A Man of Few Words: The Bricklayer of Auschwitz Who Saved Primo Levi

‘Nobody knows how much I owe that man,’ Primo Levi said of the bricklayer who saved his life in Auschwitz. For six months, Lorenzo Perrone risked his own life to smuggle food, letters and clothing to prisoners. Without Perrone, Levi would not have survived the death camp – and the world would have been deprived of his writing. In A Man of Few Words, award-winning historian Carlo Greppi pieces together the life of Perrone, a near-destitute labourer with little formal education. Despite their starkly different circumstances, Perrone and Levi forged a friendship that endured beyond the Holocaust, until Perrone’s tragic death. Levi never forgot him, returning again and again to the memory of the man who had saved his life but left few traces of his own. Compassionate, clear-eyed and deeply humane, Greppi’s account brings to light a universal story of quiet courage – of one individual who kept hope alive in one of the darkest places and times in human history.

Carlo Greppi is an award-winning historian and author. He is the author of fourteen books, including Un uomo di poche parole (A Man of Few Words), which has been translated into six languages and sold more than 20,000 copies in Italy.


Howard Curtis is a British translator of French, Italian and Spanish fiction. He has translated the works of Gianrico Carofiglio, Luis Sepúlveda, Beppe Fenoglio and Georges Simenon, among others, and has won the John Florio Prize and the Premio Campiello Europa for his translations.