by Primo Levi
November 27, 1977
The Great Mutation
For some days, Isabella had been agitated: she was barely eating, was running a slight temperature, and complained that her back itched. Her parents had the shop to run and didn’t have much time for her. “She must be developing,” her mother said. She kept her on a diet and rubbed her back with ointment, but the itching grew worse; the girl was unable to sleep. Her mother, applying the ointment, noticed that the skin felt rough: it was covered by a dense layer of short, stiff whitish hairs. Then she got frightened and discussed it with Isabella’s father, and they sent for the doctor.
The doctor examined the girl. He was young and attractive, and Isabella was surprised to notice that at the beginning of the visit he appeared concerned and puzzled, and then grew increasingly attentive and interested. In the end he seemed as cheerful as if he had won a prize in the Lottery. He announced that it was nothing serious, but that he had to consult certain books of his and would return the following day.
He returned the following day, with a magnifying glass, and showed the mother and father that those hairs were branching and flat; in fact, they weren’t hairs that were growing but feathers. He was even more cheerful than the previous day.
“You’ll see, Isabella,” he said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of: in four months you’ll be flying.” Then, addressing her parents, he added an explanation that was quite baffling: Was it possible they hadn’t heard about it? Didn’t they read the newspapers? Didn’t they watch television? “It’s a case of the Great Mutation, the first in Italy, and right here, in this remote, secluded valley!” The wings would develop little by little, without causing any harm to the organism. Then, too, there might be other cases in the area, perhaps among the child’s schoolmates, because the thing was contagious.
“But if it’s contagious, it must be a disease!” the father said.
“It is contagious, and it appears to be a virus, but it’s not a disease. Why should all viral infections have to be harmful? Flying is a fine thing! I’d like to be able to do it myself, if for no other reason than to visit patients in the outlying districts. This is the first case in Italy, as I told you, and I will have to report it to the district medical officer, but the phenomenon has already been identified, and various centers of infection have been observed in Canada, Sweden, and Japan. Just think how lucky, for you and for me!”
Isabella wasn’t sure that it was really so lucky. The feathers were growing rapidly; they bothered her when she was in bed and they could be seen through her blouse. Around March the new bone structure became quite visible, and by the end of May the wings had almost completely emerged from her back.
Photographers and journalists came, along with medical commissions, from both Italy and abroad. Isabella was enjoying herself and felt quite important. She answered their questions seriously and with dignity, even though the questions were dumb and never varied. She didn’t dare approach her parents, because she didn’t want to frighten them, but she was worried: sure, she would have wings, but where would she learn how to fly? At the driving school in the provincial capital? At the airport in Poggio Merli? She would have liked to learn from the young doctor at the health service; or maybe he, too, would sprout wings, hadn’t he said they were contagious? That way they could go together to visit the patients in the outlying districts. And maybe they would even cross the mountains and fly over the sea together, side by side, beating their wings to the same rhythm.
• • •
At the end of the school year, in June, Isabella’s wings were well formed and quite beautiful to look at. Isabella was blond, and they matched the color of her hair—they were speckled with golden brown at the top, near the shoulders, but the remiges were white, shining, and sturdy. A committee from the National Research Council arrived, a substantial grant came from UNICEF, and a physical therapist from Sweden appeared. She put up at the town’s only inn, did not understand Italian very well, nothing suited her, and she made Isabella do a series of extremely boring exercises.
Boring and useless: Isabella felt her new muscles quiver and stretch; she studied the confident flight of the swallows in the summer sky and she no longer had any doubts. She had the definite sensation that she would learn to fly on her own, or, rather, that she already knew how to fly; at night now it was all she dreamed of. The Swede was stern, and made it clear that she must delay a while longer, and not expose herself to risks, but Isabella was waiting only for the right opportunity to present itself. When she was able to go off by herself, into the sloping meadows, or at times even indoors, in her room, she tried flapping her wings. She could hear their scratchy rustling in the air, and felt an almost frightening power in her thin adolescent shoulders. She had come to hate the weight of her body; when she flapped her wings, she could feel it diminish, almost disappear. Almost. The Earth’s pull was still too strong: a halter, a shackle.
Her opportunity came in August, around the Feast of the Assumption. The Swede had returned to her country for the holidays, and Isabella’s parents were in the shop, busy with the vacationers. Isabella followed the Costalunga mule track, crossed the ridge, and found herself in the steep meadows on the other side; there wasn’t a soul in sight. She crossed herself, like someone about to jump in the water, spread her wings, and began running downhill. With each step, the impact against the ground became lighter, until the earth fell away. She felt a great sense of peace, and heard the wind whistling in her ears. She stretched her legs back: she was sorry she had not worn her jeans; her skirt, billowing in the wind, got in the way.
Her arms and hands were also in the way; she tried crossing them over her chest, then stretched them out along her sides. Who said flying was difficult? It was the easiest thing in the world, she felt like laughing and singing. If she increased the tilt of her wings, her flight slowed and pointed upward, but only for a little while; then the speed decreased too much and Isabella felt she was in danger. She tried beating her wings and felt supported; with each stroke, she gained altitude, smoothly, easily.
Even changing direction was easy as pie, and quickly learned: all you had to do was twist the right wing slightly, and immediately you turned to the right. You didn’t even have to think about it: the wings themselves saw to it, just as the feet see to it that you veer left or right when you walk. Suddenly she had a sensation of bloating, a cramping in the pit of her stomach; she felt wet, touched herself, and her hand came back slick with blood. But she knew what it was, and that it would happen one day, and she wasn’t afraid.
She stayed aloft for a good hour and learned that a current of warm air rose from the crags of the Gravio, allowing her to gain altitude with no effort at all. She followed the provincial road and went straight over the town, perhaps two hundred meters up. She saw a passerby stop, then point out the sky to another passerby. The second one looked up, then ran to the shop: her mother and father hurried out, with three or four customers. Before long the streets were teeming with people. She would have liked to alight in the piazza, but there were too many people, and she was afraid of landing clumsily and being laughed at.
She let the wind carry her beyond the stream, to the meadows behind the mill. She began to descend, lower and lower, until she was able to make out the dusty pink flowers of the clover. Even when it came to landing, her wings seemed to know a thing or two more than she did: it seemed natural to position them vertically, and whirl them energetically, as if to fly backward. She lowered her legs and found herself standing on the grass, only a little out of breath. She refolded her wings and set off for home.
In the fall, four of Isabella’s schoolmates, three boys and a girl, sprouted wings; on Sunday mornings it was amusing to watch them chase one another around the belltower in midair. In December the postman’s son got wings, and immediately took over from his father, much to everyone’s benefit. The doctor developed his wings the following year, but took no notice of Isabella and promptly married a wingless young woman
who came from the city.
Isabella’s father’s wings emerged when he had already passed his fiftieth birthday. He did not benefit much from them; fearful and shaky, he took a lesson or two from his daughter, and dislocated an ankle during landing. The wings wouldn’t let him sleep; they filled the bed with fluff and feathers, and made it difficult to put on his shirt, jacket, and overcoat. They were in the way when he stood behind the counter in the shop as well, so he had them amputated.
August 21, 1983
That Quiet Town of Auschwitz
It may seem surprising that one of the most frequent states of mind in the Lager was curiosity. And yet we were not only frightened, humiliated, and hopeless but also curious: starved for bread and also for understanding. The world around us seemed upside down, therefore someone must have turned it upside down, and therefore must be upside down himself: one, a thousand, a million anti-human beings, created to warp what was straight, to soil what was pure. It was an unwarranted simplification, but at that time and in that place we were not capable of complex ideas.
As far as the lords of evil are concerned, this curiosity—which I admit I still harbor, and which is not limited to the Nazi bosses—survives. Hundreds of books have been published about the psychology of Hitler, Stalin, Himmler, and Goebbels, and I’ve read dozens of them, without being satisfied, though, most likely, this is due to an essential inadequacy of the documentary page: it hardly ever has the power to restore the essence of a human being. The playwright or the poet is more suited to this purpose than the historian or the psychologist.
Still, this research of mine has not been entirely fruitless. Years ago, a strange, even provocative, fate put me on the track of “someone from the other side”: certainly not one of the great evildoers, perhaps not even a legitimately evil man, nevertheless a specimen and a witness. An unwilling witness, who did not want to be one but who testified without wanting to and maybe even without knowing it. Those who testify through their behavior are the most valuable witnesses, because they are unquestionably truthful.
He was an almost-me, a me inverted. We were the same age, not dissimilar in terms of our studies, perhaps not even in temperament: he, Mertens, a young German Catholic chemist, and I, a young Italian Jewish chemist. Potentially two colleagues; in fact we worked in the same factory, but I was inside the barbed wire and he was outside. However, there were forty thousand of us working in the Auschwitz Buna-Werke, and it’s unlikely, or in any case can no longer be verified, that the two of us ever met, he an Oberingenieur and I a chemist-slave. Nor did we meet afterward.
What I know about him comes from the letters of mutual friends. The world sometimes turns out to be ludicrously small, enabling two chemists from different countries to be linked by a chain of acquaintances who help to weave a net of information exchanged, which, though a poor substitute for the face-to-face encounter, is nevertheless better than mutual ignorance. In this way I learned that Mertens had read my books about the Lager, and quite likely others as well, because he was neither a cynical nor an insensitive man. He tended to deny a certain part of his past, but he was open enough to refrain from lying to himself; he didn’t permit himself lies, but there were gaps, blank spaces.
The first information I have about him dates back to the end of 1941, a time of second thoughts for all Germans still capable of reasoning and resisting the propaganda: the Japanese are victoriously running rampant through Southeast Asia, the Germans are besieging Leningrad and are at the gates of Moscow, but the period of the Blitz is over, Russia has not collapsed, and instead the aerial bombardment of German cities has begun. Now the war is everyone’s affair, in every family there is at least one man at the front, and no one at the front is sure of his family’s safety anymore. In the houses, behind closed doors, the rhetoric of war is no longer current.
Mertens is a chemist in an urban rubber factory, and the company’s management makes him a proposal that is nearly an order: there will be advantages to his career, and perhaps political benefits as well, if he agrees to move to the Auschwitz Buna-Werke. The area is peaceful, far from the front and beyond the range of the bombers, the work is the same, the wages are better, no difficulty about lodging; many Polish houses are vacant. . . . Mertens talks it over with his colleagues. The majority of them advise against it: you don’t trade what’s certain for what is uncertain, and, moreover, the Buna-Werke are in an ugly region, swampy and unhealthy. Unhealthy historically as well: Upper Silesia is one of those areas of Europe that have changed masters too many times and are inhabited by a mixture of populations hostile to one another.
But no one has any objections to the name Auschwitz: it’s still a neutral name, without resonance—one of the many Polish cities that changed their names after the German occupation. Oświęcim became Auschwitz, as if this were enough to make the Poles who had been living there for centuries Germans. It’s a town like any other.
Mertens thinks it over: he is engaged to be married, and setting up house in Germany, under the bombings, is unwise. He asks for a leave and goes to have a look. What he might have seen during this first inspection is not known. The man returned, got married, and, speaking to no one, left for Auschwitz again to settle there with his wife and furniture. His friends—in fact, those who wrote me this account—urged him to speak, but he did not.
Nor did he speak during his second return home, on vacation in the summer of 1943 (because even in wartime Nazi Germany people went on vacation in August). Now the scenario has changed. Italian fascism, assailed on all fronts, has crumbled, and the Allies are moving up the peninsula. The aerial battle against the British has been lost, and by this time no corner of Germany is safe from the merciless Allied retaliations. The Russians not only did not collapse but in Stalingrad inflicted a stinging defeat on the Germans, and on Hitler himself, who led the operations with the obstinacy of a madman.
The Mertenses are the object of a wary curiosity, because at this point, in spite of all the precautions, Auschwitz is no longer a neutral name. Vague but sinister rumors have circulated: it is to be considered alongside Dachau and Buchenwald, indeed, it seems that it may be worse. It’s one of those places about which it’s risky to ask questions, but these are close friends, going way back. Mertens has just come from there, surely he must know something, and if he knows he must speak.
But while the conversations proceed, as in all sitting rooms, the women talking about evacuations and the black market, the men about their work, someone whispering an anti-Nazi joke, Mertens keeps to himself. There’s a piano in the next room; he plays and drinks, returns to the sitting room every so often only to pour himself another glass. By midnight he’s drunk, but the host has not lost sight of him. He drags him over to the table and says to him outright: “Now, you sit down here and tell us what the devil is going on where you are, and why you have to get drunk instead of talking to us.”
Mertens feels torn between drunkenness, prudence, and a certain need to confess. “Auschwitz is a camp,” he says, “or, rather, a group of camps; one is actually adjacent to the factory. There are men and women there, who are filthy and ragged and don’t speak German. They do the hardest jobs. We aren’t allowed to speak to them.” “Who said you couldn’t?” “Management. When we got there, we were told that they were dangerous people, criminals and subversives.” “And you never spoke to them?” the host asked. “No,” Mertens replied, pouring himself another drink. Here young Mrs. Mertens joined in: “I met a woman who did the cleaning at the general manager’s house. All she said to me was ‘Frau, Brot,’ ‘Ma’am, bread,’ but I—” Mertens must not have been so drunk after all, because he said sharply to his wife, “Stop it,” and then to the others, “Would you mind changing the subject?”
I don’t know much about Mertens’s actions after Germany’s fall. I know that he and his wife, like many Germans in the eastern regions, fled ahead of the Soviets along the interminable roads of the retreat, roads covered with snow, rubble, and corpses; and t
hat he subsequently resumed his job as a technician, but avoided all contacts and became more and more closed off.
He spoke a little more some years after the end of the war, when the Gestapo was no longer there to instill fear in him. This time, he was interrogated by an “expert,” a former prisoner who today is a famous historian of the camps, Hermann Langbein. In response to specific questions, Mertens replied that he had agreed to move to Auschwitz to avoid having a Nazi sent there instead; that he had never spoken with the prisoners for fear of punishment, but that he had always tried to alleviate their working conditions; that he knew nothing about the gas chambers at the time because he had not asked anyone anything. Didn’t he realize that his obedience was a material aid to Hitler’s regime? Yes, today yes, but not then; it had never occurred to him.
I never attempted to meet Mertens. I felt a complex reluctance, of which aversion was only one component. Years ago, I wrote him a letter: I told him that if Hitler had risen to power, devastated Europe, and led Germany to ruin, it was because many good German citizens behaved just as he had, trying not to see, and remaining silent about what they did see. Mertens did not reply, and he died a few years later.
March 8, 1984
Two Flags
Bertrando had been born and brought up in a country called Lantania, which had a very beautiful flag. Or, at least, so it seemed to Bertrando, to all his friends and schoolmates, and to the majority of his fellow citizens. It was different from all other flags: an orange oval stood out against a background of vivid purple, and in the oval was a volcano, green at the base and white with snow at the top, a plume of smoke rising above it.