In his brand new historical essay, historian Carlo Greppi traces A man without wordsthe story of Lorenzo Perrone, a Piedmontese mason to whom the Turin-born Primo Levi, whose writings are considered one of the most reliable sources of daily life in the Auschwitz concentration camps, owes his life.
“I have never stopped wondering why Lorenzo’s story has remained buried in the collective consciousness for so long, while Levi’s work is peppered with allusions to this taciturn man driven by the ‘irrepressible impulse’ to help those in need,” notes Carlo Greppi, admiring this taciturn character, of whom he paints a sprawling, more or less linear portrait, bringing together an extraordinary quantity of historical sources.
Lorenzo Perrone sent postcards in secret on Levi’s behalf and sent him replies in addition to a package. He gave the young imprisoned chemist his only wool sweater, offered him daily liters of soup accumulated each night in secret, while he himself was not fed enough at his workplace. Above all, this employee working on the buildings of Auschwitz was simply good, never asking for anything in return.
These gifts and services have obviously already been recounted in Levi’s texts, and of course it was necessary to talk about them again. But beyond these repetitions, the Turin essayist has gathered, with passionate exhaustiveness, all the contextual elements that explain why a simple, poor man born in the violence of the village of Fossano, rose up as a Righteous Among the Nations – and this, despite the necessarily incomplete information surrounding the life of a worker destined to be “without history”.
The professor insists on the illegal dimension of the help Perrone gave Levi, but above all on the exemplary and courageous moral uprightness of the character. During their first meeting, the young prisoner is said to have warned the mason: “Be careful, you’re taking a risk by talking to me.” To which Lorenzo Perrone is said to have replied: “I don’t care at all.”
It is difficult not to see in this text an invitation to demonstrate humanism in an unjust world, despite the dangers and social opprobrium incurred. Because when it comes to taking stock, “what is of interest is what someone does, not what they are. Everyone is their actions, past and present, nothing else,” the historian emphasizes, quoting Levi.
Some passages offer great moments of emotion to the reader, although one could not say it better than Levi himself: “The documentary page almost never has the power to restore to us the depths of a human being: it is the business, more than of the historian and the psychologist, of the playwright and the poet.” For those, therefore, who prefer to the roughness of historical facts the somewhat more embodied stories, the writings of Levi themselves or fictions like Kites, by Romain Gary, allow a perhaps more “human” incursion into the different forms of resistance that emerged during the Second World War.