If This Is A Man/The Truce: 'Miraculous' Philippe Sands (Hachette Essentials)

by Primo Levi

So the days at Starye Dorogi passed by, in an interminable indolence, as sleepy and salubrious as a long holiday, only broken at intervals by the painful thought of a distant home and by the enchantment of our rediscovery of nature. It was useless to go to the Russians of the Command to ask why we were not returning, when we should return, by what road, what future awaited us; they knew no more than we did, or else, with polite candour, they proffered fantastic or terrifying or senseless answers: that there were no trains; or that war against America was about to start; that soon we should be sent to work in the kolkhoz; that they were waiting to exchange us for Russian prisoners in Italy. They told us these and other enormities without hatred or derision, in fact with an almost affectionate solicitude, as if they were speaking to children who asked too many questions, to quieten them.