by Primo Levi
Only the family-trucks had stoves on board; the rest of us managed to cook on the ground on camp fires which we lit in haste as soon as the train stopped, and put out half-way through the cooking, amid quarrels and oaths, when the train set off again. We cooked intensely, furiously, listening for the whistle of the engine, with one eye on the starving vagrants, who emerged at once in crowds from the countryside, attracted by the smoke, like bloodhounds by a scent. We cooked like our forefathers, on three stones; and as stones could not always be found, every truck ended by possessing its own. Spits and ingenious devices appeared; Cantarella’s pots re-emerged.
The problem of wood and water became urgent and compelling. Necessity simplifies: private woodpiles were raided in a flash; snow barriers, which in those countries were piled up alongside the rail tracks in the summer months, were stolen; fences, railway sleepers, once (for want of anything better) an entire goods truck abandoned after an accident, were demolished; in our truck the presence of the Moor and his famous axe was providential. As for water, in the first place we needed suitable vessels, which meant that every truck had to procure a bucket, by barter, theft or purchase. Our bucket, legitimately bought, revealed a leak at the first experiment; we repaired it with a piece of plaster from the surgery, and it miraculously withstood the cooking as far as the Brenner, when it peeled off.
Normally it was impossible to collect a supply of water at the stations; an endless queue formed in front of the fountain (when there was one) in a few seconds, and only a few buckets could be filled. Some people crept stealthily to the tender which held the water for the engine; but if the driver saw them, he would fly into a rage, and bombard these rash persons with oaths and burning coal. Nevertheless, we sometimes managed to tap hot water from the belly of the engine itself; it was slimy, rusty water, unsuitable for cooking but quite useful for washing.
The best sources were country wells. The train often stopped in the fields, at a red signal; it was impossible to foresee whether the halt would last a few seconds or hours. So we all hastily unbuckled our trouser belts to knot together and form a long rope; then the nimblest person in the truck rushed off, with the rope and bucket, in search of a well. I was the nimblest person in my truck, and I often succeeded in the enterprise; but once I ran a serious risk of losing the train. I had already dropped the bucket into the well and was lifting it laboriously, when I heard the engine whistle. If I lost the bucket and belts, our precious common property, I should dishonour myself for ever; so I pulled up the bucket with all my strength, got hold of it, poured the water on the ground and ran off, hampered by the knotted belts, towards the train, which was already moving. A second’s delay could mean a month’s delay; I ran without stopping, for my life, jumped over two hedges and the fence and rushed over the slippery gravel of the rail-bed as the train slid past me. My truck had already gone by; charitable hands from other trucks stretched out towards me, gripped the belts and the bucket, while yet more hands grabbed my hair, shoulders, clothing, and hoisted me on to the floor of the last truck, where I lay semi-conscious for a long time.
The train continued to move north; it entered an increasingly narrow valley, crossed the Transylvanian Alps through the Predal Pass on 24 September, amid austere naked mountains, in bitter cold, and descended on Brasov. Here the engine was detached, guarantee of a long halt and the customary ceremonial began to take place; people with a furtive ferocious air, with hatchets in their hands, wandered round the station and outside; others with buckets quarrelled over the little water; others still stole hay from the haystacks, or transacted business with the local inhabitants; children wandered around in search of trouble or small opportunities to steal; women washed clothing or themselves in public, exchanged visits and passed on news from truck to truck, rekindled ill-digested quarrels and sparked off new ones. The fires were immediately lit, and we began to cook.
Next to our train stood a Soviet military convoy, full of lorries, armoured cars and fuel tankers. It was guarded by two robust female soldiers, in boots and helmets, with guns on their shoulders and fixed bayonets; they were of indefinable age and of gnarled, unprepossessing appearance. When they saw fires being lit just in front of the petrol tankers, they grew rightly indignant at our irresponsibility and, shouting ‘nelzya nelzya’, ordered them to be put out immediately.
Everybody obeyed, cursing; everybody, except a handful from the Alpine Brigade, hardboiled types, veterans of the Russian campaign, who had rustled up a goose and were roasting it. They held council with sober words, while the two women fulminated at their backs; then two of them, nominated by the majority, got up, with the severe and resolute faces of men about to sacrifice themselves conscientiously for the common good. They advanced on the women soldiers face to face and spoke to them in a low voice. The negotiations were surprisingly short; the women put down their helmets and arms, then the four, serious and composed, left the station, took a narrow path and disappeared from our view. They returned a quarter of an hour later, the women in front, a little less gnarled and with slightly congested faces, the men behind, dignified and calm. The goose was nearly ready; the four squatted on the ground with the others, the goose was carved up and divided in pieces, then, after the brief truce, the Russian women resumed their weapons and their duties.
From Brasov our route once more turned to the west, towards the Hungarian frontier. Rain began to fall steadily and worsened the situation; it was difficult to light the fires, we were wearing our only set of clothing, mud soaked in everywhere. The roof of our truck was not watertight; only a few square yards of the floor remained inhabitable, as water dripped down pitilessly on the rest. Quarrels and disputes broke out endlessly when it was time to go to bed.
It is an age-old observation that in every human group there is a predestined victim; one who inspires contempt, whom all mock, about whom stupid malignant gossip grows, on whom, by some mysterious agreement, all unload their bad tempers and their desire to hurt. The victim of our truck was the Carabiniere. It would be difficult to establish the reason why, if a reason existed; the Carabiniere was a young Abruzzese, polite, mild, helpful, with a pleasant appearance. He was not even particularly obtuse, in fact he was rather touchy and sensitive, and consequently suffered acutely from the persecution to which he was subjected by the other soldiers in the truck. But there it was, he was a Carabiniere; and it is well known that there is little love lost between the Force (so called by antonomasia) and the other armed forces. Carabinieri are reproved, perversely, for their excessive discipline, seriousness, chastity, honesty, their lack of humour, their indiscriminate obedience, their habits, their uniform. Fantastic, grotesque, inept legends circulate about them, and are handed down in barracks from generation to generation: the legend of the hammer, the legend of the oath. I shall say nothing of the first, which is too infamous; as regards the latter, the version I heard was that the young recruit to the Force is obliged to swear a secret, loathsome, infernal oath, in which, among other things, he solemnly pledges ‘to kill his father and mother’; and that every Carabiniere either has killed them or will kill them, otherwise he will fail to win promotion. Our poor little wretch could not even open his mouth: ‘You keep quiet, you who’ve killed father and mother.’ But he never rebelled; he accepted this and a hundred other insults with the adamantine patience of a saint. One day he took me aside, as a neutral observer, and assured me ‘that the business of the oath was not true’.
For three days, virtually without stopping, we travelled in the rain, which made us bad-tempered and mean, only halting once for a few hours at a village full of mud, with the glorious name of Alba Julia. On the evening of 26 September, after travelling more than five hundred miles on Rumanian soil, we reached the Hungarian frontier, near Arad, at a village called Curtici.
I am convinced that the inhabitants of Curtici still remember the scourge of our passage; in all probability it has now become one of the local legends, and will be talked of round the fire for generations,
as elsewhere they will still speak of Attila and Tamburlane. This detail of our journey is also destined to remain obscure; according to all the evidence, the Rumanian military or railway authorities no longer wanted us or had already ‘off-loaded’ us, while the Hungarian authorities did not want to accept us, or had not ‘taken over the consignment’; as a result, we remained riveted to Curtici, we and the train and the escort, for seven exhausting days, and we devastated the place.
Curtici was an agricultural village with perhaps a thousand inhabitants, and possessed very little; we were fourteen hundred, and had need of everything. In the seven days we emptied all the wells, exhausted the supplies of wood and caused grave damage to everything in the station that could be burnt; as for the station latrines, it is better not to speak of them. We provoked a fearful increase in the price of milk, bread, maize, poultry; after which, once our purchasing power had been reduced to zero, thefts occurred by night, and later also by day. Geese, which as far as we could see constituted the main local wealth, and initially circulated freely along the muddy paths in solemn well-ordered flotillas, disappeared completely, partly captured, partly shut up in their coops.
Every morning we opened our doors with the absurd hope that the train might have moved without our realizing, while we were asleep; but nothing had changed, the sky was always black and rainy, the muddy houses always facing us, the train as inert and impotent as a stranded ship. We bent down to examine the wheels, those wheels which were supposed to take us home; but no, they had not moved an inch, they seemed soldered to the tracks, and the rain was turning them rusty. We were cold and hungry, and we felt abandoned and forgotten.
On the sixth day, enervated and envenomed more than the rest of us, Cesare abandoned us. He declared that he had had enough of Curtici, of the Russians, of the train and of us; that he did not want to go mad, or to die of hunger, or be cut to pieces by the locals; that when a man was on his toes he got along better by himself. He added that, if we wanted, we could always follow him; but his terms were clear: he was fed up with living in want, he was ready to take risks, but he wanted to cut it short, make money rapidly, and return to Rome by plane. None of us felt up to following him, and Cesare left; he took a train for Bucharest, had many adventures, and succeeded in his intention, that is, he returned to Rome by air, although later than us; but that is another story, a story ‘de haulte graisse’, which I shall not recount, or shall recount elsewhere, only if and when Cesare gives me permission.
If in Rumania I had enjoyed a delicate philological pleasure at such names as Galati, Alba Julia, Turnu Severin, immediately we entered Hungary I was confronted with Békéscsaba, followed by Hódmezövasárhely and Kiskunfélegyháza. The Hungarian plain had turned into a marsh, the sky was a leaden colour, but we were saddened above all by Cesare’s absence. He had left a painful emptiness among us; in his absence, nobody knew what to speak of, nobody managed any longer to conquer the boredom of the interminable journey, the fatigue of the nineteen days of rail-travel which weighed upon us. We looked at each other with a vague sense of guilt; why had we allowed him to leave? But in Hungary, despite the impossible names, we now felt ourselves in Europe, protected by a civilization which was ours, sheltered from alarming apparitions such as that of the camel in Moldavia. The train moved towards Budapest, but did not enter it; on 6 October it stopped more than once at Ujpest and other suburban stations, leaving us with ghostly visions of ruins, temporary huts and deserted roads; then it moved into the plain once more, in gusts of rain and a film of autumn mist.
It stopped at Szób on market day; we all got down to stretch our legs and spend the little money we possessed. I no longer had anything; but I was hungry, and bartered my Auschwitz jacket, which I had jealously preserved until then, for a noble mixture of fermented cheese and onions, whose acute aroma had conquered me. When the engine whistled, and we climbed into the truck, we counted ourselves and found that we were two more than before.
One was Vincenzo, and no one was surprised. Vincenzo was a difficult boy; a Calabrian shepherd of sixteen, who had somehow ended up in Germany. He was as wild as the Velletrano, but of different temperament: as timid, reserved and contemplative as the latter was violent and bloodthirsty. He had wonderful blue eyes, almost feminine, and a fine, expressive, dreamy face; he hardly ever spoke. He was a nomad at heart, restless, attracted by the woods at Starye Dorogi as if by invisible demons; on the train, too, he had no stable residence in any one truck, but wandered through all of them. We understood the reason for his instability immediately; no sooner had the train left Szób than Vincenzo collapsed to the ground with the whites of his eyes showing and his jaws clenched like a vice. He roared like a beast, and fought, stronger than the four soldiers who held him down: an epileptic fit. He had certainly had others, at Starye Dorogi and before; but every time he had felt the warning signs, urged on by his fierce pride, he had taken refuge in the forest, so that no one should know of his illness; or, perhaps, he fled in the face of the illness, like birds before a storm. During the long journey, as he could not stay on the ground, he changed truck when he felt the attack approaching. He stayed with us only a few days, then disappeared; we found him roosting on the roof of another truck. Why? He replied that he could see the countryside better up there.
The other new guest, for different reasons, also presented a difficult case. Nobody knew him; he was a robust youth, barefoot, dressed in a Red Army jacket and trousers. He spoke only Hungarian and none of us were able to understand him. The Carabiniere told us that the boy had approached him while he was eating some bread at the village, and had stretched out his hand; he had given him half his food, and from then on had not managed to shake him off; the boy must have followed him without anyone noticing, while we were all climbing hurriedly into the truck.
He was well received; one mouth more to feed was not a worry. He was an intelligent, cheerful boy; as soon as the train started, he introduced himself with great dignity. His name was Pista and he was fourteen. Father and mother? Here it was more difficult to understand each other; I found a pencil stub and a piece of paper, and drew a man, a woman and a child between them; I pointed to the child and said ‘Pista’; then I waited. Pista turned grave, and then sketched a drawing which was all too painfully obvious: a house, an aeroplane, a falling bomb. Then he cancelled the house, and drew a large smoking heap beside it. But he was not in a mood for sad things; he screwed up the sheet, asked for another and drew a cask, with remarkable precision: the bottom and all the visible staves in the right perspective; then the hoops, and the hole with the tap. We looked at each other puzzled; what did the message mean? Pista laughed happily; then he drew himself next to it, with a hammer in one hand and a saw in the other. Hadn’t we understood yet? This was his trade, he was a cooper.
Everybody liked him immediately; moreover, he tried to be useful; he swept the floor every morning, enthusiastically washed the bowls, went to fetch water and was happy when we sent him ‘shopping’ to his compatriots at the various halts. He could already make himself understood in Italian by the time we reached the Brenner; he sang beautiful songs of his country, which no one understood, and then sought to explain them with gestures, making us all laugh wholeheartedly, himself first of all. He was as fond of the Carabiniere as a younger brother, and slowly cleansed him of his original sin: true, the Carabiniere had killed his father and mother, but, all told, he must be a good boy, since Pista followed him. He filled up the gap left by Cesare. We asked him why he had come with us, what brought him to Italy; but we were unable to understand, partly because of the difficulty of conversing, but above all because he himself did not know. He had wandered round stations like a stray dog for months; he had followed the first human creature who had looked at him with pity.
We had hoped to cross from Hungary into Austria without further frontier complications, but it was not so easy; on the morning of 7 October, the twenty-second day of our journey, we reached Bratislava in Slovakia, in sight of th
e Beskidy, the same mountains which had closed the lugubrious horizon of Auschwitz. Another language, another coinage, another route; would we now complete the circle? Katowice was 120 miles away; would we begin another vain, exhausting circuit of Europe? But we entered German territory in the evening; on the 8th we were stranded at the goods depot of Leopoldau, a suburban station of Vienna, and we felt almost at home.
The suburbs of Vienna were ugly and casual like those we knew at Milan and Turin and, like the last visions we recalled of those cities, were reduced to rubble by bombardment. Passers-by were few: women, children, old people, not a single man. Paradoxically, their language also sounded familiar to me; some even understood Italian. We changed what money we possessed at random for local money, but it was useless; as at Cracow in March, all the shops were closed, or sold only rationed goods. ‘But what can one buy at Vienna without a ration card?’ I asked a little girl no more than twelve years old. She was dressed in rags, but wore shoes with high heels and was heavily made up: ‘Uberhaupt nichts,’ she replied contemptuously.
We returned to the train to sleep; during the night we travelled a few miles, with much jolting and screeching, and found ourselves transferred to another station, Vienna-Jedlersdorf. Next to us another train emerged from the fog, or rather the corpse of a train: the engine was standing on end, absurdly, its muzzle pointing to the sky as if it meant to climb there; all the trucks were charred. We approached, driven by an instinct for plunder and by a curiosity tinged with mockery; we promised ourselves a malignant satisfaction in laying hands on the ruins of these German objects. But derision was answered by derision: one truck contained odd scraps of metal which must have belonged to musical instruments that had been burnt, and hundreds of earthenware ocarinas, the only things to survive; another truck was full of regulation pistols, melted and rusted; the third held a tangle of curved sabres, which the fire and rain had soldered into their scabbards for all eternity: vanity of vanities, and the cold taste of perdition.
