Free Diary of the Fall by Michel Laub Page A

nature betraying the rest of the gang in order to save myself and to continue sucking other people’s blood and health.
22.
    The next day everyone at school knew about it, but this time I was prepared, as if anesthetized by what I’d experienced the previous year and which I would clearly go through again: the way people immediately changed the subject whenever I came into view, my name and the Star of David chalked on the wall in the corridor, and this time I myself would quickly rub it off so that no teacher would see it, so that the coordinator at the new school wouldn’t call me intoher office and express her profound regret at that display of religious and cultural intolerance, and so that faced by the coordinator’s sympathy I wouldn’t again run the risk of feeling sick and vomiting up the names of the classmates I believed had done it, or even giving João’s name, because he must have known who was doing it, João who now only spoke to me in class or when we were alone together, where he wouldn’t have to demonstrate in public that he had been or still was my friend or feel obliged to invite me to some party at the weekend, and gradually I would cease to know anything about João’s life outside school, if he was still stealing tokens from public phone boxes, if he was still smoking hash and sniffing glue, if he had a girlfriend and was the first in the class to have one, and I started going straight from school to home and from home to school, cut off from João and all my other classmates and from any other possibility apart from studying and my bedroom and my life, which didn’t change throughout the eternity of every day, every hour of eighth grade.

A FEW MORE THINGS I KNOW
ABOUT MY FATHER

 
1.
    Of the six hundred and fifty Jews sent to Auschwitz along with Primo Levi, six hundred and thirty-eight died within the first year. Of the twelve who survived, Primo Levi was the only one to write a book,
If This Is a Man
. Unlike my grandfather, he was concerned with recording every detail of the camp routine, from his arrival in 1944 to his liberation by the Red Army when the war ended.
2.
    Before
If This Is a Man
, no one knew about the card placed beside a tap just inside Auschwitz, warning inmates not to drink from it because the water was dirty. The rules also forbade sleeping in your jacket or without your underpants, or leaving the hut with your collar turned up or not taking a shower on the prescribed days.
3.
    Fingernails needed to be trimmed regularly, but that could only be done with your teeth. With toenails, the friction of the shoes was enough. The shoes were distributed in a completely arbitrary fashion, and each prisoner had only a few seconds in which to choose, from a distance, a pair that appeared to be the right size, for there could be no changing them later, and according to Primo Levi, this was the first important decision to be made, because a shoe that is too tight or too loose causes blisters that burst and in turn cause infections that make the feet swell and stop you walking or running, and the rubbing of the swollen foot against the wood and cloth of the shoes causes more blisters and more infections that end up taking the prisoner to the hospital with a diagnosis of swollen feet, a complaint for which there is no cure in Auschwitz.
4.
    Primo Levi says that in Auschwitz death begins with the shoes, and I wonder if he was referring only to his time in the camp or to the decades that passed after putting on the pair he managed to grab during those five decisive seconds. Primo Levi died when hewas sixty-eight, in Turin, Italy, having written thirteen books, many of them about the Holocaust and many of which had been translated into various languages, and having resumed his career as a chemist, and married and had children and received prizes and become a literary celebrity in Europe and the world, and I wonder: was he thinking about that choice of shoe, too large or too small, or