The Truce

“Hurbinek, who was three years old and perhaps had been born in Auschwitz and had never seen a tree.”

The tragic story of Hurbinek illustrates the extreme horror of the Auschwitz camp. Levi and the other adults have memories of home, of a time before the camps, which they can draw upon to comfort them in difficult times. For youngsters like Hurbinek, Auschwitz is their only known form of existence. Children are born and die in a concentration camp, knowing nothing but torture for their entire lives. Levi illustrates this with a carefully-drawn example: Hurbinek may have lived and died without ever seeing a tree. Even something as mundanely pleasant as a tree is denied to these children.

“I seemed to have known them for centuries.”

Levi spends a year in the concentration camp. Over the course of his two books, If This Is a Man and The Truce, he depicts the way in which this experience reshapes his fundamental understanding of the world. The camps reshape the nature of time itself, so that a relationship that has lasted days, weeks, or months can seem like centuries. The experience of time is yet another victim of Auschwitz, distorting the prisoners’ sense of chronology and condemning them to even longer in the camp.

“Liberty, the improbable, the impossible liberty, so far removed from Auschwitz that we had only dared to hope for it in our dreams, had come, but it had not taken us to the Promised Land.”

Levi hints at Jewish history by referencing the Promised Land, the place promised to the Jewish people by God in the Torah. In doing so, he draws on the history of his people as a way to frame his journey back to Italy following his release. Having been taken from Italy and imprisoned in Auschwitz because of his Jewishness, Levi frames his story as a quintessentially Jewish narrative, a continuation of the journey that was begun thousands of years before. He, like the rest of the Jewish people, continues to endure.

“A man who has no shoes is a fool.”

Mordo’s lesson for Levi helps to illustrate the hierarchy of needs in the post-war world. Shoes are needed to search for food, so they must be sought out first and foremost. Levi, who has no shoes, does not want to think about himself as a “fool” but Mordo is unflinching in his judgment. From this point on, Levi learns his lesson and pays particular attention to his footwear, even when he is hungry.

“One of the most important things I had learnt in Auschwitz was that one must always avoid being a nobody.”

Levi has learned to survive in deadly conditions. After being released from Auschwitz, however, he cannot abandon these lessons. The threat of death in Auschwitz was so extreme that the lessons are seared into his mind, becoming instinctive. He strives to make himself useful, even when this is no longer necessary for survival. His traumatic experience in the camp has forever altered his behavior, reflecting The Impacts of Trauma.

“Face to face with Galina I felt weak, ill and dirty; I was painfully conscious of my miserable appearance, of my badly shaved face, of my Auschwitz clothes.”

As well as the physical pain of life in the camps, the psychological pain is made more prominent when Levi feels his suffering being scrutinized. People like Gallina can only look at him with pity, inflating the inescapable feeling of shame that has been internalized in his mind by so much torture. Levi knows the absurdity of being ashamed of what has been done to him, but he cannot help feeling that way. He judges his own appearance vicariously, resenting the way that other people’s pity makes him feel.

“Thus on the main square of the camp a sort of parodied version of the German selections took place.”

After being freed from Auschwitz, the memories of the camps are impressed onto Levi’s mind. Everything, it seems, occurs in the shadow of Auschwitz. Every action or gesture has some terrible precursor, functioning as a cruel and traumatic parody of a much darker time. The totalizing effect of the camps is to impose themselves on the present, inserting their trauma into mundane, everyday actions.

“He had absolutely no need of an interpreter.”

Cesare has many schemes that he carries out on Polish and Russian people, despite The Challenges of Language. He speaks neither Polish nor Russian, but he does not have to. His charisma is a universal language that he turns to an immoral end, scheming and scamming people without saying a word to them in a language they understand. Cesare’s words are alien but his personality and actions are familiar, leaving him in no need of an interpreter.

“Unfortunately we were not able to understand the Polish newspapers; but the size of the headlines which increased day by day, the names we could read on them, the very air we breathed in the streets and at the Kommandantur, made us understand that victory was near.”

Levi learns about the end of the war via words he does not understand, reflecting The Challenges of Language. The headlines of newspapers scream to him in alien tongues, becoming deafening in their clarity. The enormity of the victory transcends language, overcoming the barriers of understanding in such a way that Levi feels a pure form of joy that is unmitigated by mere words.

“We felt that our repatriation was now our due, and every hour spent in exile weighed on us like lead; but the total lack of news from Italy weighed on us even more.”

With the war over, Levi and the Italians know that they will soon be sent home. After so long away from their homes, however, they are filled with an uneasy sense of unknowing, invoking The Experience of Uncertainty. They do not know the route they will take, nor do they know what kind of home awaits them in Italy. So much has changed, including themselves. The lack of news weighs heavily on them as they try to contemplate their place in this new world.

“It was quite clear that he was possessed by a desperate senile madness; but there was a greatness in his madness, a force and a barbaric dignity, the trampled dignity of beasts in a cage, the dignity that redeemed Capaneus and Caliban.”

To the Italian survivors, the Moor seems to be possessed by “a desperate senile madness” (271). This personal form of “madness,” however, contrasts to their recent experiences. Nazism and the Holocaust are a form of violent, society-wide “madness” that has caused tens of millions of deaths. Compared to this social “madness,” the Moor’s idiosyncratic behavior seems almost ordinary. The idea of “madness” itself has been altered by the war.

“This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.”

The journey back to Italy is not like the time in the camps. In the camps, Levi dealt with a brutal form of reality. Death, destruction, and suffering were so clear and distinct that they could not be denied. The post-war world, however, is one of abstractions and chaos. The bureaucratic absurdity of trying to return home feels almost unreal. As they move through the zone of absurdity, Levi and the other survivors are forced to reconsider their understanding of what is real and unreal.

“I was quite annoyed, and told her abruptly that we were Italians, whether she liked it or not.”

During one interaction along the journey, Levi is told that he must be a Croatian. He takes umbrage with this, insisting to the woman that he is actually an Italian. This assertion of identity is important: Levi is reclaiming his identity.

“Their exile had been different from ours.”

Levi’s story is a document of the Holocaust but he is very clear that his narrative is highly subjective. This is Primo Levi’s story of suffering and return; the exile of others, he says, has been “different from ours” (292). This suggests that suffering, pain, and brutality are so widespread and so wildly different that there is no single narrative. Each exile must have its own story; only through the combination of these stories of suffering can the Holocaust be understood.

“The Russian administration took no care at all of the camp, so that one wondered if it really existed.”

Throughout The Truce, Levi subconsciously compares the Russian soldiers to the Nazi soldiers at Auschwitz. The Nazis provide his most pointed and traumatizing understanding of his relationship with power, so the indifference or even affection of the Soviet soldiers confuses him. The Nazis cared so much about Levi’s Jewish identity that they sought to torture and murder him. The Soviets, by contrast, barely seem to care. Levi is left wondering whether this indifference means that he even exists at all.

“At this point the children had looked at him with such eyes that Cesare had thrown down the fish and run away like a thief.”

Cesare is a petty criminal and proud of it. He prides himself on his indifference to laws and morality, the forces that govern the lives of other people. When he meets a starving family, however, he gives up his merchandise to them and runs away. His benevolent act has betrayed his sense of self; he is horrified by his own moral action, as his newfound goodness infringes on the way he likes to think of himself. This benevolent act has stolen his proud self-identity as a criminal, which is why he runs away like a thief.

“Our memory of the hunger of Auschwitz was still too recent, and had changed into a violent mental stimulus, which obliged us to fill our stomachs to the utmost and imperiously forbade us to renounce any opportunity of eating.”

The survivors of Auschwitz and other camps are constantly wrestling with The Impacts of Trauma. As a result, their behavior has been reprogrammed. Having suffered from deliberate starvation at the hands of the Nazis, they cannot pass up a chance to eat. Their trauma manifests in their sudden desire to consume as much as possible, eating to the point of sickness in a way that would horrify their pre-war selves.

“It made no difference whether the prisoners were nine, or one, or none; the rations were always three.”

In Auschwitz, rations were deliberately withheld due to hatred and violence. Prisoners were deliberately starved because the Nazis did not consider the prisoners to be human. In the Russian camps, rations have a more absurd role. Someone can be sent to a jail cell and receive enough for nine people or none. This illustrates the amoral chaos of Soviet bureaucracy, contrasted with the brutally efficient administration of the Nazis.

“The Italians, all of them, were a crowd of vulgar numbskulls, all marked by striking and laughable physical defects.”

When the film group comes to Starye Dorogi, the Italians watch an Austrian film about World War I. In this film, the Italians are portrayed as a “crowd of vulgar numbskulls” (336). For the first time, the Italians are seeing themselves from the perspective of German-speaking peoples. Made many years before the Holocaust, the film contains within it an example of the dehumanizing racism that made the Holocaust possible. The film is not just entertainment, but an explanation of how the survivors reached this point.

“We had been equated with prisoners of war, at least by some Soviet departments, and so were owed compensation for the days of work we had carried out.”

The survivors of Auschwitz struggle to adjust to life in the Soviet camps for displaced people. After a problem with a theatrical performance, the survivors expect to be punished. Instead, they are given back wages for their supposed compensation as prisoners of war. They are being paid, instead of punished, but for reasons they can barely discern. This unpredictable chaos is a confusing relief after the trauma of the camps.

“On various occasions already we had been able to verify that the corresponding Russian term, by one of these semantic lapses which never occur without a reason, had come to mean something far less definite and peremptory than our ‘tomorrow’ and, in harmony with Russian habits, meant rather ‘one of the following days.’”

Life in the Russian camps appears to be chaotic but Levi and his fellow survivors are slowly adjusting to the cultural differences of the Soviet administrators and The Experience of Uncertainty. They do not speak Russian, but the Italians are learning firsthand about the intricate details of the Russian language. Words have different meanings and learning more about these meanings helps to clarify the immediate futures of the survivors.

“We realized that we were repeating the course of our last journey north, which had taken us from Zhmerinka to Slutsk and to Starve Dorogi, but in the opposite direction.”

Even after leaving Starye Dorogi, the survivors of Auschwitz find themselves caught in a maddening limbo. They feel that they should be traveling south to Italy. Instead, they are traveling north, through towns which they have already passed. After being trapped in the hellish camps, they are now trapped in the purgatory-like confusion of the Soviet bureaucracy.

“We climbed into our trucks with heavy hearts. We had felt no joy in seeing Vienna undone and the Germans broken, but rather anguish.”

Seeing the broken German cities brings no relief to Levi and the other prisoners. He is not alone in his disappointment at seeing Vienna. There is no catharsis or satisfaction in seeing the destruction, only more anguish. Levi’s journey toward reconciliation seems to have no end, even as he gets closer and closer to home.