Primo Levi (1919-1987) – Last Christmas of the War
Primo Levi – Last Christmas of the War In more ways than one, Monowitz, a part of Auschwitz, was not a typical camp. The barrier that separated us from the world - symbolized by the double barbedwire fence - was not hermetic, as elsewhere. Our work brought us into daily contact with people who were “free,” or at least less slaves than we were: technicians, German engineers and foremen, Russian and Polish workers, English, American, French, and Italian prisoners of war. Officially they were forbidden to talk to us, the pariahs of KZ (Konzentrations-Zentrum), but the prohibition was constantly ignored, and what’s more, news from the free world reached us through a thousand channels.
In the factory trash bins we found copies of the daily papers (sometimes two or three days old and rain-soaked) and in them we read with trepidation the German bulletins: mutilated, censored, euphemistic, yet eloquent. The Allied POWs listened secretly to Radio London, and even more secretly brought us the news, and it was exhilarating. In December 1944 the Russians had entered Hungary and Poland, the English were in the Romagna, the Americans were heavily engaged in the Ardennes but were winning in the Pacific against Japan.
Last Christmas of the War - Primo Levi's "Moments of Reprieve"
At any rate, there was
no real need of news from far away to find out how the war was going. At night,
when all the noises of the Camp had died down, we heard the thunder of the
artillery coming closer and closer. The front was no more than a hundred
kilometers away; a rumor spread that the Red Army was already in the West
Carpathians. The enormous factory in which we worked had been bombed from the
air several times with vicious and scientific precision: one bomb, only one, on
the central power plant, putting it out of commission for two weeks; as soon as
the damage was repaired and the stack began belching smoke again, another bomb
and so on. It was clear that the Russians, or the Allies in concert with the
Russians, intended to stop production but not destroy the plants. These they
wanted to capture intact at the end of the war, as indeed they did; today that
is Poland’s largest synthetic rubber factory. Active anti-aircraft defense was
nonexistent, no pursuing planes were to be seen; there were guns on the roofs
but they didn’t fire. Perhaps they no longer had ammunition.
In short, Germany was
moribund, but the Germans didn’t notice. After the attempt on Hitler in July,
the country lived in a state of terror: a denunciation, an absence from work,
an incautious word were sufficient to land you in the hands of the Gestapo as a
defeatist. Therefore both soldiers and civilians fulfilled their tasks as
usual, driven at once by fear and an innate sense of discipline. A fanatical
and suicidal Germany terrorized a Germany that was by now discouraged and
profoundly defeated.
Ashort time before,
toward the end of October, we’d had the opportunity to observe a close-up of a
singular school of fanaticism, a typical example of Nazi training. On some
unused land next to our camp, a Hitlerjugend—Hitler
Youth—encampment had been set up. There were possibly two hundred adolescents,
still almost children. In the mornings they practiced flag raising, sang
belligerent hymns, and, armed with ancient muskets, were put through marching
and shooting drills. We understood later that they were being prepared for
enrollment in the Volkssturm, that ragtag army of old men and
children that, according to the Führer’s mad plans, was supposed to put up a
last-ditch defense against the advancing Russians. But sometimes in the
afternoon their instructors, who were SS veterans, would bring them to see us
as we worked clearing away rubble from the bombings, or erecting slapdash and
useless little protective walls of bricks or sandbags.
They led them among us
on a “guided tour” and lectured them in loud voices, as if we had neither ears
to hear nor the intelligence to understand. “These that you see are the enemies
of the Reich, your enemies. Take a good look at them: would
you call them men? They are Untermenschen, submen! They stink
because they don’t wash; they’re in rags because they don’t take care of
themselves. What’s more, many of them don’t even understand German. They are
subversives, bandits, street thieves from the four corners of Europe, but we
have rendered them harmless; now they work for us, but they are good only for
the most primitive work. Moreover, it is only right that they should repair the
war damages; these are the people who wanted the war: the Jews, the Communists,
and the agents of the plutocracies.”
The child-soldiers
listened, devout and dazed. Seen close up, they inspired both pain and horror.
They were haggard and frightened, yet they looked at us with intense hatred. So
we were the ones guilty for all the evils, the cities in ruins, the famine,
their dead fathers on the Russian front. The Führer was stern but just, and it
was just to serve him.
At that time I worked as a “specialist” in a chemical laboratory inside the plant: these are things that I have written about elsewhere, but, strangely, with the passing of the years these memories do not fade, nor do they thin out. They become enriched with details I thought were forgotten, which sometimes acquire meaning in the light of other people’s memories, from letters I receive or books I read.
It was snowing, it was
very cold, and working in that laboratory was not easy. At times the heating
system didn’t work and at night, ice would form, bursting the phials of
reagents and the big bottle of distilled water. Often we lacked the raw
materials or reagents necessary for analyses, and it was necessary to improvise
or to produce what was missing on the spot. There was no ethyl acetate for a
colorimetric measurement. The laboratory head told me to prepare a liter of it
and gave me the needed acetic acid and ethyl alcohol. It’s a simple procedure;
I had done it in Turin in my organic preparations course in 1941. Only three
years before, but it seemed like three thousand…. Everything went smoothly up
to the final distillation, but at that point suddenly the water stopped
running.
This could have ended
in a small disaster, because I was using a glass refrigerator. If the water
returned, the refrigerating tube, which had been heated on the inside by the
product’s vapor, would certainly have shattered on contact with the icy water.
I turned off the faucet, found a small pail, filled it with distilled water,
and immersed in it the small pump of a Höppler thermostat. The pump pushed the
water into the refrigerator, and the hot water fell into the pail as it came
out. Everything went well for a few minutes, then I noticed that the ethyl
acetate was no longer condensing; almost all of it was coming out of the pipe
in the form of vapor. I had been able to find only a small amount of distilled
water (there was no other) and by now it had become warm.
What to do? There was
a lot of snow on the windowsills, so I made balls with it and put them into the
pail one by one. While I was busy with my gray snowballs, Dr. Pannwitz, the
German chemist who had subjected me to a singular “state examination” to
determine whether my professional knowledge was sufficient, came into the lab.
He was a fanatical Nazi. He looked suspiciously at my makeshift installation
and the murky water that could have damaged the precious pump, but said nothing
and left.
A few days later,
toward the middle of December, the basin of one of the suction hoods was
blocked and the chief told me to unplug it. It seemed natural to him that the
dirty job should fall to me and not to the lab technician, a girl named Frau
Mayer, and actually it seemed natural to me too. I was the only one who could
stretch out serenely on the floor without fear of getting dirty; my striped
suit was already completely filthy….
I was getting up after
having screwed the siphon back on when I noticed Frau Mayer standing close to
me. She spoke to me in a whisper with a guilty air; she was the only one of the
eight or ten girls in the lab—German, Polish, and Ukrainian—who showed no
contempt for me. Since my hands were already dirty, she asked, could I fix her
bicycle, which had a flat? She would, of course, give me something for my
trouble.
This apparently
neutral request was actually full of sociological implications. She had said
“please” to me, which in itself represented an infraction of the upside-down
code that regulated our relationships with the Germans. She had spoken to me
for reasons not connected with work; she had made a kind of contract with me,
and a contract is made between equals; and she had expressed, or at least
implied, gratitude for the work I had done on the basin in her stead. However,
the girl was also inviting me to break the rules, which could be very dangerous
for me, since I was there as a chemist, and by repairing her bike I would be taking
time away from my professional work. She was proposing, in other works, a kind
of complicity, risky but potentially useful. Having a human relationship with
someone “on the other side” involved danger, a social promotion, and more food
for today and the day after. In a flash I did the algebraic sum of the three
addends: hunger won by several lengths, and I accepted the proposal.
Frau Mayer held out
the key to the padlock, saying that I should go and get the bicycle; it was in
the courtyard. That was out of the question; I explained as best I could that
she must go herself, or send someone else. “We” were by definition thieves and
liars: if anybody saw me with a bicycle I’d really be in for it. Another
problem arose when I saw the bicycle. In its tool bag there were pieces of
rubber, rubber cement, and small irons to remove the tire, but there was no
pump, and without a pump I couldn’t locate the hole in the inner tube. I must
explain, incidentally, that in those days bicycles and flat tires were much
more common than they are now, and almost all Europeans, especially young ones,
knew how to patch a tire. A pump? No problem, said Frau Mayer; all I had to do
was get Meister Grubach, her colleague next door, to lend me one. But this too
wasn’t so simple. With some embarrassment I had to ask her to write and sign a
note: “Bitte um die Fahrradpumpe.”
I made the repair, and
Frau Mayer, in great secrecy, gave me a hard-boiled egg and four lumps of
sugar. Don’t misunderstand; given the situation and the going rates, it was a
more than generous reward. As she furtively slipped me the packet, she
whispered something that gave me a lot to think about: “Christmas will soon be
here.” Obvious words, absurd actually when addressed to a Jewish prisoner; certainly
they were intended to mean something else, something no German at that time
would have dared to put into words.
In telling this story
after forty years, I’m not trying to make excuses for Nazi Germany. One human
German does not whitewash the innumerable inhuman or indifferent ones, but it
does have the merit of breaking a stereotype.
It was a memorable
Christmas for the world at war; memorable for me too, because it was marked by
a miracle. At Auschwitz, the various categories of prisoners (political, common
criminals, social misfits, homosexuals, etc.) were allowed to receive gift packages
from home, but not the Jews. Anyway, from whom could the Jews have received
them? From their families, exterminated or confined in the surviving ghettos?
From the very few who had escaped the roundups, hidden in cellars, in attics,
terrified and penniless? And who knew our address? For all the world knew, we
were dead.
And yet a package did
finally find its way to me, through a chain of friends, sent by my sister and
my mother, who were hidden in Italy. The last link of that chain was Lorenzo
Perrone, the bricklayer from Fossano, of whom I have spoken in Survival
in Auschwitz, and whose heartbreaking end I have recounted here in
“Lorenzo’s Return.”
The package
contained ersatz chocolate, cookies, and powdered milk, but to describe its
real value, the impact it had on me and on my friend Alberto, is beyond the
powers of ordinary language. In the Camp, the terms eating, food, hunger had
meanings totally different from their usual ones. That unexpected, improbable,
impossible package was like a meteorite, a heavenly object, charged with
symbols, immensely precious, and with an enormous momentum.
We were no longer
alone: a link with the outside world had been established, and there were
delicious things to eat for days and days. But there were also serious practical
problems to resolve immediately: we found ourselves in the situation of a
passer-by who is handed a gold ingot in full view of everyone. Where to put the
food? How to keep it? How to protect it from other people’s greediness? How to
invest it wisely? Our year-old hunger kept pushing us toward the worst possible
solution: to eat everything right then and there. But we had to resist that
temptation. Our weakened stomachs could not have coped with the abuse; within
an hour, it would have ended in indigestion or worse.
We had no safe hiding
places so we distributed the food in all the regular pockets in our clothes,
and sewed secret ones inside the backs of our jackets so that even in case of a
body search something could be saved. But to have to take everything with us,
to work, to the washhouse, to the latrine, was inconvenient and awkward.
Alberto and I talked it over at length in the evening after curfew. The two of
us had made a pact: everything either one of us managed to scrounge beyond our
ration had to be divided into two exactly equal parts. Alberto was always more
successful than I in these enterprises, and I often asked why he wanted to stay
partners with anyone as inefficient as I was. But he always replied: “You never
know. I’m faster but you’re luckier.” For once, he turned out to be right.
Alberto came up with
an ingenious scheme. The cookies were the biggest problem. We had them stored,
a few here, a few there. I even had some in the lining of my cap, and had to be
careful not to crush them when I had to yank it off fast to salute a passing
SS. The cookies weren’t all that good but they looked nice. We could, he
suggested, divide them into two packages and give them as gifts to the Kapo and
the barracks Elder. According to Alberto, that was the best investment. We
would acquire prestige, and the two big shots, even without a formal agreement,
would reward us with various favors. The rest of the food we could eat
ourselves, in small, reasonable daily rations, and with the greatest possible precautions.
But in camp, the
crowding, the total lack of privacy, the gossip and disorder were such that our
secret quickly became an open one. In the space of a few days we noticed that
our companions and Kapos were looking at us with different eyes. That’s the
point: they were looking at us, the way you do at something or someone outside
the norm, that no longer melts into the background but stands out. According to
how much they liked “the two Italians,” they looked at us with envy, with
understanding, complacency, or open desire. Mendi, a Slovakian rabbi friend of
mine, winked at me and said “Mazel tov,” the lovely Yiddish and Hebrew
phrase used to congratulate someone on a happy event. Quite a few people knew
or had guessed something, which made us both happy and uneasy; we would have to
be on our guard. In any case, we decided by mutual consent to speed up the
consumption: something eaten cannot be stolen.
On Christmas Day we
worked as usual. As a matter of fact, since the laboratory was closed, I was sent
along with the others to remove rubble and carry sacks of chemical products
from a bombed warehouse to an undamaged one. When I got back to camp in the
evening, I went to the washhouse. I still had quite a lot of chocolate and
powdered milk in my pockets, so I waited until there was a free spot in the
corner farthest from the entrance. I hung my jacket on a nail, right behind me;
no one could have approached without my seeing him. I began to wash, when out
of the corner of my eye I saw my jacket rising in the air. I turned but it was
already too late. The jacket, with all its contents, and with my registration
number sewed on the breast, was already out of reach. Someone had lowered a
string and hook from the small window above the nail. I ran outside, half
undressed as I was, but no one was there. No one had seen anything, no one knew
anything. Along with everything else, I was now without a jacket. I had to go
to the barracks supply master to confess my “crime,” because in the Camp being
robbed was a crime. He gave me another jacket, but ordered me to find a needle
and thread, never mind how, rip the registration number off my pants and sew it
on the new jacket as quickly as possible. Otherwise “bekommst du
fünfundzwanzig”: I’d get twenty-five whacks with a stick.
We divided up the contents of Alberto’s pockets. His had remained unscathed, and he proceeded to display his finest philosophical resources. We two had eaten more than half of the food, right? And the rest wasn’t completely wasted. Some other famished man was celebrating Christmas at our expense, maybe even blessing us. And anyway, we could be sure of one thing: that this would be our last Christmas of war and imprisonment. —translated by Ruth Feldman
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1986/01/30/last-christmas-of-the-war/?lp_txn_id=1334901
The
Christmas truce, 1914 - Steven Johns
Hitler’s
World by Timothy Snyder
The Short, Daring Life of Lilya Litvyak; the world’s first female
fighter ace
Heda Margolius Kovaly (1919-2010) : Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague
1941–1968
Abolish War - Russell-Einstein Manifesto of
1955
Journey
To A War by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood (1939)
Picasso's
Guernica still screams the truth about war - Jonathan Jones
This Philosopher Helped Ensure There Was No
Nobel for Relativity
Greg Mitchell - 75 years ago: When Leo Szilard tried
to halt dropping atomic bombs over Japan
A universal appeal for humanity to end militarism
and stop war
Hiroshima Peace Declaration on 72nd A-bomb
anniversary
The Critical Zone of Science and Politics: Steve Paulson
interviews Bruno Latour
Book
review: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis
Ordinary
people. The courage to say NO
