by Primo Levi
It is common knowledge that nobody is born with a decalogue already formed, but that everyone builds his own either during his life or at the end, on the basis of his own experiences, or of those of others which can be assimilated to his own; so that everybody’s moral universe, suitably interpreted, comes to be identified with the sum of his former experiences, and so represents an abridged form of his biography. The biography of my Greek was linear; it was that of a strong and cold man, solitary and logical, who had acted from his infancy within the rigid framework of a mercantile society. He was also (or had been) open to other claims; he was not indifferent to the sky and the sea of his own country, to the pleasures of the home and of the family, to dialectical encounters; but he had been conditioned to drive all this back to the margins of his day and life, so that it would not disturb what he called the ‘travail d’homme’. His life had been one of war, and he considered anyone who refused this iron universe of his to be despicable and blind. The Lager had happened to both of us; I had felt it as a monstrous upheaval, a loathsome anomaly in my history and in the history of the world; he, as a sad confirmation of things well known. ‘There is always war’, man is wolf to man: an old story. He never spoke to me of his two years of Auschwitz.
He spoke to me instead, with eloquence, of his multiple activities in Salonica, of goods bought, sold, smuggled by sea or across the Bulgarian frontier by night; of frauds shamefully endured and of others gloriously perpetrated; and finally, of the happy and serene hours spent after the day’s work by the shores of his bay, with his merchant colleagues, in cafés built on piles which he described to me with unusual freedom, and of the long discussions that took place there. What discussions? Of money, customs, freight charges, naturally, but of other things as well. What is the meaning of ‘knowledge’, ‘spirit’, ‘justice’, ‘truth’? What is the nature of the slender tie that binds the soul to the body, how is it established at birth and dissolved at death? What is liberty, and how can one reconcile the conflict between the liberty of the spirit and fate? What follows death?; and other great Greek matters. But naturally, all this in the evening, when business was over, with coffee or wine or olives, a lucid intellectual game between men active even in idleness; without passion.
Why the Greek recounted these matters to me, why he confessed to me, is not clear. Perhaps in front of me, so different, so foreign, he still felt alone, and his discourse was a monologue.
We left the kitchen in the evening, and returned to the Italians’ barracks; after much insistence, we had gained permission from the Italian colonel, the head of the camp, to stay in the barracks one more night – but only one. No food, and we were not to show ourselves too much, he did not want trouble with the Russians. The morning after we should have to leave. We dined on two eggs apiece, from those purchased in the morning, keeping the last two for breakfast. After the events of the day, I felt myself very ‘junior’ compared to the Greek. When we came to the eggs, I asked him if he knew how to distinguish a raw egg from a hard-boiled one from the outside. (One spins the egg rapidly, for example on a table; if it is hard boiled it spins for a long time, if it is raw it stops almost at once); it was a little trick I was proud of, I hoped the Greek did not know it, and that I could thus rehabilitate myself in his eyes, at least in small measure.
But the Greek stared at me coldly, like a wise serpent: ‘What do you take me for? Do you think I was born yesterday? Do you think I have never dealt in eggs? Come on, tell me an article I have never dealt in!’
I had to beat a retreat. The episode, negligible in itself, came back to me many months later, in the height of summer in the heart of White Russia, on the occasion of what was to be my third and last meeting with Mordo Nahum.
We left the following morning, at dawn (this is a story interwoven with freezing dawns), aiming at Katowice: we had received confirmation that various assembly centres really existed there for dispersed Italians, French, Greeks, etc. Katowice was only about fifty miles from Cracow, little more than an hour by train in normal times. But in those days one could hardly travel a dozen miles without changing trains, many bridges had been blown up, and because of the bad state of the lines the trains travelled with extreme slowness by day, and not at all by night. It was a labyrinthine journey, which lasted three days, with nocturnal halts in places ridiculously far from the straight line between the two extremes; a journey of cold and hunger, which took us on the first day to a place called Trzebinia. Here the train stopped, and I climbed down on the platform to stretch my legs, rigid from the cold. Perhaps I was among the first dressed in ‘zebra’ clothes to appear in that place called Trzebinia; I immediately found myself the centre of a dense group of curious people, who interrogated me volubly in Polish. I replied as best I could in German; and in the middle of the group of workers and peasants a bourgeois appeared, with a felt hat, glasses and a leather briefcase in his hand – a lawyer.
He was Polish, he spoke French and German well, he was an extremely courteous and benevolent person; in short, he possessed all the requisites enabling me finally, after the long year of slavery and silence, to recognize in him the messenger, the spokesman of the civilized world, the first that I had met.
I had a torrent of urgent things to tell the civilized world: my things, but everyone’s, things of blood, things which (it seemed to me) ought to shake every conscience to its very foundations. In truth, the lawyer was courteous and benevolent: he questioned me, and I spoke at dizzy speed of those so recent experiences of mine, of Auschwitz nearby, yet, it seemed, unknown to all, of the hecatomb from which I alone had escaped, of everything. The lawyer translated into Polish for the public. Now I do not know Polish, but I know how one says ‘Jew’ and how one says ‘political’; and I soon realized that the translation of my account, although sympathetic, was not faithful to it. The lawyer described me to the public not as an Italian Jew, but as an Italian political prisoner.
I asked him why, amazed and almost offended. He replied, embarrassed: ‘C’est mieux pour vous. La guerre n’est pas finie.’ The words of the Greek.
I felt my sense of freedom, my sense of being a man among men, of being alive, like a warm tide ebb from me. I found myself suddenly old, lifeless, tired beyond human measure; the war was not over, there was always war. My listeners began to steal away; they must have understood. I had dreamed, we had always dreamed, of something like this, in the nights at Auschwitz: of speaking and not being listened to, of finding liberty and remaining alone. After a while I remained alone with the lawyer; a few minutes later he also left me, urbanely excusing himself. He warned me, as the priest had done, against speaking German; when I asked for an explanation, he replied vaguely: ‘Poland is a sad country.’ He wished me good luck, he offered me money which I refused; he seemed to me deeply moved.
The locomotive was whistling its imminent departure. I climbed on the goods truck again, where the Greek was waiting for me, but I did not tell him of the episode.
This was not the only halt; others followed, and in one of them, in the evening, we realized that Szczakowa, the place with hot soup for everybody, was not far away. It was in fact to the north, and we had to go west, but as there was hot soup for everybody at Szczakowa, and we had no other programme except to satisfy our hunger, why not aim at Szczakowa? So we got down, waited until a suitable train passed and presented ourselves again and again at the Red Cross counter; I think that the Polish sisters recognized me easily, and that they still remember me today.
When night came, we prepared to sleep on the floor in the middle of the waiting-room, as all the places by the walls were already taken. Some hours later a Polish policeman arrived, moustached, ruddy and corpulent. Perhaps out of pity or perhaps out of curiosity about my dress, he interrogated me in vain in Polish; I replied with the first phrase that one learns in every foreign language, and that is, ‘nye rozumyen po polsku’, I do not understand Polish. I added, in German, that I was Italian and that I spoke a little German. At which, mira
cle! the policeman began to speak Italian.
He spoke a terrible Italian, guttural and aspirated, interwoven with portentous oaths unknown to me. He had learnt it, and this explained everything, in a valley of northern Italy, where he had worked for some years as a miner. He too, and he was the third, had warned me not to speak German. I asked him why; he replied with an eloquent gesture, passing his index and middle fingers, like a knife, between his chin and larynx, and adding very cheerfully: Tonight all Germans kaputt.’
It was undoubtedly an exaggeration, or at any rate wishful thinking; but in fact the next day we passed a long train of cattle-trucks, closed from the outside; they were going east, and from the slits one could see many human mouths gaping for air. This spectacle, strongly evocative, aroused in me a mixture of confused and contradictory feelings, which even today I have difficulty in disentangling.
The policeman, with great kindness, proposed that the Greek and myself spend the rest of the night in warmth, in the jail; we accepted willingly, and only woke up in the unusual surroundings late in the morning, after a refreshing sleep.
We left Szczakowa the day after, for the last lap of our journey. We reached Katowice without trouble, where there really existed an assembly camp for Italians, and another for Greeks. We left each other without many words: but at the moment of farewell, in a fleeting but distinct manner, I felt a solitary wave of friendliness towards my Greek, streaked with tenuous gratitude, contempt, respect, animosity, curiosity and regret that I should not see him again.
I was in fact to see him again – twice. I saw him in May, in the glorious and turbulent days at the end of the war, when all the Greeks of Katowice, about a hundred men and women, passed singing in front of our camp, as they marched towards the station; they were going back to their country, to their homes. At the head of the column was he, Mordo Nahum, a lord among the Greeks, and it was he who bore the blue and white standard; but he put it down when he saw me, came out of the ranks to salute me (a little ironically, for he was leaving and I was staying; but it was just, he explained to me, because Greece belonged to the United Nations), and with an unaccustomed gesture took a gift out of his famous sack: a pair of trousers, of the type used in Auschwitz in the last months, that is with a large ‘window’ on the left hip, closed by a patch of striped cloth. Then he disappeared.
But he was to appear once more, many months later, against the most improbable of backgrounds and in the most unexpected of incarnations.
4
Katowice
The transit camp of Katowice, which welcomed me hungry and tired after the week of wanderings with the Greek, was situated on a low hill in a suburb of the city called Bogucice. Formerly it had been a small German Lager, and had housed the miner-slaves working in a near-by coal pit. It consisted of a dozen brick huts, of small dimensions, and a single storey; there still existed the double barbed-wire enclosure, now purely symbolic. The entrance was guarded by a solitary Soviet soldier, of a somnolent and idle mien; on the opposite side there was a large hole in the enclosure, through which one could leave without even bending down: the Russian Command did not seem to worry about it at all. The kitchens, canteen, infirmary and washrooms were outside the enclosure, so that the entrance was subject to a continual traffic.
The guard was a huge Mongolian, about fifty years old, armed with a sten-gun and bayonet, with enormous knobbly hands, grey drooping Stalin-type moustaches and fiery eyes; but his ferocious and barbaric appearance was wholly inconsistent with his innocent duties. He was never relieved, and so died of boredom. His behaviour towards those who used the entrance was unforeseeable; sometimes he demanded your propusk, that is, your permit; at other times he only asked your name; at other times again a little tobacco, or nothing at all. On certain other days, however, he ferociously repulsed everybody, but did not mind if he then saw them leaving by the hole at the back of the camp, even though it was plainly visible. When it was cold, he simply left his post, entered one of the dormitories where he saw a chimney smoking, threw his sten-gun on a bunk, lit his pipe, offered vodka if he had some, or asked for it if he had none, and swore despondently if no one gave him any. Sometimes he even gave his sten-gun to the first of us he came across, and by gestures and shouts made him understand that he was to act as substitute at the guard-post; then he dozed off near the stove.
When I arrived there with Mordo Nahum, the camp was occupied by an extremely promiscuous population of about four hundred. There were French, Italians, Dutch, Greeks, Czechs, Hungarians and others; some had been civilian workers of the Todt Organization, others military internees, still others ex-Häftlinge. There were also about a hundred women.
In practice, the organization of the camp was really left to individual or group initiative; but nominally the camp was under a Soviet Kommandantur which was the most picturesque example of a gypsy encampment that one could imagine. There was a captain, Ivan Antonovich Egorov, a little man, no longer young, with a rustic and repulsive air; three lieutenants; a sergeant, athletic and jovial; a dozen territorial-army soldiers (including the guard with moustaches described above); a quartermaster; a doktorka; a medical doctor, Pyotr Grigoryevich Danchenko, extremely young, a great drinker, smoker, lover, a negligent person; a nurse, Marya Fydorovna Prima, who soon became my friend; and an indefinite flock of girls as solid as oaks; nobody knew if they were military personnel or mobilized or auxiliaries or civilians or dilettanti. This last group had various and vague duties: washer-women, cooks, typists, secretaries, waitresses, lovers pro tem, of one or another man, intermittent fiancées, wives, daughters.
The whole troupe lived in harmony, without timetable or regulations, near the camp, lodged in the buildings of an abandoned primary school. The only person to take care of us was the quartermaster, who seemed to be the highest in authority, although not in rank, of the whole Command. In any case, their entire hierarchical relationships were indecipherable; for the most part, they lived together with friendly simplicity, like a large temporary family, without military formalism; sometimes furious quarrels and fights broke out, even between officers and soldiers, but they ended quickly without disciplinary consequences or bitterness, as if nothing had happened.
The war was about to finish, the long war that had devastated their country; for them it was already over. It was the great truce; for the other harsh season which was to follow had not yet begun, nor as yet had the ill-omened name of Cold War been pronounced. They were cheerful, sad and tired, and took pleasure in food and wine, like Ulysses’ companions after the ships had been pulled ashore. And yet, under their slovenly and anarchical appearance, it was easy to see in them, in each of those rough and open faces, the good soldiers of the Red Army, the valiant men of the old and new Russia, gentle in peace and fierce in war, strong from an inner discipline born from concord, from reciprocal love and from love of their country; a stronger discipline, because it came from the spirit, than the mechanical and servile discipline of the Germans. It was easy to understand, living among them, why this former discipline, and not the latter, had finally triumphed.
One of the buildings in the camp was inhabited by Italians only, almost all civilian workers, who had gone to Germany more or less voluntarily. They were builders and miners, no longer young, quiet folk, sober, laborious, of gentle spirit.
But the camp leader of the Italians, to whom I was directed to be ‘enlisted’, was very different. Accountant Rovi had become camp leader not by election from below, nor by Russian investiture, but by self-nomination; in fact, although he was an individual of somewhat meagre intellectual and moral qualities, he possessed to a notable degree that virtue which under any sky is the most necessary to win power – the love of power for its own sake.
To watch the behaviour of a man who acts not according to reason, but according to his own deep impulses, is a spectacle of extreme interest, similar to that which the naturalist enjoys when he studies the activities of an animal of complex instincts. Rovi had achieved his offi
ce by acting with the same atavistic spontaneity as a spider spinning its web; like the spider without its web, so Rovi did not know how to live without his office. He had begun to spin immediately; he was basically foolish, and did not know a word of German or Russian, but from the first day he had secured for himself the services of an interpreter, and had presented himself in a ceremonial manner to the Soviet Command as plenipotentiary for Italian interests. He had organized a desk, with official forms (in beautiful handwriting with flourishes), rubber stamps, variously coloured pencils and a ledger; although he was not a colonel, in fact not even a soldier, he had hung outside his door an ostentatious placard ‘Italian Command – Colonel Rovi’; he had surrounded himself with a small court of scullions, scribes, acolytes, spies, messengers and bullies, whom he paid in kind, with food taken from the rations of the community, and with exemption from all jobs of common interest. His courtiers, who, as always happens, were far worse than he, ensured (even by force, which was rarely necessary) that his orders were carried out, served him, gathered information for him and flattered him intensely.
