by Primo Levi
With surprising foresight, which is another way of saying by a highly complex and mysterious mental process, he had understood the importance, in fact the necessity, of owning a uniform, given that he had to deal with people in uniform. He had created quite a theatrical one, not without fantasy, out of a pair of Soviet boots, a Polish railwayman’s cap and a jacket and pair of trousers found heaven knows where, which seemed to have belonged to a Fascist uniform and perhaps had; he had had badges sewn on the collar, gold braid on the cap, stripes and chevrons on the sleeves, and had covered his chest with medals.
However, he was not a tyrant, and not even a bad administrator. He had the good sense to keep molestations, extortions and abuses of authority within modest limits, and possessed an undeniable vocation for red tape. Now, since these Russians were curiously sensitive to the fascination of red tape (of which however they wholly missed the ultimate rational significance), and since, it seemed, they loved bureaucracy with that platonic and spiritual love which does not arrive at or desire possession, Rovi was benevolently tolerated, albeit not really appreciated, in the environment of the Kommandantur. Furthermore, he was bound to Captain Egorov by a paradoxical impossible tie of sympathy between misanthropes; for both were sad individuals, afflicted, disgusted and dyspeptic, and sought isolation in the general euphoria.
In the camp of Bogucice I found Leonardo, already accredited as a doctor, and besieged by a scarcely profitable but extremely numerous clientele; like myself he had come from Buna, and had arrived at Katowice a few weeks earlier, following less intricate paths than mine. Among the Häftlinge of Buna there were far too many doctors, and few (in practice, only those who spoke German, or who were extremely skilled in the art of survival) succeeded in gaining recognition as such by the head doctor of the SS. So Leonardo had not enjoyed any privileges; he had been subjected to the most wearing manual tasks, and had lived his year of Lager in an extremely precarious manner. He painfully endured the fatigue and the cold, and had been sent to the infirmary countless times, for oedema of the feet, infected wounds and general undernourishment. Three times, in three infirmary selections, he had been chosen to die in the gas chamber, and three times he had narrowly escaped his fate through the solidarity of his colleagues in office. However, besides good fortune, he also possessed another virtue essential for those places: an unlimited capacity for endurance, a silent courage, not innate, not religious, not transcendent, but deliberate and willed hour by hour, a virile patience, which sustained him miraculously to the very edge of collapse.
The infirmary of Bogucice was to be found in the same school which lodged the Russian Command, in two small, quite clean rooms. It had been created from nothing by Marya Fyodorovna: Marya was a military nurse of about forty, with oblique and wild eyes, short nose with flared nostrils, and the agile, silent movements of a forest cat. In fact, she came from the forests; she was born in the heart of Siberia.
Marya was an energetic, stormy, disorderly and brisk woman. She procured drugs, partly through the normal administrative channels, drawing on the Soviet military depots; partly through the multiple channels of the black market; and partly (and it was the major part) by co-operating actively in sacking the warehouses of the former German Lagers and the abandoned German infirmaries and pharmacies, whose reserves had previously been the fruit of sacks carried out by the Germans among all the nations of Europe. So every day supplies arrived at the infirmary of Bogucice without plan or method: hundreds of boxes of pharmaceutical specialities, with labels and instructions in every language, which needed to be ordered and catalogued for possible use.
One of the most important things I had learnt in Auschwitz was that one must always avoid being a nobody. All roads are closed to a person who appears useless, all are open to a person who has a function, even the most fatuous. So after I had taken counsel with Leonardo, I presented myself to Marya, and offered my services as a polyglot-pharmacist
Marya Fyodorovna examined me with an eye expert in weighing up males. Was I a ‘doktor’? Yes, I was, I maintained, assisted in my ambiguity by the strong linguistic discord; the Siberian woman, in fact, did not speak German, but (although she was not Jewish) she knew a little Yiddish, learnt heaven knows where. I did not have a very professional or a very attractive air, but perhaps I was passable for work in a back room: Marya took a crumpled piece of paper out of her pocket, and asked me what was my name.
When I added ‘Primo’ to ‘Levi’, her green eyes lit up, at first suspectingly, then inquiringly, finally benevolently. But then we were almost relations, she explained to me. I ‘Primo’ and she ‘Prima’; ‘Prima’ was her surname, her ‘familia’, Marya Fyodorovna Prima. Excellent, I could have the job. Shoes and clothes? Well, it was no easy matter, she would speak about it to Egorov and to some of her acquaintances, perhaps something could be found later. She scribbled my name on the piece of paper and the following day solemnly gave me the propusk, a permit of a somewhat homely appearance, which authorized me to enter and leave the camp at any hour of the day or night.
I lived in a room with eight Italian workers, and every morning I went to the infirmary to work. Marya Fyodorovna passed on to me many hundreds of coloured boxes to classify, and gave me small friendly presents: boxes of glucose (extremely welcome), liquorice and mint tablets; shoelaces; sometimes a packet of salt or custard powder. One evening she invited me for tea in her room, and I noticed that on the wall above her bed hung seven or eight photographs of men in uniform; they were almost all portraits of well-known faces, of the soldiers and officers of the Kommandantur. Marya called them all familiarly by name and spoke of them with affectionate simplicity; she had known them for so many years now, and they had fought the whole war together.
After a few days, as my work as pharmacist left me with a lot of free time, Leonardo called me to help him in the surgery. The Russian intention had been to restrict the surgery to the members of the Bogucice camp; in fact, as the treatment was free and without any formalities, Russian soldiers, civilians from Katowice, people passing through, beggars and doubtful figures who did not want to have anything to do with the authorities also came to ask for examination or medicines.
Neither Marya nor Dr Danchenko had anything to say about this state of affairs (not that Danchenko ever had anything to say about anything; nor did he concern himself about anything except courting the girls, which he did with the mannerisms of an operetta grand duke; early in the morning, when he came for a rapid inspection, he was already drunk and full of happiness). Nevertheless, a few weeks later, Marya summoned me, and with a very official air informed me that ‘by order of Moscow’ the activities of the surgery had to be subjected to a minute control. So I would have to keep a register, and each evening note down the name and age of the patients, their illness and the type and quantity of medicines provided or prescribed.
In itself, the matter did not seem without sense; but it was necessary to clarify certain practical details, which I discussed with Marya. For example, how could we be sure of the identity of the patients? But Marya thought the objection trifling; ‘Moscow’ would certainly be satisfied if I wrote down the general particulars as declared. But a more serious difficulty arose; in what language was the register to be kept? Not in Italian or French or German, which neither Marya nor Danchenko knew. In Russian? No, I did not know Russian. Marya meditated, perplexed, then she brightened up, and exclaimed: ‘Galina!’ Galina would save the situation.
Galina was one of the girls attached to the Kommandantur; she knew German, so I could dictate the minutes to her in German, and she could translate them into Russian on the spot. Marya immediately sent for Galina (Marya’s authority, although ill-defined, seemed great), and so began our collaboration.
Galina was eighteen, and came from Kazàtin in the Ukraine. She was dark, cheerful and graceful; she had an intelligent face with sensitive, petite features, and was the only one of her group to dress with a certain elegance, and the only one with shoulders, hands
and feet of acceptable dimensions. She spoke German reasonably; with her help the famous minutes were laboriously manufactured evening by evening, with the stub of a pencil, on a block of greyish paper that Marya had handed to me like a holy relic. How does one say ‘asthma’ in German? And ‘ankle’? And ‘sprain’? And what are the corresponding Russian terms? At every linguistic obstacle we were forced to stop full of doubt and to fall back on complicated gestures, which ended in peals of laughter from Galina.
Far more rarely from me. Face to face with Galina I felt weak, ill and dirty; I was painfully conscious of my miserable appearance, of my badly shaved face, of my Auschwitz clothes; I was acutely conscious of Galina’s glance, still almost infantile, in which vague compassion was mixed with definite repulsion.
Nevertheless, after a few weeks of working together, an atmosphere of tenuous reciprocal confidence had settled between us. Galina gave me to understand that the business of the minutes was not all that serious, that Marya Fyodorovna was ‘old and mad’ and would be satisfied so long as the sheets she received were covered with writing, and that Doctor Danchenko was busy in wholly other matters (known to Galina in amazing detail) with Anna, with Tanya, with Vassilissa, and that he was as interested in the minutes as in ‘last year’s snow’. So the time dedicated to the melancholic bureaucratic gods began to dwindle, and Galina profited from the intervals to tell me her story in bits and pieces, while smoking distractedly.
In the middle of the war, two years previously, she had been conscripted by this very Kommandantur in the Caucasus where she had taken refuge with her family; conscripted in the simplest of ways, that is stopped on the road, and taken to the Command HQ to type a few letters. She had gone there and she had stayed; she had been unable to detach herself (or more probably, I thought, she had not even tried). The Kommandantur had become her real family; she had followed it for thousands of miles, along the dislocated supply lines and interminable front, from the Crimea to Finland. She did not have a uniform, or even a specific post or rank, but she was useful to her fighting companions, she was their friend, and so she followed them, because there was the war, and everyone had to do his duty; moreover, the world was large and varied, and it was fun to wander around when one was young and without worries.
Galina had not even the shade of a worry. One met her in the morning going to the laundry with a bundle of washing balanced on her head, singing like a thrush; or in the offices of the Command HQ barefooted, hammering away at a typewriter; or on Sundays walking along the boulevard, arm in arm with a soldier, never the same one; or in the evening on the balcony, romantically entranced, while a smitten Belgian, in rags, serenaded her on the guitar. She was a country girl, alert, ingenious, a bit of a flirt, very vivacious, not particularly well educated, or particularly serious; yet one felt in her the same force, the same dignity as in her comrades and boyfriends, the dignity of a man who works and knows why, of a man who fights and knows that he is in the right, of a man who has his life ahead of him.
In the middle of May, a few days after the end of the war, she came to say good-bye to me. She was leaving: they had told her she could go home. Did she have her travel-warrant? Did she have her train fare? ‘No,’ she replied smiling, ‘Nye nada,’ there was no need, in these matters one always found a way out; and she disappeared, sucked up into the emptiness of Russian space, along the paths of her endless country, leaving behind her a sharp scent of earth, of youth and of joy.
I also had other duties; to help Leonardo in the surgery, naturally; and to help Leonardo in the daily check for lice.
This last service was necessary in those countries and in those times, when petechial typhus crept about, endemic and mortal. The job was not very attractive; we had to go through all the huts, and ask everybody to strip to the waist and hand us his shirt, in whose creases and seams the lice normally nestled and laid eggs. This type of louse has a red spot on its back; according to a pleasantry which was repeated endlessly by our patients, if the spot was sufficiently enlarged a minute hammer and sickle would be seen. Lice are also called ‘the infantry’, with fleas as the artillery, mosquitoes as the air force, bugs as the parachutists and crab-lice as the sappers. In Russia they are called vshi; I learnt that from Marya, who had given me a second block of paper on which to note each day the number and name of those with lice, and to underline the backsliders in red.
The backsliders were rare, with the single notable exception of Ferrari. Ferrari was a prodigy of inertia. He belonged to a small group of ordinary criminals, formerly held at San Vittore, the main prison at Milan, to whom the Germans had given the option in 1944 of imprisonment in Italy or labour service in Germany, and who had opted for the latter. There were about forty, almost all thieves or receivers; they formed a closed, colourful and turbulent microcosm, a perpetual source of trouble for the Russian Command and for Mr Rovi.
But Ferrari was treated by his colleagues with open contempt, and so found himself relegated to an obligatory solitude. He was a small man, about forty, thin and sallow, almost bald, with an absent-minded expression. He spent his days stretched out on his bunk, and was an indefatigable reader. He read everything that came to hand: Italian, French, German, Polish newspapers and books. Every two or three days, at the moment of the check, he told me: ‘I’ve finished that book. Have you another one to lend me? But not in Russian: you know that I have difficulty with Russian.’ Not that he was a polyglot: in fact, he was practically illiterate. But he still ‘read’ every book, from the first line to the last, identifying the individual letters with satisfaction, pronouncing them with his lips and laboriously reconstructing the words without bothering about their meaning. That was enough for him as, on different levels, others take pleasure in solving crossword puzzles, or integrating differential equations or calculating the orbits of the asteroids.
He was a singular individual, as was confirmed by his story, which he willingly told me, and which I narrate here.
‘For many years I attended the school for thieves at Loreto. There was this dummy fixed up with bells and a wallet in its pocket; one had to filch the wallet without the bells sounding, and I never succeeded. So they never authorized me to steal; they made me a guard. I was a guard for two years. The earnings are small and it’s risky; it’s not a good job.
‘Chewing over this, one fine day I decided that, with or without authorization, if I wanted to earn my living I would have to set up on my own.
‘There was the war, the evacuation, the black market, a crowd of people on the trams. I was on a Number Two tram, at Porta Ludovica, as no one knew me in that area. Near me there was a woman with a large bag; in her coat pocket I could feel a wallet. I took out my saccagno very slowly and began to cut the pocket.’
I must open a brief technical parenthesis. The saccagno, Ferrari explained to me, is a precision instrument which is made by breaking in two the blade of an open razor. Its purpose is to cut bags and pockets, so it must be extremely sharp. Occasionally it is also used to disfigure people, in questions of honour; and this is why disfigured people are also called saccagnati.
‘I had almost finished, when a woman, not the one with the pocket, mark you, but another, began to cry “Thief, thief!” I was doing nothing to her, she did not know me, and she didn’t even know the woman with the pocket. She was not even from the police, she was somebody who had nothing to do with the matter at all. At any rate, the tram stopped, they caught me, I ended in San Vittore, and from there in Germany, and from Germany here. You see? That’s what can happen if you’re too enterprising.’
Since then, Ferrari had not been at all enterprising. He was the most submissive and docile of my patients; he undressed immediately without protest, handed me his shirt with the inevitable lice and the morning after submitted to the disinfection without putting on airs like an offended lord. But the following day, the lice, heaven knows how, were there again. He was like that; he was no longer enterprising, he no longer put up resistance, not even to the l
ice.
My professional activity brought at least two advantages: the propusk and better food.
Food in Bogucice camp, in fact, was not short; we were given the Russian military ration, which consisted of two pounds of bread, two plates of soup a day, a kasha (that is, a dish with meat, lard, millet or other vegetables), and Russian-style tea, diluted, abundant and sweet. But Leonardo and I had to repair the damage caused by a year of Lager; we were still subject to an uncontrollable hunger, for the most part psychological, and the ration was not enough for us.
Marya had authorized us to eat our midday meal at the infirmary. The infirmary kitchen was run by two Parisian maquisardes, working-class women no longer young, also survivors from the Lager, where they had lost their husbands; they were taciturn and mournful women, whose past and recent sufferings appeared to be mastered and kept within limits on their precociously aged faces by the sharp moral consciousness of political fighters.
One of them, Simone, served at our table. She ladled out the soup once, and a second time. Then she looked at me, almost with mistrust: ‘Vous répétez, jeune homme?’ Timidly I nodded assent, ashamed of my bestial greed. Under Simone’s severe look, I rarely dared to ‘répéter’ a fourth time.
As for the propusk, it formed a sign of social distinction rather than a specific advantage; in fact, anybody could easily leave through the hole in the fence, and go to the city as free as a bird in the sky. This is what many of the thieves did, to exercise their art at Katowice or even farther afield; they did not come back, or else they came back to the camp after a few days, often giving different names, not that anybody cared.