'Nobody knows how much I owe that man', Primo Levi said of his Italian compatriot Lorenzo Perrone, who saved his life at Auschwitz. 'I could never repay him'. Each day for a period of six months, Perrone, who worked beside Auschwitz in desperate conditions, risked his own life to smuggle part of his own soup ration to Levi, quietly leaving the mess tin by a half-constructed brick wall. Without those extra five hundred calories, Levi could not have survived, and would probably not have written If This Is a Man, the first published account by a Holocaust survivor.
In A Man of Few Words, Carlo Greppi pieces together the life of Lorenzo Perrone, a bricklayer from the Piedmontese town of Fossano, not far from Levi's native Turin. Near-destitute and with minimal formal education, Perrone left very few traces of himself. Yet despite their stark differences – Levi was a middle-class chemist – their friendship survived the Holocaust and continued until Perrone's tragic death. Levi never forgot Perrone. In every book he wrote, he mentions that he owes his life to a man named Lorenzo, and he returned persistently, in the last years of his life, to the man of few words who saved his life.
Compassionate, worldly and prescient, Greppi brings us a story that has much to say about the world we live in today, about an individual who kept hope alive in one of the darkest times and places known to humankind.
