by Primo Levi
As she left the Command, my sister noticed something odd. She was being tailed: the typical Italian policeman disguised as a policeman, who had followed her and then waited in a café across the street. Evidently, the Poles had notified the Italian police of my sister’s movements and “suspicious” contacts, and the police had responded in a timely if amateurish way. In the euphoric and chaotic climate following liberation, it would have been nothing to worry about, if not for the machine gun. But in that same climate, in spite of the Draconian laws, one did not give up a machine gun either easily or willingly; it might still be useful at the right moment, who knew how or where or against whom. Moreover, the Resistance had just ended, and a firearm like that held a certain charisma that rendered it almost sacred. Now, an ancile that unexpectedly falls from heaven is neither sold nor given away nor tossed in the Po. And so the machine gun remained in the house, wrapped in some rags, until, a few days later, the inexperienced police tail knocked at the door and with great ceremony summoned my sister to an interview. The questioning was confusing: my sister tells me that it mainly concerned Cravero, whom the Poles considered a liar, an agitator, or an outright Soviet spy. Out of a pure sense of duty, or some professional reflex, the policeman did not fail to do a search, though it was limited to a perfunctory glance around the attic where my sister lived at the time. There is no doubt that he saw the mummified machine gun, but he left without batting an eye. Perhaps he was a former partisan; for a brief period some of them were also on the police force.
Around August, not without bureaucratic difficulties, my sister was able to regain possession of our house, which had been seized during the period of the racial laws, and she took the machine gun with her. By then, that instrument of death had become a cross between a passionate symbol of the Resistance, an amulet, a knickknack, and a memorial to itself. My gentle sister oiled it well and hid it in the bookcase, behind the complete works of Balzac, which extended for more or less the same length. In fact, she forgot about it, or nearly. When I, just as gentle, returned from imprisonment in October, I found it by chance, looking for I no longer know what, and asked her about it. “Don’t you see? It’s a Beretta,” my sister replied with unfeigned naturalness.
The machine gun remained behind Balzac until 1947, the year Scelba became minister of the interior. His efficient motorized riot squads began to worry me: if they were to find it, I as head of the family would go to prison. The opportunity to dispose of it came unexpectedly. A partisan appeared out of nowhere, or, rather, a partigia, that is, a man from the most unprincipled, nimble-fingered fringes of our fighting comrades. He was a Sicilian and, having tired of peace, had become a separatist. He was looking for weapons—the very thing! I gave him the machine gun, not without a pang of conscience, since I had no sympathy for Sicilian separatism. Neither he, nor his elusive movement, had any money. We agreed to a trade: he, since he would never return to the Alps, gave me a pair of used mountain boots, which I still have. Then the partigia went away, but, since it’s a small world, he was spotted months later by a cousin of mine who was then living in Brazil. He had the machine gun with him, who knows for what purpose; it seems that the customs officials, so careful when it comes to chocolate and cartons of cigarettes, are blind to less innocuous items. I would feel reassured if I were to learn that the weapon is in the hands of the Indians in the Amazon, desperately defending their identity: it would mean that it has remained faithful to its initial calling.
October 24, 1986
A Valley
There’s a valley that I only know.
You can’t get there easily,
There are big boulders at the entrance,
Thickets, secret fords and rapids,
And the paths are only traces now.
Most of the atlases don’t mention it:
I found the way in on my own.
I spent years
Often getting lost, as happens,
But it wasn’t wasted time.
I don’t know who was there first,
One, a few, no one:
It doesn’t matter.
There are marks on slabs of rock,
Some beautiful but all mysterious,
Clearly some aren’t by a human hand.
At the bottom there are beeches, birches,
Up higher larches and firs,
Ever thinner, troubled by the wind
Which steals their pollen from them in the spring
When the first marmots come to life.
Higher up are seven lakes
With uncontaminated water,
Pure, dark, icy, deep.
At this altitude our plants
Stop growing but almost at the pass
Stands one strong tree,
Flourishing and evergreen
Which no one has yet named:
Maybe it’s the one in Genesis.
It bears flowers and fruit in every season,
Even when the snow weighs down its branches.
There are no others of its kind: it’s self-seeding.
Its trunk bears ancient scars
From which a dark and bitter
Resin drips that brings oblivion.
October 29, 1984 (TRANS. J. GALASSI)
The Commander of Auschwitz
Richard Baer, the SS major whose arrest we’ve now heard about, succeeded Rudolf Höss in the role of commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp. I was his subject for nearly a year, one of his hundred thousand slaves. Along with ten thousand others, I was in fact “hired out” by him to I.G. Farbenindustrie, the mammoth German chemical trust, which paid from four to eight marks a day for each of us, in wages for our work. It paid, but not to us: just as a horse or an ox is not remunerated, so that money was paid out to our masters, that is, to the SS officers who were in charge of the camp.
So I belonged to him: and yet I would not recognize his face. Unless it coincided with that of the frowning, corpulent individual, his belly bristling with decorations, who used to witness our squad’s interminable march, every morning and every evening, in step with the music, to and from work. But they were all identical, those faces, those voices, those postures: all twisted by the same hatred and the same anger, and by the lust for power. As a result, their hierarchy was obscure to us: SS, Gestapo, Labor Service, Party, Factory, the entire enormous machine stood above us, and appeared flat, without perspective: a dark, murky empyrean whose structure we were ignorant of.
Until now, not much was known about Richard Baer. He is cited briefly in the memoirs of his predecessor, Höss, who describes him as confused and uncertain about what to do in the terrible weeks of January 1945; he is at Gross-Rosen, a Lager of between 10,000 and 12,000 prisoners, and is diligently handling the transfer there of the 140,000 Auschwitz inmates whom it is essential to “rescue” in the face of the unexpected Russian advance. Think about the significance of the ratio between these two figures; then think about the other solution, which good sense, humanity, and prudence all suggested, namely, acknowledge the inevitable, leave the half-dead masses to their destiny, open the doors, and leave. Think about all this, and the figure of the man will emerge adequately defined.
He belongs to the most dangerous human species of this century. If you consider it, without men like him, without the Hösses, the Eichmanns, the Kesselrings, and the thousand other loyal, blind men who carried out orders, the savage beasts, Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, would have been impotent and disarmed. Their names would not figure in history; they would have passed like shadowy meteors through Europe’s dark sky. Instead, the opposite occurred: as history has shown us, the seed sown by these dark apostles took deep root in Germany, in all classes, with alarming speed, and led to a proliferation of hatred that continues to poison Europe and the world today.
Resistance was timid and rare, quickly crushed: the National Socialist message precisely echoed the traditional qualities of the Germans, their sense of discipline and national cohesion, their insatiable thirst for
supremacy, their propensity for submissive obedience.
This is why men like Baer are dangerous: men who are too loyal, too devoted, too submissive. It shouldn’t seem either heresy or blasphemy; in the spirit of the upstanding man of integrity whom modern morality should point to as an example, there will always be a place for love of country and conscientious obedience.
The question instinctively arises: What to say about the German people of today? How to judge them? What to expect of them?
It is difficult to examine the heart of a people. Anyone traveling in Germany today sees the same outward appearances found everywhere.
A growing prosperity, a peaceful people, intrigues large and small, a moderate air of rebellion; newspapers like ours on the newsstands; conversations like ours in the trains and trams; a scandal that ends as all scandals do. Yet something can be felt in the air that is not felt elsewhere. One who questions them about the terrible facts of recent history rarely finds repentance, or even mere critical awareness. More often one encounters an ambiguous reaction, in which a sense of guilt, a desire for revenge, and a deliberate, arrogant ignorance are intertwined.
Hence the strangely slow and circuitous conduct of the German police and courts should not be surprising. The picture is confused and full of contradictions, but a fairly well defined line of conduct seems to emerge: for its past errors, for the slaughter and suffering inflicted upon Europe, Germany intends to respond civilly, so to speak, rather than penally. We know that the German government has proved itself ready to grant monetary compensation to victims of Nazism in all formerly occupied countries (though not in Italy), and a number of German industries that exploited slave labor during the war have done the same, or are doing so. But the police and the courts have proved much less ready to complete the job of purging begun by the Allies. And so we have reached the disconcerting situation of today, in which an Auschwitz commander can live and work undisturbed in Germany for fifteen years, and the executioner of millions of innocents is tracked down not by the German police but “illegally,” by victims who escaped his hand.
December 23, 1960
The Moon and Man1
They’re on their way back and they’re fine. How to describe their feat? Even our lexicon is at a loss: to call it a “flight,” a “ride,” a “voyage” would be to reduce and diminish it, hyperbole in reverse. Now it is up to us, all of us spectators—and, as such, also actors of a sort—to ponder it and draw our conclusions.
It appears that, in just a few days, the collective consciousness has been transformed, as always happens after any qualitative leap: the expense, the effort, the risks, and the sacrifices tend to be forgotten. Undoubtedly these existed, and they were enormous; nevertheless, today few people still question whether it was “money well spent.” Today it is clear, then it was less so: the venture was not to be judged on a utilitarian scale, or not mainly on that basis. In the same way, an inquiry into the costs involved in constructing the Parthenon would be out of place. It is man’s nature to act in a creative, complex way, perhaps adding up the costs beforehand, but not limiting himself purely to profit, immediate or long term. To set off instead for remote destinations, toward goals that are their own justification: acting to challenge a secret, to expand his limits, to express himself, to measure his worth.
Our world, grim, transient, ailing, and tragic in so many respects, has another face as well: it is a “brave new world,” which does not retreat in the face of obstacles and does not rest until it has got around or pushed through or overcome them. It is a new kind of audacity: not that of the pioneer, or the war hero, or the lone sailor, which, even when laudable, is neither very new nor very rare but is found in all countries, in all eras, and is not specific to humanity. The wolf, the tiger, and the bull are also daring, and so undoubtedly were our distant forebears and the Homeric heroes.
We are at once the same and different. The daring from which the lunar venture sprang is different: it’s Copernican, Machiavellian. It defies other obstacles, other dangers, less bloody but weightier and more long-lasting. It confronts other enemies within and around us: common sense, “we’ve always done it this way,” indolence, and lassitude. It fights with other weapons, prodigiously complex and subtle, all—or nearly all—created from nothing in the past ten or twenty years, thanks to intelligence and patience: new technologies, new substances, new energies, and new concepts. It is no longer the audacity of the unforeseen but the audacity of foreseeing everything, a virtue even more valiant than the other.
Faced with this most recent evidence of courage and brilliance, we feel not only admiration and detached solidarity; in some way, not entirely unjustified, each of us feels part of it. Just as every man, even the most innocent, even the victim himself, feels a common responsibility for Hiroshima, for Dallas, and for Vietnam, and is ashamed, so even one who is utterly disconnected from the tremendous labor of the space flights feels a particle of merit fall upon the entire human race, and therefore also upon himself, and comes away from it with new esteem. For better or worse we are one people: the more we realize it, the greater our awareness of it, the less long and hard will be humanity’s path to peace and justice.
Man’s survival in space is due in large part, though only in part, to the conditioned microenvironment that is carefully maintained inside the capsule: to everyone’s astonishment, the astronauts tolerated without harm exposure to extra-human, extraterrestrial agents that are hostile to life and not reproducible (or only imperfectly so) on the surface of the planet.
Man, the naked ape, a terrestrial animal descended from a long line of terrestrial or marine creatures, every one of his organs shaped by the restricted environment that is Earth’s lower atmosphere, can be removed from that atmosphere without dying. He can endure exposure to cosmic radiation, even without the domestic air shield. He can be removed from the familiar alternation of day and night. He can tolerate accelerations many times that of gravity. He can eat, sleep, work, and think even in conditions of zero gravity; this is perhaps the most astonishing revelation, about which there were, rightly, the most serious doubts before Gagarin’s mission.
Human matter (or rather animal matter), besides being adaptable in an evolutionary sense—on a scale of millions of years and at the cost of the incalculable sacrifice of less fit variations—is adaptable here and now, on a scale of days and hours: we all saw the astronauts on TV, floating in space like fish in water, learning new equilibriums and new reflexes, never realized, or realizable, on the ground.
Therefore man is strong not only because he became so, from the time, a million years ago, when from among the many weapons nature offered animals he chose the brain: man is strong in and of himself, he is stronger than he thought possible, he is made of a substance that is fragile only in appearance, he was mysteriously designed with enormous, unsuspected margins of safety. We are unique, sturdy, versatile animals, motivated by atavistic impulses, and by reason, and, at the same time, by a “creative force” as a result of which if an undertaking, whether good or bad, can be achieved, it cannot be put aside but must be achieved.
This undertaking, the lunar flight, is a test. Others await us, works of daring and brilliance, demanding in a different way, in that they are essential to our very survival: endeavors to eliminate hunger, poverty, and suffering. These, too, must be considered a challenge to our worth, and these, too, since they can be achieved, must be achieved.
December 27, 1968
1. Author’s note: Published on the occasion of the flight of the three U.S. astronauts Borman, Lowell, and Anders on Apollo 8.
Sic!
The eclipse of the authority principle should be counted among the few positive elements of our times: no one today would think of buttressing his own assertions by resorting to citations drawn from the Greek or Latin classics, as Montaigne did, even though he was an open-minded, critical, sensible spirit. And yet what a subtle pleasure we feel even now when we manage to lay hands on a rare, elegant
quotation!
What is the source of this pleasure? Sometimes it’s the sincere satisfaction of finding ourselves in such accord with a great author that we can weave one of his threads into our own fabric, without manifesting inflammation at the edges of the transplant or reactions of rejection. But more often it’s a less noble pleasure—like saying to the reader, “There, I’m drawing upon sources that you aren’t familiar with, I know something that you don’t know, so I’m a step above you.”
The urge to quote is so strong that some writers do it unconsciously, the way sleepwalkers walk: it’s only when they reread what they’ve written, perhaps at a distance of years, that they come across the special passage that has made its way from the depths to the page without the intervention of the will. Almost complementary is the phenomenon of the invented citation: Rabelais, Borges, Wilcock1 are masters of citing marvelous aphorisms drawn from nonexistent books by nonexistent (or perhaps existing) authors.
In a polemical situation, we know all too well what base actions can be perpetrated, often with impunity, by citing an adversary’s text incompletely or inaccurately. Outrageous effects can be obtained by omitting a sentence or stitching together two separate ones. We reach the culmination, and score a decisive point, when we manage to insert brackets into the body of the quotation, and to write in them “sic”!
This “sic” is the equivalent of checkmate in chess, or the smash to the net in tennis; like them it is merciless, and like them it assumes an error on the part of the opponent. It can be a venial error, a mistake of grammar or even of spelling, but the “sic,” that hiccup of virtuous, scandalized surprise, magnifies it, illuminates it in an unrelenting light, and brings it to the center of the reader’s attention. “Sic”: the writer whom I cite here, gentlemen, and with whom I obviously disagree, as every well-bred person must, is an ass. He dares to write in our language, but he does not know it, so that he is led to set down absurdities such as this: yes, “sic,” that’s just what it says, go ahead and compare it with the original. How can you rely on him? He put the subject in the accusative; therefore every assertion of his is suspect, and his every opinion should be warily considered.