Page 11 - Balancing between the present and the past

An alert-looking boy, apparently at the head of the class, asked me the obligatory question: ‘But how come you didn’t escape?’ I briefly explained to him what I have written here; not quite convinced, he asked me to draw a sketch of the camp on the blackboard indicating the location of the watch towers, the gates, the barbed wire, and the power station. I did my best, watched by thirty pairs of intent eyes. My interlocutor studied the drawings for a few instants, asked me for a few further clarifications, then he presented to me the plan he had worked out: here, at night, cut the throat of the sentinel; then, put on his clothes; immediately after this, run over there to the power station and cut off the electricity, so the search lights would go out and the high-tension fence would be deactivated; after that I could leave without any trouble. He added seriously: ‘If it should happen to you again, do as I told you; you’ll see that you’ll be able to do it’.
Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor, in the book The Drowned and the Saved (1988), page 177- 178.