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.
Greppi’s biography of this elusive figure is intriguing. He was born in Fossano, roughly halfway between Turin and Nice, in a poor suburb called the Burgué, home mostly to bricklayers and fishers. Perrone was nicknamed Tacca – short for attaccabrighe (“troublemaker” or “brawler”) – and his family emerges as largely silent and surly. They were even confused as to the correct spelling of their surname (it was written with both one or two “r”s). Perrone was, Levi wrote without scorn, “very ignorant, almost illiterate”.
He had tried to be a feramiù, selling junk like his father but enrolled in the army and then became a bricklayer, joining the many subsistence workers who went to southern France when required: “for decades”, Greppi writes, “that porous border had been crossed by shepherds and pedlars, by beggars who appeared at fairs with dancing marmots, by the cavié who bought and sold women’s hair for Parisian wigmakers, by sellers of fireworks, woollen sweaters and canvases”. In the 1940s, Perrone ended up at Auschwitz with an Italian company called Boetti. It was there that he met Levi and almost certainly saved his life.
After the war, Perrone walked back to Italy. Greppi imagines him navigating by the stars, sleeping in haylofts and stealing potatoes as he goes. What happened postwar is almost as touching and melancholic as what happened during it: poles apart in terms of education and class, the two men stay in touch, writing warm but formal greetings to each other. But there was an agonising sort of role reversal: as Levi the former prisoner became a literary superstar; Lorenzo, his rescuer, sank into depression and alcoholism.
When Levi went to visit him, he described a man who is “mortally tired”, suffering from “a weariness without remedy. We went to the osteria for some wine together and from the few words I managed to wrest from him I understood that his margin of love for life had thinned, almost disappeared.” Perrone was rarely working any more. He had become a vagabond, collecting and carting scrap iron, spending all his money on wine and sleeping in ditches and under hedges. He was often hospitalised but would immediately check himself out to source more alcohol. According to Levi, Lorenzo’s was a slow-motion suicide: he had “seen the world” and “he didn’t like it, he felt it was going to ruin. To live no longer interested him.”
Greppi is good on the various historical settings, but is severely challenged by the paucity of source material, frequently having to resort to questions and speculation. Almost his only reliable source remains Levi himself, who wrote many iterations of his interactions with Perrone. Levi was, of course, a brilliant portraitist, able to nail characters with wry precision, surprising insights and arresting metephors. But Perrone in many ways confounded him: “in the violent and degraded environment of Auschwitz, a man helping other men out of pure altruism was incomprehensible, alien…”
That altruism was all the more confounding because it didn’t spring from any religious or political faith. Perrone was equally dismissive of any offer of money or recognition. “He was a morose saviour, with whom it was difficult to communicate,” Levi wrote: “a very silent man. He refused my thanks. He almost didn’t reply to my words. He just shrugged: Take the bread. Take the sugar. Keep silent, you don’t need to speak.”
Greppi suggests in his conclusion that Perrone’s untutored altruism answers the deepest question of Levi’s oeuvre: what it means to be human. Because within what Levi called the “infernal order” and “complicities” of nazism, Perrone’s solidarity had neither motive nor reason. It was simply instinctive. And there’s something beautifully poetic in the fact that such instinct was revealed through a man who was so simple and so troubled.
• A Man of Few Words: The Bricklayer of Auschwitz Who Saved Primo Levi by Carlo Greppi (translated by Howard Curtis) is published by Westbourne Press (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
