As we go through the holiday season, here is a short exert describing a miracle at Christmas, basic foods which we would not find a place at our tables, but were received with joy by the inmates.
http://tabletmag.com/scroll/188007/primo-levis-christmas-in-auschwitz?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=post&utm_content=Primo+Levi’s+Christmas+in+Auschwitz&utm_campaign=dec2014
It was a memorable Christmas for the world at war; memorable for me too, because it was marked by a miracle. At Auschwitz, the various categories of prisoners (political, common criminals, social misfits, homosexuals, etc.) were allowed to receive gift packages from home, but not the Jews. Anyway, from whom could the Jews have received them? From their families, exterminated or confined in the surviving ghettos? From the very few who had escaped the roundups, hidden in cellars, in attics, terrified and penniless? And who knew our address? For all the world knew, we were dead.
And yet a package did finally find its way to me, through a chain of friends, sent by my sister and my mother, who were hidden in Italy. The last link of that chain was Lorenzo Perrone, the bricklayer from Fossano, of whom I have spoken in Survival in Auschwitz, and whose heartbreaking end I have recounted here in “Lorenzo’s Return.”* The package contained ersatz chocolate, cookies, and powdered milk, but to describe its real value, the impact it had on me and on my friend Alberto, is beyond the powers of ordinary language. In the Camp, the terms eating, food, hunger had meanings totally different from their usual ones. That unexpected, improbable, impossible package was like a meteorite, a heavenly object, charged with symbols, immensely precious, and with an enormous momentum.