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  Through the back door, stealthily, and looking around cautiously, the storyteller has come in. He is seated on Wachsmann’s bunk and at once a small, attentive, silent crowd gathers around him. He chants an interminable Yiddish rhapsody, always the same one, in rhymed quatrains, of a resigned and penetrating melancholy (or perhaps I remember it so because I heard it at that time and in that place?); from the few words I understand, it must be a song that he composed himself, which contains all the life of the Lager in its minute details. Some are generous and give the storyteller a pinch of tobacco or a length of thread; others listen intently but give nothing.

  Suddenly the call resounds for the last rite of the day: “Wer hat kaputt die Schuhe?” (Who has broken shoes?), and at once a clamor erupts as forty or fifty claimants to the exchange rush toward the Tagesraum in desperate haste, well knowing that only the first ten, on the best of hypotheses, will be satisfied.

  Then there is quiet. The lights go out a first time for a few seconds to warn the tailors to put away their precious needle and thread; then in the distance the bell sounds, the night guard settles himself, and all the lights go out definitively. There is nothing left to do but undress and go to bed.

  I do not know who my neighbor is; I’m not even sure that it’s always the same person, because I have never seen his face except for a few seconds in the confusion of reveille, so I know his back and his feet much better than his face. He does not work in my Kommando and gets into the bunk only at curfew time; he wraps himself in the blanket, pushes me aside with a blow from his bony hips, turns his back on me, and at once begins to snore. Back-to-back, I struggle to regain a reasonable area of the straw mattress: with my lower back I exercise a progressive pressure against his; then I turn around and try to push with my knees; I take hold of his ankles and attempt to place them a little farther over so as not to have his feet next to my face. But it is all in vain: he is much heavier than I am and seems turned to stone in his sleep.

  So I adapt to lying like this, forced into immobility, half on the bunk’s wooden edge. But I am so tired and stunned that I, too, soon fall asleep, and I seem to be sleeping on a railroad track.

  The train is about to arrive; you can hear the panting of the engine, which is my neighbor. I am not yet so asleep that I am not aware of the double nature of the engine. It is, in fact, the very engine that towed the freight cars we had to unload in Buna today. I recognize it by the fact that even now, as when it passed close by us, I feel the heat radiating from its black side. It is puffing, it gets closer and closer, it is always on the point of running me over but instead it never arrives. My sleep is very light, it is a veil, if I want I can tear it. I will tear it, I want to, so that I can get off the railroad track. Now I’ve done it and now I’m awake, but not really awake, only a little more, one step higher on the ladder between unconscious and conscious. My eyes are closed and I don’t want to open them lest sleep escape me, but I can register noises. I’m sure this distant whistle is real, it doesn’t come from the dream engine, it can be heard objectively. It is the whistle from the narrow-gauge track; it comes from the construction site, which operates at night as well. A long, steady note, then another, a semitone lower, then again the first, but short and cut off. This whistle is an important thing and in some ways essential: we’ve heard it so often, associated with the suffering of the work and the camp, that it has become the camp’s symbol and immediately evokes its image, as certain music does, or certain smells.

  Here is my sister, with some unidentifiable friends of mine and many other people. They are all listening to me and it is this very story that I am telling: the three-note whistle, the hard bunk, my neighbor whom I would like to move but am afraid to wake because he is stronger than I am. I also speak at length about our hunger and about how we are checked for lice, and about the Kapo who hit me on the nose and then sent me to wash because I was bleeding. It is an intense pleasure, physical, inexpressible, to be at home, among friendly people, and to have so many things to recount, but I can’t help noticing that my listeners do not follow me. In fact, they are completely indifferent: they speak confusedly among themselves of other things, as if I were not there. My sister looks at me, gets up, and goes away without a word.

  A desolating grief now rises in me, like some barely remembered pain of early childhood. It is pain in its pure state, untempered by a sense of reality or by the intrusion of extraneous circumstances, the kind of pain that makes children cry; and it is better for me to swim up to the surface once again, but this time I deliberately open my eyes, to have a guarantee in front of me that I am in fact awake.

  My dream stands before me, still warm, and although I’m awake I’m filled with its anguish. And then I remember that it’s not just any dream, and that since I arrived here I have dreamed it not once but many times, with hardly any variations in setting or details. I am now fully awake and I remember that I recounted it to Alberto and that he confided, to my amazement, that it’s also his dream and the dream of many others, perhaps of everyone. Why does it happen? Why is the pain of every day so constantly translated, in our dreams, into the ever repeated scene of the story told and not listened to?

  . . . While I ponder this, I try to take advantage of the interval of wakefulness to shake off the anguished remnants of the preceding sleep, so as not to compromise the quality of the next sleep. I sit up, crouching in the darkness; I look around and listen intently.

  I can hear the sleepers breathing and snoring; some groan and speak. Many smack their lips and waggle their jaws. They dream of eating; this is another collective dream. It’s a pitiless dream: the creator of the Tantalus myth must have known it. You not only see the food, you feel it in your hands, particular and concrete, and are aware of its rich and pungent fragrance. Someone even brings it to your lips, but some circumstance, different every time, intervenes to prevent the consummation of the act. Then the dream dissolves and breaks up into its elements, but it re-forms immediately afterward and begins again, similar yet changed; and this without pause, for each of us, every night, and for the entire duration of our sleep.

  It must be after eleven, because the movement to and from the bucket next to the night guard is already intense. This is an obscene torment, an indelible shame. Every two or three hours we have to get up to eliminate the large dose of water that we are forced to absorb during the day in the form of soup, in order to satisfy our hunger—that same water which in the evening swells our ankles and the hollows of our eyes, conferring a deformed likeness on all physiognomies, and whose elimination imposes a grueling task on our kidneys.

  It’s not merely a question of the procession to the bucket; the rule is that the last user of the bucket goes and empties it in the latrine, and it is also the rule that at night one must not leave the barrack except in night uniform (shirt and pants), giving one’s number to the guard. It follows, predictably, that the night guard will try to exempt his friends, his fellow countrymen, and the Prominents from this duty. In addition, the old inhabitants of the camp have refined their senses to such a degree that, while still in their bunks, they are miraculously able to distinguish if the level is at a dangerous point, purely on the basis of the sound that the sides of the bucket make—with the result that they almost always manage to avoid emptying it. So the candidates for bucket service are a fairly limited number in each barrack, while the total volume to eliminate is at least two hundred liters, which means that the bucket has to be emptied about twenty times.

  In short, every night the risk that hangs over us, the inexperienced and unprivileged, when need drives us to the bucket, is quite serious. The night guard unexpectedly jumps out of his corner and grabs us, scribbles down our number, hands us a pair of wooden clogs and the bucket, and chases us out into the snow, shivering and sleepy. It is our task to trudge to the latrine with the bucket, which knocks against our bare calves, disgustingly warm; it’s full beyond any reasonable limit, and inevitably with the shaking some of the contents
spills over onto our feet, so that, however repugnant this duty may be, it is always preferable that we, and not our bunk companion, be ordered to do it.

  So our nights drag on. The dream of Tantalus and the dream of the story are woven into a fabric of more indistinct images; the suffering of the day, composed of hunger, blows, cold, exhaustion, fear, and lack of privacy, at night turns into shapeless nightmares of unprecedented violence, such as in free life occur only during a fever. One wakes at every moment, frozen with terror, shaking in every limb, under the impression of an order shouted out by a voice full of anger in a language not understood. The procession to the bucket and the thud of bare heels on the wooden floor turns into another symbolic procession. It is us again, gray and identical, as small as ants and big enough to reach to the stars, packed one against the other, innumerable, covering the plain as far as the horizon—sometimes melting into a single substance, an anguished dough in which we feel trapped and suffocated; sometimes marching in a circle, without beginning or end, with a blinding dizziness and a tide of nausea rising from the heart to the throat—until hunger or cold or the fullness of our bladders leads our dreams into their customary patterns. We try in vain, when the nightmare itself or the discomfort wakes us, to extricate the various elements and drive them, separately, out of the field of our present attention, so as to protect our sleep from their intrusion. But as soon as we close our eyes we feel our brain start up, yet again, beyond our control; it beats and buzzes, incapable of rest, it fabricates phantoms and terrible signs, incessantly draws and shakes them in gray fog on the screen of our dreams.

  But for the entire night, through all the alternations of sleep, waking, and nightmare, the expectation and terror of the moment of reveille keeps watch. By means of that mysterious faculty which many know, we are able, even without clocks, to calculate the moment with close accuracy. At the hour of reveille, which varies from season to season but always falls much before dawn, the camp bell rings for a long time, and in every barrack the night guard goes off duty; he switches on the lights, stands up, stretches, and pronounces the daily condemnation: “Aufstehen,” or, more often, in Polish, “Wstawać.”

  Very few sleep until the Wstawać: it’s a moment of pain too acute for even the deepest sleep not to dissolve as it approaches. The night guard knows this, and for this reason utters it not in a tone of command but in the quiet, subdued voice of one who is aware that the announcement will find all ears straining, and will be heard and obeyed.

  The foreign word sinks like a stone to the bottom of every soul. “Get up”: the illusory barrier of the warm blankets, the thin armor of sleep, the nighttime escape, though tortured, fall to pieces around us, and we find ourselves mercilessly awake, exposed to insult, atrociously naked and vulnerable. A day begins that is like every day, so long that we cannot reasonably conceive the end, so much cold, so much hunger, so much toil separate us from it: better to concentrate attention and desires on the slab of gray bread, which is small but in an hour will certainly be ours, and which for five minutes, until we have devoured it, will constitute the sum total of what the law of the place allows us to possess.

  At the Wstawać the storm starts up again. The entire barrack enters without transition into frenzied activity: everybody climbs up and down, makes his bunk, and tries at the same time to get dressed in such a way as to leave none of his objects unguarded; the air fills with dust and becomes opaque; the quickest ones elbow their way through the crowd to go to the washhouse and the latrine before the line forms. The barrack sweepers at once come onto the scene and drive everyone out, hitting and shouting.

  When I have made my bunk and am dressed, I climb down to the floor and put on my shoes. The sores on my feet reopen at once, and a new day begins.

  The Work

  Before Resnyk came, my bunkmate was a Pole whose name no one knew; he was gentle and silent, with two old sores on his shinbones, and during the night he gave out a squalid smell of illness; he also had a weak bladder, and so woke up and woke me up eight or ten times a night.

  One night he left his gloves in my care and entered the hospital. For half an hour I hoped that the quartermaster would forget that I was the sole occupant of my bunk, but when the curfew bell had already sounded, the bunk trembled and a lanky red-haired fellow, with the number of the French from Drancy, climbed up beside me.

  To have a bed companion of tall stature is a misfortune and means losing hours of sleep; I always get tall companions, because I am small and two tall men cannot sleep together. But it was immediately apparent that Resnyk, in spite of that, was not a bad companion. He spoke little and courteously, he was clean, he didn’t snore, didn’t get up more than two or three times a night and always with great delicacy. In the morning he offered to make the bed (this is a complicated and difficult operation, and also carries a notable responsibility, as those who make the bed badly, the schlechte Bettenbauer, are diligently punished) and did it quickly and well; so that I felt a certain fleeting pleasure later, in Roll Call Square, in seeing that he had been assigned to my Kommando.

  On the march to work, limping in our clumsy wooden clogs on the icy snow, we exchanged a few words, and I found out that Resnyk is Polish; he lived in Paris for twenty years but still speaks an implausible French. He is thirty, but, like all of us, could be taken for anywhere from seventeen to fifty. He told me his story, and today I have forgotten it, but it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel, and moving story; because such are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of stories, all different and all full of a tragic, shocking necessity. We tell them to one another in the evening, and they take place in Norway, Italy, Algeria, Ukraine—simple and incomprehensible, like the stories in the Bible. But are not they, too, stories in a new Bible?

  Once we arrived at the construction site, we were led to the Eisenröhreplatz, the flat area where the iron pipes are unloaded, and then the usual things began. The Kapo took the roll call again, briefly took note of the new acquisition, and arranged with the civilian Meister about the day’s work. He then entrusted us to the Vorarbeiter and went off to sleep in the toolshed, next to the stove; he is not a Kapo who makes trouble, for he is not a Jew and so has no fear of losing his post. The Vorarbeiter distributed the iron levers among us and the jacks among his friends. The usual little struggle took place to get the lightest levers, and today it went badly for me: mine is the twisted one that weighs perhaps fifteen kilograms; I know that even if I had to use it without any weight on it, I would be dead from exhaustion in half an hour.

  Then we left, each with his own lever, limping in the melting snow. At every step, a little snow and mud stick to our wooden soles, until we’re walking unsteadily on two heavy, shapeless masses from which it’s impossible to get free; suddenly one comes unstuck, and then it’s as if one leg were several centimeters shorter than the other.

  Today we have to unload an enormous cast-iron cylinder from the freight car. I think it is a synthesis pipe and must weigh several tons. This is better for us, because it is notoriously less exhausting to work with big loads than with small ones; in fact, the work is better subdivided, and we are given adequate tools. However, it is dangerous, one must not get distracted; a moment’s inattention and one would be crushed.

  Meister Nogalla, the Polish foreman, rigid, serious, and taciturn, supervised in person the unloading operation. Now the cylinder lies on the ground and Meister Nogalla says, “Bohlen holen.”

  Our hearts sink. It means “carry ties,” in order to build a path in the soft mud on which the cylinder will be pushed by the levers into the factory. But the ties are jammed in the ground and weigh eighty kilos; they are more or less at the limit of our strength. The more robust of us, working in pairs, are able to carry ties for a few hours; for me it is a torture; the load maims my shoulder bone. After the first trip, I am deaf and almost blind from the effort, and I would stoop to any baseness to avoid the second.

  I will try and pair myself with Resnyk; he seems a good worker an
d, being taller, will support the greater part of the weight. I know it’s in the order of things for Resnyk to refuse me with contempt and team up with someone more robust; then I will ask to go to the latrine and I will remain there as long as possible, and afterward I will try to hide, with the certainty of being immediately tracked down, mocked, and hit; but anything is better than this work.

  Instead Resnyk accepts, and, what’s more, lifts up the tie by himself and rests it on my right shoulder with care; then he lifts up the other end, places his left shoulder under it, and we set out.

  The tie is encrusted with snow and mud; at every step it knocks against my ear and the snow slides down my neck. After fifty steps I am at the limit of what is usually called normal endurance: my knees are folding, my shoulder aches as if clasped in a vise, my balance is in danger. At every step I feel my shoes sucked in by the greedy mud, by this ubiquitous Polish mud whose monotonous horror fills our days.

  I bite my lips deeply; we know well that gaining a small, extraneous pain serves as a stimulant to mobilize our last reserves of energy. The Kapos also know it: some of them beat us from pure bestiality and violence, but others beat us almost lovingly when we are carrying a load, accompanying the blows with exhortations and encouragement, as cart drivers do with willing horses.

  When we reach the cylinder, we unload the tie on the ground, and I stand stiffly, my eyes vacant, mouth open, and arms dangling, sunk in the ephemeral and negative ecstasy of the cessation of pain. In a twilight of exhaustion I wait for the push that will force me to begin work again, and I try to take advantage of every second of waiting to recover some energy.

  But the push never comes: Resnyk touches my elbow, we return as slowly as possible to the ties. There the others are wandering around in pairs, all trying to delay as long as possible before submitting to the load.