In the first days of January 1945 the Germans, under pressure from the approaching Red Army, had hastily evacuated the Silesian mineral basin. While elsewhere, in analogous conditions, they hadn’t hesitated to destroy by fire or weaponry the Lagers, together with their inhabitants, in the district of Auschwitz they acted differently: orders from on high (apparently dictated by Hitler himself) decreed that they “retrieve,” at whatever cost, every able-bodied man. Thus all the healthy prisoners were evacuated, under frightful conditions, to Buchenwald and to Mauthausen, while the sick were abandoned to themselves. The Germans’ original intention to leave no man alive in the concentration camps can be deduced from various clues; but a violent nighttime aerial attack, and the speed of the Russian advance, led them to change their mind, and to flee, leaving their duty and their task incomplete.
In the Buna-Monowitz infirmary eight hundred of us remained. Of these, around five hundred died of their illnesses or of cold or hunger before the Russians arrived, and two hundred others, in spite of aid, in the days immediately following.
The first Russian patrol came in view of the camp around midday on January 27, 1945. Charles and I were the first to catch sight of it: we were carrying to the common grave the body of Sómogyi, the first of the men in our room to die. We overturned the stretcher onto the dirty snow, because the grave was by now full, and no other burial could be given: Charles took off his cap, to salute the living and the dead.
Four young soldiers on horseback, machine guns under their arms, proceeded warily along the road that followed the perimeter of the camp. When they reached the fences, they paused to look, and, with a brief, timid exchange of words, turned their gazes, checked by a strange embarrassment, to the jumbled pile of corpses, to the ruined barracks, and to us few living beings.
They seemed to us miraculously physical and real, suspended (the road was higher than the camp) on their enormous horses, between the gray of the snow and the gray of the sky, motionless under the gusts of a damp wind that threatened thaw.
It seemed to us, and so it was, that the void filled with death in which for ten days we had wandered like spent stars had found a solid center, a nucleus of condensation: four armed men, but not armed against us; four messengers of peace, with rough boyish faces under the heavy fur helmets.
They didn’t greet us, they didn’t smile; they appeared oppressed, not only by pity but by a confused restraint, which sealed their mouths, and riveted their eyes to the mournful scene. It was a shame well-known to us, the shame that inundated us after the selections and every time we had to witness or submit to an outrage: the shame that the Germans didn’t know, and which the just man feels before a sin committed by another. It troubles him that it exists, that it has been irrevocably introduced into the world of things that exist, and that his goodwill availed nothing, or little, and was powerless to defend against it.
So for us even the hour of freedom struck solemn and oppressive, and filled our hearts with both joy and a painful sense of shame, because of which we would have liked to wash from our consciences and our memories the monstrosity that lay there; and with anguish, because we felt that this could not happen, that nothing could ever happen that was good and pure enough to wipe out our past, and that the marks of the offense would remain in us forever, and in the memories of those who were present, and in the places where it happened, and in the stories that we would make of it. Since—and this is the tremendous privilege of our generation and of my people—no one could ever grasp better than us the incurable nature of the offense, which spreads like an infection. It is foolish to think that it can be abolished by human justice. It is an inexhaustible source of evil: it breaks the body and soul of those who are drowned, extinguishes them and makes them abject; rises again as infamy in the oppressors, is perpetuated as hatred in the survivors, and springs up in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as moral breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation.
These things, at the time not clearly discerned, and noted by the majority only as a sudden wave of mortal fatigue, accompanied the joy of liberation. Therefore few among us ran to the saviours, few fell in prayer. Charles and I stood still near the ditch overflowing with livid limbs, while others knocked down the fence; then we returned with the empty stretcher, to bring the news to our companions.
For the rest of the day nothing happened, a thing that did not surprise us, and that we had long since become accustomed to. In our room the bunk of the dead Sómogyi was immediately occupied by old Thylle, to the visible disgust of my two French companions.
Thylle, as far as I knew then, was a “red triangle,” a German political prisoner, and was one of the old inhabitants of the Lager; as such, he had belonged by right to the aristocracy of the camp, had done no manual labor (at least in recent years), and had received food and clothing from home. For these reasons the German political prisoners were rarely guests of the infirmary, where, on the other hand, they enjoyed various privileges: most important, they avoided the selections. Since, at the moment of the liberation, Thylle was the only “political,” he had been invested by the SS in flight with the job of barracks chief of Block 20, which was made up of our room of highly contagious sick people, along with the TB ward and the dysentery ward.
Being German, he had taken this provisional appointment very seriously. During the ten days that separated the departure of the SS from the arrival of the Russians, while each man fought his last battle against hunger, cold, and illness, Thylle had carried out diligent inspections of his new domain, checking the state of the floors and the bowls and the number of blankets (one for every inmate, whether living or dead). On one of his visits to our room he had even praised Arthur for the order and cleanliness he had been able to maintain; Arthur, who didn’t understand German, and even less Thylle’s Saxon dialect, had answered “Vieux dégoutant” and “Putain de boche.” Nevertheless Thylle, from that day on, with obvious abuse of his authority, had got in the habit of coming every night to our room to make use of the comfortable slop bucket that was installed there—the only one in the whole camp whose maintenance was seen to regularly, and the only one situated near a stove.
Thus, until that day old Thylle had been a stranger to me, and therefore an enemy; in addition, he was powerful, and therefore a dangerous enemy. For people like me, that is to say the general population of the Lager, there were no other nuances: during the entire long year I spent in the Lager, I had never had either the curiosity or the occasion to investigate the complex structures of the camp hierarchy. The shadowy edifice of evil powers lay entirely above us, and our gaze was turned to the ground. And yet it was this Thylle, an old militant hardened by innumerable struggles for his party and within his party, and ossified by ten years of fierce and ambiguous life in the Lager, who was the companion and confidant of my first night of freedom.
For the whole day, we had had too much to do to have time to comment on the event, which we nevertheless felt marked the crucial point of our entire existence; and perhaps unconsciously we had sought activity, precisely for the purpose of not having time, because in the face of freedom we felt lost, emptied, atrophied, unsuited to our role.
But night came, our sick companions slept, and Charles and Arthur also slept the sleep of innocence, since they had been in the Lager only a month, and hadn’t absorbed its poison: I alone, although I was exhausted, couldn’t sleep, because of the very weariness and the illness. All my limbs ached, the blood pulsed convulsively in my head, and I felt invaded by fever. But it wasn’t only this. As if a dike had given way just at the moment when every threat seemed to diminish, when hope of a return to life ceased to be insane, I was overwhelmed by a new and vaster suffering, which had been buried and relegated to the margins of consciousness by other, more urgent sufferings: the pain of exile, of my distant home, of solitude, of lost friends, of lost youth, and of the multitude of corpses all around.
In my year in Buna I had seen four-fifths of my companions die, but I had never endured the concrete presence, the siege of death, its sordid breath close by, outside the window, in the next bunk, in my own veins. I therefore lay in a sick half-sleep that was full of baleful thoughts.
But I soon realized that someone else was awake. Superimposed on the heavy breathing of the sleepers there was at times a hoarse and irregular panting, interrupted by coughing and by stifled groans and sighs. Thylle was weeping, a weary, shameless old man’s weeping, unbearable as an old man’s nudity. Perhaps he noticed, in the dark, some movement of mine; and the solitude, which until that day both of us, for different reasons, had sought, must have weighed as much on him as on me, because in the middle of the night he asked me, “Are you awake?” and not waiting for the answer he climbed laboriously up to my bunk and without asking permission sat down beside me.
It wasn’t easy to make myself understood by him, not only for reasons of language but also because the thoughts that lay in our breasts on that long night were endless, marvelous, terrible, and above all confused. I told him that I suffered from homesickness; and he, who had stopped crying, said to me, “Ten years—ten years!” and, after ten years of silence, in a thin, strident voice, he began singing the “Internationale,” grotesque and solemn at the same time, leaving me disturbed, distrustful, and moved.
Morning brought the first signs of freedom. Twenty Polish civilians, men and women, arrived (evidently ordered by the Russians), and with very little enthusiasm got busy organizing and cleaning the barracks and getting rid of the corpses. Around midday a frightened child appeared, dragging a cow by the halter; he made us understand that it was for us, and that the Russians had sent it, then he abandoned the beast and fled in a flash. I can’t say how, the poor animal was butchered in a few minutes, gutted, and cut up, and its remains were dispersed throughout all the corners of the camp where survivors lurked.
Starting the next day, we saw more Polish girls going around the camp, pale with pity and disgust: they cleaned the sick and treated the wounds as well as they could. They also lit an enormous fire in the middle of the camp, which they fed with debris from the bomb-damaged barracks, and on which they cooked soup in any containers they could find. Finally, on the third day, we saw entering the camp a four-wheeled cart, driven cheerfully by Yankel, a Häftling: he was a young Russian Jew, perhaps the only Russian among the survivors, and as such he found himself naturally filling the function of interpreter and liaison with the Soviet command. Amid sonorous cracks of the whip he announced that he was charged with bringing to the central Auschwitz Lager, now transformed into a gigantic quarantine hospital, all the living among us, in small groups of thirty or forty a day, and beginning with the most seriously ill.
Meanwhile the thaw had arrived, which we had been dreading for days, and as the snow melted the camp became a squalid swamp. The corpses and the garbage made the soft, foggy air unbreathable. Nor had death ceased reaping: the sick died by the dozens in their cold beds, and here and there on the muddy streets, as if struck by lightning, the most voracious survivors died. Blindly following the imperious command of our ancient hunger, they had stuffed themselves on the rations of meat that the Russians, still engaged in combat on the nearby front, sent irregularly to the camp: sometimes a little, sometimes nothing, sometimes in mad abundance.
But I was aware only fitfully and indistinctly of all that was happening around me. It seemed that the weariness and the illness, like fierce, vile beasts, had been lying in wait for the moment when I was stripped of every defense to assault me from behind. I lay in a feverish torpor, only half conscious, watched over in a brotherly way by Charles, and tormented by thirst and by acute pain in my joints. There were neither doctors nor medicines. My throat also hurt, and half of my face was swollen: the skin had become red and rough, and stung like a burn; perhaps I was suffering from several illnesses at once. When my turn came to get into Yankel’s cart, I was no longer able to stand up.
I was hoisted onto the cart by Charles and Arthur, along with a load of dying men from whom I did not feel very different. It was raining, and the sky was low and dark. While the slow pace of Yankel’s horses hauled me toward very distant freedom, the barracks where I had suffered and had grown up passed before my eyes for the last time, along with Roll Call Square, where, side by side, stood the gallows and a giant Christmas tree, and the gateway of slavery, on which the three mocking words, now hollow, could still be read: Arbeit Macht Frei, Work makes us free.