His Humanity Was Pure and Uncontaminated
The Fellowship | June 14, 2017
Why you should know him: An Italian bricklayer working at Auschwitz, Perrone saved the life of Primo Levi, the Jewish chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor.
During work building a wall at Auschwitz, Perrone befriended Levi, as both spoke the same dialect of Italian. Throughout 1944, Perrone gave the Jewish man his extra food rations and extra clothing to wear underneath his camp uniform.
In his book, This Is a Man, Levi not only details his own time fighting the Fascists and his imprisonment at Auschwitz, he remembers the kind man who saved his life:
“…An Italian civilian worker brought me a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months; he gave me a vest of his, full of patches; he wrote a postcard on my behalf to Italy and brought me the reply. For all this he neither asked nor accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward.
“…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.”
The last time the two met was a night during which Auschwitz was bombed. As Perrone sneaked a bowl of soup to Levi, he was injured by the bombardment. Yet he did not let on to his wounds, merely apologizing that dirt had gotten into the soup.
This “pure and uncontaminated” man died shortly after the war of tuberculosis. But he was remembered, not only by Primo Levi who wrote of Perrone and named his two children after this man who selflessly saved his life, but also by Yad Vashem, who named Lorenzo Perrone Righteous Among