Our Lager, Monowitz, near Auschwitz, was in many ways anomalous. The barrier that separated us from the world, symbolized by a double barbed-wire fence, was not as impenetrable as it was elsewhere. Because of our work requirements, we came into daily contact with people who were “free,” or at least less enslaved than we were: technicians, German engineers and foremen, Russian and Polish workers, British, American, French, and Italian prisoners of war. Officially, they were not allowed to talk to us, the KZ (Konzentrations-Zentrum) pariahs, but this prohibition was constantly ignored, and, besides, news of the free world reached us through thousands of channels. In the factory dumps we could find copies of daily papers, maybe two or three days old and soaked with rain, and there we read with trepidation the German war bulletins; they were incomplete, censored, euphemistic, yet revealing. The Allied prisoners of war listened to Radio London in secret and, in even greater secrecy, relayed the exciting news to us. In December 1944, the Russians had entered Hungary and Poland, the British were in Romagna, the Americans were engaged in a hard fight in the Ardennes but were winning against Japan in the Pacific.
On the other hand, to know how the war was going, we didn’t really need to secure news from faraway places. At night, when all the camp noises died out, we could hear the thunder of approaching artillery: the front was no farther than a hundred kilometers; there were rumors that the Red Army had already reached the Beskids. The huge factory where we worked had been bombed several times with scientific and malevolent precision. One bomb, only one, was dropped on the heating system, disabling it for two weeks. As soon as the damage was repaired and the chimney began to smoke again, another bomb would fall—and so on. It was clear that the Russians, or the Allies in agreement with the Russians, wanted to halt production but not destroy the plant. They planned to take it over, intact, at the end of the war, and so they did; today it is the biggest synthetic-rubber factory in Poland. The antiaircraft defense was nonexistent, there were no fighter planes in sight, there were batteries on the roofs but they didn’t fire; maybe they had run out of ammunition.
In other words, Germany was near death, but the Germans did not seem to realize it. After the attempt on Hitler’s life, in July, the country lived in terror: an accusation, an absence from work, a careless word was enough for someone to end up in the Gestapo’s hands as a defeatist. Thus, both the military and the civilians continued to carry out their tasks as always, driven both by fear and by their inbred sense of discipline. A fanatic and suicidal Germany was terrorizing a Germany that was discouraged and inwardly vanquished.
Shortly before that, toward the end of October, we had the opportunity to observe “close up” a singular school of fanaticism, a typical example of National Socialist education. A camp for Hitler Youth had been set up on barren land adjoining our Lager. There were maybe two hundred teenagers, still almost children; in the morning they raised the flag, sang fierce anthems, and carried out marching and shooting drills, armed with ancient muskets. We understood later that they were being trained to join the Volkssturm, that randomly assembled army of old men and children that according to the Führer’s insane plans was to mount the final defense against the advancing Russians. But in the afternoon their instructors, who were SS veterans, would lead them among us, who were busy removing the rubble left by the bombings or hastily building, with bricks or sandbags, low, useless protection walls.
They led the youths among us on a “guided tour,” teaching them, in loud voices, as if we had neither ears to hear nor wits to understand. “These you see here are the Reich’s enemies, your enemies. Look at them carefully: can you call them men? They are Untermenschen, subhumans! They stink because they don’t wash; they are in rags because they don’t take care of themselves. Many of them don’t even understand German. They are subversives, outlaws, thieves from the four corners of Europe, but we have made them harmless. Now they work for us, but they’re only good for the most rudimentary tasks. Besides, it’s right that they should toil to repair the damage of war: they’re the ones who wanted it—them, the Jews, the Communists, the agents of plutocracies.” The child-soldiers listened, credulous and dumbfounded. Seen up close, they inspired compassion and revulsion at the same time. They were emaciated and frightened, but looked at us with intense hatred: so we were the ones responsible for all evils, for the cities in ruins, for the famine, for their fathers’ deaths on the Russian front. The Führer was harsh but just; it was just to serve him.
At the time, I was working as a “specialist” in a chemical laboratory inside the plant. I have already told the story elsewhere; oddly, however, as the years go by, those memories neither fade nor disappear. On the contrary, they are enriched by details that I thought forgotten, and that sometimes gain meaning in the light of someone else’s memories, letters I receive or books I read. It was snowing, the weather was very cold, and working in the laboratory was far from easy. At times, the heating system wasn’t working and at night the cold would burst the bottles of reagents and the big flask of distilled water.
Often, the raw material or the reagents for the analyses were not available. Then we would have to make do with surrogates or manufacture them on the spot. When we didn’t have ethyl acetate for a colorimetric measurement, the head of the lab told me to produce a liter of it and procured the necessary acetic acid and ethyl alcohol. The procedure is simple, and I knew it almost by heart: I had carried it out in Turin in 1941 for some organic preparation. Three years earlier, but it felt like three thousand. Everything went smoothly until the final distillation; at that point, the water suddenly stopped coming out of the faucets.
The situation could have turned into a minor disaster, since I was using a glass cooler: had the water come back, the cooler pipe, heated inside by the chemical vapors, would certainly have broken upon contact with the ice-cold water. I turned off the faucet, found a bucket, filled it with distilled water, and dipped into it the small pump of a Höppler thermostat: the pump pushed the water into the cooler, and the warm water coming out dropped back into the bucket. There were no problems for a few minutes, but then I realized that the ethyl acetate was no longer condensing: it was emerging from the pipe almost entirely as vapor. This was because the distilled water (no other water was available) that I had found wasn’t much, and was too warm by now. What to do? There was plenty of snow on the windowsills; I made some snowballs and put them in the bucket one by one. While I was busy with my balls of gray snow, Dr. Pannwitz walked into the lab. He was the German chemist who had subjected me to an odd “state examination” to determine whether my professional knowledge was adequate. He was a fanatical Nazi. He looked suspiciously at my makeshift equipment and the cloudy water that could have damaged his beloved pump, but said nothing and left.
A few days later, around mid-December, the sink under one of the aspiration hoods clogged up. The foreman told me to unclog it; it seemed natural to him that this dirty job was for me to do and not for the lab technician, who was a girl called Frau Mayer; and after all this seemed natural to me, too. I was the only one who could lie down easily on the floor with no fear of getting dirty: my striped clothes were already so filthy. . . . I was standing up after screwing the trap back into place, when I saw Frau Mayer next to me. She spoke in a low voice, looking guilty; among the eight or ten girls in the laboratory, who were German, Polish, and Ukrainian, she was the only one who did not show contempt toward me. As my hands were already dirty, could I perhaps fix the flat tire on her bicycle? Of course, she would compensate me.
This apparently innocent request was full of sociological implications. She had said “please,” in itself a breach of the upside-down code of conduct that governed the Germans’ relations with us; she had spoken to me for reasons unrelated to work; she had made a sort of contract with me, and a contract is made between equals; she had expressed, or at least implied, gratitude for fixing the sink in her place. However, the girl was also asking me to commit a violation, something that could be very dangerous for me: I was there as a chemist and in fixing her bike I would take time away from my professional obligations. In short, she was proposing a risky but potentially useful complicity. To have human relations with someone from “the other side” involved danger, social promotion, and also extra food for today and tomorrow. In an instant I did the algebraic sum of the three addends, hunger prevailed by far, and I accepted the proposal.
Frau Mayer handed me the key to the lock; I should go fetch the bicycle, which was in the courtyard. This was unthinkable; I did my best to explain that either she had to go or she had to send someone else. “We” were by definition thieves and liars; there would be trouble if someone saw me with a bicycle! A similar problem arose when I saw the vehicle. It had a little pocket with adhesive, rubber patches, and small levers to remove the tire, but there was no pump, and without a pump I couldn’t find the hole in the inner tube. Incidentally, I should add that in those days bicycles, and related punctures, were much more common than they are now, and that almost all Europeans, especially the young, knew how to patch a tire. A pump? No problem, said Frau Mayer, I could borrow one from Meister Grubach, her colleague next door. No, this was not so simple; not without embarrassment I had to ask her to write and sign for me a note “Bitte um die Fahrradpumpe.”
I fixed the bicycle, and Frau Mayer gave me, in great secrecy, a hard-boiled egg and four lumps of sugar. Let it be clear: given the circumstances and the going rates, this payment was more than generous. While furtively handing me the bundle, Frau Mayer whispered a sentence that gave me much to think about: “Soon it will be Christmas.” Obvious words, or, rather, absurd addressed to a Jewish prisoner; they were certainly intended to mean something else, something that at that time no German would have dared to convey openly.
Relating this episode forty years later, I do not intend to defend Nazi Germany. One humane German does not whitewash the innumerable inhuman or indifferent Germans, but it does have the merit of breaking a stereotype.
• • •
It was a memorable Christmas for the world at war; it was memorable for me as well, because it was marked by a miracle. At Auschwitz, the different categories of prisoners (political prisoners, common criminals, asocial individuals, homosexuals, etc.) could receive gift packages from home, but not the Jews. On the other hand, from whom would they have been able to receive such presents? From families who had been exterminated or were held captive in the ghettos that still survived? From the very few who had escaped the raids, hidden in basements or attics, frightened and without any money? And who knew our address? In every respect, we were dead to the world.
And yet a parcel sent by my sister and my mother, who were hiding in Italy, reached me through a chain of friends. The last link in the chain was Lorenzo Perrone, the bricklayer from Fossano whom I wrote about in If This Is a Man, and whose poignant end is described in Lilith. The parcel contained Italian-made chocolate, cookies, and dried milk. However, ordinary language is inadequate to convey the true value of that parcel, the impact it had on me and on my friend Alberto. Eating, food, hunger were words that in the Lager had meanings totally different from the usual ones. That unexpected, improbable, impossible package was like a meteorite, a heavenly object, loaded with symbols. Its value was immense and it carried an immense living force.
We were no longer alone: a link had been established with the outside world. And there were delicious treats to eat for many days. But there were also serious practical problems, to be solved immediately: we were like a passerby presented with a gold ingot in the middle of the street. Where to put it? How to preserve it? How to protect it from the greed of others? How to invest it? Our year-old hunger was pushing us toward the worst solution: to eat everything right away. We had to resist temptation; our weakened stomachs would not stand up to the challenge, within an hour we would end up with indigestion or worse.
We had no safe hiding place. We distributed the food among all sanctioned pockets in our clothes; we also stitched illicit pockets on the backs of our jackets so that, even in the case of a search, something could be saved. However, to carry everything with us, to work, to the washhouse, to the latrines, was inconvenient and awkward. Alberto and I discussed the matter at length in the evening, after the curfew. We were bound by a strict pact: everything one of us managed to secure, apart from the regular ration, was to be divided into two absolutely equal parts. In these exploits Alberto was always more successful and I had often asked him why he continued his partnership with someone as inefficient as I was. Alberto always replied: “One never knows; I’m quicker, but you’re luckier.” For once, he had been proved right.
Alberto made an ingenious proposal. The cookies were the most cumbersome item and we had them hidden all over. I even kept some inside the lining of my cap and had to be careful not to crush them whenever I had to take the cap off in a hurry to salute passing SS. The cookies weren’t very tasty, but they looked good; we could divide them into two packs and give them as presents to the Kapo and to the oldest prisoner of our barrack. According to Alberto, that would be the most profitable investment: we would gain prestige and the two “prominents,” even without a formal agreement, would reward us with a variety of favors. We would consume the rest of the parcel ourselves, in small daily rations and in the greatest possible secrecy.
But in the Lager the crowding, the close living, the gossip, and the confusion were such that the secret was short-lived. We realized this within a few days: companions and Kapos were looking at us with different eyes. Indeed, they were looking at us the way you look at something or someone who stands out from the ordinary, who is no longer part of the background but is in the limelight. Depending on the degree of sympathy they felt for “the two Italians,” they would look at us with envy, with tacit understanding, with satisfaction, with open desire. Mendi, a Slovak rabbi who was a friend of mine, said to me with a wink: “Mazel tov” (“good luck”), the beautiful Yiddish and Jewish expression used to congratulate someone on a happy occasion. We were both relieved and worried by the fact that many knew or had guessed our luck: we had to be on our guard. At any rate, we agreed to speed up the pace of consumption: what is eaten cannot be stolen.
On Christmas Day, we worked as usual. Rather, since the lab was closed, I was sent with the others to clear away rubble and transport bags of chemicals from a storehouse that had been bombed to an undamaged one. Returning to the camp in the evening, I went to the washhouse. As I still carried in my pockets a good amount of chocolate and dried milk, I waited until a spot became free in the farthest corner from the entrance. I hung my jacket on a nail right behind me; no one could come close without my seeing him. As I started to wash, I saw out of the corner of my eye that the jacket was rising. I turned around, but it was already too late; the jacket, with all its contents, and with my matriculation number stitched on its breast, was now out of reach. Someone had lowered a string and a hook from the small window above the nail. I ran outside, half naked as I was, but no one was there. No one had seen anything; no one knew anything. On top of it all, I was left without my jacket. I had to go to the quartermaster of the barracks to confess my fault, because in the Lager to be robbed was a fault. He gave me another jacket, but instructed me to find a needle and thread, no matter how; I was to unstitch the matriculation number from my trousers and stitch it right away on the new jacket, otherwise “bekommst du fünfundzwanzig,” I would get twenty-five blows with a stick.
We redivided the contents of Alberto’s pockets; he was unruffled, and he pulled out his best philosophical repertoire. We had consumed more than half of the parcel, hadn’t we? And the rest wasn’t totally wasted; some other hungry inmate was celebrating Christmas at our expense, maybe blessing us. Besides, we could be sure of one thing: it was our last Christmas of war and prison.
Published privately by Sergio Grandini with drawings by Imre Reiner (Lugano, 1984); later in Triangolo Rosso, no. 11–12, December 1986