The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Sometime around May 1944, our almost innocuous Kapo was replaced, and the newcomer proved to be terrifying. All the Kapos used to beat us: it was an evident part of their duties, their more or less accepted language, and, for that matter, the only language in that perpetual tower of Babel which could truly be understood by everyone. In its various nuances, it was understood either as an incitement to work or as an admonishment, or a punishment, and on the scale of suffering it came last. Yet there was something different about the way the new Kapo beat us, something convulsive, malicious, perverse: on the nose, the shins, the genitals. His blows were meant to hurt us, to cause suffering and humiliation. He was driven not by blind racial hatred, like many others, but, rather, by an open desire to inflict pain, indiscriminately and without pretext, on all his subjects. He was probably mentally ill, but, under the circumstances, the indulgence toward the mentally ill that we consider appropriate today would obviously have been out of place there. I spoke with a colleague, a Croatian Jewish Communist: What should we do? How should we defend ourselves? Should we act collectively? He gave me a strange smile and said only, “He won’t last long, you’ll see.” Indeed, the beater disappeared within a week. Years later, at a gathering of survivors, I learned that some political prisoners assigned to the camp’s Work Office had the terrifying power to substitute matriculation numbers on the lists of prisoners destined for the gas chambers. Anyone who had the means and the desire to act in such a manner, to fight the Lager machine in this or in other ways, was protected from “shame”: or at least from the kind of which I speak, since he may perhaps feel another type. Sivadjan, a quiet, peaceful man I mentioned in passing in the “Canto of Ulysses” chapter of If This Is a Man, must have been protected in this way: at the same gathering I learned that he had introduced explosives into the camp in preparation for a possible insurrection.

  In my view, the sense of shame and guilt that coincided with regaining freedom was highly composite: it contained different elements, and in different proportions, for each individual. Each of us, it should be remembered, experienced the Lager in his own way, both objectively and subjectively.

  Upon emerging from the darkness, we suffered from the renewed awareness that we had been maimed. Through no desire, no laziness, no fault of our own, we had lived for months or years at a brutish level: from dawn to dusk our days had been filled with hunger, fatigue, cold, and fear, and any room to reflect, to reason, to feel had been wiped out. We had endured filth, overcrowding, and deprivation, suffering much less than we would have in normal life because our moral compass had shifted. What’s more, we had all stolen: from the kitchens, the factory, the fields—“from the others,” that is, from our adversaries. But it was still theft; some (very few) had stooped so low as to steal bread from their fellow prisoners. We had forgotten not only our country and our culture but also our families, our past, and the future we had envisioned, because, like animals, we were confined to the present. We had emerged from this abasement only at rare intervals, on the few Sundays of repose, in the fleeting moments before falling asleep, during the frenzy of the air raids, but these excursions were painful precisely because they gave us the opportunity to measure from the outside how far we had fallen.

  I believe that this very turning back to gaze at the dangerous waters, acqua perigliosa, was the cause of many cases of suicide after (sometimes immediately after) liberation.11 It was always a critical moment, which coincided with a wave of rethinking and depression. Yet all the historians of concentration camps, including the Soviet Gulags, agree that cases of suicide during internment were rare. Various explanations of the phenomenon have been attempted. I would propose three, which are not mutually exclusive.

  First: suicide pertains to man, not to animals. In other words it is a premeditated act, a choice that is not instinctive, not natural. And there were few opportunities for making choices in the Lager, since people lived like enslaved animals, as I was saying, who at times allow themselves to die but never kill themselves. Second: “We had other things on our mind,” as the saying goes. The day was packed: you had to worry about satisfying hunger, about finding a way to shield yourself from the hard labor and the cold, about avoiding beatings. The constant imminence of death meant there was no time to focus on the idea of death. There is the roughness of truth in Italo Svevo’s unsparing description of his father’s death agony in Zeno’s Conscience. He observes: “When a man dies he has too many other worries to allow any thinking about death. My father’s whole organism was concentrated on respiration.” Third: in most cases, suicide arises from a feeling of guilt that no punishment has come to alleviate. The harshness of prison was perceived as a punishment, and the sense of guilt (if there is punishment, there must have been guilt) was relegated to the background, only to reemerge after liberation. In other words, there was no need to punish oneself with suicide for a (real or presumed) guilt that was already being expiated through the sufferings of every day.

  Why did we feel guilty? Once everything was over, the awareness dawned on us that we had done nothing, or not enough, against the system into which we had been absorbed. Regarding the lack of resistance in the Lagers, or, rather, in some Lagers, too much has been said and too superficially, especially by people who had very different transgressions to answer for. Those who did make attempts know that there were collective and personal situations in which active resistance was possible, and others, far more frequent, when it was not. It is well-known that millions of Soviet military prisoners fell into German hands, especially in 1941. Young, and for the most part well nourished and healthy, they had military and political training, and often formed organized units, with enlisted men, noncommissioned officers, and officers. They hated the Germans, who had invaded their country, and yet they rarely put up any resistance. Malnutrition, being stripped of one’s clothing, and other physical hardships—which are cheap and easy to bring about, and at which the Nazis were masters—quickly can destroy a person, and before they destroy they paralyze, especially when they have been preceded by years of segregation, humiliation, harassment, forced migration, rending of family ties, and the severing of all contact with the outside world. Such was the situation of the bulk of the prisoners who arrived at Auschwitz after passing through the ante-inferno of the ghettos or transit camps.

  So at the rational level there would not have been much to be ashamed of, but still the shame remained, especially in the face of the few, lucid examples of people who had the strength and the opportunity to resist. I bring this up in the chapter “The Last One” of If This Is a Man, which describes the public hanging of a resister in front of a terrorized and apathetic crowd of prisoners. The thought barely occurred to us at the time, but it came back “after”: maybe you, too, could have, certainly you should have. The survivor sees or thinks he sees this judgment in the eyes of people (especially young people) who listen to his tales and judge them with the easy wisdom of hindsight; or perhaps he feels he is being addressed too ruthlessly. Consciously or not, he feels accused and judged, compelled to justify and defend himself.

  It is more realistic to accuse oneself or be accused by others of having failed in terms of human solidarity. Few survivors feel guilty for having deliberately injured, robbed, or beaten a fellow prisoner: people who committed such acts (the Kapos, but they were not alone) repress the memory. On the other hand, almost everyone feels guilty for not coming to the aid of another person. The presence beside you of a fellow prisoner who is weaker, more unprepared, older, or too young, pestering you by asking for help or by simply “being there,” which is already asking for help, is a constant feature of life in the camps. The request for solidarity, for a kind word, a piece of advice, even just a sympathetic ear, was permanent and universal, but it was rarely satisfied. There was a shortage of time, space, privacy, and strength. In addition, the one who received that request was also in a state of need, of credit.

  I remember with a certain relief that I once tried to revive t
he courage (at a time when I still felt I had some) of an eighteen-year-old Italian who had just arrived and was floundering in the bottomless despair of the first days in the camp: I don’t remember what I said to him, definitely some words of hope, maybe a few white lies for a “newcomer,” spoken from the authority of my twenty-five years of age and my three months of seniority. In any case, I granted him a moment’s attention. But I also remember, with discomfort, that much more often I shrugged my shoulders impatiently at other requests, and this was after I had been in the Lager for almost a year and had thus accumulated a hefty dose of experience. But I had also assimilated to the core the primary rule of the camps: to look out for oneself first of all. I never found it expressed more frankly than in Ella Lingens-Reiner’s book Prisoners of Fear. She attributes the following words to a doctor who, despite what she says, proved to be generous and courageous and saved many lives:

  How was I able to survive Auschwitz? My principle is: I come first, second, and third. Then nothing. Then me again, and then all the others.

  In August 1944, it was very hot at Auschwitz. A torrid, tropical wind kicked up clouds of dust from the bombed-out buildings, dried the sweat off our backs, and thickened the blood in our veins. My squad had been sent to a cellar to clear out the rubble, and we were all suffering from thirst: a new punishment that was added to or rather multiplied the old punishment of hunger. There was no potable water either in the camp or at the worksite. In those days there was often a shortage even of water in the washhouses, which was undrinkable but still good for refreshing oneself and rinsing off the dust. Normally, the evening soup, along with the surrogate coffee distributed at around ten o’clock in the morning, was more than sufficient to slake our thirst. Now it wasn’t enough, and we were tormented by thirst. Thirst is more imperious than hunger: hunger obeys the nerves, grants reprieves, and can be temporarily covered by an emotion, a pain, a fear (as we realized during the train journey from Italy). Not thirst: it gives no respite. Hunger is exhausting, thirst is infuriating. At that time it was our constant companion, day and night: by day at the worksite, where order (although order was our enemy, it was still a place of logical and certain things) had been transformed into a chaos of shattered construction projects; by night in the unventilated barracks, as we gasped for air breathed a hundred times over.

  The Kapo had assigned me a corner of the cellar to clear of rubble. It was adjacent to a large room filled with laboratory equipment that was being installed but had already been damaged by the bombs. Running vertically down the wall was a two-inch-diameter pipe that terminated in a spigot close to the floor. Was there water in it? I tried opening the faucet, I was alone, no one could see me. It was stuck, but by using a stone as a hammer I was able to turn it a couple of millimeters. A few odorless drops came out, and I collected them on my fingers: it looked like water. I didn’t have any sort of container. The drops came out slowly, without pressure: the pipe must have been only half full, maybe less. I stopped trying to open it and lay down on the ground with my mouth under the faucet: it was water that had been warmed by the sun, tasteless, perhaps distilled or the result of condensation; anyway, it was a delicacy.

  How much water can a two-inch pipe one or two meters in length contain? One liter, if that. I could drink it all immediately, it would have been the safest thing. Or leave a little for the next day. Or split it evenly with Alberto. Or reveal the secret to the whole work squad.

  I chose the third option: egotism expanded to the nearest person, which an old friend of mine has rightly called “nosismo”—we-ism. We drank all the water, in short greedy sips, taking turns under the faucet, just the two of us. Secretly. But on the march back to camp I found myself next to Daniele, who was covered with gray cement dust, his lips cracked and his eyes glazed over, and I felt guilty. I traded glances with Alberto, we understood each other immediately and hoped no one had seen us. But Daniele had noticed us in that strange position, on our backs next to the wall amid the rubble. He had suspected something was up and then guessed what it was. Many months later, in Belorussia, after the liberation, he had harsh words for me: why the two of you and not me? The “civilian” moral code was resurgent, the same code by which I, a free man today, am appalled by the death sentence meted out to the Kapo who beat us, a sentence decided and carried out with no appeal, in silence, with a swipe of the eraser. Is there any justification for feeling shame in hindsight? I could not figure this out then, nor can I today, but the shame existed and it is still there, concrete, heavy, perpetual. Today Daniele is dead, but in our affectionate, fraternal get-togethers as survivors, the veil of that failure to act, that unshared glass of water, stood between us, transparent, unexpressed, but tangible and “costly.”

  It is always costly to change one’s moral code: every heretic, apostate, and dissident knows this. We are no longer able to judge our own or other people’s behavior at that time—which was governed by the moral code of that time—on the basis of today’s codes. But I still think there is justification for the anger that invades us when one of the “others” feels he has the authority to judge us “apostates” or, rather, us “re-converts.”

  Do you feel shame because you are alive in the place of someone else? A person more generous, sensitive, wise, useful, and worthy of living than you? You cannot exclude the possibility: you reexamine yourself, comb through your memories, hoping that you will find them all and that none have been camouflaged or disguised. You find no obvious transgressions. You did not take anyone’s place, you did not beat anyone (but would you have had the strength?), you did not accept appointments (but none were offered), you did not steal anyone’s bread. Yet you cannot exclude the possibility. It’s just a supposition, or, rather, the shadow of a doubt: that each is a Cain to his brother, that each of us (here I say “us” in a very broad—indeed, universal—sense) has betrayed his neighbor and is living in his place. It’s a supposition, but it gnaws at you; it’s nesting deep inside, like a worm. You cannot see it from the outside, but it gnaws, and it shrieks.

  After my return from the camps, I received a visit from an older friend, a mild-mannered and intransigent man, a follower of his own personal religion, which struck me, however, as severe and serious. He was happy to find me alive and, for the most part, unharmed, more mature and stronger, perhaps, and definitely more experienced. He told me that my survival could not be the result of chance, of an accumulation of lucky breaks (as I maintained then and still do), but was, rather, the work of Providence. I was one of the elect, the chosen: I, the nonbeliever, and even less of a believer after my time in Auschwitz, had been saved, touched by Grace. Why me, of all people? There is no way to know, he replied. Perhaps so that you would write, and through your writing bear witness: was I not in fact writing a book about my imprisonment right then, in 1946?

  This opinion struck me as monstrous. It hit a raw nerve and revived the doubts I described above: maybe I was alive in someone else’s place, at someone else’s expense. I might have supplanted him, in effect killed him. Those who were “saved” in the camps were not the best of us, the ones predestined to do good, the bearers of a message. What I had seen and experienced proved the exact opposite. Generally, those who survived were the worst: the egotists, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the “gray zone,” the informers. It was not a fixed rule (there were no fixed rules, nor are there in human affairs), but it was still a rule. I felt innocent, to be sure, but herded among the saved and thus in permanent search of a justification, in my own eyes and in the eyes of others. Those who survived were the worst, that is to say, the fittest. The best all died.

  Chaim died. A watchmaker from Kraków, he was a pious Jew who, despite our language difficulties, struggled to understand me and to make himself understood, and to explain to me, a foreigner, the essential rules of survival in the first crucial days of captivity. Szabó died. A quiet Hungarian farmer, he was almost two meters tall and therefore hungrier than everyone else, yet as long a
s his strength held out he did not hesitate to help his weaker comrades to push and to pull. And Robert, the Sorbonne professor, who emanated courage and confidence, spoke five languages, and labored to record everything in his prodigious memory. If he had lived, he would have been able to answer all the questions that I cannot. Baruch died. A dockworker from Livorno, he was killed immediately, the first day, because he responded to the first punches sent his way with his fists, and he was beaten to death by three Kapos who teamed up on him. These men and countless others died not despite their valor but because of it.

  My religious friend told me I had survived so that I could bear witness. And I did, to the best of my abilities, nor could I have done otherwise. And I still do, every time the occasion arises. But I am disturbed by the thought that bearing witness should have earned me the privilege of surviving and of living for many years without major problems, because I see no comparison between the privilege and the result.

  Let me repeat that we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This is a troublesome notion that I became aware of gradually by reading other people’s memoirs and rereading my own years later. We survivors are an anomalous and negligible minority. We are the ones who, because of our transgressions, ability, or luck, did not touch bottom. The ones who did, who saw the Gorgon, did not come back to tell, or they came back mute. But it is they, the “Muselmänner,” the drowned, the witnesses to everything—they are the ones whose testimony would have had a comprehensive meaning. They are the rule, we are the exception. Beneath another sky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the survivor of a similar yet different slavery, observed the same thing: