Lorenzo Perrone

Perrone was born on 12 September 1904 in Fossano, Italy, to a family with five other children. 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 became a migrant worker, often crossing into France with his brother to work as a bricklayer. Once Italy joined World War II on the side of the Axis Powers in June 1940, entering France for work was more difficult. == Auschwitz ==

Perrone was a chief mason under contract to the Boetti company, who was transferred to work at the Auschwitz concentration camp. As a civilian worker, Perrone was given better food and lodging than the prisoners and allowed to send and receive mail. 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." == Post-war and death ==

In the years after the war, Perrone struggled to return to his normal life and suffered from alcoholism. 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. Over the next six months, Perrone left the hospital several times to find alcohol. One day he was found nearly dead in a ditch. He was brought back to the hospital where he died on 30 April 1952 of tuberculosis and bronchial pneumonia, but Levi credited his death to suicide. At Perrone's funeral, Levi stated: "I believe that it is really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today." == Legacy ==

In homage to Perrone, Levi named his children Lisa Lorenza and Renzo Cesare. 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: In an interview, published posthumously by The Paris Review in 1995, Levi described Perrone as:Yad Vashem designated Perrone as Righteous among the Nations on June 7, 1998. 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?" ==References==