The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  There is one question that we are always asked. Indeed, it is formulated more insistently, and with a more openly accusatory tone, as the years go by. It is not so much a single question as a cluster of questions. Why didn’t you escape? Why didn’t you rebel? Why didn’t you avoid capture “before”? It is precisely because of the inevitability and growing frequency of these questions that they deserve our attention.

  My first comment on these questions, and my first interpretation of them, is optimistic. There are countries that have never known freedom, since man’s natural need for it is secondary to many more urgent needs: to withstand cold, hunger, diseases, parasites, and attacks by animals and humans. But, in countries where basic needs have been met, the youth of today see freedom as a good that should never be given up: we cannot live without it, it is an obvious natural right, and it costs nothing, like health and the air we breathe. They perceive the times and places where this birthright has been denied as remote, alien, strange. So for them the idea of imprisonment is associated with the idea of escape or revolt. The prisoner’s condition is seen as unjust and abnormal, like a disease that should be cured through flight or rebellion. For that matter, the concept of escape as a moral obligation has solid roots; according to the military code of conduct in many countries, a prisoner of war is expected to make every effort to free himself and to resume his post as a combatant, and according to the Hague Convention an escape attempt should not be punished. In the common conscience escape washes away and expunges the shame of imprisonment.

  Consider, in passing, Stalin’s Soviet Union, where the practice if not the law was different and far more drastic. For the returning Soviet prisoner of war there was neither healing nor redemption: he was considered irremediably guilty, even if he had succeeded in escaping and rejoining his combat division. He was supposed to die rather than surrender, and, in addition, because he had been in enemy hands (even if for only a few hours), he was automatically suspected of collusion with the enemy. Former prisoners of war, upon their ill-considered return home, were deported to Siberia or killed, including many soldiers who had been captured by the Germans on the front and dragged into occupied territory, and who had then escaped and joined partisan groups active against the Germans in Italy, France, or even behind the lines in Russia. In wartime Japan, the soldier who surrendered was also regarded with extreme disdain. This was the reason for the harsh treatment of Allied soldiers who fell into Japanese hands: not only were they enemies; they were cowardly enemies who had been degraded by their surrender.

  There is more. The concept of escape as a moral duty and a reaction demanded by captivity is constantly reiterated in Romantic literature (The Count of Monte Cristo) and popular literature (witness the extraordinary success of Papillon’s memoirs). In the world of cinema, the unjustly (or perhaps justly) incarcerated hero is always a positive figure and always attempts to escape, even in the most implausible circumstances, and his attempt is invariably crowned with success. Amid the thousand films buried in oblivion, I can still remember I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and The Hurricane. The typical prisoner is portrayed as an able-bodied man, in full possession of his physical and moral faculties, who, with a force born of desperation and wits sharpened by necessity, hurls himself against barriers and climbs over or breaches them.

  This schematic image of imprisonment and escape bears very little resemblance to the situation in the concentration camps. If we use the term in its broader sense, to include not only the death camps whose names are universally known but also the very many camps for military prisoners and internees, in Germany there were several million foreigners in conditions of enslavement: exhausted, despised, malnourished, poorly clothed and cared for, and cut off from contact with their home country. They were not “typical prisoners.” They were not able-bodied; in fact, they were demoralized and broken. An exception has to be made for Allied prisoners of war (Americans and members of the British Commonwealth), who received food supplies and clothing from the International Red Cross. They were in possession of good military training, high motivation, and a strong esprit de corps, and they maintained a fairly solid internal hierarchy that was exempt from the gray zone I discussed earlier in this book. With few exceptions they could trust one another, and they also knew that, if captured, they would be treated in accordance with international conventions. Many of them did indeed try to escape, some successfully.

  Things were different for the other prisoners, the pariahs of the Nazi universe (including Gypsies and Soviet prisoners, both military and civilian, who in racial terms were considered only slightly superior to the Jews). For them escape was difficult and extremely dangerous: hunger and mistreatment had left them debilitated and demoralized. They were regarded as less valuable than beasts of burden, and they felt this. Their heads were shaved, their clothing filthy and immediately recognizable, and they had wooden clogs that prevented them from moving swiftly and silently. The foreigners had no acquaintances or possible hiding places in the vicinity; the Germans knew that the ever-vigilant secret police kept a close watch on and records of their movements, and that very few of their fellow citizens would risk their freedom or their lives to give them shelter.

  The special (but numerically imposing) case of the Jews was the most tragic. Even if they had managed to make it past the barbed wire and the electric fence, and evade the patrols, the surveillance of the guards armed with machine guns in the watchtowers, and the dogs trained to hunt humans, which way could they have gone? Who could they have asked for hospitality? Men and women of the air, they were no longer of this world. They no longer had a homeland—their citizenship of origin had been taken away from them—or a home, since it had been confiscated and turned over to legitimate citizens. With some exceptions, they no longer had families, or if relatives were still alive they didn’t know where to find or write to them without putting the police on their trail. The anti-Semitic propaganda of Goebbels and Streicher had borne fruit. Most Germans, especially the young, hated the Jews, despising them and regarding them as enemies of the people. The rest of the population, with a very few heroic exceptions, refrained from providing any assistance out of fear of the Gestapo. Anyone who provided hospitality to or simply aided a Jew risked terrifying punishment. In this connection it is only fair to remember that a few thousand Jews survived throughout the period of Hitler’s rule, hidden in monasteries, cellars, and attics in Germany and in Poland by citizens who were courageous, merciful, and above all intelligent enough to maintain the strictest confidentiality for years.

  In the Lagers the escape of even a single prisoner was considered a major failure on the part of all the supervisory personnel, from the inmate-functionaries to the camp commander, who risked dismissal from his post. In the Nazi way of thinking, such an event was intolerable: the escape of a slave, especially a member of a race “of inferior biological value,” seemed to be charged with symbolic value, representing a victory by someone who is defeated by definition, a shattering of the myth. From a more realistic perspective, it could also cause objective damage, since every prisoner had seen things that the world was not supposed to know. Consequently, all hell broke loose when a prisoner was missing at roll call (a not uncommon occurrence, often the result of a simple counting error or of a prisoner fainting from exhaustion). The whole camp was placed on high alert. In addition to the SS guards, the Gestapo patrols were called in, and searches were conducted of Lagers, job sites, farmhouses, and nearby homes. At the camp commander’s discretion, emergency measures were taken. The fugitive’s countrymen, known friends, or bunkmates were interrogated under torture and then killed. Escape was in effect a difficult undertaking, and it was unlikely that the fugitive had no accomplices or that no one had noticed the preparations. The barrack mates and sometimes all the camp prisoners were forced to stand in the roll-call area for hours or even days on end, in snow, rain, or withering heat, until the fugitive had been found, dead or alive. If tracked down or captured alive, h
e or she was invariably punished by public hanging, preceded by a ceremony that varied each time but always involved unspeakable savagery, in which the imaginative cruelty of the SS ran wild.

  To illustrate how desperate an undertaking an escape was, but for other reasons as well, I would like to recall the feat of Mala Zimetbaum; in fact, I would like it to remain etched in our memories. The story of Mala’s escape from the women’s Lager of Auschwitz-Birkenau has been told by several people, but the details coincide. Mala was a young Polish Jew who had been captured in Belgium. She was fluent in many languages, so at Birkenau she served as an interpreter and a messenger, which gave her a certain freedom of movement. Generous and courageous, she had helped many fellow prisoners and was loved by all. In the summer of 1944 she decided to escape with Edek, a Polish political prisoner. They wanted to do more than regain their freedom: they wanted to document to the world the massacres that were taking place every day at Birkenau. They managed to bribe an SS officer and get hold of two uniforms. They left in disguise and got as far as the Slovak border, where they were stopped by customs agents on suspicion of being deserters, and handed over to the police. They were immediately identified and sent back to Birkenau. Edek was hanged right away, but he did not want to wait until, according to the inexorable protocol of the camp, the sentence was read. He slipped his head inside the noose and stepped off the stool.

  Mala had also resolved to die her own death. While she waited in a cell to be interrogated, one of her prison mates managed to get close and ask, “How is it going, Mala?” She replied, “For me it’s always fine.” Mala had managed to hide a razor blade on her person. At the foot of the scaffold she slit the arteries of one wrist. The SS officer acting as the executioner tried to grab the blade, and Mala, in front of all the women of the camp, slapped her bloody hand across his face. Other soldiers immediately came running in a rage: a prisoner, a Jew, a woman, had dared to defy them! They beat her nearly to death. Luckily for her, she died on the cart taking her to the crematorium.

  This was not “useless violence.” It was useful: it served quite effectively to nip in the bud any wishful thoughts of escape. It was normal for a new prisoner, unfamiliar with such refined and consolidated techniques, to think of escape. It was very rare for the same thought to cross the minds of more senior prisoners; in fact, preparations for escape were commonly reported by inhabitants of the gray zone, or by simple third parties, fearful of the repercussions just described.

  I remember with a smile something that happened to me a few years ago in a fifth-grade classroom, where I had been invited to talk about my books and answer the pupils’ questions. A smart-looking boy, apparently the class leader, asked me the ritual question: “Why didn’t you escape?” I explained to him briefly what I have just written. Not quite convinced, he asked me to draw on the blackboard a sketch of the camp, indicating the location of the watchtowers, the gates, the fences, and the electric power station. I did my best with thirty pairs of eyes staring at me. My questioner studied the drawing for a few seconds, asked me for some additional details, and then illustrated the plan he had devised: over here, at night, slit the sentry’s throat; then put on his uniform; right afterward, run down to the power station and cut the electricity, so that the searchlights would go off and the electric fence would be deactivated. After that, I could easily make my getaway. He added, in all seriousness, “If it should happen to you another time, do as I said: you’ll see, you’ll succeed.”

  Within its limits, this episode seems like a good illustration of the gap, growing wider as the years pass, between the way things were “down there” and the way they are represented in today’s imagination, fueled by inaccurate books, films, and myths. It drifts fatally toward simplification and stereotypes. Here I would like to build an embankment against this drifting. At the same time, I would like to point out that the phenomenon is not confined to the perception of the recent past or historic tragedies: it is much more general, pertaining to our difficulty or inability to perceive the experiences of others, which becomes more pronounced the further removed these experiences are from our own in time, space, and quality. We tend to liken them to “closer” experiences, as if the hunger of Auschwitz could be compared to the hunger of someone who has skipped a meal, or as if escape from Treblinka were similar to an escape from the Regina Coeli prison, in Rome. It is the historian’s task to bridge this gap, which grows wider as the events being studied slip further and further into the past.

  With the same frequency, and in an even harsher tone of accusation, we are asked “Why didn’t you rebel?” This question is quantitatively different from the previous one but similar in nature, and it, too, is based on a stereotype. The answer is best divided into two parts.

  First, it is not true that there were no uprisings in the Lagers. The revolts at Treblinka, Sobibór, and Birkenau have been described in great detail many times. There were also revolts in smaller camps. They were extremely audacious undertakings and they deserve our deepest respect, but none of them ended in victory, if by victory we mean the liberation of the camp. It would have been senseless to set such a goal. The guards had such overwhelming power that it would have failed in a few minutes, since the insurgents were practically unarmed. Their real purpose was to damage or destroy the death machinery, and to enable their small group to escape; sometimes they succeeded (in Treblinka, for example, although only in part). There were never designs for a mass escape, which would have been a mad undertaking. What would have been the sense or the use of opening the gates to thousands of individuals barely able to crawl and others who would not have known where to seek refuge in enemy territory?

  But there were insurrections all the same. They were prepared intelligently and with incredible courage by a resolute and still able-bodied minority. These uprisings took a shocking toll in terms of human lives and collective sufferings inflicted in reprisal, yet they helped to show, and still do, that it is not true that the prisoners of the German concentration camps never attempted rebellion. In the insurgents’ minds, they were supposed to lead to another, more concrete result: namely, to make the free world aware of the terrible secret of the mass murder. The few who managed to escape and, after further ordeals, gain access to the news media did in fact speak, but, as I mentioned in the introduction, they were almost never listened to or believed. Inconvenient truths have a difficult road.

  Second, the link between oppression and rebellion is just as stereotypical as the one between imprisonment and escape. I do not mean to say that it is never valid, only that it is not always so. The history of uprisings—that is to say, of rebellions from below by the “oppressed many” against the “powerful few”—is as old as the history of humanity and just as varied and tragic. A few uprisings have been victorious, many have failed, and countless others were suppressed at the outset, so precociously that no trace of them appears in the history books. There are many variables in play: the numeric, military, and idealistic force of the rebels and of the authorities they are defying; their respective inner cohesiveness or divisions; outside assistance to one side or the other; the skill, charisma, or demonism of the leaders; luck. In every case, however, it can be observed that the most oppressed individuals never appear at the head of an uprising; revolutions, in fact, are usually guided by audacious, daring leaders who throw themselves into the fray out of generosity (or maybe ambition), although they themselves have the potential to live safe, peaceful, and perhaps even privileged lives. The image of the slave breaking his heavy chains, so often depicted in monuments, has something rhetorical about it: his chains were broken by fellow slaves whose bonds were lighter and looser.

  We should not be surprised by this. A leader has to be effective. He has to have moral and physical force, both of which are depleted by oppression when it goes beyond a certain very low level. To rouse anger and indignation, the engines of all true uprisings (by which I mean grassroots rebellions and certainly not putsches or palace revolts), ther
e must indeed be oppression, but it has to be of a modest degree or carried out very inefficiently. The measure of oppression in the Lagers was extreme, and it was carried out with the Germans’ well-known and, in other areas, commendable efficiency. The typical prisoner, who constituted the backbone of the camp, was at the limits of exhaustion: starving, debilitated, covered with sores (especially on his feet: “impeded” in the original sense of the term—and it’s not a minor detail), and thus deeply despondent. He was a ragged man, and with rags, as Marx knew, you can’t start a revolution in the real world, only in the world of literary or film rhetoric. All revolutions—those which changed the course of world history and the tiny ones described here—were led by individuals who knew oppression well, but not on their own skin. The Birkenau revolt, which I have already mentioned, was incited by the Sonderkommando assigned to the crematoriums. Its members were desperate and exasperated men but they were well fed and had decent clothing and shoes. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising deserves our utmost respect; it was the first European “resistance,” and the only one carried out without the least hope of victory or salvation, but it was the work of a political élite that had rightly maintained some basic privileges for the sake of conserving its energies.