Finally Olga came, in a night full of silence, to bring me the dismal news of the Birkenau camp, and of the fate of the women deported with me. I had been waiting for her for many days; I did not know her personally, but Frau Vita, who, despite sanitary injunctions, also frequented patients in other wards in search of troubles to alleviate and of impassioned conversations, had informed us of our respective presences, and had organized the illegal meeting in the depth of the night while everyone was sleeping.
Olga was a Jewish Croat partisan, who in 1942 had fled to Piedmont with her family and had been interned there; she belonged to that flood of thousands of foreign Jews who had found hospitality, and a brief peace, in the paradoxical Italy of those years, officially anti-Semitic. She was a woman of great intelligence and culture, strong, beautiful and with insight: deported to Birkenau, she had survived there, alone of her family.
She spoke Italian perfectly; from reasons of gratitude and temperament, she had soon become a friend of the Italian women in the camp, and in particular of those who had been deported in the same train as I. She told me their story by candlelight, with her eyes fixed on the ground. The furtive light illumined only her face in the darkness, accentuating its precocious lines, and transforming it into a tragic mask. A handkerchief covered her head; she untied it at one point and the mask became as macabre as a skull. Olga’s cranium was bare, covered only with a short grey down.
They had all died. All the children and all the old people had died immediately. Of the 550 people of whom I had lost trace when I entered the Lager, only twenty-nine women had been admitted to the Birkenau camp: of these, five alone had survived. Vanda had died by gas, fully conscious, in the month of October; Olga herself had procured two sleeping tablets for her, but they had not proved sufficient.
3
The Greek
Towards the end of February, after a month in bed, I was not yet cured, and indeed began to feel but little improvement. I had a clear impression that I would not regain my health and my strength until I stood upright again (albeit with difficulty), and put shoes on my feet. So, on one of the rare days when the doctor called, I asked him to let me out. The doctor examined me, or pretended to do so; he noted that the desquamation of the scarlet fever had finished; he told me that as far as he was concerned I could go; he warned me, absurdly, not to expose myself to fatigue or cold, and he wished me good luck.
I cut myself a pair of socks from a blanket, grabbed as many jackets and pairs of trousers as I could find (for no other clothing was to hand), said good-bye to Frau Vita and Henek and went out.
I stood on my feet somewhat shakily. Immediately outside the door, there was a Soviet officer; he photographed me and gave me five cigarettes. A little farther on, I was unable to avoid a fellow in civilian dress, who was hunting for men to clear away the snow; he captured me, deaf to my protests, gave me a spade and attached me to a squad of shovellers.
I offered him the five cigarettes but he refused them with contempt. He was an ex-Kapo, and had naturally remained in office; who else in fact could have managed to make people like us clear the snow? I tried to shovel, but it was physically impossible. If I could get round the corner, no one would see me any more, but first I had to free myself of the spade; it would have been interesting to sell it, but I did not know to whom; and to carry it with me even for a few steps was dangerous. There was not enough snow to bury it. In the end I dropped it through a cellar window, and I found myself free again.
I walked into a Block; there was a guardian, an old Hungarian, who did not want to let me enter, but the cigarettes convinced him. Inside it was warm, full of smoke and noise and unknown faces; but in the evening they gave soup to me as well. I was hoping for a few days of rest and of gradual training for an active life, but I did not know that I had tripped up badly. No later than the following morning, I got caught up in a Russian transport convoy towards a mysterious transit camp.
I cannot say that I remember exactly how and when my Greek sprang up from nowhere. In those days and in those parts, soon after the front had passed by, a high wind was blowing over the face of the earth; the world around us seemed to have returned to primeval Chaos, and was swarming with scalene, defective, abnormal human specimens; each of them bestirred himself, with blind or deliberate movements, in anxious search of his own place, of his own sphere, as the particles of the four elements are described as doing in the verse-cosmogonies of the Ancients.
I too, swept up by the whirlwind, found myself, one bitter night, after a heavy snowfall, loaded on to a horse-drawn military cart many hours before dawn, together with a dozen unknown companions. The cold was intense; the sky, thick with stars, slowly lightened in the east, promising one of those marvellous daybreaks of the plain, which, at the time of our slavery, we had watched interminably in the roll-call square of the Lager.
Our guide and escort was a Russian soldier. He sat in front singing full-throatedly to the stars, and every now and again spoke to the horses in that strangely affectionate way that Russians have, with gentle inflections and long modulated phrases. Naturally, we had asked him about our destination, but we got nothing comprehensible from him, except – as far as we could gather from certain rhythmic puffings of his and from the movement of his elbows bent like piston-rods – that his task was limited to taking us as far as a railway.
This was in fact what happened. As the sun rose, the cart stopped at the foot of an embankment which carried the railway lines, interrupted and destroyed for about fifty yards by a recent bombardment. The soldier pointed to one of the two sections, helped us climb down from the cart (it was necessary: the journey had lasted nearly two hours, the cart was small, and many of us, because of the uncomfortable position and the penetrating cold, were so numb as to be unable to move), took leave of us with jovial incomprehensible words, turned the horses round, and departed, singing sweetly.
The sun, which had barely risen, had disappeared behind a veil of mist; from the top of the railway embankment we could only see an interminable flat, deserted countryside, buried under the snow, without a roof, without a tree. More hours passed; not one of us had a watch.
As I have already said, we were about a dozen. There was a Reichsdeutscher who, like many other ‘Aryan’ Germans, had assumed relatively courteous and frankly ambiguous attitudes after the liberation (this was an amusing metamorphosis, which I had already seen happen in others, sometimes gradually, sometimes in a few minutes at the first appearance of the new lords of the Red Star, on whose large faces it was easy to read the tendency not to split hairs). There were two tall, thin brothers, Viennese Jews about fifty years old, silent and cautious like all the old Häftlinge; an officer of the regular Yugoslav Army, who seemed as if he had not yet succeeded in throwing off the compliance and inertia of the Lager, and who looked at us with empty eyes. There was a sort of human wreck, of indefinable age, who spoke ceaselessly to himself in Yiddish; one of the many whom the ferocious life of the camp had half destroyed, and then left to their fate, sealed up (and perhaps protected) by a thick armour of insensitivity or open madness. And finally there was the Greek, with whom destiny was to unite me for an unforgettable week of vagabondage.
His name was Mordo Nahum, and at first sight he seemed nothing exceptional, except for his shoes (of leather, almost new, of elegant design: a real portent, given the time and the place), and the sack that he carried on his back, which was of conspicuous size and corresponding weight, as I myself was to ascertain in the following days. Besides his own language, he spoke Spanish (like all Jews from Salonica), French, a halting Italian but with a good accent, and, as I found out later, Turkish, Bulgarian and a little Albanian. He was about forty; of fairly tall stature, he walked with curved shoulders, his head pushed forward like a myope. Red of hair and skin, he had large pale watery eyes and a great curved nose, which gave his whole body a rapacious yet halting appearance, like a night-bird surprised by light, or a shark outside its natural environment.
He was recovering from some indeterminate illness, which caused attacks of extremely high, enervating fever; in the first nights of the journey he still sometimes fell into a state of prostration, with attacks of shivering and delirium. Although we did not feel particularly attracted to each other, we were drawn together by having two languages in common, and by the fact, quite noticeable in the circumstances, that we were the only two Mediterraneans in the small group.
The waiting was interminable; we were hungry and cold, and we were forced to stand or lie down in the snow, because there was no roof or shelter as far as the eye could see. It must have been nearly midday when, heralded from afar by the puffing and smoke, the hand of civilization was stretched out to us charitably in the form of an emaciated string of three or four goods trucks dragged by a small locomotive, such as is used in normal times for shunting wagons.
The train stopped in front of us, at the end of the interrupted line. We were unable to gain any sensible information from the few Polish peasants who got out; they looked at us with closed faces, and avoided us as if we were pestiferous. In fact, we were, probably in the strict sense of the word, and in any case our aspect could hardly have been pleasing: but we had misguidedly hoped for a more cordial welcome from the first ‘civilians’ we met after our liberation. We all climbed into one end of the trucks, and the small train left almost at once in the opposite direction, pushed and no longer pulled by the toy locomotive. At the next stopping place two peasant women climbed on; once the first diffidence and linguistic obstacles had been overcome, we learnt from them some important geographical facts, and some news which, if true, sounded little less than disastrous to our ears.
The break in the railway line was a little way from a locality named Neu Berun, which had formerly been the junction for a branch line, later destroyed, to Auschwitz. The two sections which started from the interruption led to Katowice (to the west), and to Cracow (to the east). Both of these localities lay about forty miles from Neu Berun, which, in the frightful conditions in which the war had left the line, meant at least two days’ journey, with an unspecified number of stops and changes. The train on which we found ourselves was travelling towards Cracow; until a few days before, the Russians had gathered an enormous number of ex-prisoners at Cracow, and now all the barracks, schools, hospitals and convents were overflowing with people in a condition of desperate need. The very streets of Cracow, according to our informers, were swarming with men and women of all races, who in a moment had transformed themselves into smugglers, clandestine merchants, even into thieves and bandits.
For several days now, the ex-prisoners had been concentrated into other camps, around Katowice. The two women were amazed to find us travelling towards Cracow, where, they said, the Russian garrison itself was suffering from hunger. After they had heard our story they consulted briefly, then they declared themselves convinced that it must simply have been a mistake on the part of our escort, the Russian cart-driver, who, with little knowledge of the country, had directed us towards the eastern section instead of towards the western.
The news plunged us into a riddle of doubts and anxiety. We had hoped for a short and safe journey, towards a camp equipped to receive us, towards an acceptable substitute for our homes; and this hope formed part of a far greater hope, that of an upright and just world, miraculously re-established on its natural foundations after an eternity of upheavals, of errors and massacres, after our long patient wait. It was a naïve hope, like all those that rest on too sharp a division between good and evil, between past and future, but it was on this that we were living. That first crack, and the other inevitable ones, small and large, that followed it, were for us a cause of grief, the more hardly felt because they were unforeseen; for one does not dream for years, for decades, of a better world, without representing it as perfect.
It was not so; something had happened that only the few wise ones among us had foreseen. Liberty, the improbable, the impossible liberty, so far removed from Auschwitz that we had only dared to hope for it in our dreams, had come, but it had not taken us to the Promised Land. It was around us, but in the form of a pitiless deserted plain. More trials, more toil, more hunger, more cold, more fears awaited us.
I had been fasting now for twenty-four hours. We were sitting on the wooden floor of the truck, huddled together to protect ourselves from the cold; the railway lines were loose, and at every bump our heads, unsteady on our necks, knocked against the wooden planks of the walls. I felt exhausted, not only physically; like an athlete who has run for hours, using up all his own resources, those of nature first, and then those that he squeezes out, that he creates from nothing in moments of extreme need; like an athlete who arrives at his goal, and who, in the act of falling spent to the ground, is brutally hauled to his feet, and forced to start running again, in the dark, towards another goal of unknown distance.
The train travelled slowly. In the evening dark, apparently deserted villages emerged; then total night came down, atrociously cold, without light in heaven or on earth. Only the bumping of the truck prevented us from drifting into a sleep which the cold would have rendered mortal. After interminable hours of travel, perhaps about three o’clock at night, we finally stopped at a wrecked, dark little station. The Greek was delirious; of the others, none wanted to get down from the truck, some from fear, some from sheer inertia, some in the hope that the train would leave soon. I got down, and wandered into the dark with my ridiculous baggage until I saw a small lighted window. It was the telegraph hut, packed with people: there was a lighted stove. I entered cautiously, like a stray dog, ready to disappear at the first sign of a threat, but nobody bothered about me. I threw myself on the floor and fell asleep at once, as one learns to do in the Lager.
I woke up some hours later at dawn. The hut was empty. The telegraphist saw me raise my head, and placed an enormous slice of bread and cheese beside me on the ground. I was startled (apart from being half paralysed by the cold and sleep) and I fear I did not thank him. I pushed the food into my stomach and went outside; the train had not moved. In the truck, my companions were lying besotted; when they saw me they shook themselves, all except the Yugoslav, who strove to move in vain. The cold and immobility had paralysed his legs; when we touched him he shouted and groaned. We had to massage him for a long time, and then to move his limbs cautiously, as one inches a rusty mechanism.
It had been a terrible night for everyone, perhaps the worst of our whole exile. I spoke to the Greek about it; we agreed to join forces so as to avoid at all costs another freezing night, which we felt we should not survive.
I think that the Greek, thanks to my nocturnal outing, had somehow overestimated my qualities of ‘débrouillard et démerdard’, as they were elegantly described at the time. As for myself, I confess that I was impressed mainly by his big sack and his quality of a Salonikite, which, as everyone in Auschwitz knew, was equivalent to a guarantee of highly skilled mercantile ability, and of knowing how to get oneself out of any situation. Sympathy, bilateral, and esteem, unilateral, came later.
The train left again, and by a tortuous and vague route led us to a place called Szczakowa. Here the Polish Red Cross had established a marvellous field-kitchen; a quite substantial hot soup was distributed at all hours of the day and night, and to anyone, without distinction, who presented himself. A miracle that none of us would have dared to dream of in our most audacious dreams: in a certain sense, the Lager upside down. I do not remember the behaviour of my companions; as for myself, I was so voracious that the Polish sisters, used as they were to the famished clientele of the place, crossed themselves.
We left again in the afternoon. The sun was out. Our poor train stopped at dusk, in trouble; far away the spires of Cracow glowed red. The Greek and I got down from the truck and went to interrogate the engine-driver, who stood in the middle of the snow, busy and dirty, fighting long jets of steam that shot out from some burst pipe. ‘Masheena kaputt,’ he replied to us epigraphically. We we
re no longer slaves, we were no longer protected, we had left our tutelage. For us the hour of trial was sounding.
The Greek, revived by the hot soup of Szczakowa, felt quite strong. ‘On y va?’ – ‘On y va.’ So we left the train and our perplexed companions, whom we were never to see again, and we started out on foot in the problematical search for human kind.
At his peremptory request I shouldered the famous bundle. In vain I had tried to protest. ‘But it’s your stuff!’ ‘Exactly, because it is mine. I organized it and you carry it. That’s the division of work. Later you too will profit from it.’ So we started off, he first and I second, on the hard snow of a minor road; the sun had gone down.
I have spoken already of the Greek’s shoes; as for myself, I was wearing a pair of curious foot-coverings which in Italy I had only seen worn by priests: of extremely delicate leather, reaching higher than the ankle, without laces, but with two large clasps, and two lateral patches of elastic fabric which should have ensured that they remained tight-fitting. I was also wearing four pairs of Häftling-style cloth trousers on top of each other, a cotton shirt, a jacket, also striped – and that was all. My baggage consisted of a blanket and a cardboard box in which I had formerly kept a few pieces of bread, but which was now empty. The Greek eyed the whole lot with unconcealed contempt and annoyance.
We had deceived ourselves grossly about the distance from Cracow: we should have to walk at least four miles. After about twenty minutes, my shoes were finished; the sole of one of them had come off, and the other began to unstitch itself. Until then the Greek had maintained a pregnant silence; when he saw me put down the sack and sit by the side of the road to contemplate the disaster, he asked me: