50 pages • 1 hour read
Primo LeviThe Truce
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1963A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “Northwards”
During the three days in Zhmerinka, the Italians aboard the train are reduced to “penury” (290). They will soon be sent to an unknown destination, but the lack of available information, resources, and supplies leaves them in limbo in the large agricultural village.
Other trains with other passengers pass through the railway depot. These include captured German prisoners who ask for bread; though many of their relatives were killed by Nazis in the war or in the camps, Levi observes the Italians giving bread to the Germans. There are also Ukrainian women who are castigated by the Russians for working with the Germans.
The Italians leave Zhmerinka and head north. Levi travels in a crowded train until, during one stop, he and Cesare find an unused medical carriage. They spend the rest of the journey in this relative comfort. When they reach a large Soviet camp, they are collected with other prisoners from other countries.
In this place, Levi sees his Greek friend Mordo Nahum for the last time. They greet cordially and, during the course of the conversation, Mordo offers Levi access to women, pointing to “twenty huge sleepy girls” (296). Levi declines, reflecting on the reality of a man who seems to be selling sex during a time of crisis. He never sees Mordo again.
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Little Hen”
Finally, the Italians are sent to a camp near a village named Starye Dorogi. This village is “not to be found on a map” (298) and, to get there, the Italians must travel several miles along a road.
Before they can go there, however, they are held in a temporary camp in the town of Slutsk, alongside people of many other nationalities. Each nationality takes turns running the camp kitchen, sharing their respective cuisine with the other peoples. As they wait for news as to when they will depart for Starye Dorogi, the Italians settle into the comfortable life in Slutsk. After some time, they eventually depart.
Levi walks in a group with Cesare, Leonardo, and other Italians named Daniele, Mr. Unverdorben, and Mr. Unverdorben’s friend from Trieste. Growing weary of the long, arduous walk, they decide to split from the main group and make their own way to the village. Rather than forage for food, however, Cesare is insistent that he will have a roast chicken. The night has arrived and they will not be able to catch a chicken, but he insists that they passed a village. He wants to purchase a chicken from the villagers.
Cesare is right and Levi accompanies him to the village. They are shot at as they arrive and, in the village, the “visibly alarmed” (304) people stare at the Italians. They have no languages in common, so Cesare struggles to clarify his desire to purchase a chicken. Eventually, Levi overcomes this by drawing a diagram on the ground. They purchase their chicken and return to their friends, whereupon the chicken is cooked.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Old Roads”
After the chicken dinner and a refreshing sleep, Levi and his companions wake up the next day still several miles from their destination. Unwilling to work, Cesare insists that they return to the village and hire someone to take them. Levi accompanies him, negotiating for an old man to take them on his cart.
As they set out, however, Levi begins to suspect that the old man was already heading to Starye Dorogi and would likely have taken them “free of charge” (309). As they travel, they realize that they are being followed. Then, they recognize that their follower is their old friend, the Moor. Levi explains that the Moor is a poor, isolated man who travels and works hard for his daughter. Everything he does is designed to earn whatever money he can to send to her.
The Italians arrive at the camp near Starye Dorogi. The Russians run the camp, which holds 1,400 displaced Italians who are awaiting repatriation. The Russian soldiers seem uninterested in making the Italians do anything; their only role seems to be protecting the Italian women from unwanted interest. The Italians receive the same rations and lodgings as the Russian soldiers. Though they are not required to work, many of them volunteer to help.
Leonardo and Levi run a small clinic but, with the summer weather, there are not many patients. The Italians include Jews, Communists, partisans, and criminals, as well as fascists and former soldiers. To the Russians, they are “all the same” (312). Among their rations they find a river fish named ribba. Cesare, not liking the taste, begins to sell it to the local people and passing Russian soldiers. He inflates the fish with water to fetch a better price. Like many of his schemes, he relies on his customers being far away when the truth about whatever he is selling is uncovered.
On one occasion, he returns to the camp despondent. Levi discovers that the reason for his sadness is that he found a woman and her starving children in the woods. He gave them his ribba, rather than sell it, and now he is horrified by his own benevolence.
Chapter 12 Summary: “The Wood and the Path”
The Italians stay at Starye Dorogi for “two long months” (316) between July and September 1945. The camp is situated in a quiet, remote forest. Levi describes the feeling of being surrounded by so much silence after his time in Auschwitz. During one of his long walks, during which he relishes the solitude, he becomes lost. He wanders for hours until he is able to return to the camp.
Rather than stay in the camp, some Italians move into the neighboring forest. They live an unconventional lifestyle; one man becomes a hermit, for example, and performs makeshift wedding ceremonies as well as manufacturing pots and pans. Two German women also live in the woods. They are sex workers and, Levi says, many of the Italian men go out to the forest to use their services.
The Italians forage in the woods for berries, mushrooms, and meat. They are “badly under-nourished” (320) and their traumatic memories of Auschwitz mean that they feel a constant need to eat whenever they can, lest they return to starvation. They make arrangements with the residents of the Starye Dorogi village, making commercial deals to acquire anything they need. One of the local women is named Irina. She has a special friendship with Cesare, who often haggles with her. She is also responsible for the distribution of soap in the public baths. In this way, the days at Starye Dorogi pass by in “interminable indolence” (324) as the thought of returning home becomes more pronounced.
Meanwhile, the victorious Soviet troops pass by the camp in their long columns. Cesare takes advantage of the passing soldiers, selling them cheap items at high prices. Many horses pass by the camp; occasionally, they are hunted and killed by the Italians who have been “almost wholly deprived of meat for eighteen months” (326). Only when the Italians set up a slaughterhouse to cure the meat do the Russians intervene.
Chapters 9-12 Analysis
Levi and his fellow Italians are sent to a camp for displaced peoples near a village named Starye Dorogi. Levi depicts Starye Dorogi as a form of limbo, a self-contained bubble of post-war existence that neither punishes nor rewards the Italians. Compared to the horrors of Auschwitz, the camp is almost like a paradise. The Italians are left almost entirely to their own devices; compared to the brutality of the Nazis, the Soviet soldiers are largely indifferent. For the survivors, this is a period of adjustment, a halfway house between the camps and actual freedom, in which they slowly adjust to living in a society. They are allowed to go almost anywhere they want and do as they please, rather than having their movements limited and their work assigned. Since they are not yet back in their actual communities, the Italians build a makeshift community of their own.
Their reintegration into society after leaving the camps is conducted in such a manner that they are rehabilitating themselves as they cope with The Impacts of Trauma. Work duties are assigned on a communal level, with people contributing (or not contributing) to the good of the community. These contributions are not always moral. Cesare, for example, continues his favorite scams and schemes in a new context. These scams are as important as the cooking duties, however, as the survivors of the camps are slowly relearning their old worlds, bringing back their memories of the past and learning how to live as free people again. Starye Dorogi, in this sense, functions as a useful space in which they can gradually adjust to life outside the camps while surrounded by fellow survivors.
Starvation was a constant threat in Auschwitz. Levi and his fellow survivors suffer from a constant fear that their food supplies will run out. This is exacerbated by the infrequency and the unreliability of the Soviet rations (though this is caused by bureaucratic absurdity, rather than genocidal intent). The result is that the survivors are possessed by a terrible hunger. Many of them, even at Starye Dorogi, have not recovered from their malnutrition. When they do eat, they eat greedily and beyond the point of satisfaction. They eat as much as they can because they have been traumatized by the reality of not eating at all.
This fear and trauma causes them to break social conventions. Not only do they abandon their old manners and sense of prudence when it comes to meals, but they also set up an entire hunting unit to capture horses from the returning Red Army. Levi describes this as almost “primordial” (326) behavior, a return to a form of existence that is almost proto-civilization. In this sense, the survivors have been so traumatized that they have abandoned the supposedly civilized behaviors of their past, which must be relearned during their time in Starye Dorogi.
The longer he spends in Starye Dorogi, the more Levi is filled with a burning sense of nostalgia. This nostalgia is complex, informed by Levi’s view of the changing world and The Experience of Uncertainty. World War II changed Italy. Levi being sent to Auschwitz was a product of this change, as the fascist regime in the country collapsed into a puppet state run by the Nazis, who then enacted their antisemitic laws. The Italy that Levi left behind has been defeated and something new will emerge in its place. Like the lives of the survivors, however, the exact details of this new post-war Italy have not yet been clarified. The plight of survivors like Levi embodies the plight of their homeland.
This notion of a changing Italy complicates Levi’s nostalgia. Levi knows that his country will be changed by World War II. Importantly, however, he has also changed. Life in Starye Dorogi clarifies this for Levi, reminding him of the psychological trauma that has been caused by his time in the camps. While he may be able to go home and find his family, they will not be the same either. Thus, a lasting horror of Auschwitz is the way in which it has denied him the ability to return to his old life—Levi has a painful nostalgia for a place he cannot fully return to and for a person he can no longer be.
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