In the small apartment on the fourth floor of an old building in Turin, which he has transformed into a writing studio, 42-year-old historian and writer Carlo Greppi works among the ghosts of completed works and the promises of texts yet to be born. In the window, sits an enlarged reproduction of the cover of Il Buon Tedesco ("The Good German"), in which Greppi tells the story of a Wehrmacht officer who defected to the Italian resistance in 1944.

Pinned to one wall is a newspaper clipping featuring his pamphlet "L'antifascismo non serve più a niente" ("Anti-fascism no longer serves any purpose"), an ironic defense of a political culture that was once central in Italy but has been undermined for the past 30 years.

Between the library and the kitchen, where he has set up his office, there is a shelf dedicated to the man Greppi has featured in his new book, Un Uomo di Poche Parole ("A Man Of Few Words"). The French edition, Un Homme Sans Mots, will be released on April 3 following its publication in Italy in March 2023. Immersed in memories of the Second World War, Greppi, who writes both essays and novels for young people, recounts the fate of Lorenzo Perrone. In Auschwitz, this illiterate Piedmontese bricklayer could have remained a complete unknown but he shared his meager food rations with Primo Levi (1919-1987). Perrone has been listed as Righteous Among the Nations at the Yad Vashem memorial since 1998.

Thanks to Perrone, the great Turin writer, arrested for his involvement in the resistance in December 1943 and deported as a Jew a few months later, was able to survive. In 1947, in his masterpiece If This is a Man, a fundamental testimony to the concentration camp experience and an indispensable reflection on totalitarian mechanisms for destroying human dignity, Levi wrote of Perrone: "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."

"Throughout Primo Levi's work, Lorenzo Perrone occupies at most 15 pages, yet he plays an essential role in his thought," explained Greppi, seated in his armchair, surrounded by shelves laden with books on fascism, Italian partisans, the history of the Holocaust, as well as borders and migrations. "Through his radical moral act, his clear appreciation of what must be done without expectation of reward and even at personal risk, Lorenzo represents the antidote to what Primo Levi calls the 'gray zone'." This concept, which runs through all of Levi's work, signifies the space where evil contamination occurs between perpetrators and victims.

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