Lorenzo. A first name mentioned by Primo Levi in “If it’s a Man”, an unforgettable story about his captivity in Auschwitz, in Poland. In 1944, the future Italian writer was deported as a Jew, assigned to a factory in the camp, convinced of his imminent death. A mason from the same region as him, around Turin, who is not detained but employed as foreign labor in this part of the concentration camp complex, leaves him at the risk of his life a bowl of food, in a hiding place , every day, for six months.
It is the story of this man doomed to anonymity, semi-illiterate, destroyed by what he saw at Auschwitz, died of alcoholism and tuberculosis at the age of 47, six years after the end of the war, as recounted by the historian Carlo Greppi in “A Man Without Words”. A miracle, as the sources were so lacking. There are only two photos of the mason from the village of Fossano in the family heirloom.
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