I wondered how Primo Levi managed in that rough company. He a bookish, thin young man of about 23 (yet, a survivor of Auschwitz), surrounded by hundreds of Italian ex-POWs, herded about by the Russians. It was rough company.
The movie house scene, in which a traveling movie troupe stops at the transit camp and shows a 30s Hollywood adventure film is a scream. The Russian soldiers comically mobbing the barn that served as the cinema, smashing through the doors and carrying the splinters as weapons to use on each other, the wild assaults on the screen by the shouting men. And all through it, there is Levi's love for the Russians. Even the rude, heedless ones, he loves them all.
And the scene I most recall: stopping at a village where a crowd of exhausted, starving and thirsty captured German soldiers lay huddled together in the dust. Perhaps they'd been left there for days. They begged the Italians for water, but the Italians had none to share with them. What happened to those men?
No comments:
Post a Comment