Books
The non-Jewish Italian who saved Primo Levi
A new biography sheds light on an unsung hero consigned to work at the death camp where the great author was interned
January 31, 2025 09:21
A new biography sheds light on an unsung hero consigned to work at the death camp where the great author was interned
January 31, 2025 09:21Just when we thought the excellent biographies of the great Italian author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi had uncovered all there was to be known of his internment in Auschwitz in 1943, a new one appears. This time it is not of Levi himself, however, but of a man who smuggled food, clothing and letters into the camp where he worked, and who risked his own non-Jewish life to keep Levi alive.
The friendship between the two is, at least superficially, an unlikely one. Lorenzo Perrone was an uneducated, barely literate Italian labourer who was consigned by his company to work at Auschwitz in 1944. He was “a man of few words”, apparently without intellectual affinities, yet he and Levi shared a moral position: each saw the humanity in the other, to be protected when it could not be openly defended.
He was a man of few words, apparently without intellectual affinities, yet he and Levi shared a moral position: each saw the humanity in the other
Each in their own way was determined to defend life itself, not just through the struggle to survive but by bringing others with them. This put Perrone at a risk similar to the inmates, a risk he appeared to entirely discount or ignore, to Levi’s admiration.
Levi, as we learn from the extensive biographies of Carole Angier and Ian Thomson, retained a respect verging on affection for Perrone that lasted long after the war ended. He named his children Lisa Lorenza and Renzo Cesare after him, and publicly acknowledged in The Paris Review that “it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today [for] Lorenzo was a man. His humanity was pure and uncontaminated … thanks to Lorenzo I managed not to forget that I myself was a man”.
Yet after liberation, Perrone became an alcoholic and “let himself go”, sleeping rough and contracting TB, for which he refused treatment. He met an early end by what Levi called “a genuine suicide”. And while the jury is still out, perhaps indefinitely, on whether Levi intended his own final fall down a flight of steep stairs, the coroner’s conclusion was unambiguously one-worded: “Suicide”. As my mother once said to me, “‘It’s always possible to survive ‘the camps’ and not the memory of the camps.”
Carlo Greppi, an established historian of the period and author of more than a dozen history books specialising in the Italian Resistance, overcomes the complications and ambiguities of re-viewing an historical life through a contemporary reading in this fluent retelling, first published in Italian in 2023. Recognition in this way has been, perhaps long in coming.
Yet Greppi assisted at the installation of a plaque honouring Perrone on the Viale delle Alpi in his native town of Fossano in 2004. He has, though, long been acknowledged in Israel: in 1998, Yad Vashem declared him as Righteous among the Nations, a title given to people who, for various reasons, “made an effort to assist victims, including Jews, who were being exterminated by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust”.
A Man of Few Words: The Bricklayer of Auschwitz Who Saved Primo Levi
By Carlo Greppi, translated by Howard Curtis
The Westbourne Press, £16.99