Lorenzo Perrone~Moral Courage

“..An Italian civilian worker brought me a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months; he gave me a vest of his, full of patches; he wrote a postcard on my behalf to Italy and brought me the reply. For all this he neither asked nor accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward.
…I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.
…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.”

Levi, Primo, If This is a Man, New York:The Orion Press, 1959

Lorenzo Perrone, born in 1904, in Fossano, in Cuneo province, saved the life of the famous author, Primo Levi, when they were both in Auschwitz. Levi, a resident of Turin, worked as a chemist specializing in paints and varnishes. In 1943, as soon as Italy was occupied by the Germans, he joined a partisan band in his native Piedmont. He was arrested in the roundup of December 13, 1943, by the Republican Fascist militia and imprisoned in Aosta until January 20, 1944. Then he was transferred to Fossoli camp and deported on February 22, 1944. After he arrived in Auschwitz, he was sent to slave labor in the I.G. Farben factory in the Buna-Monowitz camp.
As a chemist, he was given a job in the synthetic rubber factory. When Levi was assigned to a squad that was erecting a wall, he met his rescuer Perrone, a mason. He was from the Piedmont region and belonged to a group of skilled bricklayers who were civilian workers, hired by the Italian firm Boetti. The meeting between the two Italians occurred one day, during the summer of 1944, when Levi heard Perrone speaking to another worker in the same dialect as his. From that day on, Perrone brought Levi food every day for half a year, until the end of December 1944. Then, with the front getting nearer, the foreign workers were sent home. The extra food, part of Perrone's food ration, saved Levi’s life, and he also shared it with his friends. Perrone also gave Levi a multi-patched vest to wear under his prisoner’s uniform to keep him warm. He also agreed to send postcards to a non-Jewish friend of Levi’s through which Levi’s mother, Esther, and sister, Anna Maria, were informed that he was alive. Levi’s sister and mother, who were in hiding in Italy, succeeded, through a chain of friends ending with Perrone, to send Levi a package of food, including chocolate, cookies, and powdered milk, as well as clothing. Perrone, an exceptional man, risked his life to save Levi. He did not expect any reward for what he did. He only agreed to have Levi arrange to fix his torn shoes at the camp’s workshop.
The last meeting between the two occurred one night after a heavy Allied bombardment. The blast had burst one of Perrone’s eardrums, and earth sprayed by the explosion had spewed sand and dirt into the bowl of soup he was bringing to Levi. When he gave him the food, Perrone apologized for the soup being dirty, but did not tell Levi what had happened to him, because he did not want his friend to feel indebted to him. Perrone reminded Levi that there was still a just world outside Auschwitz and that there were still human beings who were uncorrupted. Levi believed that he survived Auschwitz thanks to Perrone. After the liberation, Primo Levi was in touch with Perrone, visiting him in Fossano. During Perrone’s last illness, Levi was the one who got him admitted into the hospital. Perrone died in 1952 of tuberculosis. Levi named his two children after Lorenzo Perrone: his daughter, born in 1948, was called Lisa Lorenza; and his son, born in 1957, was called Renzo. Levi died in 1987. Lorenzo Perrone appears in Primo Levi’s autobiographical narratives: If This is a Man; Moments of Reprieve; Lilit; and the stories “The Events of the Summer” and “Lorenzo’s Return.” In these writings he told about the bricklayer from Fossano to whom he owed his survival. He called him “a saint.”


On June 7, 1998, Yad Vashem recognized Lorenzo Perrone as a Righteous Among the Nations.

Ludwig Worl~Moral Courage

Ludwig Wörl (1906-1967) spent 11 years of his life as a political prisoner in Nazi concentration camps.
He was first arrested by the Gestapo in 1934, and sent to Dachau for distributing a pamphlet informing the public about the horrors of the camp. After spending some nine months in a dark detention cell, he was first transferred to the camp’s joinery and later, as a trained medical orderly, assigned to the camp’s sick-bay. In 1942, he was sent to Auschwitz together with 17 other male nurses to deal with an outbreak of typhus, which threatened not only the prisoners but also the German camp personnel.
Appointed as the Lagerälteste (the camp elder) of the hospital barracks, Wörl, against the express orders of the SS, employed Jewish doctors, thus saving them from certain death. He also put himself at risk in order to obtain at least a minimum of the required medicines and medical instruments for the treatment of the sick. He would forge selection lists in order to save Jewish patients from death by gassing. As a result of consistently countermanding the orders of the SS doctors aimed at decimating the number of the sick, Wörl was dismissed from his post and incarcerated once again in an isolated detention cell. After a while he was released and, by virtue of his nationality and seniority, put in Güntergrube, a forced-labor camp near Auschwitz.

In Guntergrube, as in Auschwitz, he protected the 600 Jewish prisoners from maltreatment by sadistic German Kapos and saw to it that they get their due share of food and clothing. Even prisoners with tuberculosis were able to survive because Wörl exempted them from hard work and protected them by various subterfuges from the inspection of the SS doctors. At the time of the evacuation of Auschwitz, he helped prisoners escape from the infamous death marches. After the war Wörl, who became chairman of the Organization of Former Auschwitz Prisoners in Germany, dedicated his life to perpetuating the memory of the Nazi crimes and bringing their perpetrators to justice. In 1963, he took the stand as one of the key witnesses in the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt am Main.


On March 19, 1963, Yad Vashem recognized Ludwig Wörl as a Righteous Among the Nations.

Jerzy Bielecki~A Story of Moral courage

Jerzy Bielecki

JERZY BIELECKI: A story of moral courage

(As told by Stanlee Stahl Executive Vice President, JFR
Jerzy Bielecki and Stanlee Stahl).

We drove from Zakopane, Poland to the nearby town of Nowy Targ on a warm August morning, eager to meet rescuer Jerzy Bielecki for the first time. Jerzy is somewhat famous at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Musuem, because he was one of the few prisoners who managed to escape successfully from the camp in July 1944 with
During the winter of 1944, Jerzy decided to attempt to escape from Auschwitz. He begged Cyla to join him. “You are the only one left in your family,” he told her, “maybe I can save you.” Cyla’s parents and brothers, who had also been deported to Auschwitz, had already been murdered. Although she initially did not take Jerzy seriously, she eventually decided to join him. Over several months Jerzy made the necessary arrangements by securing food, documents, clothing and shoes for Cyla, and an SS uniform for himself.

On July 21, 1944, Jerzy, dressed in the stolen SS uniform, arrived in the laundry room where Cyla worked. He told the SS woman in charge that he was summoning Cyla for interrogation.Together they began walking through the camp. As they approached the guard house, an SS guard stopped them. Jerzy showed him a stolen pass authorizing one guard and one prisoner to return to a nearby work farm. The guard let them through. At this point, Jerzy and Cyla had passed the guarded area of the camp. They were still

Auschwitz

in grave danger, however, because they both had camp numbers tattooed on their arms that would have easily identified them as Auschwitz escapees. Capture by the Germans would have meant certain death.
They walked for ten nights, hiding in the fields during the day. Cyla and Jerzy eventually reached the home of one of Jerzy’s relatives. They stayed there for several days. In one of the towns that they stayed in, Jerzy coincidentally reunited with his brother, Leszek, a member of an underground resistance movement,
and Jerzy decided to join the underground. Jerzy found Cyla a permanent hiding place with a Polish family. They lost contact, and when the war ended, each assumed that the other was dead.
After several years, Cyla married and moved to the United States to find some distant relatives. Jerzy also married and remained in Poland. In 1983, Cyla learned that Jerzy was still alive and traveled to Poland to visit him. Jerzy greeted her with 39 red roses, one for each year they were apart. Following their reunion, Cyla and Jerzy saw each other fifteen more times, until Cyla died in February 2005. Jerzy is 84 and lives in Nowy Targ, Poland.
Cyla, the Jewish girl with whom he had fallen in love. When we pulled up to his apartment, Jerzy was at the third floor window watching for us. He waved as we got out of the car, and we quickly walked up to his apartment.
Jerzy greeted us warmly. He is a charming and vivacious man and amazingly robust for 84 years old. He lives alone in a small walk-up apartment; his wife passed away a few years ago. Jerzy made tea for us and we sat down to talk. Jerzy said how grateful he is for the JFR’s support, which he has been receiving since January 1997. He uses the funds mainly to pay for home heating fuel and medication. He told us to pass on his thanks to everyone in America for helping him. I invited Jerzy to meet with our Alfred Lerner Fellows in July 2006 when we are at Auschwitz during the European Study Program. He was touched by the invitation and has already put it on his calendar. The educators who join us will no doubt be moved and inspired by Jerzy’s story.

AUSCHWITZ, POLAND... SUMMER 1944 – Jerzy Bielecki was in the first transport of Polish political prisoners that left Tarnow, Poland for Auschwitz on June 13, 1940. Upon arriving at Auschwitz, Jerzy was given number 243. During his more than four years as an inmate at Auschwitz, Jerzy worked in several places, including the grain warehouse. There he met and fell in love with Cyla Cybulska, a Polish Jew. Although men and women were not allowed to communicate with each other, Jerzy and Cyla were able to exchange a few words every day.