A DISCIPLE
Levi, Primo
The distinguished Italian-Jewish writer PRIMO LEVI is best known for his books Survival in Auschwitz (1947) and The Reawakening (1963), which deal with his experiences as a prisoner, or slave...
...In that place we were supposed to work...
...Oppression, humiliations, hard work, exile—all seemed to slide off him like water off a rock and without corrupting or wounding, indeed purifying and enhancing him and in him his inborn capacity for joy, as we are told happened to the simple, cheerful and pious Chassidim described by Jiri Langer in his novel The Nine Doors...
...I knew that it was elementary prudence to keep silent, and yet I had to talk about it...
...The newcomers caused a profound change in the fabric of all the camps...
...If there are seventeen, why should we make them believe that there are twenty...
...And yet I cling to the memories of this man Bandi as precious things, and I am happy to preserve them on a page...
...And especially a great number of human figures stood out against that tragic background...
...I went down into my cistern and Bandi was with me...
...Bandi was very sensitive about his condition of "Zugang," that is, new arrival, and to the condition of social subjection that derived from it...
...Halfway along the path stood an overseer, and he checked to see that the load was regulation...
...Others were professional men, students and intellectuals, who came from Budapest and other cities...
...I had done all this as one obeys a ritual, without really hoping for success...
...This was a ruse I thought I had invented (I found out later that it was, however, in the public domain), and that I had used several times with success...
...But as he writes in the introduction to his new book, Moments of Reprieve (translated into English by RUTH FELDMAN): '`il host of details continued to surface in my memory and the idea of letting them fade away distressed me...
...They communicated with us in a curious draggedout German, and communicated with each other in their odd language, which bristled with unusual inflections, and seems to be made up of interminable words, pronounced with irritating slowness, and all with the accent on the first syllable...
...August came, with an extraordinary gift for me: a letter from home—an unprecedented event...
...At least I believe that Bandi, even though he was a "Zugang," understood or sensed all this, because when I was through reading, he came close to me, rummaged at length in his pocket, and finally, with loving care, pulled out a radish...
...But he understood what it was essential he should understand: that that piece of paper in my hands, which had reached me in such a precarious way, and which I would destroy before nightfall, represented a breach, a small gap in the black universe that closed tightly around us, and through that breach hope could pass...
...Besides, I soon realized that Bandi had a unique talent for happiness...
...This is for you: it's the first thing I've stolen...
...Translation copyright 01979, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1985 by Summit Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc...
...All the barracks and work squads were inundated by the Hungarians, around whom, as happens in all communities around new arrivals, an atmosphere of derision, gossip, and vague intolerance rapidly condensed...
...Certainly he could not understand much because German was neither my language nor his, and also because the message was scant and reticent...
...Besides, they're not going to be used to build your house or mine...
...on the contrary with a touch of childlike and athletic vanity for having "brought it off...
...Twenty bricks are heavy...
...He told me his name was Endre SzantO, a name that is pronounced more or less like "canto" in Italian, and this reinforced in me the vague impression of a halo that seemed to encircle his shaved head...
...but no, he explained laughingly to me: SzantO means plower, or, more generically, peasant...
...Instead, my letter had arrived without difficulty, and my mother had answered via the same route...
...Our task that day was to carry bricks on a sort of crude wooden litter equipped with two poles in front and two behind: twenty bricks a trip...
...At other times it had earned me some nasty blows...
...Copyright 01981, 1985 by Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a...
...I wouldn't be able to repeat them all today: every memory fades...
...The Hungarians arrived among us, not in a trickle but all at once...
...At work he was dexterous and strong, the best worker in the 25 squad, but he did not try to profit from this superiority of his, nor show off to the German foremen, nor lord it over us...
...I only wish that, by some not impossible miracle, the page might reach him in the corner of the world where he still lives, perhaps, that he might read it and we could find each other again...
...We are grateful to Primo Levi's American publisher, Summit Books, for permission to print the following selection from Moments of Reprieve...
...But twenty bricks weigh more than seventeen," I answered impatiently, "and if they're well arranged, no one will notice...
...He had spent two winters in the woods, cutting down pine trees with three companions: heavy work but he had liked it and had been almost happy there...
...26...
...They were workmen and peasants, simple and robust, who did not fear manual labor but were From the forthcoming book Moments of Reprieve by Primo Levi, translated by Ruth Feldman...
...In June, with frightful irresponsibility, and through the mediation of a "free" Italian laborer who was a bricklayer, I had written a message for my mother, who was hidden in Italy, and addressed it to a woman friend of mine named Bianca Guidetti Serra...
...To be published by Summit Books...
...so he worked as best he could...
...In no time, with his radiant and childlike face, his energetic voice and awkward gait, Bandi became very popular...
...At the end of June a good half of my squad was made up of fine fellows, still well-nourished, still full of optimism and joviality...
...I told him that in my opinion working like this was a waste of energy, and that it was also politically wrong, but Bandi gave no sign of understanding me...
...One of them was assigned to me as work companion...
...I tried to convince him of a few recent discoveries of mine (in truth, not yet well digested): that down there, in order to get by, it was necessary to get busy, organize illegal food, dodge work, find influential friends, hide one's thoughts, steal, lie...
...At Auschwitz the wave of Magyars reduced the three other nationalities to minorities, without, however, making a dent in the cadres, which remained in the hands of the German and Polish common criminals...
...In the space of two months, May and June 1944, they invaded the Lager, convoy after convoy, filling the void that the Germans had not neglected to create with a series of diligent selections...
...In any case, it seemed to me that for pedagogical purposes it served well as an illustration of the theories I had expounded to him just before...
...The Germans had captured him three years earlier, not because he was Jewish but because of his political activity, had enrolled him in the Todt Organization, and sent him to be a woodcutter in the Ukrainian Carpathians...
...At that time we were cleaning cisterns...
...I.H...
...When the convoy arrived, the SS forced all the men to take off their shoes and hang them around their necks, and then made them walk barefoot on the jagged stones of the railroad bed, for the entire seven kilometers that separated the station from the camp...
...Yes," he said, "but still seventeen bricks are not twenty...
...We made three trips together, during which I tried, in a fragmentary fashion, to explain to him that the place he had landed in was not for polite or quiet people...
...he did not want to lie...
...The letter from the sweet world burned in my pocket...
...I told him so...
...We worked together for a few more weeks...
...They were mild individuals, slow, patient and methodical, and hunger afflicted them less, but they had delicate skins, and in no time at all were covered with sores and bruises, like ill-treated horses...
...The result is a book of sketches—little incidents, quick character portraits—that deal with the stratagems by which some of the men and women of Auschwitz tried to survive...
...He gave it to me, blushing deeply, and said with shy pride: "I've learned...
...Bandi listened attentively...
...And since, as I have said, twenty bricks are heavy, on our fourth trip, instead of taking twenty of them, I took seventeen and showed him that if you placed them on the litter in a certain way, with an empty space in the lower layer, no one would ever suspect that there weren't twenty...
...that whoever did not do so was soon dead, and that his saintliness seemed dangerous to me, and out of place...
...By the weak gleam of the light bulb, I read the miraculous letter, hastily translating it into German...
...It is a very common last name in Hungary, and besides, he was not a plower but worked in a factory...
...He recounted the episode with a shy smile, without asking for commiseration...
...Bandi told me about his entrance into the Lager...
...so on the outgoing trip we did not have much breath, or at least I didn't, for talking...
...The distinguished Italian-Jewish writer PRIMO LEVI is best known for his books Survival in Auschwitz (1947) and The Reawakening (1963), which deal with his experiences as a prisoner, or slave laborer, in Auschwitz and then his torturous experience of return to Italy...
...used to abundant food, and who, for that reason, in a few weeks were reduced to pitiful skeletons...
...Therefore he did not object, but neither did he show any enthusiasm for my invention...
...He was a strong, pink-faced young man, of medium height, whom everyone called Bandi: the diminutive of Endre/Andrew, he explained to me as though it were the most 24 natural thing in the world...
...He told me that he was a Communist sympathizer, not a party member, but his language was that of a proto-Christian...
...He was not a good disciple...
...but on the way back we spoke and I learned many attractive things about Bandi...
Vol. 33 • January 1986 • No. 1
