by Primo Levi
We walked away, and wandered round until we found ourselves on the banks of the Danube. The river was in flood, turbid, yellow and threateningly swollen; at that point its course is almost straight, and we could see, one behind the other, in a misty nightmare perspective, seven bridges, all smashed exactly at the centre, all with their broken segments plunging into the eddying water. As we returned to our itinerant dwelling, we were startled by the clanging noise of a tram, the sole sign of life. It was running crazily on the loose rails, along the deserted avenues, without halting at the stops. We saw the driver at his post, as pale as a ghost; behind him, delirious with enthusiasm, stood the seven Russians of our escort, and not another passenger: it was the first tram they had ever travelled in. Some hung out of the windows and cheered, while others incited and threatened the driver into increasing his speed.
There was a market on a big square; once again a spontaneous and illegal market, but far more wretched and furtive than the Polish ones I had frequented with the Greek and Cesare; in fact, it reminded me strongly of another scene, the Exchange at the Lager, indelible in our memories. There were no stalls, but people on their feet, shivering and restless, in little cliques, ready to run away, with their bags and suitcases in their hands and their pockets swollen; they exchanged minute trifles, potatoes, slices of bread, loose cigarettes, small items of worn-out rubbish from their homes.
We climbed into our trucks with heavy hearts. We had felt no joy in seeing Vienna undone and the Germans broken, but rather anguish: not compassion, but a larger anguish, which was mixed up with our own misery, with the heavy, threatening sensation of an irreparable and definitive evil which was present everywhere, nestling like gangrene in the guts of Europe and the world, the seed of future harm.
The train seemed unable to tear itself away from Vienna; after three days of halts and manoeuvres, on 10 October, hungry, drenched and wretched, we found ourselves at Nussdorf, another suburb. But on the morning of the 11th, as if it had suddenly picked up a lost scent, the train moved decisively towards the west; with unaccustomed speed it passed through St Polten, Loosdorf and Amstetten, and in the evening a sign appeared on the road which ran parallel to the railway, as portentous to our eyes as the birds which tell navigators of land nearby. It was a vehicle unknown to us: a squat, graceless, military vehicle, as flat as a tin can with a white, and not a red, star painted on its side: in short, a jeep. A Negro was driving it; one of the occupants waved his arms at us, and shouted in Neapolitan dialect: ‘You’re going home, you bums!’
Clearly the demarcation line was nearby; we reached it at St Valentin, a few miles from Linz. Here we had to get down; we said good-bye to the young barbarians of the escort and to our excellent engine-driver, and passed into American hands.
Almost by definition, it can be said of transit camps that the shorter the average stay, the worse the organization. At St Valentin one stopped only for a few hours, a day at the most, and consequently it was an extremely dirty and primitive camp. There was no lighting, no heating, no beds: we slept on the bare wooden floor, in frightfully decrepit huts, in the middle of ankle-deep mud. The only efficient equipment was in the baths and the disinfection room; the West took possession of us by this form of purification and exorcism.
A few gigantic, taciturn GIs, unarmed, but embellished with a myriad of gadgets whose significance and use escaped us, were responsible for this ritual task. Everything went well with the bath; there were about twenty wooden cabins, with lukewarm showers and bath wraps, a luxury never seen again. After the bath, they took us to a vast brick room, divided in two by a cable on which ten curious implements were hanging, vaguely similar to pneumatic drills; we could hear an air compressor pulsating outside. All fourteen hundred, that is all of us, were crammed to one side of the division, men and women together; and at this point ten officials appeared on the scene, with a science-fiction attire, wrapped up in white overalls, with helmets and gas masks. They seized the first of the flock, and without wasting time stuck the tubes of the hanging instruments into all the openings of their clothes in turn: under collars and belts, into pockets, up trouser legs, under skirts. They were a sort of pneumatic blower, which blew out insecticide: the insecticide was DDT, an absolute novelty to us, like the jeeps, penicillin and the atomic bomb, which we learnt about soon afterwards.
Everybody accommodated himself to the treatment, swearing or laughing from the tickling, until it came to the turn of a naval officer and his beautiful fiancée. When the hooded men laid chaste but rough hands on her, the officer placed himself decisively in between. He was a robust and resolute young man: woe betide anyone who touched his woman.
The perfect mechanism stopped abruptly; the hoods consulted briefly, with inarticulate nasal sounds, then one of them took off his mask and overalls and planted himself in front of the officer with his fists at the ready for a fight. The others formed an orderly circle, and a regular boxing match began. After a few minutes of silent and gentlemanly combat, the officer fell to the ground with a bleeding nose; the girl, shaken and pale, was dusted all over according to the regulations, but without anger or vengefulness, and everything re-established itself in American order.
17
The Awakening
Austria borders on Italy, and St Valentin is only 180 miles from Tarvisio; but on 15 October, the thirty-first day of our journey, we crossed a new frontier and entered Munich, prey to a disconsolate railway tiredness, a permanent loathing for trains, for snatches of sleep on wooden floors, for jolting and for stations; so that familiar smells, common to all the railways of the world, the sharp smell of impregnated sleepers, hot brakes, burning fuel, inspired in us a deep disgust. We were tired of everything, tired in particular of perforating useless frontiers.
But from another point of view, the fact of feeling a piece of Germany under our feet for the first time, not a piece of Upper Silesia or of Austria, but of Germany itself, overlaid our tiredness with a complex attitude composed of intolerance, frustration and tension. We felt we had something to say, enormous things to say, to every single German, and we felt that every German should have something to say to us; we felt an urgent need to settle our accounts, to ask, explain and comment, like chess players at the end of a game. Did ‘they’ know about Auschwitz, about the silent daily massacre, a step away from their doors? If they did, how could they walk about, return home and look at their children, cross the threshold of a church? If they did not, they ought, as a sacred duty, to listen, to learn everything, immediately, from us, from me; I felt the tattooed number on my arm burning like a sore.
As I wandered around the streets of Munich, full of ruins, near the station where our train lay stranded once more, I felt I was moving among throngs of insolvent debtors, as if everybody owed me something, and refused to pay. I was among them, in the enemy camp, among the Herrenvolk; but the men were few, many were mutilated, many dressed in rags like us. I felt that everybody should interrogate us, read in our faces who we were, and listen to our tale in humility. But no one looked us in the eyes, no one accepted the challenge; they were deaf, blind and dumb, imprisoned in their ruins, as in a fortress of wilful ignorance, still strong, still capable of hatred and contempt, still prisoners of their old tangle of pride and guilt.
I found myself searching among them, among that anonymous crowd of sealed faces, for other faces, clearly stamped in my memory, many bearing a name: the name of someone who could not but know, remember, reply; who had commanded and obeyed, killed, humiliated, corrupted. A vain and foolish search; because not they, but others, the few just ones, would reply for them.
If we had taken one guest on board at Szób, after Munich we realized that we had taken on board an entire contingent: our train consisted no longer of sixty, but of sixty-one trucks. A new truck was travelling with us towards Italy at the end of our train, crammed with young Jews, boys and girls, coming from all the countries of Eastern Europe. None of them seemed more than twenty years old, but they were ext
remely self-confident and resolute people; they were young Zionists on their way to Israel, travelling where they were able to, and finding a path where they could. A ship was waiting for them at Bari; they had purchased their truck, and it had proved the simplest thing in the world to attach it to our train: they had not asked anybody’s permission, but had hooked it on, and that was that. I was amazed, but they laughed at my amazement: ‘Hitler’s dead, isn’t he?’ replied their leader, with his intense hawk-like glance. They felt immensely free and strong, lords of the world and of their destinies.
We passed through Garmisch-Partenkirchen and in the evening reached the fantastically disordered transit camp of Mittenwald, in the mountains, on the Austrian border. We spent the night there, and it was our last night of cold. The following day the train ran down to Innsbruck, where it filled up with Italian smugglers, who brought us the greetings of our homeland, in the absence of official authorities, and generously distributed chocolate, grappa and tobacco.
As the train, more tired than us, climbed towards the Italian frontier it snapped in two like an overtaut cable; there were several injuries, but this was the last adventure. Late at night we crossed the Brenner, which we had passed in our exile twenty months before; our less tired companions celebrated with a cheerful uproar; Leonardo and I remained lost in a silence crowded with memories. Of 650, our number when we had left, three of us were returning. And how much had we lost, in those twenty months? What should we find at home? How much of ourselves had been eroded, extinguished? Were we returning richer or poorer, stronger or emptier? We did not know; but we knew that on the thresholds of our homes, for good or ill, a trial awaited us, and we anticipated it with fear. We felt in our veins the poison of Auschwitz, flowing together with our thin blood; where should we find the strength to begin our lives again, to break down the barriers, the brushwood which grows up spontaneously in all absences, around every deserted house, every empty refuge? Soon, tomorrow, we should have to give battle, against enemies still unknown, outside ourselves and inside; with what weapons, what energies, what willpower? We felt the weight of centuries on our shoulders, we felt oppressed by a year of ferocious memories; we felt emptied and defenceless. The months just past, although hard, of wandering on the margins of civilization now seemed to us like a truce, a parenthesis of unlimited availability, a providential but unrepeatable gift of fate.
With these thoughts, which kept us from sleep, we passed our first night in Italy, as the train slowly descended the deserted, dark Adige Valley. On 17 October, we reached the camp of Pescantina, near Verona, and here we split up, everyone following his own destiny; but no train left in the direction of Turin until the evening of the following day. In the confused vortex of thousands of refugees and displaced persons, we glimpsed Pista, who had already found his path; he wore the white and yellow armband of the Pontifical Organization of Assistance, and collaborated briskly and cheerfully in the life of the camp. And then we saw advance towards us a figure, a well-known face, a full head higher than the crowd, the Moor of Verona. He had come to say good-bye to us, to Leonardo and me; he had reached his home, the first of all of us, for Avesa, his village, was only a few miles away. And he blessed us, the old blasphemer: he raised two enormous knobbly fingers, and blessed us with the solemn gesture of a Pontiff, wishing us a good return and a happy future.
I reached Turin on 19 October, after thirty-five days of travel; my house was still standing, all my family was alive, no one was expecting me. I was swollen, bearded and in rags, and had difficulty in making myself recognized. I found my friends full of life, the warmth of secure meals, the solidity of daily work, the liberating joy of recounting my story. I found a large clean bed, which in the evening (a moment of terror) yielded softly under my weight. But only after many months did I lose the habit of walking with my glance fixed to the ground, as if searching for something to eat or to pocket hastily or to sell for bread; and a dream full of horror has still not ceased to visit me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer, intervals.
It is a dream within a dream, varied in detail, one in substance. I am sitting at a table with my family, or with friends, or at work, or in the green countryside; in short, in a peaceful relaxed environment, apparently without tension or affliction; yet I feel a deep and subtle anguish, the definite sensation, of an impending threat. And in fact, as the dream proceeds, slowly or brutally, each time in a different way, everything collapses and disintegrates around me, the scenery, the walls, the people, while the anguish becomes more intense and more precise. Now everything has changed to chaos; I am alone in the centre of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it; I am in the Lager once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager. All the rest was a brief pause, a deception of the senses, a dream; my family, nature in flower, my home. Now this inner dream, this dream of peace, is over, and in the outer dream, which continues, gelid, a well-known voice resounds: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, ‘Wstawàch’.
Turin, December 1961–November 1962.
Postscript: The Author’s Answers to His Readers’ Questions
Someone a long time ago wrote that books too, like human beings, have their destiny: unpredictable, different from what is desired and expected. The first of these two books also has a strange destiny. Its birth certificate is distant: it can be found where one reads that ‘I write what I would never dare tell anyone.’ My need to tell the story was so strong in the Camp that I had begun describing my experiences there, on the spot, in that German laboratory laden with freezing cold, the war, and vigilant eyes; and yet I knew that I would not be able under any circumstances to hold on to those haphazardly scribbled notes, and that I must throw them away immediately because if they were found they would be considered an act of espionage and would cost me my life.
Nevertheless, those memories burned so intensely inside me that I felt compelled to write as soon as I returned to Italy, and within a few months I wrote If This is a Man. The manuscript was turned down by a number of important publishers; it was accepted in 1947 by a small publisher who printed only 2,500 copies and then folded. So this first book of mine fell into oblivion for many years: perhaps also because in all of Europe those were difficult times of mourning and reconstruction and the public did not want to return in memory to the painful years of the war that had just ended. It achieved a new life only in 1958, when it was republished by Einaudi, and from then on the interest of the public has never flagged. In Italy the book has sold more than 500,000 copies; it has been translated into eight languages and adapted for radio and theatre. This belated success encouraged me to write The Truce, the natural continuation of its older brother, which, unlike it, immediately met with an excellent reception from the public and critics.
In the course of the years, I have been asked to comment on the two books hundreds of times, before the most diverse audiences: young and adult, uneducated and cultivated, in Italy and abroad. On the occasion of these encounters, I have had to answer many questions: naïve, acute, highly emotional, superficial, at times provocative. I soon realized that some of these questions recurred constantly; indeed, never failed to be asked: they must therefore spring from a thoughtful curiosity, to which in some way the text of the book did not give a satisfactory reply. I propose to reply to these questions here.
1. In these books there are no expressions of hate for the Germans, no desire for revenge. Have you forgiven them?
My personal temperament is not inclined to hatred. I regard it as bestial, crude, and prefer on the contrary that my actions and thoughts, as far as possible, should be the product of reason; therefore I have never cultivated within myself hatred as a desire for revenge, or as a desire to inflict suffering on my real or presumed enemy, or as a private vendetta. Even less do I accept hatred as directed collectively at an ethnic group, for example, all the Ger
mans; if I accepted it, I would feel that I was following the precepts of Nazism, which was founded precisely on national and racial hatred.
I must admit that if I had in front of me one of our persecutors of those days, certain known faces, certain old lies, I would be tempted to hate, and with violence too; but exactly because I am not a Fascist or a Nazi, I refuse to give way to this temptation. I believe in reason and in discussion as supreme instruments of progress, and therefore I repress hatred even within myself: I prefer justice. Precisely for this reason, when describing the tragic world of Auschwitz, I have deliberately assumed the calm, sober language of the witness, neither the lamenting tones of the victim nor the irate voice of someone who seeks revenge. I thought that my account would be all the more credible and useful the more it appeared objective and the less it sounded overly emotional; only in this way does a witness in matters of justice perform his task, which is that of preparing the ground for the judge. The judges are my readers.
All the same I would not want my abstaining from explicit judgement to be confused with an indiscriminate pardon. No, I have not forgiven any of the culprits, nor am I willing to forgive a single one of them, unless he has shown (with deeds, not words, and not too long afterward) that he has become conscious of the crimes and errors of Italian and foreign Fascism and is determined to condemn them, uproot them, from his conscience and from that of others. Only in this case am I, a non-Christian, prepared to follow the Jewish and Christian precept of forgiving my enemy, because an enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.
