by Primo Levi
To complicate matters another trainload of Italians coming from Rumania arrived at Zhmerinka on the third day. They looked totally different from us; there were about six hundred men and women, well dressed, with suitcases and trunks, some with cameras slung round their necks – almost tourists. They looked down on us, like poor relations; so far they had travelled in a regular train of passenger coaches, paying for their tickets, and were in order as regards their passports, money, travel documents and collective permit for Italy via Odessa. If only we could gain permission from the Russians to join up with them, then we too should reach Odessa.
With much condescension, they gave us to understand that they were persons of consequence; they were civilian and military officials from the Italian Legation at Bucharest, as well as certain other persons who, after the ARMIR* had been dissolved, had stayed in Rumania with various duties, or to fish in troubled waters. There were whole family groups among them, husbands with lawfully-wedded Rumanian wives and numerous children.
But the Russians, in contrast to the Germans, possess little talent for subtle distinctions and classifications. A few days later we were all travelling together towards the north, towards an unknown goal, at all events towards a new exile. Italian-Rumanians and Italian-Italians, all in the same cattle-trucks, all sick at heart, all in the hands of the inscrutable Soviet bureaucracy, an obscure and gigantic power, not ill-intentioned towards us, but suspicious, negligent, stupid, contradictory and in effect as blind as the forces of nature.
9
Northwards
In the few days we spent at Zhmerinka we were reduced to penury; this, in those conditions, was in itself not particularly tragic, compared with the far more serious prospect of an imminent departure for an unknown destination. Lacking the shelter provided by Gottlieb’s talent for improvisation, we had undergone the full impact of the ‘Rumanians’’ superior economic power; they could pay five, ten times as much as we could for any goods, and did so, because they too had exhausted their food supplies, and they too foresaw that we should be leaving for a place where money would count for little, and where it would be difficult to keep it.
We had encamped at the station, and often made expeditions to the village, which consisted of low, unequal houses, built with a curious and amusing contempt for geometry and uniformity: nearly aligned façades, near vertical walls, near right angles; but here and there a pillar was to be found, resembling a column, with a pretentious capital and volutes. Thick thatched roofs covered smoky, gloomy interiors, where one could glimpse the enormous central stove with straw mattresses for sleeping, and the black icons in a corner. At a crossroad a gigantic, white-haired, barefoot story-teller recited; he stared at the sky with his blind eyes, and at intervals bent his head and made the sign of the cross on his forehead with his thumb.
In the main street, fixed on two stakes driven into the muddy soil, stood a wooden plaque with a map of Europe painted on it, now fading from the sun and rains of many a summer. It must have been used to follow the war bulletins, but it had been painted from memory, as if seen from a great distance; France was decidedly a coffee pot, the Iberian Peninsula a head in profile, with the nose sticking out from Portugal, and Italy a genuine boot, just a trifle oblique, with the sole and heel smooth and straightlined. Only four cities were shown in Italy: Rome, Venice, Naples and Dronero.
Zhmerinka was a large agricultural village, formerly a market town, as could be deduced from the huge central square, of trodden earth, with numerous parallel rows of iron bars to which beasts could be tethered. It was now wholly empty; but in a corner, in the shade of an oak tree, a tribe of nomads had encamped, a vision stemming from distant millennia.
Both men and women were dressed in goatskins, tied to their limbs with leather thongs; on their feet they wore slippers made from the bark of birch trees. There were several families, about twenty people, and their home was an enormous cart, as massive as some instrument of war, constructed of beams crudely squared and mortised, resting on heavy wheels of solid wood; the four shaggy carthorses to be seen grazing nearby must have had a hard time dragging it. Who were they, where did they come from and where were they going? We did not know; but in those days we felt that they were singularly close to us, blown like us by the wind, dependent like us on the fickleness of a distant, unknown, erratic will, symbolized in the wheels dragging us and them, in the stupid perfection of the circle which has neither beginning nor end.
Not far from the square, near the railway, we came across another apparition heavy with foreboding. We saw a depot of logs, massive and rough like everything in that country where the subtle and refined have no place; among the logs, beaten to the ground by the sun, cooked by the sun, lay a dozen German prisoners, like unattended cattle. No one guarded them, no one commanded them or looked after them; as far as we could see, they had been forgotten, simply abandoned to their fate.
They were dressed in rags, which were faded but still recognizable as the proud uniforms of the Wehrmacht. They had pinched, dazed, wild faces; accustomed to live, act and fight within the iron bounds of Authority, their support and sustenance, they found themselves impotent and inanimate when Authority itself ceased. These good subjects, good executors of all commands, good instruments of power, did not possess even a particle of power in themselves; they were emptied and inert, like barren leaves piled up by the wind in sheltered corners; they had not even sought safety in flight.
They saw us, and some of them moved towards us with the uncertain steps of automata. They asked for bread; not in their own language, but in Russian. We refused, because our bread was precious. But Daniele did not refuse; Daniele, whose strong wife, whose brother, parents and no fewer than thirty relatives had been killed by the Germans; Daniele, who was the sole survivor of the raid on the Venice ghetto, and who from the day of the liberation had fed on grief, took out a piece of bread, showed it to these phantoms and placed it on the ground. But he insisted that they come to get it dragging themselves on all fours; which they did, docilely.
It must have been true that groups of Allied ex-prisoners had embarked at Odessa months before, as some Russians had told us, for the station of Zhmerinka, our temporary and scarcely intimate residence, still bore the signs: a triumphal arch made of branches, now withered, bearing the words ‘Long live the United Nations’; enormous ghastly portraits of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, with phrases extolling the victory against the common enemy. But the brief season of concord between the three great allies must now have been drawing to its end, for the paintings were discoloured and faded by the weather, and were taken down during our stay. A painter arrived; he put up scaffolding along the wall of the station, and covered the slogan ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ with a coating of whitewash; in its place we saw, with a subtle sense of chill, another quite different slogan appear, letter by letter: ‘V pered na Zapàd’, ‘On towards the west’.
The repatriation of Allied soldiers had now finished, but other trains arrived and left for the south before our eyes. These were also Russian trains but quite distinct from the military ones, glorious and homely, which we had seen passing through Katowice. They were trainloads of Ukrainian women returning from Germany; only women, because the men had gone off as soldiers or partisans, or else had been killed by the Germans.
Their exile had been different from ours, and from that of the prisoners of war. Not all of them, but the majority, had abandoned their homes ‘spontaneously’. A coerced, blackmailed spontaneity, distorted by subtle and heavy Nazi lies and propaganda, both threatening and enticing, blaring out from the radio, newspapers, posters; nevertheless, a demonstration of free will, an assent. Women aged sixteen to forty, hundreds of thousands of them, peasant women, students, factory workers, had left the devastated fields, the closed schools and bombarded factories for the invaders’ bread. Not a few were mothers, who had left to earn bread for their children. In Germany they had found bread, barbed wire, hard work, German order, servitude an
d shame; now under the weight of their shame they were being repatriated, without joy and without hope.
Victorious Russia had no forgiveness for them. They returned home in roofless cattle-trucks, which were divided horizontally by boards so as to exploit the space better: sixty, eighty women to a truck. They had no luggage, only the worn-out discoloured clothes they were wearing. If their young bodies were still solid and healthy, their closed and bitter faces, their evasive eyes, displayed a disturbing, animal-like humiliation and resignation; not a voice emerged from those coils of limbs, which sluggishly untangled themselves when the train stopped at the station. No one was waiting for them, no one seemed aware of them. Their inertia, their fugitive shyness, their painful lack of pudency, was that of humiliated and tame beasts. We alone watched their passage, with compassion and sadness, a new testimony to, and a new aspect of, the pestilence which had prostrated Europe.
We left Zhmerinka at the end of June, oppressed by a deep anguish born of disillusionment and uncertainty about our destiny which had found an obscure echo and confirmation in the scenes we had witnessed.
We were fourteen hundred Italians, including the ‘Rumanians’. We were loaded on to about thirty goods trucks, which were tacked on to a northbound train. At Zhmerinka nobody knew or was prepared to tell us our destination; but we were going northwards, away from the sea, away from Italy, towards exile, solitude, gloom, winter. Despite this, we thought it a good sign that provisions were not distributed for the journey; perhaps it would not be a long one.
In fact we only travelled for two days and one night, with very few stops, through a majestic and monotonous scenery of desert steppes, forests, forlorn villages and wide slow rivers. It was uncomfortable, crushed in the goods trucks; on the first evening, taking advantage of a halt, Cesare and I got out to stretch our legs and find some more satisfactory arrangement. At the head of the train we saw several passenger carriages, and a hospital car; it seemed empty. ‘Why don’t we climb in?’ proposed Cesare. ‘It’s not allowed,’ I replied foolishly. Why in fact should it be forbidden, and by whom? In any case, on various occasions we had noticed already that the Western religion (German in particular) of differential prohibitions has no deep roots in Russia.
The hospital car was not only empty, but offered sybaritic refinements. Washbasins which worked, with water and soap; first-rate suspension to absorb the jarring of the wheels; wonderful bunks resting on adjustable springs, complete with white sheets and warm blankets. At the head of the bed I chose, I even found, as an additional gift of the gods, a book in Italian: I Ragazzi di Via Paal, which I had never read as a child. While our companions were already declaring us lost, we enjoyed a heavenly night.
The train crossed the River Beresina at the end of the second day, as the sun, garnet red, sank obliquely between the tree trunks with bewitching slowness, casting a blood-red glow on the waters, the woods and the battle-strewn plain. The journey ended a few hours later, in the middle of the night, at the height of a violent storm. We had to climb down in a deluge, in total darkness, lit momentarily by flashes of lightning. We walked for half an hour in single file through the grass and mud, each of us like a blind man, holding on to the man in front, while heaven knows whom the leader of the column followed; finally, soaked to the skin, we emerged at a huge dark edifice, half destroyed by bombardment. The rain continued, the floor was muddy and wet and more water came through the holes in the roof; we waited for day in a state of exhaustion and passive drowsiness.
The dawn arose in splendour. We went outside, and only then could we see that we had spent the night in the pit of a theatre, in the middle of a large Soviet military camp which had been destroyed and abandoned. All the buildings had been subjected to a Teutonically methodical devastation and plundering; the German armies in flight had carried away everything that could be carried: locks, bars, railings, the entire lighting and heating plant, the water pipes, even the fence-posts. Not a nail had been left in the walls. The tracks and sleepers of a near-by railway junction had been torn up: with a special machine, the Russians told us.
In short, it was more than a sack: it was the genius of destruction, of anti-creation, here as at Auschwitz; it was the mystique of barrenness, beyond all demands of war or impulse for booty.
But they had not been able to carry away the unforgettable frescoes which covered the inside walls: the work, naïve, forceful and crude, of some anonymous soldier-poet. Three gigantic horsemen, armed with swords, helmets and clubs, stood on a hill, turning their eyes towards an endless horizon of virgin lands to be conquered. Stalin, Lenin, Molotov, reproduced with reverent affection in intent, with sacrilegious audacity in effect, and really only recognizable by their respective moustache, pointed beard and spectacles. Then there was an enormous spider, at the centre of a web as large as the wall, with a lock of black hair across one eye, a swastika on its rump and written underneath: ‘Death to Hitler’s invaders.’ A Soviet soldier in chains, tall and blond, raised a handcuffed arm to judge his judges; these, hundreds of them all against one, huddled on the benches of the amphitheatre-court, like so many repellent men-insects, with yellow and grey faces, twisted, distorted, as macabre as skulls, cringing against each other, like lemurs fleeing the light, driven back into nothingness by the prophetic gesture of the prisoner-hero.
In these spectral barracks, and spilling outside over the vast courtyards overgrown with grass, thousands of foreigners bivouacked, in transit like us, belonging to all the nations of Europe.
The generous warmth of the sun began to penetrate the damp soil, and mist arose from everything. I walked a few hundred yards away from the theatre, entering an overgrown meadow where I intended to strip and dry myself in the sun; and in the middle of the meadow, as if he were waiting for me, whom should I see but Mordo Nahum, my Greek, almost unrecognizable in his opulent fatness and the quasi-Soviet uniform he was wearing; he looked at me with his pale owlish eyes, lost in his round, rosy, red-bearded face.
He greeted me with fraternal cordiality, disregarding a spiteful question of mine about the United Nations who had taken so little care of him and his Greeks. He asked me how I was; did I need anything? Food? Clothes? Yes, I could not deny it, I had need of many things. ‘It will be seen to,’ he replied mysteriously and magnanimously; ‘here I count for something.’ He paused briefly, and added, ‘Do you need a woman?’
I looked at him dumbfounded; I was afraid I had not understood him. But the Greek, with a broad gesture, swept three-quarters of the horizon with his hand: and then I saw that in the middle of the tall grass, idly stretched out in the sun, far and near, lay some twenty huge sleepy girls. They were blonde and rosy creatures, with powerful backs, massive frames and placid bovine faces, dressed in various primitive and incongruous styles. ‘They come from Bessarabia,’ the Greek explained to me: ‘they are all employees of mine. The Russians like them like this, white and substantial. There was a great pagaille, a great muddle here before I arrived but since I have taken over, everything has been running smoothly: cleanliness, choice, discretion and no quarrels about money. It’s also a good business: and sometimes, moi aussi j’y prends mon plaisir.’
I now recalled, in a new light, the episode of the hard-boiled egg, and the indignant challenge of the Greek: ‘Come on, tell me an article I have never dealt in!’ No. I had no need of a woman, or at least not in that sense. After a cordial conversation, we went our ways; and since then, with the subsiding of the whirlwind which had upturned this old Europe, dragging it into a savage quadrille of separations and encounters, I have never again seen my Greek master, nor have I ever heard further of him.
10
The Little Hen
The assembly camp where I had so unexpectedly found Mordo Nahum was called Slutsk. Anyone searching for the village bearing this name on a good map of the Soviet Union could find it with a little care, in White Russia, about sixty miles south of Minsk. But the village called Starye Dorogi, our final destination, is not to be foun
d on any map.
In July 1945, about ten thousand persons were resident at Slutsk; I say persons, because any more restrictive term would be inappropriate. There were men, but also a good number of women and children. There were Catholics, Jews, Orthodox Christians and Muslims; there were people with white and with yellow skins and Negroes in American uniform; Germans, Poles, French, Greeks, Dutch, Italians and others; and in addition, Germans pretending to be Austrians, Austrians declaring themselves Swiss, Russians stating that they were Italians, a woman dressed as a man and finally, conspicuous in the midst of this ragged crowd, a Magyar general in full uniform, as quarrelsome, motley and stupid as a cock.
Slutsk was comfortable. It was hot, excessively so; we slept on the ground, but there was no work to be done and there was food for everybody. In fact, the canteen was wonderful; the Russians entrusted it, for one week in rotation, to each of the principal nationalities represented in the camp. We ate in a huge room, clean and full of light; each table was laid for eight; all one had to do was to arrive at the correct time and sit down, without controls or shifts or queues, and the procession of voluntary cooks arrived at once, with surprising foods, bread and tea. During our brief stay the Hungarians were in office: they made fiery goulashes, and enormous portions of spaghetti with parsley, overcooked and crazily sugared. Moreover, faithful to their national idols, they had instituted a gypsy orchestra; six peasant musicians, in corduroy trousers and embroidered leather doublets, majestic and sweating, began with the Soviet national anthem, then the Hungarian and the Hatikva (in honour of the large nucleus of Hungarian Jews), and continued with interminable frivolous Tziganes until the last diner had laid down his fork.