Lorenzo Perrone

Lorenzo Perrone (12 September 1904 – 30 April 1952) born in Fossano, Italy, was an Italian mason who was transferred by his company to work at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. There he met and befriended Jewish-Italian prisoner Primo Levi for whom he provided food and other assistance. After the war, he struggled to cope with what he had witnessed in Auschwitz and became an alcoholic, eventually dying of tuberculosis in 1952.

Levi credited Perrone with saving his life and named both of his children after him. Additionally, Levi wrote about Perrone in his books, including If This Is A Man (1947) and Moments of Reprieve (1981). Perrone has been recognized as one of the Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem, and Un uomo di poche parole, a biography about him, was published in 2023. He had difficulty with writing and only completed three years of primary school. When he was ten years old, he began working and later served as a bersagliere in the 7th Regiment of Brescia. He opposed the actions of the Nazis that he saw at Auschwitz and, at great risk to himself, By that time, Auschwitz had been liberated by the Soviets, and Levi was in fact alive and regaining his health in a Soviet camp in Katowice, Poland. Unsure if his family was still living, Levi sent them a long letter in June in which he mentioned Perrone: "Nobody knows how much I owe that man; I could never repay him." In December 1945, Levi visited Perrone in Fossano. Perrone refused to speak about Auschwitz and told Levi to leave. Levi found him a masonry job in Turin, but Perrone had no interest in it.

After Perrone contracted tuberculosis, Levi arranged for him to be hospitalized in Savigliano and brought him warm clothes. Levi, who published several works after Auschwitz, wrote about Perrone in several of them, including If This Is A Man (1947) and Moments of Reprieve (1981).

In If This Is a Man, Levi wrote:

I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid, 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; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving. [...] But Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man.” In 2004, a plaque honoring Perrone was placed on Viale delle Alpi, a street in Fossano. Piedmontese historian Carlo Greppi published a biography of Perrone entitled Un uomo di poche parole [A Man of Few Words] in 2023. In an interview about the book Greppi asked: "What would our perception of the Shoah have been like if Levi hadn't survived the concentration camp and hadn't left us his testimonies?"