In the footsteps of the humble Auschwitz bricklayer to whom Primo Levi owed his life

Greppi reconstructs as much as possible who Perrone was, a civilian who volunteered as a mason at Monowitz, a satellite camp of Auschwitz; Here, in the words of Primo Levi, “The slaves’ slaves slept and died”, Just like that. Every day for six months, this taciturn and almost illiterate tinsmith’s son secretly brought a bowl of soup and leftovers to that thin and emaciated 24-year-old prisoner with the number 174517 tattooed on his arm. “Look, you’re taking a risk by talking to me,” the chemist warned him. Although Perrone was at risk of being arrested by the Nazis and imprisoned in the camp or executing himself, he replied, “I don’t care,” always remaining economical in his words.

HE soup It was for malnourished Levi 500 extra calories this helped compensate for the meager food rations the Nazis gave the prisoners. Levi knew that Perrone would “sneak into the camp kitchen at three in the morning while everyone else was asleep” and put soup and leftovers left by other volunteer workers into his aluminum bowl. “I think if I’m alive today it’s because of Lorenzo” ‘If this is a man,’ the chemist wrote in his statement, which devoted about five pages; It was also a statement he repeated often in later interviews with the man he remembered. ‘The Return of Lorenzo’ (1981) -from ‘Lilit and other stories’- and ‘The wrecks and the survivors’ (1986) without revealing his surname.

“Thanks to Lorenzo, I didn’t forget that I was a man”Levi spoke of the poor bricklayer from the Burgué neighborhood of Fossano, the son of a cruel, violent and drunken father, who made ends meet as best he could. smuggling route After crossing the border before becoming one of hundreds subcontracted by the G. Beotti company to build a synthetic products factory at Auschwitz III IG Farben (Zyklon B, the lethal insecticide used in gas chambers, was patented).

First date It happened while Perrone was laying bricks on the scaffolding. He was missing mortar, and when he saw the young prisoner, he told him to put away the bucket. However, the weakened Levi could not lift it and dropped it, spilling some of its contents. After two or three days the mason approached him and gave him the full game. Soup sprinkled with “sausage skins and plum pits.” “He just told me to return it to him empty before sunset,” he recalled. The one from Fossano also took a risk by writing postcards to his family with news about Levi.

“His humanity was pure and unpolluted”The survivor wrote about Lorenzo Perrone, whom she also honored with the names she gave to her two children, Lisa Lorenza (1948) and Renzo (1957). They continued their contact after the war. In fact, in the summer of 2022, Greppi unexpectedly found the letters that the mason had sent to Levi (those from the chemist had been lost). He always rejected their thanks and refused to take anything in return..

The chemist tried to help him with money and clothes until he was emaciated in 1952. tuberculosis patient and alcoholic. He managed to get himself admitted to hospital and escaped because he was not given wine. Levi claimed many times that his savior had committed suicide. He stated that Perrone was “traumatized by what he experienced in Auschwitz” and that Perrone returned “much more helpless” than he was. He felt “horrified by what he saw” and was “deeply hurt, he didn’t want to live anymore.” Like it probably happened to other rescuers known to Yad Vashem. The Righteous Among the Nations The person who saved Jews from the Holocaust Oskar Schindler, Perrone, who had helped two or three other inmates, felt “guilty for not doing more.”

Some time later in 1987 spiral of depressionLevi, who always wondered why he survived and why others did not, fell down the stairwell of his home in Turin when he was 67 years old. “Everything I saw and suffered burned inside me,” he wrote. “I felt closer to the dead than to the living, and I was ashamed to be human because it was men who built a place like Auschwitz. Auschwitz had swallowed millions of people, many of my friends and a woman I carried in my heart.”