La Trêve (The Truce) is a strange and powerful book, the one in which, no doubt, Primo Levi’s range of writing unfolds most widely, from the darkest to the most lighthearted, capturing as closely as possible the contradictory feelings experienced in the aftermath of liberation: a timid joy in the face of freedom, “the improbable, the impossible freedom, so far removed from Auschwitz that we saw it only in dreams,” he writes, but also a muffled anguish, the awareness of the destructive, irreparable, “indelible” character of the “offense” suffered.
La Trêve1 is the account of a double return. On leaving Auschwitz, it is the return toward their homeland of a group of Italians, along an improbable itinerary that takes them through Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Moldavia, in order to reach their homes. An odyssey strewn with comical turns of fortune, encounters, detours, halts, twists and roundabout journeys depending on the railway lines destroyed or repaired, at the mercy of the incomprehensible decisions of improvident or forgetful Russian officials. A trajectory in which one must seek no logic, and in which will be expressed what Primo Levi describes as “the rough kindliness of the Russians.”
But the book also recounts another return, uncertain, painful — the return to life of prisoners who were confronted with the reign of death, the death of others, their own, and with the reign of Evil. And indeed, what can it mean to return to the world of men, to return to oneself, when one has passed through the destructive ordeal of the camps? When one has seen what one should never have had to see, and has felt, with so much pain, the shame of being a man? Can one, in the impetus, the hope of this return, unlearn the deadly lesson of the camp? Or at least attempt to do so? I am returning from beyond knowledge. Now I must unlearn. I see clearly that otherwise I could no longer live,2 wrote Charlotte Delbo.
The reader then understands that this interminable journey, these weeks of incoherent and surreal travel, are indeed a parenthesis of infinite availability3 that opens a necessary space between the world of death and that of life. It is a truce, which may perhaps make it possible to take up once again the poisoned weight of memory and the hard business of living.
And the power of Primo Levi’s prose lies in this: that it is able to show how, in these still-stunned survivors, there now do battle the expectation “of a world of justice,” a fragile but tenacious hope in the life to come, for “life was beginning to flow again, tumultuous,”4 and the muffled anguish of the irreparable.
Freeze-frame
La Trêve opens exactly at the moment when Si c’est un homme (If This Is a Man) closes, inside the camp, in a frozen, devastated universe. Two men, the narrator and his friend Charles, carry toward the common grave the corpse of one of their companions, Somogyi, who died during the night, while the first Russian soldiers arrive before the camp.
The Russians arrived while Charles and I were carrying Somogyi some distance away. He was very light. We tipped the stretcher onto the gray snow. Charles took off his cap; I regretted not having one.
As in a prodigious freeze-frame, La Trêve opens on this same sequence, on these same protagonists and on this arrival:
The first Russian patrol came in sight of the camp around midday on 27 January 1945. Charles and I were the first to spot them; we were carrying to the common grave the body of Somogyi, the first of our roommates to die. We tipped the stretcher onto the defiled snow, for the common grave was full and no other burial was given. Charles took off his cap to salute the living and the dead.5
The second evocation of this moment, written in terms almost identical to those of the first account, nonetheless makes it possible to understand that time has passed. In this second version, the narrator has introduced the date of liberation, that of 27 January 1945, as a date that is now historical. He has reestablished a chronology that had vanished in the deadly, dislocated time of the camp. He has felt the need to explain what was then a matter of self-evidence — why the stretcher is simply tipped over: “the common grave was full and no other burial was given,”6 he writes. Likewise, he specifies that Charles takes off his cap to salute the living and the dead, and the salute to the dead present in the second text is there too to bear witness that one has emerged from the deadly indifference felt in the camp.7 Finally, the snow is not gray as in the previous version; it is described as defiled, the first occurrence of the theme of defilement which, as we shall see, runs through the work.
If La Trêve evokes the first encounter between the liberated and their liberators, it is under the sign of a failed encounter. There are four young Russian soldiers on horseback, and these “four messengers of peace with rough and boyish faces” remain as if petrified by what they see, casting glances “full of a strange embarrassment at the disordered corpses, the broken-down barracks” and at the survivors. No joy, no effusion. “They did not greet us, did not smile at us,” writes Primo Levi. Two worlds meet, but liberators and liberated seem able to share only a feeling of shame before the evil that “man does to man.” First episode of this difficult encounter that will keep replaying itself between the witness and the one who has not lived his deadly experience.
Limbo
In the days that follow liberation, while thousands of inmates continue to die, the survivors, timidly, attempt to insert themselves into the flow of life.
For the inmate who was subjected to blows and to the interminable torture of hunger, thirst and cold, his own body has become an enemy as much as an ally. And when the struggle for survival relaxes, this body is prey to “a thousand pains,” as if it could no longer find the strength to defend itself against “fatigue and illness,” which assail it “like ferocious beasts,”8 or as if it were now in a position to “rebel openly.” Thus, for Primo Levi, before and after liberation, there will follow one another a scarlet fever, a pleurisy, a weakness that for days on end leaves him entirely dependent on his roommates, then, each night, for months, bouts of intense fever.
In this process of reintegration, of reconciliation with his body, there makes itself felt the importance of a salvific and maternal feminine presence. And an important moment in La Trêve is the moment of the bath given by the Russian nurses, who take the sick in their robust arms, soap them, rinse them, scrub them, dry them from head to foot in a roughly maternal ritual. A little later, it is another Russian nurse, Marja Fjodorovna Prima, who will give the narrator the rations of glucose he needs. In every case, this feminine attentiveness and compassion give back to these wounded men access to the humanity of a body that was as if “uninhabited.”
The survivors have been transported on a makeshift cart from their camp, Buna-Monowitz, to the main camp of Auschwitz, which the narrator compares to an “immense metropolis.” And it is there that they receive this first bath, certainly necessary, but whose symbolic dimension Primo Levi very quickly perceives, as if it were a matter of washing them clean of their experience.9 With the repetition of the verb to wash, the theme of purification returns like an obsession in the text. The narrator speaks of this deep and grave desire that assails them from the very first hours of liberation: “We would have liked to wash our consciences of the ugliness that reigned in them.”10 A little further on, he evokes Frau Vita, a young widow from Trieste who, “deeply embittered by all she had seen and suffered in a year of camp” and during the last days “when she had been assigned to the transport of corpses,” tries to exorcise the images that haunt her. She attempts to “wash herself of them” by throwing herself into a tumultuous activity: “she scrubbed the floor and the tiles with a savage fury, noisily rinsed glasses and mess tins.”11 A question is posed with anguish, giving meaning to these rituals: will the life to come be good enough to fight against the memory of the offense? It seems that already there takes shape the foreboding that “nothing could happen good enough and pure enough to erase” this past.
After “one last great scything stroke” in which the most stricken of the sick expire, those who have remained alive understand that they will probably survive. Primo Levi, convalescent, finds himself in a room of twenty people where each, in his own way, tries to regain a footing in existence. And he analyzes in a remarkable way what happens in consciences over which the ferocious tyranny of the struggle for life relaxes. Very soon, he sets about describing the surviving children and the adults’ reactions to the children. For it is indeed around the death and suffering of children that the most unbearable aspects of the genocidal madness are concentrated. And the children and adolescents evoked in dense and terrible pages all present the visible and invisible stigmata of what they have lived through and of what was inflicted upon them.
There is Peter Pavel, a handsome child, blond and robust, with an impassive face, who looks after himself, his body, his food, who expects nothing from anyone and gives nothing to anyone. A child who now seems without affect and without any desire to communicate.
There is Kleine Kiepura, an adolescent who, at twelve, was the protégé of the Lager Kapo and the mascot of Buna-Monowitz. Even if the word is not pronounced, he is a piepel, that figure whom survivors evoke with so much pain and reticence — a child damaged, perverted by his protector and by the camp system, having absorbed “the poison of Auschwitz,” too young to be able to resist it or rid himself of it. Kleine Kiepura expresses throughout the nights his nostalgia for the world of the camp, the only one he has known. For the other patients, who hear him sing and whistle the camp’s marches, bellow in German, give orders in the slang of Auschwitz, his only language, he represents something unbearable. For them, “weak, sick but full of the timid and anxious joy of recovered freedom,”12 he is like the defiled memory of what they would have wished to evacuate forever.
We should pause for a moment on the symbolism of names and first names in Primo Levi. The name Kleine Kiepura associates an adjective, kleine, which means little, with Kiepura, a Polish surname but one that cannot but recall the word Kapara, the expiatory victim. And for this shattered child, whose being departed in Kapara in the daily horror of the camp, his neighbors can feel only “a hostile pity,” a mixture of compassion and horror. He is like the reverberated voice of Auschwitz. They wait for him to disappear, to go away, like a scapegoat. “His presence wounded like that of a corpse.”13 The words used by Primo Levi are very violent, inseparable from the idea of defilement and impurity. Is there a restoration, a rehabilitation possible? In a veiled but significant way, the terms used to describe the place borrow from religious vocabulary. The space of the room is described as “limbo.” There reigns, we are told, an “atmosphere of purgatory full of hope and pity.”
There is another child upon whom the room’s attention is concentrated. Primo Levi evokes his “obsessive, imperious and fatal presence.” Of all those who surround him, Hurbinek is “the smallest, the most defenseless, the most innocent.” He is a child of Auschwitz, a child of death, who never learned to speak, to walk, and whose silent suffering, whose relentless struggle to join the world of men, leaves the reader inconsolable. How, here too, not to hear resonate in the child’s name the name of the catastrophe, the Hurban, the name that Yiddish-speakers gave to their own destruction?
Hurbinek is the victim among victims, the essence of their condition and the very image of the evil done to them. He casts about him “a savage and human gaze, the gaze of an adult who judged.” A gaze that none of the adults can endure, “so charged was it with strength and pain.”14
This passage has often been commented upon,15 and the figure of Hurbinek, the wordless infans, has often been summoned, invoked. His anonymous and silent suffering would suffice to give meaning and legitimacy to the enterprise of testimony, to prove its absolute necessity. “Nothing remains of him. He bears witness through my words,” writes Primo Levi, wresting the child from the anonymous mass of the dead by the force of his writing and by his will to name.
Hurbinek, who has not learned to speak, emits indistinct but insistent sounds:
In the following days, we all listened to him, in silence, anxious to understand. And there were among us representatives of all the languages of Europe. But Hurbinek’s word remained secret.16
Around the child’s bed are thus exercised a listening, an attentiveness, a patience toward the Other that run counter to all the rules learned in the camp. If Auschwitz is indeed the place where human bonds are broken, where no one speaks to anyone (for lack of strength and interest), where attempts to understand are crushed (“here there is no why”17), where the weakest are pitilessly ground down and then forgotten, what is at stake, modestly, in this room is an attempt to reestablish a world that no longer obeys the laws of Auschwitz. This mobilization around the weakest child, this passionate listening of the adults who take turns at his bedside, appear as an attempt to reestablish the order of the world and of the human relations perverted by the Lager. Around the child is played out a pathetic attempt, mute and perhaps unconscious, almost at restoration, at redemption, in which each tries to recover his lost humanity. To hear, to understand Hurbinek’s word would be a timid victory. But, the narrator tells us: “Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed.”18 An enigmatic expression. What redemption is meant? That of the child or that of his companions?
Significantly, the room’s inhabitant who takes the most care of Hurbinek, the one who “spends his days beside him, showing himself with him more maternal than paternal” (what works toward life is feminine in Primo Levi), the one who washes him, feeds him, persists in trying to teach him to speak, and above all who believes he hears a word that Hurbinek may have uttered, is young Henek, a fifteen-year-old Hungarian whom Primo Levi describes as “a product of the camp,” an adolescent with “peaceably bloodthirsty” instincts, a young “carnivore — quick, shrewd, ferocious and cautious.”19 Henek, who arrived at Auschwitz at fourteen, the only survivor of his family, was made Kapo in the children’s block. From what he tells the narrator, “when there were selections in the children’s block, it was he who chose.”20
The rough kindliness of the Russians
Beyond the precincts of Auschwitz and its sufferings, a long adventure begins for the survivor. Evoked with a tenderness, a humor, a sympathy that will never falter, the Russians occupy a privileged place in Primo Levi’s memory.
They are presented under the sign of childhood. The first soldiers glimpsed on the day of liberation “have a rough and boyish face.” The last to accompany the convoy toward Italy are “soldiers of eighteen, candid creatures with a naïve and gentle spirit, lively and carefree like schoolboys on holiday.”21 Soldiers who, moreover, spend a large part of their time playing a game akin to marbles with the children of the convoy.
Primo Levi describes a generous people, endowed with a kind of innocence and with “a Homeric capacity for joy and abandon,” a people that displays “a primordial vitality,” a people “vigorous and enamored of life.” Some of his descriptions resemble veritable declarations of love:
And yet beneath these appearances of laxity and anarchy, it was easy to discover in them, in each of these rough and frank faces, the valiant men of the old and the new Russia, good-natured in peacetime, ferocious in wartime, strong with an inner discipline born of concord, of mutual love and of love of country.22
To be sure, the narrator cannot fail to notice certain national characteristics and their consequences, but they are then evoked with a serene indulgence. Thus he notes an immoderate love of vodka, he admits that “the Russians were curiously sensitive to the charm of paperwork,” and he evokes several times “the indecipherable Soviet bureaucracy.” He acknowledges that there is not much logic in the acts and decisions of his liberators, and even that they seem to have “the genius of disorganization.” But this disorganization is benevolent, and Levi sets it against the icy, destructive organization that reigns among the Germans, just as he sets what he believes to be the inner discipline of the Russians “against the mechanical and servile discipline of the Germans.” Just as he sets the Russian bath, a bath “on a human scale, improvised and approximate,” against the bath inflicted on entering the camp, “a bath of grotesque, demonic and ritual humiliation.”
In fact, the Russians seem in his eyes to be like an inverted image of the Germans, a reparative image of kindness and generosity that helps the survivors try to believe in man, and contributes to their return to life.
A storyteller’s gift
To describe life in Katowice, in Bogucice, and in the various displaced-persons camps where he will stay, in the heart of Europe, then his long five-week journey, Primo Levi gives free rein to his verve and to his gift as a storyteller.
The text bears witness to a true impulse toward life and to a renewed relationship with nature after months of camp. Walking for hours in the “marvelous morning” air, the narrator says he breathes in this air like a “medicine.” He feels quivering in the earth “the germs of life.”23 He delights in lying in the sun in the midst of “the high, vigorous grass.” He wanders in the woods in search of wild strawberries and mushrooms, obeying, he says, the imperious need to take possession of his body once again. Finally, he knows once more how to be attentive to the beauty of the world. Witness this magnificent passage where, evoking the last hours spent at Staryje Doroghi, Primo Levi, the city-dweller, describes the song of the shepherds:
During our long vigil one could hear, modulated and faint, the songs of the shepherds; one of them would begin, a second would answer kilometers away, then another and yet another from all points of the horizon. It was as if the earth itself were singing.24
In the tradition of the storyteller that Walter Benjamin evoked,25 he delivers portraits of colorful characters and human types chiseled with humor, some of whom bear a kind of wisdom, even if they sometimes represent contradictory philosophies of life, like Mordo Nahum, who lives like “a lone wolf in perpetual war against all,” or like the radiant, picaresque and warmhearted Cesare, “son of the sun.”
Thus there follow one another, in pages full of high spirits and great comic precision, a series of characters sketched in a few lines: “a barber with wild and haggard eyes who plied his trade with a reckless violence,”26 a woman in charge of the canteen service, who is “a gigantic Valkyrie,” capable of knocking over with a backhand any admirer, “a tall, parchment-skinned old man with a dinosaur’s bone structure,” nicknamed the Moor of Verona and seething with rage against the entire world, “against the day when it was day and against the night when it was night,”27 or again “a carabiniere” conforming to the unflattering image that Italians have of them, though he is “barely obtuse.” Their most salient bodily traits are underscored, which liken certain passages to a bestiary: Marja, the Russian nurse, is like a wild cat, Rovi the administrator resembles a spider, while Mordo the Greek is compared now to “a night bird surprised by the light,” now to a voracious fish out of its natural element.
The text is now a travel journal, now an ethnological report, and the description of Sluzk, a small village south of Minsk, sketches the laboratory of a delightful melting pot:
There were Catholics, Jews, Orthodox and Muslims. There were whites, yellows and various blacks under the American uniform; Germans, Poles, French, Greeks, Italians. There were also Germans passing themselves off as Austrians, Austrians who claimed to be Swiss, Russians who declared themselves Italian, a woman disguised as a man, and even, standing out against this ragged crowd, a Magyar general in full uniform, gaudy, quarrelsome and stupid as a rooster.28
The narrative, carried by the exhilaration of the writing, multiplies anecdotes recounted with eloquence. One should evoke the great building of Staryje Doroghi, the Red House, where the travelers spend weeks, and which presents an architecture so incoherent that we are told “one could not quite tell whether it was the work of several architects in disagreement or of a single one, but a madman.”29 One should evoke too the Russian lesson given by a “professor armed with a bayonet” and the reactions of the narrator, who fears as much for the potatoes he is cooking on the fire as for his life, for the improvised professor, who decidedly lacks pedagogy, brandishes his bayonet whenever the pupil gives him the wrong answers.30 Another bravura piece: the description of the film screenings at Staryje Doroghi, and the projection of films that unleashes among the Russians “a seismic enthusiasm”31 and a total commitment alongside the innocent and persecuted hero. So much so that against the canvas of the screen come crashing pebbles, clods of earth and even “a military boot hurled with furious precision between the hateful eyes of his enemy,” enthroned in an enormous close-up. Finally, the arrival of a Russian general covered in medals, in a Fiat 500 from which he tries in vain to extract himself because, Primo Levi tells us, “the man was literally bigger than the car,”32 remains one of the high points of these savory memories.
By a kind of miracle, after years of ravage and destruction, it is as if the world were being reborn in a good-natured and memoryless chaos. The surviving travelers content themselves with living, day by day, in an immense and rough “summer camp,” in a present without past, without future other than the next meal or the next departure date. The feeling of being alive seems to suffice and to push back to a later, more distant point all introspection and all philosophical questioning.
Anchored in a retrospective vision charged with emotion and a kind of nostalgia, these chapters of La Trêve describe the peaceful and joyful coexistence of the members of what Primo Levi calls “the caravan” and their friendly encounters with the populations they come to know and the individuals they integrate into their convoy. They constitute a disorderly parenthesis of peace, of solidarity.
The return, or the end of the truce
However, as the train draws closer to Italy, the tone will grow graver, the reflection more melancholy, the anguish more present. A first crack has already shaken the brand-new hope in a better world. When, near Katowice, a Polish lawyer asks the barely freed deportee to testify, but without mentioning his identity as a Jew, the latter feels “old and bloodless,” he feels recede far from him the warm wave of the feeling of being “a man among men.” In the course of the long journey, the question of forgiveness and of revenge has been broached, at the moment when the narrator watches Germans pass by, crammed into cattle cars, and has difficulty untangling the feelings this sight inspires in him, or before the spectacle of destroyed Vienna. Likewise, at the stop in Munich, he was painfully confronted with the denial of the evil inflicted. He and his companions have the impression “of having enormous things to say to every German,” but in the destroyed streets they encounter only “deaf, blind, mute beings, entrenched in their ruins as in a fortress of willful forgetting.”33 But it is as if these questions had been set aside in parentheses until the end of the journey.
In these last days of the railway odyssey, the proximity of Italy and of “home” seems to revive these questions that had been, as it were, set aside during the journey. This proximity seems to reactivate the awareness of the disaster in its magnitude and its cruelty. To the feeling of being part of a resourceful and solidary “caravan” succeeds the feeling of belonging to a spectral and decimated group. There imposes itself the memory of another convoy of which there are almost no survivors: “we had set out six hundred and fifty, we were returning three.”
What now dominates is a feeling of loss and of uncertainty, the anguish of the morrow, the fear before the return to a daily life that appears as an insurmountable ordeal. There imposes itself a premonition, which will prove accurate. There will be a need to fight “enemies still unknown, within and outside ourselves,” writes Primo Levi, who indeed, and until his last day, would never be finished with these “inner enemies.”
We felt flowing in our exhausted veins the poison of Auschwitz.34
The theme of infection, which runs quietly through the whole of the narrative, declined in a series of explicit or allusive formulations, takes on here a new vigor. Primo Levi expresses the feeling (which would never leave him) that the evil he was confronted with extended its hold without end, poisoned beings and the world. It remains engraved in memories, but it also circulates within populations, in their blood and their veins, like an epidemic diffusion of Evil. To this feeling is mingled, in the final pages, a terrible, almost cosmic premonition, which concerns not only the survivors but Europe, not only the past but the future:
The heavy and menacing sensation of an irreparable and definitive evil, omnipresent, crouching like gangrene in the viscera of Europe and of the world, source of evil to come.35
A dream of anguish
The last date of La Trêve is that of the arrival in Turin, on 19 October 1945. It is also the one on which the narrator recovers a dream that will not leave him. It is a dream of anguish. The terror and despair it arouses seem beyond all recourse and constitute the final words of the narrative.
Then comes chaos, I am at the center of a grayish, murky nothingness and suddenly I know what all this means, and I know too that I have always known it: I am again in the Camp, and nothing was true except the Camp. The rest — the family, nature in flower, the home — was only a brief vacation, an illusion of the senses, a dream; the inner dream, the dream of peace, is over, and in the outer dream that continues and freezes me, I hear resound a voice I know well. It utters only one word, a single one, with nothing authoritarian about it, a word brief and low; the order that accompanied the dawn at Auschwitz, a foreign word, awaited and dreaded: get up, Wstawać.
In this dream, the narrator has never left the camp. And he will never be able to leave it. In a frightening inversion, the only place of the real is henceforth that of the camp; all the rest is but illusion.
The reader then realizes that La Trêve, the account of a return, is as if framed by two passages that belie its hope. He remembers that the book opens on a poem, written in 1946, like a sinister prophecy, whose last stanza is an announcement of the dream:
Now we have found our home again Our bellies are sated, We have finished our tale. It is time. Soon we shall hear again the foreign order: Wstawać.
In the poem, the use of the future reinforces the inevitable character of a fate that had been, as it were, suspended during the time of the narrative. The picaresque narrative is thus caught in a pincer between these two texts. The tragic accents that one will find again in Les Naufragés et les rescapés (The Drowned and the Saved) are already there, in all their violence and their despair. But for the space of a detour, they have been as if veiled, muffled by the beauty of the world and the hope of return.
Notes
Primo Levi, La Trêve, Einaudi ed. 1963, then Grasset ed., 1966 (for the French translation).↩︎
Charlotte Delbo, Aucun de nous ne reviendra (None of Us Will Return), Éditions Gonthier, 1965.↩︎
La Trêve, op. cit., p. 244.↩︎
op. cit., p. 25.↩︎
op. cit., p. 14.↩︎
op. cit., p. 14.↩︎
In the penultimate paragraph of Si c’est un homme, where the logic of the camp still reigns, the corpse is described as “an ignoble tumult of stiffened limbs, the thing Somogyi.”↩︎
“Fatigue and illness, like ferocious and cowardly beasts, seemed to have lain in wait for the moment when I dropped all defense, in order to assail me.” op. cit., p. 20.↩︎
La Trêve, p. 22.↩︎
La Trêve, p. 15.↩︎
op. cit., p. 33.↩︎
op. cit., p. 31.↩︎
op. cit., p. 31.↩︎
op. cit., p. 25.↩︎
I refer the reader to the text by Alain Finkielkraut, “Le combat avec l’ange,” in Le Messager européen no. 4, 1990. And to the text by Catherine Coquio, “Parler au camp, parler des camps,” in Parler des camps, penser les génocides. Texts collected by Catherine Coquio, Éditions Albin Michel, 1999.↩︎
op. cit., p. 26.↩︎
One of the inaugural phrases of the education in the camp in Si c’est un homme.↩︎
op. cit., p. 26.↩︎
op. cit., p. 27.↩︎
op. cit., p. 28.↩︎
op. cit., p. 83.↩︎
op. cit., p. 68.↩︎
op. cit., p. 121.↩︎
op. cit., p. 214.↩︎
“The storyteller imprints his mark on the tale as the potter leaves on the clay vessel the mark of his hands.” Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller. Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov,” Œuvres III, Gallimard 2000 (trans. by Maurice de Gandillac).↩︎
op. cit., p. 23.↩︎
op. cit., p. 113.↩︎
op. cit., p. 147.↩︎
op. cit., p. 162.↩︎
op. cit., p. 188.↩︎
op. cit., p. 195.↩︎
op. cit., p. 211.↩︎
op. cit., p. 242.↩︎
op. cit., p. 248.↩︎
op. cit., p. 242.↩︎