The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  The measures taken to achieve these ends were also heinous, but they were not mad: the unleashing of military aggression or ruthless wars; the fostering of internal fifth columns; and the transfer or subjugation, sterilization, or extermination of entire populations. Neither Nietzsche nor Hitler nor Rosenberg was mad when he intoxicated himself and his followers by preaching the myth of the superman, to whom all is conceded in recognition of his dogmatic congenital superiority. But it is worth considering the fact that all of them, master and pupils, gradually took leave of reality at the same pace as their morals became detached from the morals common to every time and every civilization, morals that belong to our heritage as human beings and must ultimately be recognized.

  Rationality ended and the disciples surpassed (and betrayed) their master by a broad measure in the practice of useless cruelty. Nietzsche’s language repels me deeply; I struggle to find a statement that does not coincide with the opposite of my own preferred way of thinking. His oracular tone annoys me, but I do not think it ever expresses a desire for the suffering of others: indifference there is, on almost every page, but never Schadenfreude, joy in the hardships of his fellow man, or joy in deliberately causing pain. The suffering of the common people, the Ungestalten, the unformed, the not nobly born, is the price to pay for the coming of the kingdom of the elect. It is a lesser evil but evil nonetheless; it is not desirable in itself. Hitler’s language and practices were another matter entirely.

  Today, much of the Nazis’ useless violence has been consigned to history; take, for example, the “disproportionate” massacres at the Ardeatine Caves, Oradour, Lidice, Boves, Marzabotto, and too many others, where the already intrinsically inhuman limit of reprisals was surpassed by enormous lengths. But other minor, individual acts of violence—details of the larger picture—are still inscribed in indelible characters in the memory of each of us former deportees.

  The memory’s sequence almost always begins with the train that marked the departure toward the unknown: not only for chronological reasons but also because of the gratuitous cruelty by which those otherwise innocuous convoys of ordinary boxcars were employed for an uncustomary purpose.

  Of our many diaries and stories, there is not one without the appearance of the train, the sealed boxcar, transformed from a commercial vehicle into a mobile prison or even an instrument of death. It’s always overcrowded, but a rough calculation does seem to have been made, case by case, of how many people to cram in: from fifty to a hundred and twenty, depending on the length of the journey and the hierarchical value the Nazi system assigned to the “human material” being transported. The convoys departing from Italy contained “only” between fifty and sixty people per car (Jews, political prisoners, partisans, unlucky souls who had been rounded up on the streets, soldiers captured after the capitulation of Italy to the Allies on September 8, 1943): consideration may have been given to the distance, or to the impression these transfers might make on possible witnesses along the route. The transports from Eastern Europe were at the opposite extreme: the Slavs, especially if they were Jewish, were baser goods, of no value, in fact; they were supposed to die anyway, it didn’t matter whether they did so during the journey or after. The convoys that transported the Polish Jews from the ghettos to the Lagers, or from Lager to Lager, held up to a hundred and twenty people per car: the trip was short. . . . Well, fifty people can fit in a freight car very uncomfortably; they can all lie down to rest at the same time, one body against the other. If there are a hundred or more, even a journey of a few hours is a living hell. They all have to stand, or take turns crouching; and the passengers often included the elderly, the infirm, children, breast-feeding women, the mentally ill, or individuals who lost their minds during the journey or as a result of it.

  Some variables and constants can be identified in the practices of the Nazi railway transports. We don’t know whether they were based on regulations, or whether the officials in charge acted on their own. One of the constants was the hypocritical advice (or order) to bring with you as much as possible: especially gold, jewelry, hard currency, furs, and, in some cases (certain transports of Jewish farmers from Hungary and Slovakia), small livestock. “It could all come in handy,” the guards would whisper with an air of complicity. In reality it was self-plunder: it was a simple and ingenious stratagem by which valuables were transferred to the Reich without publicity, bureaucratic complications, special transports, or fear of theft en route: because in reality everything was confiscated upon arrival. Another constant was the complete barrenness of the cars: for a journey that could last up to two weeks (as it did for the Jews deported from Thessaloniki), the German authorities provided literally nothing: no food or water, no mats or straw for the wooden floor, no receptacles for bodily functions. Nor did they bother warning the local authorities or commanders (if there were any) of transit camps to arrange provisions of some sort. A notification would have cost nothing: but the whole point of this systematic neglect was to produce useless cruelty, in a deliberate creation of pain for the pure sake of it.

  In some cases the prisoners destined for deportation were able to glean something from experience. They had seen other convoys depart and learned at their predecessors’ expense that they would have to provide for all their own logistical needs, as well as they could and within the constraints imposed by the Germans. The case of the trains that departed from the transit camp of Westerbork, in Holland, is typical. Westerbork was a huge camp, holding tens of thousands of Jewish prisoners, and Berlin demanded that the local commander dispatch one train every week with about a thousand deportees. A total of ninety-three trains departed from Westerbork in the direction of Auschwitz, Sobibór, and other smaller camps. Approximately five hundred people survived, none of whom had been in the first convoys, whose occupants departed blindly, in the unfounded hope that the most elementary needs for a three- or four-day journey would have been provided for as a matter of procedure. We do not know how many people died en route or what the dreadful journey was like, since no one has come back to tell. After a few weeks, however, a worker in the Westerbork infirmary, a keen observer, noticed that the convoys always used the same boxcars, shuttling back and forth between the Lager of departure and the Lager of destination. So it came to be that some people in the later transports were able to hide messages in the cars that came back empty, after which it was possible to make provisions for at least a supply of food and water, and a bucket for bodily functions.

  The convoy in which I was deported, in February 1944, was the first to depart from the Fòssoli transit camp (others had left earlier from Rome and Milan, but no news of them had reached us). The SS, which had just removed the Italian public security forces from command of the camp, gave no precise instructions for the journey. They indicated only that it would be long, and they circulated the self-serving, ironic advice I have just mentioned (“Bring gold and jewelry, and especially wool coats and furs, because you are going to work in a cold country”). The camp leader, who was also deported, had the good sense to procure a reasonable supply of food but no water: water costs nothing, after all. And while the Germans give away nothing, they are good organizers. . . . He did not even think to supply every car with a recipient for a latrine, an omission that proved grievous, causing an affliction far worse than thirst or cold. In my car there were quite a few elderly people, both men and women. Among them were all the residents of the Jewish Home for the Aged of Venice. For everyone, but especially for them, evacuating in public was agonizing or impossible, a trauma for which our civilization leaves us unprepared, a deep wound inflicted on human dignity, an obscene and ominous attack, but also the sign of a deliberate, gratuitous malice. By our paradoxical fortune (a word I hesitate to write in this context), in our car there were two young mothers with babies a few months old, and one of them had brought with her a chamber pot: only one, and it had to serve about fifty people. After traveling for two days we found a couple of nails stuck in the wooden walls,
repositioned them in a corner, and with string and a blanket improvised a shelter that was largely symbolic: we are not yet beasts, not as long as we try to resist.

  It is hard to imagine what happened in cars that were without this minimal arrangement. The convoy stopped two or three times in the open countryside, the doors of the cars were opened, and the prisoners allowed to get out: but not to stray from the tracks or go off by themselves. Once the doors were opened during a stop at an Austrian transit station. The SS guards did not hide their amusement at seeing men and women squatting wherever they could, on the benches, on the tracks. The German travelers openly expressed their disgust: people like that deserve their destiny, just look how they behave. They are not Menschen, human beings. They’re animals, pigs, it’s as plain as day.

  This was in effect a prologue. In the life that was to follow, in the daily rhythms of the Lager, the affront to decency represented, at least at the beginning, a major component of the overall suffering. It was neither easy nor painless to get used to the enormous group latrine, the rigid compulsory schedule, the presence, right in front of you, of the next person in line, standing there, impatient, sometimes pleading, sometimes hectoring, insisting every ten seconds, “Hast du gemacht”—“Are you done?” Within a few weeks, however, the discomfort lessened until it disappeared, to be replaced (but not for everyone) by habituation, a charitable way of saying that the transformation from human being to animal was well under way.

  I don’t believe that this transformation was ever clearly planned or formulated at any level of the Nazi hierarchy, in a document or at a “working meeting.” It was a logical consequence of the system: an inhumane regime spreads and extends its inhumanity in every direction, especially downward. Unless it encounters exceptional resistance and toughness, it also corrupts its victims and its opponents. The useless cruelty of violated modesty conditioned life in every Lager. The women of Birkenau relate that once you got your hands on a mess tin (a large enameled metal bowl), it had to be used for three distinct purposes: to collect the daily soup; to evacuate at night, when access to the latrines was forbidden; and to wash when there was water in the washhouses.

  The food rations at every camp included one liter of soup a day; in our Lager, by concession of the chemical factory where we worked, there were two liters. Consequently there was a great deal of water to eliminate, which compelled us to frequently ask permission to go to the latrine, or to make alternative arrangements in the corners of the worksite. Some of the prisoners couldn’t control themselves: whether because of a weak bladder, or panic attacks, or a nervous disorder, they had an urgent need to urinate and often wet themselves, for which they were punished and mocked. An Italian my age, who slept on a third-tier berth of the bunk beds, had an accident one night and wet the occupants of the lower level, who immediately reported the incident to the barrack chief. He pounced on the Italian, who against all the evidence denied the accusation. So the chief ordered him to urinate, right then and there, to prove his innocence. Of course he couldn’t and he was beaten up badly, but despite his reasonable request he was not moved to the lower bunk. Such an administrative act would have created too many complications for the quartermaster.

  The forced nakedness was similar to the forced evacuation. You entered the Lager naked: more than naked, in fact, deprived not only of your clothing and shoes (which were confiscated) but also of all the hair on your head and body. The same is done, or used to be done, of course, upon entering the military, but at the camps the shaving was total and weekly, and the public and collective nudity was a typical, recurrent condition that was charged with significance. It was also a form of violence with some roots in necessity (you obviously have to get undressed for a shower or for a medical examination), but offensive because of its useless redundancy. The day in the Lager was punctuated by countless irritating moments of denuding: the check for lice, the search of our clothing, the inspection for scabies, the morning washup. And also for the periodic selections, when a “commission” decided who was still fit to work and who instead was destined for elimination. A man who is naked and barefoot feels as if his nerves and tendons had been severed: he is defenseless prey. Clothing, even the filthy clothes that were handed out, even the shoddy wooden-soled clogs, is a tenuous but indispensable defense. Without it, a man no longer feels like a human being. He feels like a worm: naked, slow, ignoble, prostrate on the ground. He knows that he might be crushed at any moment.

  The same debilitating feeling of impotence and destitution was provoked, in the first days of imprisonment, by the lack of a spoon. This might seem like a minor detail to anyone accustomed since childhood to having an abundance of utensils available, in even the poorest kitchen, but it was not. Without a spoon, you could consume your daily soup ration only by lapping it up like a dog. Only after many days of apprenticeship (here, too, it was important to figure out immediately how to understand and be understood) did you come to learn that there really were spoons in the camp, but they had to be bought on the black market, paid for with soup or bread. One spoon usually cost a half-ration of bread or a liter of soup, but the inexperienced newcomers were always asked for much more. When the Auschwitz camp was liberated, however, in the warehouses we found thousands of brand-new clear plastic spoons, in addition to tens of thousands of aluminum, steel, and even silver spoons that had come from the baggage of the arriving deportees. So the point was not to save but rather a deliberate intent to humiliate. I am reminded of the episode in Judges 7:5, when the warrior Gideon chooses the best soldiers by observing how they drink water from the river: he rejects anyone who laps the water, “as a dog lappeth,” or who kneels down, and accepts only those who stand to drink, cupping their hands to bring the water to their mouths.

  There are other forms of vexation and violence described repeatedly and consistently in all the concentration-camp memoirs that I would hesitate to call completely useless. It is common knowledge that in every camp there was a roll call once or twice a day. Not a roll call by name, of course, which would have been impossible with thousands or tens of thousands of prisoners, especially since they were never designated by name but, rather, only by a five- or six-figure serial number. It was a Zählappel, a head count that was complicated and laborious because it included prisoners transferred to other camps or to the infirmary the night before and those who had died during the night, and because the actual figure had to square exactly with the data from the day before and with the count by fives when the squads marched to work. In The Theory and Practice of Hell, Eugen Kogon describes how at Buchenwald even the dying and the dead had to report for the evening roll call. Stretched out on the ground rather than standing on their feet, they, too, had to be arranged in rows of five, to facilitate the count.

  The roll call took place (in the open, of course) in all weather. It lasted for at least an hour but could go on for two or three if the numbers didn’t add up, and even twenty-four hours or longer if there were suspicions of an escape. In the rain, snow, or bitter cold it became an even worse torture than the work, whose fatigue it compounded at night. It was perceived as an empty ritual ceremony, but in all probability it was not. It was not useless, nor, following the same logic, were the hunger, the exhausting labor, or even (forgive my cynicism: I am trying to reason with a logic not my own) the death by gas of adults and children. All this suffering developed a theme, namely the presumed right of the superior people to subjugate or eliminate the inferior people. As did the roll call, which in our “later” dreams became the very emblem of the Lager, summarizing the fatigue, the cold, the hunger, and the frustration. The suffering that it provoked, causing collapses or deaths every day in winter, was part of the system, the tradition of the “drill,” the harsh military practice, a Prussian legacy, immortalized by Büchner in Woyzeck.

  Besides, to me it seems clear that in many of its most painful and absurd respects the concentration-camp world was just another version, an adaptation, of German military pract
ices. The army of concentration-camp prisoners was supposed to be an inglorious copy of the true army, or rather a caricature of it. An army has a uniform: the soldier’s uniform is clean, honored, and covered with insignia; the Häftling’s is dirty, mute, and gray. But both must have five buttons, otherwise there will be trouble. An army parades in march step, in tight formation, to the sound of a band, and so there must be a band in the Lager, too; and the parade has to be properly executed, with eyes left when passing before the reviewing stand, in time with the music. This protocol is so necessary, so obvious, that it prevailed even over the anti-Jewish legislation of the Third Reich. With paranoid sophistry, these laws prohibited Jewish orchestras and musicians from playing music by Aryan composers, since they would contaminate the scores. But there were no Aryan musicians in the Jewish Lagers, nor for that matter are there many military marches written by Jewish composers. So in a dispensation from the racial purity laws, Auschwitz was the only German place where Jewish musicians could or indeed had to play Aryan music: necessity knows no laws.