by Primo Levi
On the other hand, the Turinese Jewish community, which has remote French-Provençal and Spanish origins, never experienced sizable incursions from other regions. At different times there were infiltrations—as attested to by some family names of evident German origin (Ottolenghi, Diena, Luzzati, Morpurgo, and, obviously, Tedeschi2) and by the single dialectal and liturgical expression ij ursài—the anniversary of a death, that is, the corruption of the Yiddish yahrzeit, “time of year.” However, these influences were quickly absorbed into a social fabric that remained ethnically stable up to the forty-year period (1880–1920) covered by this exhibition, in fact even up to now, in striking contrast to what happened in the city of Turin, which, during the economic boom, took in five or six hundred thousand immigrants in the space of two or three years, with profound changes for all its structures and infrastructures.
The prevailing endogamy, rarely extended outside the boundaries of the region, confirms that this was a small tribe, aware of its identity and with well-established features, almost like a village embedded in the Savoyard capital. Further confirmation is found in the odd Jewish-Piedmontese dialect, today a subject of research for linguists and sociologists, but earlier described by Alberto Viriglio, a keen observer of Piedmontese life. For this linguistic hybrid to be born and to survive, a deep assimilation with the majority population was indispensable, along with an adequate recollection of the language of the liturgy (the only pathway by which Hebrew and Aramaic followed the currents of the Diaspora), and an environment in which there were no strong tensions between majority and minority. When such tensions exist, no hybrid languages are formed. Thus, for instance, a Jewish-Polish dialect never developed, nor did Italian-German hybrids in Alto Adige, while Italian immigrants in the United States, in spite of the limited phonetic compatibility, developed from the outset their own way of speaking, which was adroitly used by Pascoli in a famous short poem.3
Our fathers, and above all our mothers, used Jewish-Piedmontese every day and unaffectedly; it was the language of home and family. Yet they were aware of the intrinsic humor that emerged from the contrast between the fabric of the speech, the unrefined and laconic Piedmontese dialect, and the Hebrew inserts, taken from the language of the Patriarchs, remote but revitalized every day by public and private prayers and the reading of the Holy Books, a language made smooth by the ages like a riverbed by the glaciers. But this mirrored another, essential contrast of Judaism, which, scattered among le genti, or peoples—the Gentiles—is torn between its divine calling and its daily tribulations; and yet another, much broader contrast, the one inherent in the human condition, since man is bipartite, a mixture of heavenly spirit and earthly dust. The Jewish people, after the Diaspora, experienced this conflict painfully, and derived from it, alongside their wisdom, their laughter, which is absent from the Bible and the Prophets.
This exhibition is dedicated to these honest, hardworking, and witty forefathers. They were neither heroes nor saints or martyrs; they are not too far from us in time and space. We are aware of the limits of the exhibition, which were deliberately restricted. Other things could be said, and of quite different weight, about the history of the Turinese Jews in the following decades: their early anti-Fascist militancy, originating in that craving for freedom and justice that runs through Jewish history and paid for with long years of imprisonment and internment; the exemplary lives of such men as Umberto Terracini, Leone Ginzburg, Emanuele and Ennio Artom, Giuseppe, Mario, and Alberto Levi, and the fallen partisans Sergio, Paolo, and Franco Diena; Jewish participation in the Resistance, again much greater than the size of our community warranted; the eight hundred people deported, of whom nothing is left but a plaque in our cemetery. But on this occasion we do not want to talk about victories, defeats, struggles, and massacres. Today we want to remember, invite others to remember, and make ourselves known before it is too late. Indeed, for every human group there is a critical mass below which stability ends: then it diminishes ever more rapidly, heading toward decline, and a silent and painless dissolution. Barring unforeseeable developments, our community seems to be moving down this road. With this exhibition we intend an act of filial piety, to show our Turinese friends, and our children, who we are and where we come from.
From the exhibition catalog Ebrei a Torino: Ricerche per il Centenario
della Sinagoga (1884–1984) (Jews in Turin: Studies for the Centenary of
the Synagogue [1884–1984]) (Turin: Allemandi, 1984)
1. The Mole Antonelliana is a major Turin landmark. Originally conceived as a synagogue, it was designed by Alessandro Antonelli and constructed between 1863 and 1889.
2. Tedesco is the Italian word for “German.”
3. “Italy,” from the collection Poemetti (1904), by Giovanni Pascoli (1865–1912).
The Last Christmas of the War
Our Lager, Monowitz, near Auschwitz, was in many ways anomalous. The barrier that separated us from the world, symbolized by a double barbed-wire fence, was not as impenetrable as it was elsewhere. Because of our work requirements, we came into daily contact with people who were “free,” or at least less enslaved than we were: technicians, German engineers and foremen, Russian and Polish workers, British, American, French, and Italian prisoners of war. Officially, they were not allowed to talk to us, the KZ (Konzentrations-Zentrum) pariahs, but this prohibition was constantly ignored, and, besides, news of the free world reached us through thousands of channels. In the factory dumps we could find copies of daily papers, maybe two or three days old and soaked with rain, and there we read with trepidation the German war bulletins; they were incomplete, censored, euphemistic, yet revealing. The Allied prisoners of war listened to Radio London in secret and, in even greater secrecy, relayed the exciting news to us. In December 1944, the Russians had entered Hungary and Poland, the British were in Romagna, the Americans were engaged in a hard fight in the Ardennes but were winning against Japan in the Pacific.
On the other hand, to know how the war was going, we didn’t really need to secure news from faraway places. At night, when all the camp noises died out, we could hear the thunder of approaching artillery: the front was no farther than a hundred kilometers; there were rumors that the Red Army had already reached the Beskids. The huge factory where we worked had been bombed several times with scientific and malevolent precision. One bomb, only one, was dropped on the heating system, disabling it for two weeks. As soon as the damage was repaired and the chimney began to smoke again, another bomb would fall—and so on. It was clear that the Russians, or the Allies in agreement with the Russians, wanted to halt production but not destroy the plant. They planned to take it over, intact, at the end of the war, and so they did; today it is the biggest synthetic-rubber factory in Poland. The antiaircraft defense was nonexistent, there were no fighter planes in sight, there were batteries on the roofs but they didn’t fire; maybe they had run out of ammunition.
In other words, Germany was near death, but the Germans did not seem to realize it. After the attempt on Hitler’s life, in July, the country lived in terror: an accusation, an absence from work, a careless word was enough for someone to end up in the Gestapo’s hands as a defeatist. Thus, both the military and the civilians continued to carry out their tasks as always, driven both by fear and by their inbred sense of discipline. A fanatic and suicidal Germany was terrorizing a Germany that was discouraged and inwardly vanquished.
Shortly before that, toward the end of October, we had the opportunity to observe “close up” a singular school of fanaticism, a typical example of National Socialist education. A camp for Hitler Youth had been set up on barren land adjoining our Lager. There were maybe two hundred teenagers, still almost children; in the morning they raised the flag, sang fierce anthems, and carried out marching and shooting drills, armed with ancient muskets. We understood later that they were being trained to join the Volkssturm, that randomly assembled army of old men and children that according to the Führer’s insane plans was to mount
the final defense against the advancing Russians. But in the afternoon their instructors, who were SS veterans, would lead them among us, who were busy removing the rubble left by the bombings or hastily building, with bricks or sandbags, low, useless protection walls.
They led the youths among us on a “guided tour,” teaching them, in loud voices, as if we had neither ears to hear nor wits to understand. “These you see here are the Reich’s enemies, your enemies. Look at them carefully: can you call them men? They are Untermenschen, subhumans! They stink because they don’t wash; they are in rags because they don’t take care of themselves. Many of them don’t even understand German. They are subversives, outlaws, thieves from the four corners of Europe, but we have made them harmless. Now they work for us, but they’re only good for the most rudimentary tasks. Besides, it’s right that they should toil to repair the damage of war: they’re the ones who wanted it—them, the Jews, the Communists, the agents of plutocracies.” The child-soldiers listened, credulous and dumbfounded. Seen up close, they inspired compassion and revulsion at the same time. They were emaciated and frightened, but looked at us with intense hatred: so we were the ones responsible for all evils, for the cities in ruins, for the famine, for their fathers’ deaths on the Russian front. The Führer was harsh but just; it was just to serve him.
At the time, I was working as a “specialist” in a chemical laboratory inside the plant. I have already told the story elsewhere; oddly, however, as the years go by, those memories neither fade nor disappear. On the contrary, they are enriched by details that I thought forgotten, and that sometimes gain meaning in the light of someone else’s memories, letters I receive or books I read. It was snowing, the weather was very cold, and working in the laboratory was far from easy. At times, the heating system wasn’t working and at night the cold would burst the bottles of reagents and the big flask of distilled water.
Often, the raw material or the reagents for the analyses were not available. Then we would have to make do with surrogates or manufacture them on the spot. When we didn’t have ethyl acetate for a colorimetric measurement, the head of the lab told me to produce a liter of it and procured the necessary acetic acid and ethyl alcohol. The procedure is simple, and I knew it almost by heart: I had carried it out in Turin in 1941 for some organic preparation. Three years earlier, but it felt like three thousand. Everything went smoothly until the final distillation; at that point, the water suddenly stopped coming out of the faucets.
The situation could have turned into a minor disaster, since I was using a glass cooler: had the water come back, the cooler pipe, heated inside by the chemical vapors, would certainly have broken upon contact with the ice-cold water. I turned off the faucet, found a bucket, filled it with distilled water, and dipped into it the small pump of a Höppler thermostat: the pump pushed the water into the cooler, and the warm water coming out dropped back into the bucket. There were no problems for a few minutes, but then I realized that the ethyl acetate was no longer condensing: it was emerging from the pipe almost entirely as vapor. This was because the distilled water (no other water was available) that I had found wasn’t much, and was too warm by now. What to do? There was plenty of snow on the windowsills; I made some snowballs and put them in the bucket one by one. While I was busy with my balls of gray snow, Dr. Pannwitz walked into the lab. He was the German chemist who had subjected me to an odd “state examination” to determine whether my professional knowledge was adequate. He was a fanatical Nazi. He looked suspiciously at my makeshift equipment and the cloudy water that could have damaged his beloved pump, but said nothing and left.
A few days later, around mid-December, the sink under one of the aspiration hoods clogged up. The foreman told me to unclog it; it seemed natural to him that this dirty job was for me to do and not for the lab technician, who was a girl called Frau Mayer; and after all this seemed natural to me, too. I was the only one who could lie down easily on the floor with no fear of getting dirty: my striped clothes were already so filthy. . . . I was standing up after screwing the trap back into place, when I saw Frau Mayer next to me. She spoke in a low voice, looking guilty; among the eight or ten girls in the laboratory, who were German, Polish, and Ukrainian, she was the only one who did not show contempt toward me. As my hands were already dirty, could I perhaps fix the flat tire on her bicycle? Of course, she would compensate me.
This apparently innocent request was full of sociological implications. She had said “please,” in itself a breach of the upside-down code of conduct that governed the Germans’ relations with us; she had spoken to me for reasons unrelated to work; she had made a sort of contract with me, and a contract is made between equals; she had expressed, or at least implied, gratitude for fixing the sink in her place. However, the girl was also asking me to commit a violation, something that could be very dangerous for me: I was there as a chemist and in fixing her bike I would take time away from my professional obligations. In short, she was proposing a risky but potentially useful complicity. To have human relations with someone from “the other side” involved danger, social promotion, and also extra food for today and tomorrow. In an instant I did the algebraic sum of the three addends, hunger prevailed by far, and I accepted the proposal.
Frau Mayer handed me the key to the lock; I should go fetch the bicycle, which was in the courtyard. This was unthinkable; I did my best to explain that either she had to go or she had to send someone else. “We” were by definition thieves and liars; there would be trouble if someone saw me with a bicycle! A similar problem arose when I saw the vehicle. It had a little pocket with adhesive, rubber patches, and small levers to remove the tire, but there was no pump, and without a pump I couldn’t find the hole in the inner tube. Incidentally, I should add that in those days bicycles, and related punctures, were much more common than they are now, and that almost all Europeans, especially the young, knew how to patch a tire. A pump? No problem, said Frau Mayer, I could borrow one from Meister Grubach, her colleague next door. No, this was not so simple; not without embarrassment I had to ask her to write and sign for me a note “Bitte um die Fahrradpumpe.”
I fixed the bicycle, and Frau Mayer gave me, in great secrecy, a hard-boiled egg and four lumps of sugar. Let it be clear: given the circumstances and the going rates, this payment was more than generous. While furtively handing me the bundle, Frau Mayer whispered a sentence that gave me much to think about: “Soon it will be Christmas.” Obvious words, or, rather, absurd addressed to a Jewish prisoner; they were certainly intended to mean something else, something that at that time no German would have dared to convey openly.
Relating this episode forty years later, I do not intend to defend Nazi Germany. One humane German does not whitewash the innumerable inhuman or indifferent Germans, but it does have the merit of breaking a stereotype.
• • •
It was a memorable Christmas for the world at war; it was memorable for me as well, because it was marked by a miracle. At Auschwitz, the different categories of prisoners (political prisoners, common criminals, asocial individuals, homosexuals, etc.) could receive gift packages from home, but not the Jews. On the other hand, from whom would they have been able to receive such presents? From families who had been exterminated or were held captive in the ghettos that still survived? From the very few who had escaped the raids, hidden in basements or attics, frightened and without any money? And who knew our address? In every respect, we were dead to the world.
And yet a parcel sent by my sister and my mother, who were hiding in Italy, reached me through a chain of friends. The last link in the chain was Lorenzo Perrone, the bricklayer from Fossano whom I wrote about in If This Is a Man, and whose poignant end is described in Lilith. The parcel contained Italian-made chocolate, cookies, and dried milk. However, ordinary language is inadequate to convey the true value of that parcel, the impact it had on me and on my friend Alberto. Eating, food, hunger were words that in the Lager had meanings totally different from the usual ones.
That unexpected, improbable, impossible package was like a meteorite, a heavenly object, loaded with symbols. Its value was immense and it carried an immense living force.
We were no longer alone: a link had been established with the outside world. And there were delicious treats to eat for many days. But there were also serious practical problems, to be solved immediately: we were like a passerby presented with a gold ingot in the middle of the street. Where to put it? How to preserve it? How to protect it from the greed of others? How to invest it? Our year-old hunger was pushing us toward the worst solution: to eat everything right away. We had to resist temptation; our weakened stomachs would not stand up to the challenge, within an hour we would end up with indigestion or worse.
We had no safe hiding place. We distributed the food among all sanctioned pockets in our clothes; we also stitched illicit pockets on the backs of our jackets so that, even in the case of a search, something could be saved. However, to carry everything with us, to work, to the washhouse, to the latrines, was inconvenient and awkward. Alberto and I discussed the matter at length in the evening, after the curfew. We were bound by a strict pact: everything one of us managed to secure, apart from the regular ration, was to be divided into two absolutely equal parts. In these exploits Alberto was always more successful and I had often asked him why he continued his partnership with someone as inefficient as I was. Alberto always replied: “One never knows; I’m quicker, but you’re luckier.” For once, he had been proved right.