The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  In the first pages of The Truce, I related the extreme case of absent but necessary communication: the case of a three-year-old boy, Hurbinek, who, perhaps born secretly in the Lager, had not been taught to speak, and had an intense need to speak, expressed by every part of his poor body. Here, too, the Lager was a laboratory of cruelty in which one witnessed situations and behavior never seen before, or since, or elsewhere.

  I had learned a few words of German a few years earlier, when I was still a student, for the sole purpose of understanding my chemistry and physics textbooks—certainly not to actively convey my thoughts or understand the spoken language. These were the years of the Fascist racial laws, and for me the idea of meeting a German or traveling to Germany seemed unlikely. Cast into Auschwitz, I realized quite early, despite my initial bewilderment (or rather precisely because of it), that my meager Wortschatz had become critical to survival. Wortschatz means “lexical property,” literally a “treasury of words”: never has a term been more appropriate. Knowing German meant life: all I had to do was look around. My Italian comrades who did not understand it—almost everyone except for a few from Trieste—were drowning one by one in the stormy seas of incomprehension; they did not understand orders and were slapped and kicked without knowing why. In the rudimentary ethics of the camp, a blow was supposed to be somehow justified, to facilitate the establishment of the transgression-punishment-reformation cycle, so the Kapo or his deputies would accompany the punch with a grunted “Do you know why?” followed by a quick “communication of the crime.” But this ceremony was useless for the newly deaf and dumb, who instinctively took refuge in the corner to cover their backs: aggression could come from any direction. They looked around with bewildered eyes, like animals caught in a trap, which is what they had in effect become.

  Many Italians received vital assistance from the French and Spanish prisoners, whose languages were less “foreign” than German. While there were no Spaniards in Auschwitz, there were many Frenchmen (to be precise, deportees from France or Belgium), making up maybe 10 percent of the total in 1944. Some were Alsatians and some were German and Polish Jews who in the previous decade had sought refuge in France, which turned out to be a trap; they all knew German or Yiddish to varying degrees. The others—the metropolitan French, whether proletarian, bourgeois, or intellectual—had undergone a selection similar to ours one or two years earlier: the ones who did not understand disappeared from the scene. Almost all the survivors were métèques, who had been mistreated in France and now had a sad revenge. They were our natural interpreters: they translated for us the fundamental commands and notices of the day, “get up,” “muster,” “line up for bread,” “whose shoes are broken?” “in threes,” “in fives,” and so on.

  This was hardly enough. I implored one of them, an Alsatian, to give me a private, accelerated course, subdivided into short lessons administered in whispers between curfew and our succumbing to sleep, lessons bartered for bread, there being no other currency. He accepted, and I think bread was never better spent. He explained to me the meaning of the barking of the Kapos and the SS, the inane or ironic mottos written in Gothic letters on the crossbeams of the barracks, the meaning of the colors of the triangles we wore on our chests above our serial numbers. Thus I realized that the German of the Lagers—skeletal, shouted, sprinkled with obscenities and curses—was only loosely related to the precise, austere language of my chemistry textbooks, or to the melodious and refined German of the poetry of Heine, which a classmate, Clara, used to recite to me.

  What I did not realize then—and came to realize only many years later—was that the German of the Lagers was a separate language. In German it was called Orts- und Zeitgebunden, place- and time-bound. It was a particularly barbarized variant of what the German Jewish philologist Victor Klemperer christened the Lingua Tertii Imperii, the language of the Third Reich, going so far as to propose the acrostic LTI, in ironic analogy with the hundred others so dear to the Germany of those years (NSDAP, SS, SA, SD, KZ, RKPA, WVHA, RSHA, BDM).

  Much has already been written about LTI and its Italian equivalent, and by linguists, too. The observation that, where violence is done to man, it is also done to language is obvious; in Italy we have not forgotten the idiotic Fascist campaigns against dialects, “barbarisms,” place names in the Val d’Aosta, Val de Susa, and Alto Adige, and the “servile and foreign” use of the pronoun lei to address a person formally.13 In Germany the situation was different: for centuries already the German language had shown a spontaneous aversion to words of non-Germanic origin, leading German scientists to busy themselves with renaming bronchitis Luftwegentzündung (air-tube inflammation), the duodenum Zwölffingerdarm (twelve-finger intestine), and pyruvic acid Brenztraubensäure (burn-grape acid). In this respect, the Nazis—who wanted to purify everything—had very little left to purify. LTI differed from Goethe’s German mainly in certain semantic shifts and the abuse of some terms; the adjective völkisch (national, folk), for example, which became ubiquitous and infused with nationalistic self-regard, and fanatisch, whose negative connotations became positive. But in the archipelago of the German Lagers a jargon emerged, subdivided into specific subjargons for each Lager and closely related to the old German of the Prussian barracks and the new German of the SS. There is nothing strange about its parallels with Soviet labor camp jargon, various terms of which are cited by Solzhenitsyn, and each of which has an exact counterpart in Lager jargon. It cannot have been very hard to translate The Gulag Archipelago into German, or if there were difficulties they were not of terminology.

  Common to all the Lagers was the term Muselmann, Muslim, to describe prisoners who were irreversibly exhausted, emaciated, and close to death. Two equally unconvincing explanations for its origin have been proposed: fatalism, and the turban-like dressing of head wounds. This is perfectly mirrored, even in its cynical irony, by the Russian term dochodjaga, literally “come to the end,” “concluded.” In the Ravensbrück Lager (the only all-female camp) the same concept was expressed, Lidia Rolfi tells me, by the two specular nouns Schmutzstück and Schmuckstück, “garbage” and “jewel,” which in German are almost homophones, one a parody of the other. The Italian women did not understand the first word’s cold-blooded meaning and pronounced it smistig, combining the two terms into one. “Prominent” is another term common to all the subjargons. In If This Is a Man I described at length the Prominentz, prisoners who had worked their way up. As an indispensable component of concentration-camp sociology, they also existed in the Soviet Gulags, where (as I mentioned in the third chapter) they were called pridurki.

  In Auschwitz “to eat” was rendered by the verb fressen, which in proper German applies only to animals. To say “Get out of here,” the expression hau’ ab was used, the imperative form of the verb abhauen. Its proper meaning is “to cut, to crop,” but in the Lager jargon it was the equivalent of “Go to hell, scram.” Once, shortly after the end of the war, I used the expression “Jetz hauen wir ab” in all good faith, to take my leave of some very proper Bayer company officials after a business meeting. It was as if I had said, “Let’s hit the road.” They looked at me with astonishment: the term belonged to a linguistic register different from that of the preceding conversation, and it was certainly not taught in “foreign language” courses at school. I explained to them that I had not learned German at school but, rather, at a Lager called Auschwitz. A certain embarrassment ensued, but since I was there in the role of buyer, they continued to treat me with courtesy. Later I realized that my pronunciation is rough, too, but I have deliberately refused to gentrify it. I have never had the tattoo removed from my left arm for the same reason.

  Of course, Lager jargon was heavily influenced by other languages that were spoken in the camps and their environs: Polish, Yiddish, the Silesian dialect, and, later, Hungarian. From the background din of my first few days of imprisonment, four or five non-German expressions emerged insistently: they must indicate, I thought, some basic obj
ect or action, such as work, water, or bread. They were engraved in my memory in the curious mechanical way I have just described. Only much later did a Polish friend reluctantly explain to me that these words simply meant “cholera,” “blood of a dog,” “thunder,” “son of a bitch,” and “fucked,” the first three as interjections.

  Yiddish was the de facto second language of the camp (later replaced by Hungarian). Not only did I not understand it; I was only vaguely aware of its existence, on the basis of a few quotes or jokes that my father, who worked for a few years in Hungary, had picked up. The Polish, Russian, and Hungarian Jews were amazed that we Italians did not speak Yiddish: this made us suspicious, untrustworthy Jews, in addition to being “Badoghli” to the SS and “Mussolini” to the French, the Greeks, and the political prisoners.14 Apart from the difficulties of communication, it was inconvenient to be Italian Jews. After the well-deserved success of books by Isaac Bashevis Singer and his siblings, Israel Joshua Singer and Esther Kreitman, as well as many others, everyone knows that Yiddish is primarily an ancient German dialect whose vocabulary and pronunciation are different from those of modern German. It caused me more anguish than Polish, which I did not understand at all, because “I should have understood it.” I listened to it with strained attention: I often had a hard time understanding whether a sentence addressed to me, or uttered near me, was German, Yiddish, or a hybrid. In fact, some well-meaning Polish Jews made an effort to Germanize their Yiddish as best they could so that I might understand them.

  I discovered a unique trace of the Yiddish we breathed in If This Is a Man. In the chapter “Kraus,” I report a dialogue in which Gounan, a French Jew of Polish origin, says to Kraus the Hungarian, “Langsam, du blöder Einer, langsam, verstanden?” which, word for word, means “Slow down, you stupid one, slow down, understand?” It sounded a little strange, but I felt sure that this was what I had heard (they were recent memories: I was writing in 1946), so this was how I transcribed it. My German translator was not convinced: I must have heard or remembered wrong. After a long epistolary exchange, he proposed that I revise the expression, which he thought unacceptable. In the published translation, the sentence appears as “Langsam, du blöder Heini . . .” Heini being the diminutive of Heinrich, Enrico. But I recently discovered, in a good book on the history and structure of Yiddish (Mame Loshen, by

  J. Geipel; London: Journeyman, 1982), that one of its characteristics is the form “Khamòyer du eyner!”—“Donkey you one!” My mechanical memory had worked correctly.

  Not everyone suffered in equal measure from the absence or shortage of communication. Not to suffer from it, accepting the eclipse of the word, was an ominous symptom: it signaled the approach of the final indifference. A select few, solitary by nature or already accustomed to isolation in “civilian” life, showed no signs of suffering from it. But most of the prisoners who survived the critical initiation phase tried to defend themselves, each in his own way: some by begging for scraps of information, some by indiscriminately spreading news that was triumphant or disastrous, true, false, or invented, some by sharpening their eyes and their ears to seize on and try to interpret every human sign from the earth or the heavens. But the scarcity of internal information was compounded by the scarcity of communication with the outside world. In some Lagers the isolation was total. In this respect, my own camp, Auschwitz-Monowitz, could be considered privileged. Almost every week, “new” prisoners arrived from all the countries of occupied Europe, bringing the latest news, often as eyewitnesses. Despite the prohibitions, and the danger of being reported to the Gestapo, in the huge worksite we used to converse with Polish and German workers, and sometimes even with British prisoners of war. In the trash bins we would find newspapers that were a few days old, and read them avidly. One of my more enterprising fellow workers, a journalist by profession who as an Alsatian was bilingual, even boasted that he had a subscription to the Völkischer Beobachter, the most authoritative daily newspaper in Germany in those days: what could be easier? He had asked a German worker, whom he trusted, to take out a subscription, and he paid for it by giving him a gold tooth. Every morning, during the long wait for the roll call, he gathered us around and gave us a thorough summary of the day’s news.

  On June 7, 1944, we saw a group of English prisoners going off to work, and there was something different about them: they marched in tight formation, chests puffed out, smiling, martial, and at such a brisk pace that the German guard escorting them, a local no longer in his prime, had to struggle to keep up. They greeted us with the V sign for victory. The next day, we found out that they had heard the news of the Allied landing in Normandy on their clandestine radio, and it was a great day for us, too: freedom seemed within reach. But things were much worse in most of the camps. The newcomers arrived from other Lagers or from ghettos that were, in turn, cut off from the world, so they brought with them only the horrific local news. Unlike us, they did not work in contact with free workers from ten or twelve different countries but, rather, on farms, in small workshops, in stone quarries or sand pits, and even in mines, and the conditions in the mine-lagers were the same as the ones that led to the deaths of the Roman prisoners of war and of the Indios enslaved by the Spaniards. They were so deadly that no one returned to describe them. The news “from the world,” as we used to say, arrived irregularly and was vague. We felt forgotten, like the condemned prisoners left to die in the oubliettes of the Middle Ages.

  The Jews, who were the quintessential enemies—impure, sowers of impurity and destroyers of the world—were forbidden the most precious form of communication, with their country of origin and their family. Those who have experienced exile, in any of its many forms, know how much suffering follows when this nerve is cut. It gives rise to a fatal impression of abandonment, together with an unfair resentment: they are free, so why don’t they write to me, why don’t they help me? We thus had the opportunity to understand clearly that on the great continent of freedom the freedom to communicate is an important province, like health, whose value can be understood only by those who have lost it. This suffering is not only at an individual level: in the countries and in the eras in which communication is obstructed, all other freedoms wither quickly. Debate dies of starvation, ignorance of others’ opinions spreads, and imposed opinions are triumphant. A well-known example is the mad genetics preached in the USSR by Trofim Lysenko, who, in the absence of opposition (anyone who disputed his theories was exiled to Siberia), jeopardized harvests for twenty years. Intolerance leads to censure, and censorship increases ignorance of other people’s reasons and thus intolerance: it is a rigid vicious circle that is hard to break.

  The most disconsolate hour of the week for us was when our “political” comrades received mail from home. It was the hour when we felt the full burden of being alien, estranged, cut off from our country and, indeed, from the human race. It was the hour when our tattoos burned like a wound, and the certainty that none of us would return washed over us like a mudslide. Even if we had been allowed to write a letter, to whom would we have addressed it? The families of the Jews of Europe were drowned or scattered or destroyed.

  I had the rare good fortune, as I related in Lilith and Other Stories, to exchange a few letters with my family. I am indebted to two very different people: an elderly and almost illiterate mason, and a courageous young woman, Bianca Guidetti Serra, who is today a well-known lawyer. I know that this was one of the factors that enabled me to survive. But, as I have said before, each of us survivors is an exception in more ways than one, something that we ourselves, to exorcise the past, tend to forget.

  13. In standard Italian, the subject pronoun lei is used both as “she” and as the formal “you.” Objecting to its feminine connotations, Mussolini imposed the usage of voi—more common in southern Italy—for second-person formal address.

  14. “Badoghli” is a German mispronunciation of the name of Pietro Badoglio, the marshal who became the prime minister of Italy immediately aft
er the removal of Mussolini, and was consequently considered a traitor by the Germans.

  5

  Useless Violence

  The title of this chapter may appear provocative or even offensive: is there such a thing as useful violence? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. Even an unprovoked or most merciful death is a form of violence, but it is sadly useful. A world filled with immortals (like the Struldbruggs in Gulliver’s Travels) would be neither conceivable nor livable, and it would be even more violent than the already violent world of today. Nor is murder as a general principle necessarily useless: Raskolnikov gave himself a purpose by killing the old pawnbroker, however wrong he may have been. As did Princip when he assassinated the archduke in Sarajevo, and the kidnappers of Aldo Moro on Via Fani. Except for homicidal maniacs, murderers know why they are doing what they are doing: to make money, eliminate a real or presumed enemy, or avenge an offense. Wars are detestable, a terrible way to settle disputes between nations or factions, but we cannot call them useless. They do have a purpose, which may be evil or perverse, but they are not gratuitous and they do not deliberately inflict suffering. The suffering is a reality. It is collective, excruciating, and unjust, but it is a side effect, something extra. Now, I think that the violence of Hitler’s twelve years had something in common with that of many other historical times and places, but that Hitler’s era was characterized by a widespread violence that was useless, an end in itself, designed solely to create pain; sometimes for a purpose but always redundant and always disproportionate to that purpose.

  When we look back at those years with the wisdom of hindsight, at a time when Europe and ultimately Germany itself were devastated, we are torn between two judgments: Did we witness the rational unfolding of an inhuman plan, or a manifestation of collective madness (still unique in history, yet still poorly explained)? A malevolent logic or an absence of logic? As is often the case with human affairs, the two alternatives coexist. The fundamental design of National Socialism undoubtedly had a rationale: expansion toward the east (an old German dream); the suppression of the labor movement; hegemony over continental Europe; the annihilation of Bolshevism and Judaism, which Hitler simplistically saw as one and the same; the claiming of a share of world power with England and the United States; and the apotheosis of the German race through the “Spartan” elimination of the mentally ill and of useless mouths. All of these elements were compatible, and they can be deduced from a few postulates that had already been expressed with undeniable clarity in Mein Kampf. Arrogance and radicalism, hubris and Gründlichkeit: insolent logic rather than madness.