Greppi A Man of Few Words

The Bricklayer of Auschwitz Who Saved Primo Levi
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-908906-62-5
Verlag: The Westbourne Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

'Nobody knows how much I owe that man', Primo Levi said of his Italian compatriot Lorenzo Perrone, who saved his life at Auschwitz. 'I could never repay him'. Each day for a period of six months, Perrone, who worked beside Auschwitz in desperate conditions, risked his own life to smuggle part of his own soup ration to Levi, quietly leaving the mess tin by a half-constructed brick wall. Without those extra five hundred calories, Levi could not have survived, and would probably not have written If This Is a Man, the first published account by a Holocaust survivor. In A Man of Few Words, Carlo Greppi pieces together the life of Lorenzo Perrone, a bricklayer from the Piedmontese town of Fossano, not far from Levi's native Turin. Near-destitute and with minimal formal education, Perrone left very few traces of himself. Yet despite their stark differences - Levi was a middle-class chemist - their friendship survived the Holocaust and continued until Perrone's tragic death. Levi never forgot Perrone. In every book he wrote, he mentions that he owes his life to a man named Lorenzo, and he returned persistently, in the last years of his life, to the man of few words who saved his life. Compassionate, worldly and prescient, Greppi brings us a story that has much to say about the world we live in today, about an individual who kept hope alive in one of the darkest times and places known to humankind.

Carlo Greppi (1982) is a historian at the University of Turin and author of numerous essays on the history of the twentieth century. For Laterza, he is the editor of the series 'Fact Checking: History Under the Test of Facts'. His latest book is Il Buon Tedesco (2021, Fiuggi History Award 2021; Giacomo Matteotti Award 2022) which sold 10,000+ copies.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Greppi, Carlo

Weitere Mitwirkende

Curtis, Howard

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1

Tacca From the

When he met Prisoner 174,517, Lorenzo was putting up a wall. Despite or perhaps because of the blows he had been dealt by life, even here he built his walls ‘straight, solid, with well-staggered bricks and as much mortar as was required; not in deference to orders but out of professional dignity.’1 These are Primo Levi’s words, in .

When he saw the Turinese prisoner for the first time, Lorenzo, who was from the old quarter of Fossano, wasn’t asking himself what and who would benefit from his backbreaking work. It was early summer of 1944, sometime between 16 and 21 June. An allied bombing raid had just damaged ‘that immense tangle of iron, concrete, mud and smoke’2 called ‘the Buna’, the great project of I. G. Farben in Monowitz, six kilometres from Auschwitz I. The whole site had been bent out of shape by Allied bombers, who struck the industrial plant, and later took aerial photographs of ‘Planet Auschwitz’, but did nothing to liberate the prisoners from the threat of the gas chamber. The western part of Upper Silesia was on a state of alert: in the months to come, it would be systematically subjected to increasingly spectacular bombing raids. After zigzagging between the rubble that crunched under the leather of his work shoes, Lorenzo and his fellow worker, another Italian, reached the most valuable equipment. Their task was to protect it with high, sturdy walls and not complain too much about it.

Lorenzo was up on a scaffolding, laying bricks in silence. Prisoner 174,517, a nondescript with his number tattooed on his left arm, who Lorenzo would later discover was named Primo, was below him. Lorenzo told Primo in German that the cement had nearly run out and so he needed another bucket. The twenty-four-year-old, still only a number and worn down to almost nothing, spread his legs, seized the handle of the bucket with both hands, and tried to lift and swing it in such a way that he could take advantage of the momentum and move the load forward and, from there, onto his back. But the results proved pathetic to say the least and the bucket fell to the ground, spilling half the cement. Lorenzo hadn’t found this funny.

‘Well, what can you expect from people like this?’3 Lorenzo had said as he prepared to descend. By the time he came down to the same level as the spilled cement, it was already hardening amid the rubble. Who was Lorenzo referring to when he said ‘people like this’? Did he mean the ‘slaves of the slaves’,4 ‘the lowest rung’ in the hierarchy of Monowitz? Or did he mean middle-class folk unable to keep hold of a bucket, people who’d been privileged until they entered this upside-down world, at which point they’d become the lowest of the low? The phrase oozes either contempt or commiseration – it’s Levi himself who uses these words – and, at the same time, it shows a reversal of roles. Who knows how many times Lorenzo had heard it said of himself? He was a poor wretch, an alcoholic, prone to violence. Though he may also have been a good worker, you just can’t trust ‘people like this’. You take advantage of them until they reach the age of forty, when their strength starts to go and they lose concentration and then, when they’re no more use, you get rid of them.

It was certainly not an auspicious first encounter between the two, considering what a mess Prisoner 174,517 had made. All the same, Primo Levi had been noticed by Lorenzo because of his curious reaction on hearing Italian, following the initial surly order given in bad German. Lorenzo’s Italian, in a very recognisable Piedmontese accent, broke the spell that confined every human being to his or her place in the monumentally absurd universe of the Lager. Lorenzo had felt the overwhelming presence of this unqualified male workforce. Although inmates of other nationalities had the opportunity to establish contact with the outside world, for example, through the Frenchmen forced into the , as far as civilian workers like Lorenzo were concerned, the slaves were ‘untouchables’. ‘[Civilians] think, more or less explicitly – with all the nuances lying between contempt and commiseration – that as we have been condemned to this life of ours, reduced to our condition, we must be tainted by some mysterious, grave sin,’5 Primo Levi would recall.

Did Lorenzo think this, in that moment when he became aware of Levi? It seems unlikely, because he was not the kind of person to casually attribute blame. He knew that it’s almost always the weak who are in chains, while the strong change their shoes every few weeks. Having gained something of an insight into his personality through a reasonable number of sources, I think that even in the two or three days that followed Lorenzo made no attempt to search for words: more likely, he mulled things over, with that inscrutable look on his face, partly lost, partly stern, the look we see in the photographs of him that have come down to us – as far as I know, there are only two. One of them we will see shortly; this is the other.

Lorenzo Perrone, 1940s.

Did Lorenzo feel contempt for this man who had almost vanished, this man at death’s door? Did he feel pity? Was he afraid of him? Anxiety had risen with the introduction of the racial laws of 1938, which Primo Levi would describe in 1975 in , recalling that first ‘minuscule but perceptible flash of mistrust and suspicion. What do you think of me? What am I for you?’6 I quote again from Levi, so good at weaving the words and concepts that help us understand the human spirit; here referring specifically to the way the civilian workers looked at the ‘slaves of the slaves’, the Jewish prisoners in their ragged striped uniforms and caps who were marched in a highly regimented manner to the Buna to work, if it could be described as work:

They hear us speak in many different languages, which they do not understand and which sound to them as grotesque as animal noises. They see us reduced to ignoble slavery, without hair, without honour and without names, beaten every day, more abject every day, and they never see in our eyes a light of rebellion, or of peace, or of faith. They know us as thieves and untrustworthy, muddy, ragged and starving, and mistaking the effect for the cause, they judge us worthy of our abasement.7

How to capture the moment when this story started to become something more than a line in a buried archive? How to unite in a single snapshot the distance Lorenzo had travelled to work, head bowed, since he was a child? In vagabond lives, more than in any others, you must play your best hand. One image dominates: Lorenzo and Primo belonged ‘to two different castes’8 and might never have looked at each other. Not in their previous lives and not here, where privilege was reversed. Primo was destined to die, if he didn’t use his wits each minute; Lorenzo to live, if he didn’t get into trouble.

Lorenzo’s superior position, both in spatial terms at that moment and in the hierarchy of the Lager, was a kind of retribution, considering their respective histories in the world as it was before, the world outside. Here, in 1944, privilege was in the ground Lorenzo walked on, he who had swallowed so much dust. In his previous life, Prisoner 174,517 had been a bourgeois with a decent income, the aspiring chemistry graduate Primo Levi. Now he was at the lowest point of the human spirit, a slave like I.G. Farben’s 11,600 other workers. He did all kinds of exhausting jobs that year to build the Buna, the camp’s chemical products factory. But his work, their work, was often ‘pointless’9 toil, intended to exhaust every fibre of their bodies until it killed them. In heavy rain or light snow, whether the wind blew away the ash or the sun threw it into sharp relief, Levi spent his day shovelling, burying, lifting, dropping, sorting and assembling until his veins and arteries were close to bursting. If he couldn’t continue, he would be hit on the head with a shovel by a Kapo or someone else in charge. It was a reaffirmation of power and a destruction of what makes us human. But Primo didn’t ask Lorenzo for help that day, I assume because at the time, with all that was happening in the summer of 1944, he didn’t have ‘a clear idea of how these Italians lived or what they could afford.’10 In the world as it used to be, they were mostly poor wretches, but here they were on the surface, while he was sinking with thousands of other rejects into history itself. Yet all it took was a handful of words, barely tipping the scales of their common language, to break the spell: this is how ‘the weapons of the night are blunted,’11 as Levi would say.

Lorenzo was sparing with his words, it’s true – but he did utter more after that initial awkward misunderstanding.

‘You’re taking a big risk, talking to me,’ said Primo.

‘I really don’t care,’ replied Lorenzo.12

…

A bricklayer, one who knows his job, builds.

Not that he has an overall vision – it’s the person who gives orders, who tells him what to do, who has that – but he plays his part. I would hazard a guess that Lorenzo was one of the few who had that vision from the start, although...