Who was Lorenzo Perrone?
A man.
A man?
What makes us human? People like Lorenzo Perrone.
I do not know anything about him.
Because he was a bricklayer, and the cults went from a bricklayer. Having culture does not guarantee goodness, we know that from the Nazis.
What do we know about Lorenzo Perrone?
What is kindness? The answer to this question is Lorenzo Perrone. He immortalized him in a book: Un uomo de poche parole (A man of few words).
Here The man who saved Primo Levi.
That’s what Perrone did in the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz III-Monowitz.
Was Primo Levi there?
Slave in Auschwitz (Poland) from March to December 1944, he was 25 years old and had the number 174517 tattooed on his forearm.
How do I get there?
An anti-fascist partisan, he was arrested and deported. He was going to be gassed to death. Or beaten. Or exhausted by work and hunger.
Why is Primo Levi relevant?
An anonymous boy in 1944, after the war he wrote If This Is a Man (1947), the most important book of the 20th century!
It is?
Place humanity in the mirror. It has marked millions of minds and hearts: this book has shaped humanity.
And what role does the bricklayer have?
He worked on the reconstruction of a bombed German factory next to the Auschwitz camp, works where free workers – like Lorenzo – and slaves – like Primo Levi – rubbed shoulders.
Did Perrone and Levi meet there?
The Piedmontese accent brought them closer… and the illiterate bricklayer, at 40 years old, decided to save the life of the anonymous young Jewish boy.
As?
I gave him food every day in a lunch box: soups, vegetables, cookies… And that’s why Primo Levi didn’t die!
Do we owe Levi’s work to Perrone?
Clear! If this is a man, being a man is still valuable, something good remains in the world, thought Primo Levi: he will later write The Truce and The Sunken and the Saved.
What was Lorenzo Perrone like?
Illiterate. Of few words. Refractory to authoritarians. He didn’t say, he did! Drinker. Quarrelsome.
Quarrelsome?
There were fights in bars. His life was hard. He died at only 48 years old, worn out, tubercular… and alcoholic, in 1952.
What else do we know about Perrone and Levi in ??Auschwitz?
“You risk your life by talking to me,” Primo Levi warned him, as he did.
And what did Perrone say?
“I don’t mind”. And he risked more: he sent postcards from Primo Levi to Turin… and the family sent him a package of clothes.
And he didn’t ask for anything in return?
“My family will pay you, they have money,” Primo Levi offered him one day. “I don’t want anything,” Lorenzo replied.
Why did Perrone act like this?
Because it was good.
Because it was good!
He decides that this young man is his friend, and for a friend, everything! He just does what’s right.
Exciting story.
At the end of 1944 they exchanged boots, which denotes deep twinning. Soviet troops arrived and Nazi guards fled. And there the two separate.
What did each one do?
Lorenzo, walking from Poland!, returned to Italy. Many inmates died on foot marches south. Or when eating again. There Primo Levi survived again.
How did he survive?
In a group of prisoners, on foot and on trains, they traveled around Europe a lot… until arriving in Turin, months later.
How did Primo Levi’s life continue?
Employed in the chemical industry until retiring in 1977… while he was writing his luminous books about Auschwitz.
¿Y Lorenzo Perrone?
An itinerant bricklayer, he continued working on construction sites… without stopping going into bars.
Why was Lorenzo Perrone good?
I don’t have an answer for this yet.
For love of his mother, perhaps?
Hmm… Thanks! I’ll think about this.
If there is good, is there evil?
There is evil and it is contagious, as observed by Primo Levi, a fine ethologist of the human being… Evil spreads by contagion!
Did these two friends see each other again?
Yeah! Primo Levi always said wonderful things about Perrone. And in 1952 he attended his funeral dressed in white! He conveyed what he saw in Lorenzo Perrone: absolute good.
This moves me, Greppi.
And me too. The great Primo Levi had a son… whom he named Renzo (Lorenzo). And a daughter, whom he named… Lisa Lorenza.
