by Primo Levi
The train reached the Brenner Pass at noon on July 25, 1945. During stops at the previous stations, Gedale had never failed to make sure the doors were closed, but now it seemed he had forgotten: and yet it was important, that was a border station, there would almost certainly be a check. Line took care of it, even before the train came to a halt; she had those sitting in the open doorway get up, closed both doors, tied them together from the inside with pieces of metal wire, and told everyone to be silent. At first there was a fair amount of turmoil on the platforms, but then there was silence outside as well, and the hours began to pass and impatience increased. The heat also increased, in the locked freight car standing motionless in the hot sun. The Gedalists, thirty-five people crammed into a few square meters, once again felt they were in a trap. Whispering could be heard:
“Are we already in Italy? Have we passed the boundary checkpoint?”
“Maybe they uncoupled the car.”
“No, we would’ve heard the noise.”
“Let’s open up, get out, and take a look.”
“Let’s all get out and continue on foot.”
But Line imposed silence; on the deserted platform there were footsteps and voices. Pavel peeked out through the crack in the doors:
“They’re soldiers. They look English.”
The voices came closer: there were four or five people, and they stopped to talk right outside the freight car. Pavel listened closely.
“But they’re not speaking English,” he said in a faint voice. Then someone rapped sharply twice with his knuckles on the door, and asked an incomprehensible question; but Line understood, made her way through the crowd, and replied. She replied in Hebrew: not in the embalmed liturgical Hebrew of the synagogues, which was familiar to everyone’s ears, but in the fluid, living Hebrew that has always been spoken in Palestine and that among them only Line understood and spoke. She had learned it from the Zionists in Kiev, before the heavens closed up again, before the flood. Line opened the doors.
Standing on the platform were four young men in clean, neatly pressed khaki uniforms. They wore odd loose shorts, low shoes, and woolen knee socks; on their heads were black berets with British insignia, but sewn onto the short-sleeved shirts was the six-pointed star, the Shield of David. English Jews? Jews who had been taken prisoner by the English? Englishmen disguised as Jews? For the Gedalists, a star on the chest was a symbol of slavery, it was the brand imposed by the Nazis on the Jews in the concentration camps. The perplexed Jews in the freight car and the unruffled Jews on the platform stood looking at one another in silence for a few instants. Then one of them, young and sturdy, with a cheerful pink-cheeked fair-skinned face, asked, in Hebrew: “Who here speaks Hebrew?”
“Just me,” Line replied. “The others speak Yiddish, Russian, and Polish.”
“Then we’ll speak Yiddish,” said the young man; but he spoke with an effort and haltingly. His three comrades showed that they’d understood but didn’t speak. “You needn’t be afraid of us. We’re with the Jewish Brigade, we come from the land of Israel but we belong to the British Army. We came up the Italian peninsula, fighting alongside the British, the Americans, the Poles, the Moroccans, and the Indians. Where do you come from?”
That was not an easy question; nearly all of them answered, in confusion, they came from Polesie, Bialystok, Kosava, from the ghettos, from the marshes, from the Caucasus, from the Red Army. The young man, whom his comrades called Chaim, gestured with his hands as if to calm the waters. “Young lady, you speak,” he said. Before speaking, Line consulted in a low voice with Gedale and Mendel: should she tell him everything? should she tell the truth? These are strange soldiers: Jews but in British uniform. Whom do they obey? London or Tel Aviv? Should they be trusted? Gedale seemed undecided, in fact, indifferent.
“Do as you think best,” he said, “and stick to generalities.” Mendel said, “What right do they have to ask us questions? Take your time answering, and do your best to question them. Then we’ll decide the best line to take.”
Chaim was looking on. He smiled, then he laughed openly. “‘The wise man hears one word and understands seven’: as I told you, this uniform may be British, but the war is over now, and we think for ourselves. We’re not here to block your path, if anything, for the exact opposite reason. We, and all the rest of our company, are traveling through Germany, Hungary, and Poland: we’re searching for Jews who survived the concentration camps, Jews who were in hiding, the sick, the children.”
“What will you do with them?”
“We’ll help them, we’ll care for them, we’ll assemble them, and we’ll escort them here, to Italy. My team was in Kraków two weeks ago; tomorrow we’ll be in Mauthausen and Gusen, the day after tomorrow we’ll be in Vienna.”
“And do the British know what you’re doing?”
Chaim shrugged: “Among them as well there are wise men, who understand and give us free rein. There are also fools, who notice nothing. And then there are sticklers for order; in fact, they’re the biggest meddlers, and they often try to put spokes in our wheels. But we weren’t born yesterday, and we know how to deal with them. Where do you want to go?”
“To the land of Israel; but we are weary, we have no money, and here’s a woman who’s about to give birth,” said Line.
“Are you armed?”
Caught off guard, Line said no, but in such an unconvincing tone that Chaim was forced to laugh again:
“Nu, I told you we weren’t born yesterday. Do you think that, with the work we’ve been doing for the past three months, we don’t know how to tell a survivor from a refugee, and a refugee from a partisan? You have it written on your faces, just who you are; and why should you be ashamed of it?”
Mottel broke in: “No one’s ashamed here, but we’re not giving up our weapons.”
“We’re certainly not going to take them away from you. I told you, we’re just passing through. But you should be reasonable. A little below the pass is our brigade headquarters; I don’t know if they’re interested in you, but the smartest thing would be to go in and hand over your weapons to them. Farther down, in Bolzano, is British headquarters, and they’re certain to search you; better to hand the weapons over to us than have them confiscate them, don’t you agree?”
Pavel said, “You may have your experience, but we have ours. And it’s our experience that weapons are always useful. In war and in peace, in Russia and in Poland and in Germany and in Italy. Two months ago, when the war was already over, the Germans killed one of our comrades, a woman, and we took revenge for her; how could we have done that if we hadn’t had weapons? And in Poland, under Russian occupation, the Polish Fascists threw a bomb right between our feet.”
Chaim said, “Let’s not act like enemies—we aren’t enemies. Come down out of that freight car, and let’s go sit in the meadow; they’ve unhitched the locomotive, it will be at least two hours until your train departs. You see, we have some important things to talk about.” They all got out of the freight car and went to sit in a circle in the meadow, in the resin-scented air, beneath a sky swept clean by the high winds.
“Where I come from, this is called a kum-sitz, a come-and-sit,” said Chaim, and then continued, “It’s the question of the lion and the fox. You come out of a terrible world. We don’t know that much about it: from the stories our fathers told us, and from what we’ve been able to see on our missions; but we know that each of you is alive by a miracle, and that you’ve left Gehenna behind. You and we have fought the same enemy, but in two different ways. You’ve had to do it on your own: you had to invent everything, defenses, weapons, allies, stratagems. We were luckier: we were part of a great army, organized and integrated. We had no enemies attacking on our flanks, but only straight ahead of us; we didn’t have to fight to obtain our weapons, they were issued to us, and we were also taught to use them. We’ve had hard battles, but supporting us there was always an organization behind the lines, kitchens, infirmaries, and a country that ha
iled us as liberators. In this country your weapons won’t be of any use to you.”
“Why won’t they be of use?” asked Mottel. “And why is this country different from the other countries? We’re foreigners here the same as we are everywhere: in fact, we’re more foreign here than in Russia and Poland, and a foreigner is an enemy.”
“Italy is a strange country,” said Chaim. “It takes a long time to understand the Italians, and even we, who came up through Italy from Brindisi to the Alps, still don’t really understand them completely; but one thing is certain, in Italy foreigners aren’t enemies. You might say that Italians are more enemies to themselves than they are to foreigners: it’s odd but true. Perhaps it comes from the fact that the Italians don’t like laws, and since Mussolini’s laws, along with his policies and his propaganda, condemned foreigners, maybe that’s exactly why the Italians helped them. The Italians don’t like laws, in fact they like to disobey them: it’s their game, just as the Russians’ game is chess. They like to cheat; they don’t especially like getting cheated, but they don’t make a big thing of it: when somebody cheats them, they think, Look how clever he was, he outsmarted me, and they set about obtaining not revenge but, if anything, a rematch. Just like in chess, in fact.”
“Then they’ll probably cheat us, too,” said Line.
“Probably, but that’s the only real risk you run; that’s why I said that you don’t need your weapons here. But at this point I have to tell you the strangest thing of all: the Italians have been friendly to all foreigners, but to no one have they been friendlier than to us, the Jewish Brigade.”
“Maybe they didn’t realize you were Jews,” said Mendel.
“They certainly did, and for that matter we didn’t hide it. They helped us, not in spite of the fact that we were Jews but because we were. They helped their own Jews, too; when the Germans occupied Italy, they made great efforts to capture them, but they tracked down and killed only a fifth; all the others found shelter in the homes of Christians, and not only the Italian Jews but also many foreign Jews who had taken refuge in Italy.”
“Maybe this happened because the Italians are good Christians,” Mendel now suggested.
“That may well be,” said Chaim, scratching his forehead, “but I’m not really sure. The Italians are strange Christians, too. They attend Mass but they curse. They pray to the Madonna and all the saints to grant them favors, but it seems to me that they don’t especially believe in God. They know the Ten Commandments by heart, but they observe at most two or three. I believe that they help those in need because they’re good people, because they’ve suffered a lot themselves, and because they know that those who suffer should be helped.”
“The Poles have suffered a lot, too, and yet . . .”
“I don’t know what to say to you: we might come up with ten reasons, all of them right and all of them wrong. But there’s one thing you should know: Italian Jews are as strange as Italian Catholics. They don’t speak Yiddish—in fact, they don’t even know what Yiddish is. They speak only Italian; rather, the Jews of Rome speak Roman, the Jews of Venice speak Venetian, and so on. They dress like the others, they have the same faces as the others. . . .”
“Then how do you tell them from the Christians when you see them in the street?”
“That’s just it, you can’t tell them apart. Isn’t it a remarkable country? For that matter, there aren’t that many of them; the Christians don’t pay them much attention, and they aren’t particularly concerned with being Jewish. In Italy there has never been a pogrom, not even when the Church of Rome was inciting the Christians to treat the Jews with contempt and accused them all of being usurers, not even when Mussolini issued the racial laws, not even when northern Italy was under German occupation; no one in Italy knows what a pogrom is, or even the meaning of the word. It’s an oasis of a country. The Italian Jews were Fascists when all the Italians were Fascists and they applauded Mussolini; and when the Germans invaded some of them escaped to Switzerland, while others became partisans, but most of them went into hiding in the cities or in the countryside, and very few were found or betrayed, even though the Germans were offering great sums of money to those willing to collaborate. There, that’s the country you’re entering; a country of good people, people who don’t much like to make war, but do like to trick you. And since to send you to Palestine we have to trick the British, this is the ideal place; you could call it a wharf in the perfect location, put here just for us.”
To the Gedalists squatting or stretched out on the grass of the Brenner Pass, the idea of handing over their weapons, to anyone and for whatever reason, was distasteful; but in the presence of these four soldiers who came from Palestine, who wore Allied uniforms, and who appeared so confident in their speech, they did not dare to express their dissent. They remained silent for a while, and then they began to discuss among themselves in low voices. Chaim and his three comrades showed no signs of impatience; they walked away a short distance and strolled around in the meadow. They came back a few minutes later and Chaim asked, “Who is your leader?”
Gedale raised his hand.
“I guess I’m the leader. I led the band, for better or worse, from White Russia to here; but you see, we have no ranks and we never have. I’ve almost never had to give orders. I’d make a suggestion, and occasionally someone else would, we’d talk it over and come to an agreement. But most of the time we were in agreement even without talking it over. That’s how we lived and fought for eighteen months, and we walked two thousand kilometers. I was the leader because I dreamed up things, because ideas and solutions came to my mind; but why should we have a leader now that the war is over and we’re entering a peaceful country?”
Chaim turned to his comrades and said something to them in Hebrew; they replied, and as they did there was no scorn or annoyance on their faces, but instead patience and respect. Chaim said:
“I understand you, or at least I think I do. You’re strange birds yourselves, even stranger than the Italians; but everyone is strange to another person, that’s in the order of things, and war is a great reshuffler. Fine, as far as your leader is concerned, do as you please; elect yourselves one, reappoint him”—and he pointed to Gedale, who shied away—“or do without. But the weapons are a different matter. We understand you perfectly, but the British and the Americans won’t understand you at all. They’re fed up with partisans; they were useful as long as there was fighting, but now they don’t want to hear about them. They even wanted to retire the Italian partisans, this past winter, before the war was over; and now medals and certificates as much as you like, but no more weapons. If they catch them carrying weapons, or find weapons in their homes, they put them in jail; so just imagine what they would do to foreign partisans, especially if they come from Russia. Trust me, be reasonable and give the weapons to us; we’ll be able to make good use of them. Come on, keep whatever weapons you can hide on your persons and hand over the rest. All right?”
Gedale hesitated for a moment, then he shrugged and said sullenly:
“My dear comrades, here we’re returning to the world of law and order.” He climbed back into the freight car and reemerged with Smirnov’s machine pistol and a few other weapons. The four soldiers weren’t that strict; they asked for nothing more, and loaded everything onto the Jeep they’d parked nearby.
“All right. Now what’s to become of us?” asked Gedale when they came back.
“It’s a simple matter,” said Chaim. “Now that you’ve been disarmed, or almost, you’re not so strange anymore. Now you’ve become DPs.”
“What have we become?” asked Line suspiciously. “What’s a DP?”
“A DP is a ‘displaced person’: a refugee, someone uprooted, without a country.”
“We aren’t DPs,” said Line. “We had a country, and it’s not our fault we don’t have it anymore; and we’re going to build another. It’s ahead of us, not behind. We’ve met plenty of refugees along the way, and they were nothing li
ke us. We aren’t DPs, we’re partisans, and not in name alone. We built our future with our own hands.”
“Calm down, girl,” said Chaim. “This isn’t the time to worry about definitions, you shouldn’t give too much weight to words. You have to be flexible. The Allies are here now; sooner or later you’re going to run into the Military Police. They’re nothing like the Nazis, but they can be a pain in the neck, and they’ll lock you up who knows where for who knows how long. They’ll give you food and water, but you’ll stay behind bars, maybe until the war with Japan is over; that is, if war between the Americans and the Russians hasn’t started in the meantime. They won’t ask you a lot of questions; as far as they’re concerned a partisan is a Communist, and if he comes from the east he’s twice as much a Communist: have I made myself clear? In other words, brothers in arms are a thing of the past. Would you like to wind up in a camp, right now?”
The Gedalists replied to the question with a confused mumbling, in which Chaim was able to make out a few scraps of words.
“Go into hiding? Don’t even think of it, Italy isn’t like the places you come from; especially northern Italy, it’s as crowded as a henhouse. There aren’t any forests, there aren’t any marshes, and you don’t know the terrain. The peasants wouldn’t understand you, they’d take you for bandits, and bandits is what you would end up becoming. Try to be flexible, turn yourselves in.”
“Where, how, and to whom?” asked Gedale.
“Try to make it to Milan without being noticed, and in Milan go to this address.”
He wrote a few words on a piece of paper and handed it to Gedale, and then added:
“If we ever meet again, you’ll tell me that I gave you good advice. Now get back into your car: they’re reattaching the locomotive.”
When they got out of the freight car in the Central Station in Milan, beneath the high steel-and-glass shed roof peppered with bomb holes, they thought that another war had broken out. There were people camped everywhere, between the tracks, on the platforms, on the stairways leading down to the piazza, on the escalators that no longer worked, and outside on the piazza itself. There were Italians dressed in rags coming home, foreigners dressed in rags waiting to leave for who knows where; there were Allied soldiers, white-skinned and black-skinned, in their elegant uniforms, and well-dressed Italian civilians, with suitcases and rucksacks, going on vacation. Around the piazza in front of the ugly stone façade a few trams were running, and the rare automobile; there were flower beds that had been transformed into war gardens, only to be plundered and abandoned, and were now overrun with weeds. Some tents had been pitched there, and in front of them women pinched with poverty were cooking meals over rudimentary fires. Other women were crowding around the little spigots, with basins, pots and pans, and whatever receptacles they could find. All around were bomb-damaged apartment buildings.