by Primo Levi
In the tumultuous and memorable last days of the Second World War on the European fronts, in early May 1945, the Russian headquarters that administered the constellation of small concentration camps in Glogau vanished as if by magic. One night, without a word, they all simply left, including Captain Smirnov: no one knew whether they had been transferred or demobilized or simply absorbed by the collective frenzy of the Red Army, drunk with victory. There were no more sentries, the gates swung wide open, the storehouses had been looted; but, nailed to the outside of their barracks door, the Gedalists found a note that had been scrawled in haste:
We have to leave. Dig behind the kitchen chimney; there’s a gift for you—we don’t need it anymore. Good luck.
SMIRNOV
Behind the kitchens they found several hand grenades, three pistols, a German machine pistol, a small supply of ammunition, a military map of Saxony and Bavaria, and a wad of bills: eight hundred dollars. Gedale’s band set off once again: no longer by night, no longer following furtive trails or traveling through deserted wildernesses, but on the roads of the Germany that had once been proud and prosperous and now lay devastated, between hedges of faces sealed shut, marked by a new sense of impotence, which gave new fuel to an old hatred. “Rule number one, we mustn’t get separated,” Gedale had told them; for the most part they went on foot, at times hitching a ride on a Soviet military vehicle, but only if there was enough room for them all. By now Rokhele the White was entering her seventh month of pregnancy. Gedale allowed her alone to be transported by the occasional horse-drawn wagon, but then the entire band marched along as an escort.
Against the indifferent backdrop of the countryside in springtime, those roads were teeming with a twofold humanity, afflicted or festive. German citizens, on foot or in wagons, were returning to the ruined cities, blind with weariness; other carts carried farmers, bringing goods for the black market. In contrast, Soviet soldiers, riding bicycles or motorcycles, driving military vehicles or requisitioned automobiles, drove at reckless speed in both directions, singing, playing music, shooting into the air. The Gedalists narrowly avoided being run over by a Dodge truck that carried two grand pianos: two uniformed officers were playing Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture in unison, with seriousness and commitment, while the driver zigzagged around the wagons, swerving sharply, sounding the siren at full blast, and ignoring the pedestrians in his path. Ex-prisoners of all nationalities were traveling, in groups or alone, men and women, civilians in tattered clothing, Allied soldiers in their khaki uniforms with the large letters KG on their backs: all of them on their way to be repatriated or simply searching for a place to sleep.
Toward the end of May, the band set up camp outside the village of Neuhaus, not far from Dresden. Once they began advancing into German territory, they noticed that it was virtually impossible to buy food in the larger cities, which were in ruins, half deserted, and starving. Pavel, Rokhele the Black, and two other men, out on a foraging mission, knocked at the door of a farmhouse, twice, then a third time; no one answered. “Shall we go in?” Pavel suggested. The shutters over the windows had been recently painted, in vivid colors. They opened easily, but there were no windows behind them: there was a solid wall of reinforced concrete, and in place of a window there was the narrow aperture of a loophole. It wasn’t a farmhouse; it was a camouflaged bunker, now empty and abandoned.
The village, on the other hand, was swarming with people. It was surrounded by walls, and through the gates women and elderly men came and went with a furtive, famished look, pulling hand carts loaded with provisions or odds and ends. On either side of the gateway stood two hard-faced guards, dressed in civilian clothes, and apparently unarmed. “What do you want?” they asked the four, whom they had recognized as outsiders.
“To buy something to eat,” Pavel replied in his best German. One of the sentries nodded his head for them to proceed.
The village hadn’t been damaged. The cobblestone lanes ran between picturesque and bright-colored façades crisscrossed by half-beams painted black. The setting was serene, but the human presence was unsettling. The streets were thronged with people walking in all directions, apparently without destination or purpose: elderly people, children, cripples. There were no able-bodied men in sight. The windows, too, were filled with fearful and suspicious faces.
“It looks like a ghetto,” murmured Rokhele, who had been in Kosava.
“It is,” Pavel replied. “They must be refugees from Dresden. Now it’s their turn.” They had spoken in Yiddish, and perhaps a little too loudly, because a large, stout woman, wearing a pair of men’s boots, turned to an old man beside her and told him ostentatiously: “Look at them, back again, and more insolent than before.” Then, addressing the four Jews directly, she added, “This is not the place for you.”
“Then where is our place?” Pavel asked, in good faith.
“Behind barbed wire,” the woman replied.
Pavel, without thinking, grabbed the woman by the lapels of her coat, but he immediately released her because out of the corner of his eye he had seen that a crowd was gathering around them. At the same instant he heard a shot overhead, and Rokhele, at his side, staggered and fell forward. The crowd surrounding them vanished in an instant, and the windows, too, emptied. Pavel knelt down next to the young woman: she was breathing, but her limbs were limp, inert. She wasn’t bleeding; there were no visible wounds. “She fainted; let’s get her out of here,” he said to the two others.
At the camp, Sissl and Mendel examined her more carefully. There was a wound after all, practically invisible, hidden under her thick black hair: a clean hole just above her left temple. There was no exit wound, the bullet had remained in her skull. Her eyes were closed; Sissl lifted the lids and saw only the white of her eyes; the irises had rolled upward, and were concealed in the sockets. Rokhele’s breathing was increasingly faint and irregular, and she no longer had a pulse. As long as she lived, no one dared to speak, as if in fear of breaking that soft whisper of breath; by evening she was dead. Gedale said, “Let’s go, with all our weapons.”
They set out at night, all of them; the only ones left in the camp were Bella and Sissl, who were digging the grave, and the White, saying the prayer for the dead over the body of her black sister. They didn’t have many weapons, but rage was driving them, the way a tempest drives a ship. A woman, not yet twenty years old, and not even a combatant; a woman who had survived the ghetto and Treblinka, murdered in peacetime, treacherously, for no reason, by a German. An unarmed woman, a cheerful carefree hardworking woman, someone who accepted everything and never complained, the only one who had never experienced the paralysis of despair, the fireman on Mendel’s train, Pyotr’s woman. Pyotr was the most furious of them all, and the most clearheaded.
“To the Rathaus,” he said tersely. “The important ones will be there.” Rapidly and silently they reached the village gates; the sentries were no longer there, and they burst in, running through the empty streets, while distant images resurfaced in Mendel’s mind, faded and insistent, images that trip you up instead of driving you forward. Simeon and Levi taking bloody revenge for the outrage perpetrated by the Shechemites against their sister Dinah. Was that vengeance just? Is there such a thing as just vengeance? There is no such thing; but you’re a man, and vengeance calls out in your blood, and so you run and you destroy and you kill. Like them, like the Germans.
They surrounded the Rathaus. Pyotr was right: there was no electrical power in Neuhaus, the streets were dark, and most of the windows dark, too, but the second-floor windows of the city hall were faintly illuminated. Pyotr had asked for and been given the machine pistol that Smirnov had bequeathed them; from the shadows where he was hiding, with two single shots, he killed the two men standing guard outside the front door. “Now, hurry!” he shouted. He ran to the door and tried frantically to break it down, first with the butt of the machine pistol, and then with his shoulder. The door was heavy and resisted, and already excited voices could b
e heard within. Arie and Mendel stood away from the façade and simultaneously hurled hand grenades through the illuminated windows; splinters of glass rained into the street, three long seconds went by, then two explosions were heard. All the windows on the second floor blew out, vomiting pieces of wood and paper. In the meantime, Mottel tried in vain to help Pyotr get the door open. “Wait!” he shouted; in a flash he climbed up to the ground-floor window, shattered the glass with a blow from his hip, and jumped inside. A few seconds later he could be heard firing three, then four shots with his pistol, and immediately afterward the door was unlocked from within. “You stay out here, and don’t let anyone get away!” Pyotr ordered four of the men from Ruzany; he and the others rushed up the staircase, striding over the body of an elderly man lying sideways across the steps. In the meeting hall stood four men, with their hands up; two others were dead, and a seventh man moaned in a corner, writhing weakly.
“Who is the burgomaster?” Gedale shouted; but Pyotr had already cut them down with a burst of machine-gun fire.
No one had tried to intervene, no one had escaped, and the four men standing guard hadn’t seen anyone approach. In the Rathaus cellars the Gedalists found bread, hams, and lard, and they returned to the camp loaded down and unharmed, but Gedale said, “We need to get out of here! Bury the Black, take down the tents, and let’s go immediately: the Americans are thirty kilometers away.”
They walked through the night, in haste, with remorse for the ease of their vengeance, and relief because it was all over. The White marched courageously, with the others taking turns helping her so that she would not fall behind. Mendel found himself walking at the head of the column, between Line and Gedale.
“Did you count them?” Line asked.
“Ten,” Gedale replied. “Two outside the front door, and Mottel killed one on the stairs, and seven in the meeting hall.”
“Ten against one,” said Mendel. “We’ve done just what they used to do: ten hostages for a German killed.”
“You’re reckoning wrong,” said Line. “The ten in Neuhaus shouldn’t be counted against Rokhele. They should be counted against the millions of Auschwitz. Remember what the Frenchwoman told us.”
Mendel said, “Blood isn’t paid for with blood. Blood is paid for with justice. Whoever shot the Black was an animal, and I don’t want to become an animal. If the Germans killed with gas, should we kill all the Germans with gas? If the Germans killed ten for one, and we do the same thing, we’ll become like them, and there will never again be peace.”
Gedale broke in: “You may be right, Mendel. But in that case, how do you explain the fact that I feel much better now?”
Mendel looked inside himself, then admitted: “Yes, I feel better, too, but that doesn’t prove a thing. The people in Neuhaus were refugees from Dresden. Smirnov told us: in Dresden, a hundred and forty thousand Germans were killed in a single night. That night, in Dresden, there was a firestorm that melted iron lampposts.”
“We didn’t bomb Dresden,” said Line.
“Enough,” said Mendel. “That was the last battle. Let’s keep walking, let’s go find the Americans.”
“Let’s see what they look like,” said Gedale, who didn’t seem too interested in the problems that were worrying Mendel. “The war is over: it’s hard to understand, we’ll understand it little by little, but it’s over. Tomorrow, day will dawn and we’ll no longer have to shoot or hide. It’s springtime, we have enough to eat, and all the roads are open. Let’s go find a place in the world where he can be born in peace.”
“He who?” asked Line.
“The baby. Our son, the son of two innocents.”
They ventured into no-man’s-land with conflicted souls. They were uncertain and shy, they felt they had been washed clean, like blank pages, children once again. Savage grown-up children, who had matured in hardship, and isolation, in bivouacs and wartime, misfits on the threshold of the West and of peace. There, beneath the soles of their patched boots, lay enemy soil, the land of the exterminator, Germania-Deutschland-Daychland-Niemcy: a tidy countryside, untouched by war, but look carefully, it’s only appearance, the real Germany is in the cities, the Germany they had glimpsed in Glogau and Neuhaus, the Germany of Dresden, Berlin, and Hamburg, the Germany they had heard about with horror. That’s the real Germany, the one that had become drunk on blood and had been forced to pay; a prostrate body, fatally wounded, already rotting. Naked: along with the barbaric glee of revenge, they felt a new uneasiness; they felt indiscreet and shameless, like someone who exposes a forbidden nudity.
On either side of the road they saw houses with shuttered windows, like dead eyes, eyes that are unwilling to see; some still covered by thatched roofs, others roofless, or with roofs charred and burned. Lopped-off belltowers, playing fields where the weeds were already growing. In town centers, heaps of rubble marked with signs that read “Don’t walk here: human bodies”; long lines in front of the few open shops, and citizens busy erasing or chiseling away the symbols of the past, the eagles and swastikas that were meant to last for a thousand years. From the balconies strange red banners waved: they still bore the shadow of the black swastika that had been unstitched in haste; but soon, as they went on walking, the red banners were seen less frequently and finally disappeared. Gedale said to Mendel: “If your enemy falls, do not rejoice; but do not help him to his feet.”
The line of demarcation between the two armies had not yet been consolidated. On the morning of the second day of their march they found themselves in a gentle landscape, green and brown, hilly, dotted with farms and large houses; in the fields the peasants were already at work. “Americans?” The peasants shrugged their shoulders mistrustfully and waved vaguely westward. “Russians?” No Russians; no Russians here.
They found themselves amid the Americans almost without noticing the transition. The first patrols they ran into glanced at the Gedalists’ ragged caravan without interest: in Germany there was nothing but refugees, they had seen worse. Only in Scheibenberg did a patrol stop them and escort them to the command post. The little office, which had been set up on the ground floor of a large requisitioned house, was overflowing with people, nearly all of them Germans, who had been evacuated from bombed-out cities or were fleeing before the Red Army. The men of the band left their baggage (and the weapons hidden in their baggage) in Mottel’s care and formed an orderly line.
“You speak for everyone,” said Gedale to Pavel. Pavel was intimidated:
“But I don’t know English. I pretend to know it, but I just ape the words, the way actors and parrots do.”
“That doesn’t matter, they’ll question you in German. So you answer in bad German, tell them that we’re Italians, and that we’re going to Italy.”
“They won’t believe me. We don’t look like Italians.”
“Just give it a try. If it works, good; if it doesn’t work, we’ll see. We’re not risking much, Hitler’s gone now.”
The American sitting behind the desk was sweaty, shirtless, and bored, and he questioned Pavel in surprisingly good German; and in fact Pavel had to work hard to invent a language that would sound believable coming from an Italian. Fortunately, the American seemed entirely indifferent to what Pavel had to say, how he said it, the band, its makeup, its intentions, its past, and its future. After a few moments he said to Pavel: “Please be more concise”; after another minute he interrupted him and told him to wait outside the house, him and his comrades. Pavel walked outside, they all slung their knapsacks over their shoulders, and they left Scheibenberg “with hand raised.” Gedale said:
“The Americans may not all be so distracted, and we don’t know what agreements there might be between the Russians and the Americans. In any case, it might be best for those who still have Soviet uniforms and insignia, either on their clothing or in their baggage, to get rid of them; it would be no joke if they sent us back.”
They were no longer in any hurry. They continued westward, in short stages, stoppin
g frequently to rest, in a setting that was always new, both idyllic and tragic. They were often overtaken by American military units, some motorized, others on foot, marching into the heart of Germany, or they met vast columns of German prisoners of war escorted by American soldiers, white or black, machine guns dangling lazily from their shoulders. At the train station in Chemnitz, halted on a stretch of siding, was a fifty-car freight train, its locomotive pointing toward the demarcation line; it was carrying the entire apparatus of a paper mill, the raw materials, the enormous rolls of newly produced paper, and the office furniture. Guarding the train was just one soldier, very young and fair-haired, in a Soviet uniform, lying on a sofa wedged in among the machinery; Pyotr greeted him in Russian, they struck up a conversation, and the young soldier told him that the paper mill was being sent to Russia, he knew not where; it was a gift from the Americans to the Russians, because all the factories in Russia were kaput. The soldier asked Pyotr nothing. A short distance farther on was a bombed-out factory, possibly a machine-tool workshop; a team of prisoners of war was shoveling the rubble under the supervision of American officers and engineers. They were working not as laborers but, rather, as archeologists: using the tips of their shovels, with their bare hands, while the Americans bent over every metal artifact, examining it, labeling it, and setting it carefully aside.
Rokhele never complained, but she was tired and everyone was worried about her condition. She had a hard time walking: her ankles were more swollen every day, and so she was forced to give up wearing boots and butcher the uppers of the shoes that Mottel had found for her, and in the end she was reduced to walking in wooden clogs. For short distances they even carried her on a stretcher, but it was obvious that a different solution had to be found. In mid-June they arrived in Plauen, on the Berlin–Munich–Brenner railroad line, and Gedale sent Pavel and Mottel to investigate the situation. The situation was chaotic: trains came through at irregular intervals, on unpredictable schedules, loaded beyond any reasonable limit. They camped out in the waiting room, which had taken on the appearance of a public dormitory. In the band’s treasury there was no longer enough money to buy tickets to the Brenner Pass for all of them, as Gedale would have preferred; more money had to be spent to get Rokhele the White a gynecological examination. She was admitted to a clinic and emerged excited about the cleanliness and tidiness she had seen; she was healthy, her pregnancy was proceeding normally, she was just a little tired. She could walk, yes, but not too much. In the meantime, most of the members of the band were roaming through the city, like tourists, but at the same time keeping an eye out for any barter that could bring in a little cash. “Sell heavy clothing, yes, because we’re heading south and into summer,” Gedale had said. “Kitchen utensils only at the right price; and weapons at no price whatsoever.”