The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Almost anyone who served a long sentence and whom you congratulate because he survived is undoubtedly either a pridurki or was one for most of his imprisonment. Since the camps are meant for extermination, this should not be forgotten.

  In the language of that other concentration-camp universe, the pridurki are prisoners who, one way or another, gained a position of privilege, the ones we called the Prominentz.

  Those of us singled out by fate have sought, with greater or less wisdom, to relate not only our own fate but also the fate of the others, the drowned. But it has been a “third party” account, a tale of things observed closely but not experienced directly. No one has told the story of the demolition brought to its end, the finished work, just as no one has ever come back to tell us about his death. Even if they had possessed pen and paper, the drowned could not have borne witness, because their death had already begun before the body perished. Weeks and months before dying, they had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, to measure, and to express themselves. We speak in their place, by proxy.

  I could not say whether we did or are doing so out of a sense of moral obligation toward the silenced or if, rather, it is to free ourselves of their memory; certainly we are driven by a powerful, lasting impulse. I do not believe that psychoanalysts—who have delved into our tangles with professional rapacity—are competent to explain this impulse. Their knowledge has been built and tested “outside,” in the world that for simplicity’s sake we call civilian: they trace the phenomenon and seek to explain it; they study its deviations and attempt to heal them. Their interpretations, even those of someone who, like Bruno Bettelheim, lived through the ordeal of the Lager, seem approximate and simplistic, as if the theorems of plane geometry were being applied to spherical triangles. The mental mechanisms of the Häftlinge were different from ours; so, by a curious parallel, was their physiology and pathology. There were no colds or flus in the camps, but people died, at times suddenly, from diseases that doctors had never had the opportunity to study. Stomach ulcers and mental illnesses were cured (or at least the symptoms), but everyone suffered from an incessant malaise that poisoned our sleep and has no name. To call it “neurosis” is reductive and ridiculous. Perhaps it would be more accurate to see it as the atavistic anguish that reverberates in the second verse of Genesis: the anguish, inscribed in each one of us, of the tohu vaholu, the formless and void universe, crushed beneath the Spirit of God, but from which the spirit of man—as yet unborn or already dead—is absent.

  There is another, greater shame, the shame of the world. In a memorable line, much quoted, in this regard and others, John Donne wrote that “No man is an island,” and that every death bell tolls for us all. Yet there are those who turn their backs on their own transgressions and those of others, to avoid seeing or being touched by them. This is how most Germans behaved in the twelve years of Hitler, in the illusion that not seeing was not knowing, and that not knowing relieved them of their own share of complicity or connivance. But we were denied the shield of willful ignorance, T. S. Eliot’s “partial shelter”: we could not not see.12 We were surrounded by the sea of suffering, past and present, and its level rose each year until it almost drowned us. There was no use closing our eyes or turning our backs, because it was all around us, in every direction, as far as the horizon. We could not or would not be islands: the righteous among us, whose number was neither higher nor lower than in any other human group, felt remorse, shame, and sorrow for the wrongs that were committed by others, not by them, but in which they felt implicated, because they felt that what had happened around them, in their presence, and in them was irrevocable. It could never be washed away. It would prove that man, the human race—we, in other words—was capable of building an infinite mass of suffering; and that suffering is the only force created from the void, with neither expense nor effort. All it takes is a refusal to see, to hear, and to act.

  We are often asked, as if our past had conferred prophetic powers upon us, whether “Auschwitz” will return: whether there will be other unilateral, systematic, mechanized mass exterminations ordained at the governmental level, perpetrated on defenseless, innocent peoples, and legitimatized by the doctrine of contempt. Luckily, we are not prophets, although there are some things that can be said. That a similar tragedy, almost ignored in the West, did take place around 1975 in Cambodia. That the German massacre was set off, and then fueled by cowardice and a craving for servitude, thanks to a combination of specific factors—the state of war, Germanic technological and organizational perfectionism, the determination and perverse charisma of Hitler, and the lack of solid democratic roots in Germany—each of which was indispensable but not enough by itself. These factors can be and, in part, already are being replicated in various parts of the world. A new combination of them in ten or twenty years (it makes no sense to speak of a more distant future) is highly unlikely but not impossible. In my opinion, mass slaughter is particularly unlikely in the Western world, Japan, and even the Soviet Union: the Lagers of the Second World War are still fresh in the memory of many, among the people and in the government, and a kind of immunological defense is at work that coincides broadly with the shame I have described.

  It would be prudent to suspend judgment on what might happen in other parts of the world, or later. And the nuclear apocalypse, which will certainly be bilateral, and probably instantaneous and final, is a greater horror, different, strange, and new, that lies outside the theme I have chosen.

  10. “Uscir di pena / è diletto fra noi.” From “La quiete dopo la tempesta” (“The Calm After the Storm”), by Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), translated by Jonathan Galassi.

  11. In Canto I, line 24, of Dante’s Inferno, the narrator compares his state of mind to that of a castaway washed up on the beach, looking back at the “acqua perigliosa e guata.”

  12. “Living and partly living, / Picking together the pieces, / Gathering faggots at nightfall, Building a partial shelter, / For sleeping, and eating and drinking and laughter.” Murder in the Cathedral (speech by Chorus of Women of Canterbury, in Part 1).

  4

  Communication

  I have never liked the term “incommunicability,” which was so fashionable in the 1970s, first because it is a linguistic monstrosity and then for more personal reasons.

  In the normal world today, which by convention and for contrast is variously called “civilian” and “free,” you almost never run into a total linguistic barrier and find yourself facing another human being with whom you absolutely must establish communication, on pain of death, and do not succeed. Antonioni gives a famous but incomplete example of this in the film Red Desert, in the episode where, one night, the protagonist comes across a Turkish sailor who doesn’t know a word of any language except his own, and tries in vain to make himself understood. Incomplete, because both the protagonist and the sailor have the desire to communicate, or at least they have no desire to reject contact.

  According to a theory that was very fashionable in those years, and which I find frivolous and irritating, “incommunicability” is inevitable, a life sentence innate in the human condition, especially in industrial society. We are monads, incapable of reciprocal messages or capable only of incomplete messages that are false upon departure and misunderstood upon arrival. Speech is a fiction, sheer noise, a painted veil that conceals the existential silence. Alas, we are alone, even (or especially) if we live in couples. To me this critique seems to originate in, and betray, a mental laziness. It certainly encourages it, in a dangerous vicious circle. Except in cases of pathological incapacity, communication is both possible and necessary. It is an easy and useful way to contribute to one’s own peace of mind and that of others, since silence, the absence of signals, is itself a signal but an ambiguous one, and ambiguity generates disquiet and suspicion. It is wrong to deny that communication is possible: communication is always possible. It is wrong to reject communication: we are biologically and socially predisposed to i
t, especially in its noble, highly evolved form, language. All the human races have speech; no non-human species does.

  Also in the area of communication, or rather of its absence, we survivors have a unique experience. We have the irritating habit of interjecting, whenever someone (our children) says he or she is cold, hungry, or tired. “What do you know? You should have seen what we went through.” For reasons of good taste or neighborliness, we generally try to fight the temptation of such boasting, but whenever I hear talk of absent or impossible communication I am overcome by the temptation to say, “You should have seen what we went through.” It hardly compares to the experience of the tourist who travels to Finland or Japan and encounters speakers of other languages who are professionally (or even spontaneously) well-meaning and kind, and who make the effort to understand and assist him; besides, is there any corner of the world where people don’t know a few words of English? And tourists’ questions are few and generally the same, so impasses are rare, and near misunderstandings can be an amusing game.

  The case of an Italian emigrant to America a hundred years ago, or of a Turk, Moroccan, or Pakistani to Germany or Switzerland today, is certainly more dramatic. For them it is not a short excursion, with no surprises, down the well-worn itineraries of travel agencies: it is a relocation that could be final; it is an insertion into a job that nowadays is rarely uncomplicated, and that requires an understanding of the spoken or written word. It involves indispensable human relations with neighbors, shopkeepers, colleagues, and superiors, at the workplace, on the street, in cafés, with foreigners who have different customs and are often hostile. But there is no lack of correctives: capitalist society is intelligent enough to realize how amply its own profits coincide with the guest worker’s output and consequently with his welfare and his adaptation. He is allowed to bring along his family, that is, a little piece of home. Some kind of accommodations are found for him. He can and sometimes must take language classes. The deaf-mute who has just stepped off the train gets a maybe unloving but not inefficient hand, and soon he regains his ability to speak.

  The way we experienced incommunicability was much more radical. I am referring in particular to the Italian, Yugoslav, and Greek deportees; to a lesser extent to the French, many of whom were of Polish or German origin, or Alsatian, and understood German quite well; and to the many Hungarians from rural areas. For us Italians, the impact with the language barrier began even before deportation, dramatically, and while we were still in Italy. It took place the moment the Italian public security officials, with visible reluctance, handed us over to the SS, which had already taken over command of the Fòssoli transit camp, near Modena, in February 1944. Immediately, from our first contact with the contemptuous men wearing black insignia, we realized that knowledge of German was a dividing line. Those of us who understood them, and responded articulately, were able to establish the semblance of a human relationship. Those who did not were subjected to a shocking and frightening reaction from the black shirts: the order, delivered in the calm tone of a man who knows he will be obeyed, was repeated in a loud, angry voice and then barked at earsplitting volume, the way one might shout at a deaf person or, rather, at a pet, more responsive to the tone of a message than to its content.

  If you hesitated (we all hesitated, because we did not understand and we were terrorized), the blows rained down, and it became obvious that they were a variant of the same language: the custom of using words to communicate thought—the necessary and sufficient mechanism by which man is defined—had become obsolete. This was a signal: to those others, we were no longer men; we were to be treated like cows or mules, for whom there is no significant difference between a shout and a punch. For a horse to run or to stop, to turn, to pull or stop pulling, there is no need to come to an agreement or provide a detailed explanation. All it takes is a lexicon of a dozen variously assorted but unequivocal acoustic, tactile, or visual signals: a yank on the reins, a jabbing of spurs, shouts, gestures, cracks of the whip, clucking of the tongue, pats on the back—they all work equally well. Talking to a horse would be foolish, like talking to yourself, or ridiculously pathetic—what would it understand, anyway? In his book Mauthausen, Hans Maršálek relates how at the Mauthausen camp, which was even more multilingual than Auschwitz, the rubber whip was called der Dolmetscher, the interpreter: the thing that could make itself understood by everyone.

  In fact, the uneducated (and Hitler’s Germans, especially the SS, were shockingly uneducated: either they hadn’t been “educated” or they had been educated badly) do not know how to distinguish clearly between people who do not understand their language and people who do not understand anything. It had been hammered into the young Nazis’ heads that there was only one civilization in the world, German civilization. All others, present or past, were acceptable only to the extent that they contained some Germanic element. Consequently, people who neither understood nor spoke German were barbarians by default. If they persisted in trying to express themselves in their own language, or, rather, non-language, they were to be beaten into silence and put in their place—hauling, lugging, pushing—since they were not Menschen, human beings. I remember a particularly telling episode. At the worksite, the fledgling Kapo of a squad consisting mainly of Italians, Frenchmen, and Greeks didn’t realize that one of the more dreaded SS supervisors had come up behind him. He turned suddenly, jumped to attention in confusion, and delivered the prescribed Meldung (report): “Kommando 83, forty-two men.” In his agitation, he said “zweiundvierzig Männer,” forty-two men. The officer corrected him in a brusque but paternal tone: that’s not what we say, we say “zweiundvierzig Häftlinge,” forty-two prisoners. The Kapo was young, and could therefore be forgiven, but he still needed training in the job, in the social conventions, and in hierarchical differences.

  This “not being spoken to” had quick and devastating effects. You dare not say a word to someone who does not speak to you or who addresses you only in seemingly inarticulate shouts. If you had the good fortune to find yourself near someone with whom you share a common language, lucky you: you can exchange impressions, ask for advice, let off some steam; but if you’re not, your speech runs dry in a few days and, with it, thought.

  Right then and there, you cannot understand the orders and prohibitions or decipher the regulations, some of which are futile and insulting, while others are crucial. In short, you find yourself in a void, and realize at your own expense that communication generates information and that without information you cannot live. Most of the prisoners who did not know German—almost all the Italians, in other words—died within the first ten to fifteen days of their arrival: at first sight, from starvation, exposure, exhaustion, or disease; but on closer examination from insufficient information. If they had been able to communicate with more senior prisoners, they would have had an easier time getting their bearings. They would have learned more quickly how to procure clothes, shoes, and illegal food; to avoid the toughest jobs and the often deadly encounters with the SS; and to manage the inevitable diseases without making fatal errors. I do not mean to say that they would not have died, but they would have lived longer and had a better chance of regaining lost ground.

  For those of us who survived, and who were scarcely polyglot, the first days in the Lager have remained impressed on our memories in the form of a blurry and frenzied movie filled with sound and fury signifying nothing: a hubbub of nameless, faceless people drowned out by a constant deafening background noise through which no human word could be heard. A black-and-gray film, with sound but not speech.

  In myself and other survivors I have noticed a strange effect of this absence of and need for communication. At a forty-year distance, we still have a purely acoustic memory of words and phrases spoken around us in languages that we did not understand and never learned; for me, for example, they are in Polish or Hungarian. To this day I can still remember the Polish pronunciation not of my own serial number but, rather, of the number of the
prisoner ahead of me in the roll call of one barrack: a jumble of sounds that ended harmoniously, like the undecipherable counting of children, in something like stergísci stèri (today I know that those two words were czterdzieści cztery, forty-four). In fact, in that barrack the soup distributor and most of the prisoners were Polish, and Polish was its official language. When your number was called, you had to be ready with your bowl outstretched to avoid missing your turn, and, to avoid being taken by surprise, the best thing to do was to jump up the minute the matriculation number of the person right ahead of you was called. That stergísci stèri worked like the bell that conditioned Pavlov’s dogs: it provoked an instantaneous secretion of saliva.

  Those foreign phrases were engraved in our memory as if on a blank magnetic tape, the way a hungry stomach rapidly assimilates even indigestible food. Their meaning did not help us to remember them, since for us they had no meaning. Many years later, however, we were able to repeat them to people who could understand, and we learned that they did have a petty, ordinary meaning: they were curses, swear words, or common everyday expressions such as “What time is it?” “I can’t walk,” or “Leave me alone.” They were fragments torn from obscurity: the fruit of a useless, unconscious effort to carve meaning out of meaninglessness. They were also the mental equivalent of our bodily need for nourishment, which drove us to look for potato peels near the kitchens: little more than nothing, better than nothing. The undernourished brain, too, suffers from its own specific form of hunger. Or perhaps this useless and paradoxical memory had another meaning and another purpose: it was an unconscious preparation for “after,” for an unlikely survival, in which every scrap of experience would become a tile in a vast mosaic.