Machado praised those extraordinarily ordinary people who seem condemned to not occupy a single line in the book of history. “They are good people who live, / work, pass and dream, / and on a day like so many / they rest underground.” The Italian Lorenzo Perone (1904-1952) could have been one of those beings, despite the fact that he made merits for the opposite. He was the man who saved Primo Levi.
Young, a university student and a chemist, Levi was from a wealthy family. And Jewish and partisan. From Turin, like Perone himself (his real surname, although he pronounced and transcribed it poorly, which is why he is also cited as Perrone). Both came from different worlds, but ended up in the same hell: Monowitz-Buna, one of the three complexes of the Auschwitz death camp, in Poland under the Nazi boot.
Levi arrived as prisoner 174,517, from block 48. He was 24 years old. Perone/Perrone, who was 39, was a bricklayer and almost illiterate. He was not imprisoned and lived “on the margins of horror”, as one of the more or less voluntary workers that Mussolini's fascist regime placed at the disposal of the Third Reich. They met between June 16 and 21, 1944, a meeting that turned out to be providential for the prisoner.
Over the years, Primo Levi (1919-1987) became a writer and one of the most lucid and shocking voices in Holocaust literature. He couldn't have done it without Lorenzo Perone, who risked his life to save him (although he was a civilian worker he would have ended up in a striped uniform, if he had been caught). How did he save him? Giving him a bucket of soup secretly, daily and for six months, until they transferred him.
It was a strange, watery concoction, the result of leftovers from the workers' canteen, which a surreptitious diner collected at dawn. Sometimes it contained plum bones, sausage skins and even the unplucked wing of a bird or a La Stampa leaf. Once again, dirt was floating in that soup. Levi later discovered that it was because of the bombing that the camp suffered that day. The Russians were already very close.
Lorenzo Perone was momentarily buried because the dining room was completely hit. He could have died and suffered a ruptured eardrum, but even so he gave up his daily commitment and brought the soup. He helped other prisoners without ever asking for anything in return. Levi shared his gift with his friend Alberto Dalla Volta, who ended up dying, like the majority of deportees: for four out of five that was a path of no return.
The extra calories were essential for hits like If This Is a Man, Levi's masterpiece, to reach us, although he published more memoirs, essays, dramas and novels. All of his works exude an exquisite sensitivity that does not renounce harshness, as happens in Necropolis, by another surviving writer, Boris Pahor. Lorenzo's humanity and bravery could have stayed in Levi's books. And it's not a little...
The writer spoke of Lorenzo, with his name or a pseudonym, in his writings and in a play. In his honor she named his daughter Lisa Lorenza and his son Renzo, diminutive of Lorenzo. But the memory of this humble bricklayer does not end there. He was chosen righteous among the nations in 1988 by Yad Vashem, the World Shoah Commemoration Center, thus honoring Gentiles who did not flinch from the industry of death and hatred.
“In a world of widespread moral debacle, there was a small minority who knew how to display extraordinary courage to maintain human values,” says Yad Vashem. Lorenzo Perone was one of them. The Italian historian Carlo Greppi has rescued his figure in an unusual biography, in the style of those written by Stefan Zweig, which more than explaining a character aimed to make us feel a life.
That's what Greppi achieves with The Man Who Saved Primo Levi (Review). The original title of this research, more literary than academic, is Un uomo di poche parole. That's what that bricklayer was like, a man of few words, almost illiterate and with a sullen appearance. His nickname in Fossano, where today he has a commemorative plaque and where nicknames were once inherited from father to son, was Tacca (the Brawler, the Brawler).
Like those poorly wrapped packages containing a precious jewel, the Tacca had a heart of gold. He never allowed the deportees he helped to give him any gifts (except to fix his boots). He gave Primo Levi not only food and clothing. He agreed to send a letter, in coded language, to a friend of the deportee, who sent it to his mother and her sister, Jews who lived in hiding and thus knew that he was still alive.
Through the same route, but in reverse, Lorenzo Perone received a package that was actually for prisoner 174,517. Chocolate, cookies, powdered milk. Imagine yourself in Auschwitz, “a planet of ghosts,” as Levi describes it. A place “frozen with terror and where hunger was a living hunger.” And now repeat: chocolate, cookies, powdered milk!” Everything had to be done, of course, in complete secrecy.
The prisoners (and even more so the Jews, “the slaves' slaves”) were strictly prohibited from receiving packages and any contact with the outside world. Primo Levi and his friend Alberto had to eat those delicacies secretly and were not able to fully enjoy them: other deportees located their hiding place and stole half of the food, but even so the two friends received more than just food. Hope.
The last soup delivery was at the end of December 1944: with the Russians at the doors, the foreign workers were sent home. The liberation of the camp surprised Levi in the infirmary and with scarlet fever. If he had gotten sick earlier he would have been sent to the gas chamber. The infirmary saved him from the death marches, when thousands of prisoners died (his friend Alberto among them) in the retreat to Germany.
There are only two photos of Lorenzo Perone. One when he was young, when he did his military service. And another upon his return to Italy, prematurely aged. He was no longer the same. What he saw shook him. He was always a heavy drinker, but from that moment on he was a sponge, a compulsive alcoholic seeking self-destruction. He became even more sparse in words. Primo Levi tried to hospitalize him, but all in vain.
The bricklayer who redeemed the world died in 1952, officially of tuberculosis. The drink killed him. Primo Levi, who also arrived deranged from the horror and committed suicide in 1987, described him as “a sensitive and illiterate man... in fact, a saint.” That's why he didn't call him Perone or Perrone. Neither does Lorenzo. Although neither of them were religious, he simply called him Antonio, in honor of Saint Anthony, “who fed the hungry.”
