When Primo Levi, the Turin-born chemist and nuanced chronicler of the human condition, pondered quite how he had survived Auschwitz, he gave the credit to a gruff bricklayer called Lorenzo Perrone: “not so much for his material aid”, he wrote, “as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror… for which it was worth surviving”.
Perrone was, like Levi, from Piedmont (in north-western Italy), but he wasn’t a prisoner: he was one of the workers outside the camp. He passed Levi bread, soup and clothing, he wrote postcards to Italy on his behalf and brought Levi the replies. “For all this he neither asked nor accepted any reward,” Levi wrote in If This Is a Man, “because he was good and simple.” In his books and interviews throughout the postwar decades, Levi referred often to Perrone and eventually his biographer, Carole Angier, successfully campaigned to have him elevated to the honour of “righteous among the nations” – the tribute offered by Yad Vashem (The World Holocaust Remembrance Center) to those who helped save Jews at that time.
