DIO ERA TRA NOI (God was among us) - Malazeta - video transcript translated by Claude Almansi
The movie of the play translated to the Web: Dio era tra noi, (God was among us), Malazeta and Compagnia dell'angelo.
25 aprile 2008, Mestrino (Padova), Malazeta and Compagnia dell'angelo - "Dio era tra noi" (God was among us), musical based on books by Primo Levi
Video transcript
Antonio Pellegrino, LIS singer.
Filming, video editing, captioning and Web adaptation by Roberto Ellero www.webmultimediale.org
www.malazeta.net - info@malazeta.net
Malazeta.net - Webmultimediale.org - All rights reserved
Video transcript, translated by Claude Almansi
25 April 2008, Mestrino (Padova), Malazeta and Compagnia dell'angelo - "Dio era tra noi" (God was among us), musical based on texts by Primo Levi
Antonio Pellegrino, LIS (Italian Sign Language) singer
Filming, editing, captioning and Web adaptation by Roberto Ellero www.webmultimediale.org
www.malazeta.net - info@malazeta.net
Malazeta: 174 – 517
Mala came back to tell everything that had not yet been told,
her mouth had been sewn, with death smiling on her face.
Yet no, she didn't end up on that fork, now we our talking from our own,
how to understand the studentless teachings of history
how to dress in her clothes, and speak with her voice
on the walls, the words said: after using the latrine, don't forget to wash your hands before eating
Primo 174 517
Primo Levi, If this is a man
You who live safely
In your warm houses,
You who, when you come home in the evening,
Find hot food and friendly faces:
Ask yourselves if this is a man
who works in the mud
who knows no peace
who struggles for half a loaf of bred
who dies for the flimsiest motive.
Ask yourselves if this is a woman,
hairless and nameless
powerless to remember
Empty eyes and cold womb
Like a frog in winter.
Ponder that this has taken place:
I entrust you with these words.
Chisel them in your heart
at home and abroad,
lying down and getting up;
repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble down,
may illness paralyze you,
may your children turn away from you
Primo Levi: I remember this terrible journey, in cargo cars without windows, shut from outside.
And inside: men, women and children, squeezed pitilessly. Traveling towards nothingness, traveling downwards, towards the bottom.
The soldiers of the watch pushed away those who tried to come near our convoy
Two young mothers, still breastfeeding, moaned night and day, begging for water.
Narrator: Because Auschwitz was like an industry – everything was exploited.
In the next scene we shall see visiting officers, their arrival, their being welcomed by the Chief Officer of Auschwitz.
March of the officers' visit.
[music]
Officer: We eventually got hold of the tool that will enable us to annihilate once and for all what is the people of the faithless, the people of Israel.
Narrator: It's important to understand that into Auschwitz you entered by train. From Auschwitz you exited from the chimney stack.
Malazeta: Eyes
Talking people don't always have something to tell, and vice-versa people who keep silent have a lot more to tell
We know that whoever makes too much noise will come out of the house, we know what he'll eat today and tomorrow,
that he might eventually write a book about his memories, about his acquaintances.
6.000 people die daily nowadays, 600'000 aged 1-5 in Africa, half a million become blind,
but maybe you don't know this, we aren't frightened by it because today we can eat and see,
And so if you can see in such circumstances, it is as if you were blind and this does not make sense, it's time you should open your eyes and see the light of knowledge because everything is around you.
Primo Levi: At once, the platform teemed with shadows. About 10 SS kept apart, apparently indifferent, standing with their legs wide open.
At one point they started questioning us in pidgin Italian "Quanti anni? Sano o malato?" (How old? Healthy or sick) and according to our answers, they'd send us in 2 different directions.
Someone dared ask about luggage, someone else didn't want to leave his wife, but Renzo loitered a little too long saying goodbye to Francesca, his fiancée, and so with one single shot in his face they brought him down.
What happened to the others, women, children, old people, we couldn't ascertain back then or later: they were swallowed by night. Purely and simply.
Malazeta: Water
Everything was silent as in a water bowl and as in some dream sequences. We would have expected something more apocalyptic
they looked like simple law and order agents, it was baffling and disarming, someone dared ask about luggage, they answered "luggage later",
someone else didn't want to leave his wife, they answered "later together again", many mothers did not want to be separated from their child and they said "fine, stay with child", always with the same quiet assurance of those who only do their daily duty,
but Renzo loitered a little too long saying goodbye to Francesca, his fiancée, and so with a single shot in his face they brought him down: it was their daily duty.
Primo Levi: You must undress and bundle your clothes in a given way. I had never seen old men naked.
Nothing is ours anymore: they took away our clothes, shoes, even our hats. They even took away our names.
Imagine now a man deprived of his loved ones, of his home, of his habits, of his clothes – of everything, that is.
Literally of everything he owns. He shall be an empty man, reduced to suffering and need, he'll forget about dignity and discerning.
Haftling. I've learned that I am a haftling [prisoner].
My name is 174 517. We'll bear the mark tattooed on our left arm for the rest of our lives.
Officer: From now on I'd say they aren't persons anymore. We take away their identity, we erase their past, they have no history left.
They become ciphers, registration numbers. We reason with registration numbers.
Malazeta: Clothes
[Guitar solo]
Clothes – even the filty clothes that got shared out,
even the shoes with a wooden sole, are a flimsy but indispensable defense.
Those who don't have them don't perceive themselves as human being anymore, but as worms - naked, slow, disgusting, face down on the ground - He knows he can be squashed any time.
Narrator: But in a Poland, in winter, when temperature reached -20° Celsius, the only chores they let us do were useless chores: moving railway sleepers, moving rocks, moving stones from one part to another in the concentration camp.
And this was a strategy to alienate people, to deprive them of their own personality.
Malazeta: Non communication
For a horse to run or stop, turn or pull or stop pulling, you don't have to negotiate with it or give it detailed explanations a lexicon of a dozen assorted but univocal signs is enough – whether acoustic or tactile or visual: Rein-pulling, spurring, yells, gestures.
Discourse is a fiction, sheer noise, a painted veil covering existential silence, we are alone even if we live as a couple.
It seems to me that this lament proceeds from mental sloth and exposes it; obviously it encourages it in a dangerous vicious circle. Except in case of pathological incapacity, one can and must communicate: it is a useful and easy way to contribute to others' and one's own peace, because silence, the absence of signs is in turn a sign, but an ambiguous one, and ambiguity generates worry and mistrust.
Primo Levi: When a soldier would draw his gun, we were overcome by terror...
Malazeta: Language
If someone hesitated, blows rained down and it was obvious that this was a variation of the same language: using words to communicate thought, this mechanism – necessary and sufficient for a human to be a human – had become obsolete.
[guitar solo]
It was a signal for those others, we weren't human anymore: with us – as with cows and mules – there was no substantial difference between a shout and a blow.
Primo Levi: Once they got to the camp, mothers were brutally separated from their children.
Therefore some of them tried to hide their children in the hut [...] and then the atrocious shouts of these poor mothers would rise of these mothers deprived of their only reason left to live and to struggle.
Narrator: Go, children, follow these people, go feed the fire and flames of Nazism.
May the heat caused by your bodies' combustion heat and melt the ice that has grown in the mind and hearts of those who wanted this. May your parents' tears drench the parched earth on which shall be laid the seed of hope and of memory.
Yet Mara, Mara didn't believe what they were telling her, that they were taking her daughter Maria Cristina for a medical check-up.
No, Mara understood that these were the last seconds she would spend with her daughter.
She embraced her, she tried to remember the last seconds, details, the perfume of her hair, the coolness of her skin, the warmth of her body. But Mara didn't cry, she didn't want her daughter to see her crying before she died.
To this mother, to these mothers, to all mothers who lost a child through misfortune, in an accident, through illness, the Compagnia dell'Angelo and the Malazeta dedicate this Lullaby.
[music]
The crematorium is within the door that will lead to hell, it draws black bodies to be burned by the flame, I draw my son there, my son with his golden hair, his silent eyes that gaze at you up there, crying stony tears that won't flow down anymore.
The crematorium is within the door that will lead to hell, it draws black bodies to be burned by the flame, I draw my son there, my son with his golden hair.
Malazeta: NN ("Notte Nebbia" i.e. Night Mist)
As I am talking to you, the pond water, at the heart of January, is cold and opaque like our bad memory.
War is a-slumber, with one eye always open. Trustworthy grass returned to the grounds around the huts.
An abandoned village, still full of threats. The crematorium broke down, Nazi tricks are out-fashioned. Nine million dead haunt this landscape.
Who keeps watch from this strange observatory to warn us of new butchers' arrival? Will their faces be different from ours?
Somewhere among us lurk lucky kapos, recycled chiefs.
There are those who didn't believe us. And here we are, contemplating these ruins.
Who keeps watch from this strange observatory to warn us of new butchers' arrival? Will their faces be different from ours?
Somewhere among us lurk lucky kapos, recycled chiefs. There are those who didn't believe us. And here we are, contemplating these ruins.
As if the violence of the camps had died under the rubble.
We pretend to hope again, facing this dwindling image, as if you could recover from this pestilence.
We pretend to believe that all fhis belongs a single time and to a single country and it doesn't cross our thoughts to look around and we don't hear that people are shouting endlessly.
Even a quiet landscape looks like death. A holiday village with its church tower.
Primo Levi, from "The Truce"
I arrived in Turin on October 19, after a 35-day journey: the house was still standing, all my relatives alive, nobody expected me.
I was swollen, bearded, torn and had difficulty in making others recognize me. I found again my friends, full of life; the warmth of assured meals, the concreteness of daily work, the freeing joy of telling.
I found again an ample and clean bed that gave under my weight that night.
But it took me many months to get rid of the habit of staring at the earth while walking, as if looking there for something to eat or to pocket swiftly and sell for bread, and I am still being haunted, at times more often, at times less, by a frightening dream. It's a dream within a dream, with changing details, but unique in its substance.
I am sitting at a table with my relatives, or with friends, or at work, and in a green countryside, in a peaceful and relaxed environment, apparently without stress or pain, yet I feel a subtle, deep anxiety, the precise feeling of a lurking threat.
And actually, as the dream unfolds, little by little and brutally, each time in a different manner, everything falls and crumbles around me: landscape, walls, people – and my anxiety becomes more intense and more focused. Now everything is turning into chaos:
I am alone in the middle of a grey and murky nothingness and I know what that means and I also know that I have known it forever:
I am again in the lager, and nothing outside the lager is true.
The rest is a short holiday, or an illusion of the senses, a dream... my family, the blooming nature, the house.
Now this inner dream, the dream of peace, is over and in the outside dream that continues freezingly, I hear a well-known voice, a single word, not imperious but brief and understated, on the contrary. It is the dawn order in Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected:
arise.
[clapping]
Thanks... just carry on.... thanks.
© 2007