know; I, too, trust only a few people, and I often force myself to withstand the temptation to trust someone. Think it over; but there’s one thing I want to tell you, I admire you and your comrades, and to a certain extent I envy you.”
“You envy us? We’re not enviable. We’ve walked a hard road. Why would you envy us?”
“Because your choices weren’t forced upon you. Because you decided your own fate.”
“Comrade captain,” said Mendel, “the war isn’t over yet, and we don’t know whether this war will give birth to another. It may be too early to write our story.”
“I know that,” said Smirnov. “I know what a partisan war is. I know that a partisan might happen to have done, seen, or said things that he shouldn’t tell others. But I also know that what you learned in the marshes and in the forests should not be lost; and it’s not enough for it to survive in a book.”
Smirnov had uttered these last words very distinctly, looking Mendel right in the eyes.
“What do you mean?” asked Mendel.
“I know where you’re going, and I know that your war is not over. It will begin again, in a few years, I couldn’t say just when, and no longer against the Germans. Not for Russia, but with Russia’s help. People like you w
ill be needed, for instance; you could teach others the things that you learned, on the Kursk front, at Novoselky, at Turov, and perhaps elsewhere, too. Think it over, gunner: think this over, too.”
Mendel felt as if he’d been seized by an eagle and taken soaring into the sky.
“Comrade captain,” he said, “this war isn’t over yet and you’re already talking to me about another one. All of us are tired, we’ve done and withstood many things, and many of us are dead.”
“I can hardly blame you. And if you were to tell me that you want to go back to being a watchmaker, I could hardly blame you for that, either. But think it over.”
The captain poured out whiskey for Mendel and for himself, raised his glass, and said: “L’chaim!” Mendel’s head jerked up sharply: this expression is the Hebrew equivalent of “To your health!” and it’s used as a toast before drinking; but it has a broader application, because it means literally “To life!” Few Russians have ever heard it, and they usually pronounce it wrong; but Smirnov had perfectly enunciated the harsh breathing of the ch.
In the days that followed, Smirnov summoned one by one all the Gedalists for an interview, and he called some of them more than once. He was exceedingly courteous with them all, but endless discussions sprang up regarding his personality and his true identity. A converted Jew; a Jew in disguise; a Jew pretending to be a Christian, or a Christian pretending to be a Jew. A historian. A busybody. Many of them considered him to be ambiguous at best, others said in no uncertain terms that he was a spy from the NKVD, and that he was just a little cleverer than most; but most of the Gedalists, and among them Mendel and Gedale himself, trusted him and told him about the band’s exploits and their own personal experiences, because, as the saying goes, “Ibergekumeneh tsores iz gut tsu dertsailen” (“It’s good to recount past troubles”). The proverb applies in all the languages on earth, but in Yiddish it sounds especially appropriate.