Survival in Auschwitz

comforted Penelope…’, is it correct?

‘…So on the open sea I set forth.’

Of this I am certain, I am sure, I can explain it to Pikolo, I can point out why ‘I set forth’ is not ‘je me mis,’ it is much stronger and more audacious, it is a chain which has been broken, it is throwing oneself on the other side of a barrier, we know the impulse well. The open sea: Pikolo has travelled by sea, and knows what it means: it is when the horizon closes in on itself, free, straight ahead and simple, and there is nothing but the smell of the sea; sweet things, ferociously far away.

We have arrived at Kraftwerk, where the cable-laying Kommando works. Engineer Levi must be here. Here he is, one can only see his head above the trench. He waves to me, he is a brave man, I have never seen his morale low, he never speaks of eating.

‘Open sea’, ‘open sea’, I know it rhymes with ‘left me’: ‘…and that small band of comrades that had never left me’, but I cannot remember if it comes before or after. And the journey as well, the foolhardy journey beyond the Pillars of Hercules, how sad, I have to tell it in prose — a sacrilege. I have only rescued two lines, but they are worth stopping for:

‘…that none should prove so hardy
To venture the uncharted distances…’

‘to venture’: I had to come to the Lager to realize that it is the same expression as before: ‘I set forth’. But I say nothing to Jean, I am not sure that it is an important observation. How many things there are to say, and the sun is already high, midday is near. I am in a hurry, a terrible hurry.

Here, listen Pikolo, open your ears and your mind, you have to understand, for my sake:

‘Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance
Your mettle was not made; you were made men,
To follow after knowledge and excellence.’

As if I also was hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forget who I am and where I am.

Pikolo begs me to repeat it. How good Pikolo is, he is aware that it is doing me good. Or perhaps it is something more: perhaps, despite the wan translation and the pedestrian, rushed commentary, he has received the message, he has felt that it has to do with him, that it has to do with all men who toil, and with us in particular; and that it has to do with us two, who dare to reason of these things with the poles for the soup on our shoulders.

‘My little speech made every one so keen…’

…and I try, but in vain, to explain how many things this ‘keen’ means. There is another lacuna here, this time irreparable. ‘…the light kindles and grows Beneath the moon’ or something like it; but before it?… Not an idea, ‘keine Ahnung’ as they say here. Forgive me, Pikolo, I have forgotten at least four triplets.

‘Ca ne fait rien, vas-y tout de mime.’

‘…When at last hove up a mountain, grey

With distance, and so lofty and so steep,

I never had seen the like on any day.’

Yes, yes, ‘so lofty and so steep’, not ‘very steep’, a consecutive proposition. And the mountains when one sees them in the distance… the mountains… oh, Pikolo, Pikolo, say something, speak, do not let me think of my mountains which used to show up against the dusk of evening as I returned by train from Milan to Turin!

Enough, one must go on, these are things that one thinks but does not say. Pikolo waits and looks at me.

I would give today’s soup to know how to connect ‘the like on any day’ to the last lines. I try to reconstruct it through the rhymes, I close my eyes, I bite my fingers — but it is no use, the rest is silence. Other verses dance in my head: ‘…The sodden ground belched wind…’, no, it is something else. It is late, it is late, we have reached the kitchen, I must finish:

‘And three times round she went in roaring smother
With all the waters; at the fourth the poop
Rose, and the prow went down, as pleased Another.’

I keep Pikolo back, it is vitally necessary and urgent that he listen, that he understand this ‘as pleased Another’ before it is too late; tomorrow he or I might be dead, or we might never see each other again, I must tell him, I must explain to him about the Middle Ages, about the so human and so necessary and yet unexpected anachronism, but still more, something gigantic that I myself have only just seen, in a flash of intuition, perhaps the reason for our fate, for our being here today…

We are now in the soup queue, among the sordid, ragged crowd of soup-carriers from other Kommandos. Those just arrived press against our backs. ‘Kraut und Ruben? Kraut und Ruben.’ The official announcement is made that the soup today is of cabbages and turnips: ‘Choux et navets. Kaposzta es repak.’

‘And over our heads the hollow seas closed up.’

12. The Events of the Summer

Throughout the spring, convoys arrived from Hungary; one prisoner in two was Hungarian, and Hungarian had become the second language in the camp after Yiddish.

In the month of August 1944, we who had entered the camp five months before now counted among the old ones. As such, we of Kommando 98 were not amazed that the promises made to us and the examination we had passed had brought no result; neither amazed nor exceptionally saddened. At bottom, we all had a certain dread of changes: ‘When things change, they change for the worse’ was one of the proverbs of the camp. More generally, experience had shown us many times the vanity of every conjecture: why worry oneself trying to read into the future when no action, no word of ours could have the minimum influence? We were old Haftlinge: our wisdom lay in ‘not trying to understand’, not imagining the future, not tormenting ourselves as to how and when it would all be over; not asking others or ourselves any questions.

We preserved the memories of our previous life, but blurred and remote, profoundly sweet and sad, like the