On 13 December 1943, Primo Levi, at the time a member of a partisan group fighting the Fascists and the German occupiers in the north of Italy, was caught in the Valle d’Aosta. At the end of February 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz. Four months later, he was assigned to help a fellow Piedmontese, a bricklayer called Lorenzo, one of the 200,000 workers sent by Mussolini to aid the German war effort – work that was voluntary at first, then compulsory. They exchanged a few sentences in dialect. Two or three days later, Lorenzo, who lived outside the barbed-wire fence surrounding Auschwitz and was rebuilding the walls protecting a chemical factory recently bombed by the Allies, handed Levi his aluminium mess tin full of soup. Thereafter, even when it became extremely perilous to be caught assisting Jewish prisoners, Lorenzo regularly brought Levi soup and sometimes a little bread. He was also able to get messages to Levi’s family in Turin. All Levi could do in return was to get Lorenzo’s shoes mended by a cobbler in the camp.

A Primo Levi industry has grown up in recent years, not only in Italy but worldwide. Carlo Greppi, a historian at the University of Turin, has made Lorenzo’s encounter with Levi the basis of this book. He traces Lorenzo’s life after the war, his nomadic existence buying and selling scrap iron and his descent into alcoholism. After his own return to Turin, magnificently recounted in his memoir The Truce, Levi did what he could for Lorenzo; he spoke and wrote about him often and gave his two children variants of his name. Lorenzo died of pneumonia and tuberculosis in 1952, aged forty-seven, having, as Levi wrote, been ‘wounded morally’ by his experiences and seemingly lost the will to live. 

The problem for Greppi is that Lorenzo was a man of very few words. He and Levi could not have been more different: Levi was a scholarly, articulate, somewhat physically frail chemist; Lorenzo was burly, uneducated and taciturn. In the absence of material, Greppi falls back on speculation, constantly