The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940–1945

By Steven B. Bowman

The Agony of Greek Jews tells the story of modern Greek Jewry as it came under the control of the Kingdom of Greece during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, it deals with the vicissitudes of those Jews who held Greek citizenship during the interwar and wartime periods. Individual chapters address the participation of Greek and Palestinian Jews in the 1941 fighting with Italy and Germany, the roles of Jews in the Greek Resistance, aid, and rescue attempts, and the problems faced by Jews who returned from the camps and the mountains in the aftermath of the German retreat. Bowman focuses on the fate of one minority group of Greek citizens during the war and explores various aspects of its relations with the conquerors, the conquered, and concerned bystanders. His book contains new archival material and interviews with survivors. It supersedes much of the general literature on the subject of Greek Jewry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Oct 7, 2009
• ISBN: 9780804772495

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e9780804772495_cover.jpg

The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940–1945

Steven B. Bowman

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior

University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archivalquality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bowman, Steven B.

The agony of Greek Jews, 1940-1945 / Steven B. Bowman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780804772495

1. Jews—Greece—History—20th century. 2. Sephardim—Greece—History—20th century. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) —Greece. 4. Greece—History—Occupation, 1941-1944. I. Title.

DS135.G7B69 2008

940.53’1809495—dc22

2007044946

Extracts appearing in chapters 1, 2, and 4 from the book Jewish Resistance in Wartime Greece by Steven Bowman (2006) are published by permission from Vallentine Mitchell Publishers, London.

The book was published with the assistance of the Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Fund, University of Cincinnati.

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

A Note on Names

Introduction

One - The Jews of Greece to World War I

Two - Germans and Jews in Greece

Three - In Victory and Defeat

Four - Vernichtungsorganisierung

Five - Chronicle of the Deportations

Six - Abnormal Deaths in a Foreign Land

Seven - How a Remnant Survived

Eight - Freedom or Death

Nine - Relief and Rescue

Ten - Bitter Homecoming

Afterword

Appendix: Numbers

Notes

Index

IN MEMORIAM

THOSE WHO DIED AS VICTIMS OR ANDARTES

EIS TIMHN

THOSE WHO SURVIVED TO REBUILD

Preface

Contrary to scholarly and popular perceptions, it should be emphasized that the destruction of the Sephardi metropolis in Salonika, a city that had earned the sobriquets Jerusalem of the Balkans and Madre de Israel, was so devastating that even two generations after the war a new center for the Sephardim and their widespread diaspora has not appeared. Moreover, the political broadening of the term Sephardi in Israel and among scholarly and philanthropic organizations through the inclusion of all non-Ashkenazi Jews under its rubric signals both dilution and perhaps even dissolution of that proud heritage. Not even the emergence of regional scholarly and cultural centers dedicated to the Sephardim and their heritage has yet been able to generate any new creative dynamics to stimulate and develop this heritage. Perhaps two generations is not yet enough time to mourn the loss of a mother city. It took more than a century after the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem in 70 CE to rejuvenate Jews with a new leadership and Judaism with the mishnah. The task of this generation is to sustain the survivors and teach their progeny until a new spirit arises from the children of that great Jewish metropolis.¹

A project on this subject can never be considered finished, not even after all the dead and the living have been accounted for and their various vicissitudes chronicled and explained. Then the task will be to integrate this material into the history of Greece, not as a separate chapter but rather as an integral part of the multifaceted prism that constitutes Greek history and culture. The time is overdue to bring forth this study to the public. Indeed, too many of the fifty- and sixty-year seminal anniversaries have already past: 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1998, 2003, 2005. Perhaps 2008 will have a resonance to survivors and their kin.

Three factors encouraged presentation of this text at this time. The first is the announcement that the archives of Salonika, confiscated by the Nazis in 1941 and captured by the Soviets at the end of the war, will soon be returned to Greece. Whatever these archives contain, preliminary reports from Tel Aviv and Washington indicate the wealth of data about the interwar communities. Those already recovered from the Bulgarian-occupied zone and recently delivered to the Jewish community of Athens (now housed in the Jewish Museum of Greece) suggest the value of their contents. This material signals a new era in research on Greek Jewry. Greek wartime archives in Israel and prewar archives from Salonika now in New York are just beginning to be exploited. Second, only recently has there appeared a systematic attempt to interview Greek Jewish survivors, both those who went to the mountains and those who went to the camps. This process is still haphazard in Israel (despite the rich deposits at Yad Vashem) and the United States. Despite the many testimonies that have yet to be read and collated, there are many important areas of research to be pursued whose participants await their interview. Third, the holdings in principal archival collections have been made available in a variety of monographs.

Acknowledgments

My task in this book has been to collate, organize, and interpret that which has been collected. In a few instances, I have been able to supplement this material through my own archival research. It is a pleasure to record here my thanks to those archives and libraries that freely assisted my research and facilitated my visits:

In Israel: Yad Vashem Archives, Institute for Contemporary History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Historical Archives of the Jewish People at the HUJ, Joint Distribution Committee Archives at the HUJ, Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, Haganah Archives in Tel Aviv, Beth Tabenkin, Haifa University

In Greece: Jewish Museum of Greece, Gennadeion Library, Institute for Balkan Studies, Jewish Community of Salonika

In Switzerland: Bundesarchiv in Bern, Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva

In Austria: Staatsarchiv in Vienna, Archiv der Widerstand, Simon Wiesenthal Archive

In Germany: Dachau Archives

In Poland: Auschwitz Archives

In France: Archives of the Ministère des Affaires étrangères in Paris and Nantes, Archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine

In Britain: Public Record Office, Imperial War Museum, Wiener Library, Institute for Jewish Affairs (renamed the Institute for Jewish Policy Research), Bodleian Library, St. Anthony’s College at Oxford University, Centre for Hebrew and Judaic Studies at Oxford University

In the United States: libraries of the University of Cincinnati, Hebrew Union College, YIVO, United Nations Archives, World Jewish Congress Archives (in New York and at HUC in Cincinnati), American Joint Distribution Committee Archives, Franklin D. Roosevelt Archives in Hyde Park, National Archives in Washington, D.C., Gratz College in Philadelphia, University of Washington in Seattle, Magnes Museum in Berkeley, Holocaust Center of Northern California, and the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. (where I was a Miles Lerman Fellow for the Study of Jewish Resistance in August 2002)

It is with sincere thanks and deep appreciation that I acknowledge support of this project over the past two and a half decades from a number of institutions and foundations. First, from my home University of Cincinnati and its Judaic Studies Department; the Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Fund of the University of Cincinnati for research and sabbatical grants; the Fulbright Foundation for sabbatical support during 1988–89 as a Research Fellow in Western Europe and 1996 as a Research Professor in Greece; the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture; the Lucius Littauer Fund for a travel grant to Auschwitz and Moscow in 1990; Yad Vashem for research support in its archives; the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Judaic Studies, which offered me the hospitality of Yarnton Manor during 1988–89 and a Koerner Fellowship in 1996 for research connected with this book; New York University and its Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, where I have taught a Holocaust course for a number of summers and had the opportunity to extend my research in the many archival sources for Greek Jewry in that city; and the Jewish Community of Salonika, which offered hospitality and assistance during the last phases of my research and writing.

In addition to debts of honor incurred over the decades, there are many debts of friendship and courtesy from individuals who answered questions and gave interviews. A number of them have died in the interim, and I hope this volume will recall their memory. They are too many to be listed here, but I should single out those who read, discussed, and critiqued parts of the manuscript and the project during the formative stage and alerted me to infelicities of style and errors of fact. John Petropoulos, while president of the Modern Greek Studies Association, invited me to present a paper on Greek Jews at its 1978 conference on the 1940s in Greece, held in Washington, D.C. This may be considered as the prolegomenon to the project that introduced me to scholars, researchers, and a host of new friends in this area of study. The research for that paper was done in Jerusalem and continued with the counsel of Yehudah Bauer. Over the years, I have discussed this study with Yoav Gelber; Miriam Novitch, a special lady; Rachel Dalven, who chronicled the Jews of Ioannina; Joseph Matsas of Ioannina; Michael Matsas of Potomac, Maryland; Meir Michaelis; Daniel Carpi; Jonathan Steinberg and Mark Mazower, who shared research materials; Richard Clogg; Nikos Stavroulakis; Anthony Seymour, Judith Humphrey, and Isaac Benmayor, who critiqued and discussed earlier drafts; Asher Moissis, Sam Modiano, and Baruch Shibi, three participants of that tragic period whom I met while a young Fulbright and Gennadeion Fellow in Greece; Marcel Yoel, who is a continuing fount of information; Albertos Nar, Heinz Kounio, Moses Altsekh, Rena Molho, and Rebecca Camhi Fromer, who facilitated contacts; Benny Kraut; Fred Krome, who is a fine editor; copy editor Thomas Finnegan; production editor Judith Hibbard; and Yael Feldman, my best critic and constant companion. Whatever inconsistencies remain are the responsibility of the author.

Some of the material in this book was presented at seminars and conferences over the years in the United States, United Kingdom, Greece, and Israel. I am grateful for the comments and contacts that resulted from these meetings. Portions of the Introduction and Chapters 2 and 3 appear in proceedings of conferences held in Greece in 1994 and 1995; an adumbration of the volume appeared in the proceedings of a symposium on minorities in Greece held at St. Anthony’s College in Oxford in January 1994. A companion to this volume is my Jewish Resistance in Wartime Greece (Vallentine Mitchell, 2006), parts of which are reproduced through the courtesy of the press.

CINCINNATI AND NEW YORK

TISHA BE’AV–HANUKKAH 2007

Abbreviations

A Note on Names

For the purposes of this book, I have chosen to standardize place names according to the Blue Guide Greece, edited by Stuart Rossiter (2nd ed., 1973). This choice seems to me a better compromise than to follow the changing national languages and historical spellings that permeate the literature on Greece and the Balkans. Older spellings will be found on the maps and in the contemporary sources cited in the text. I beg the reader’s indulgence and hope the issue of place names will not cause confusion.

With respect to individual names, I have followed in all cases the spelling in the source. Jewish names in Greece are spelled differently in Greek, French, Spanish, Hebrew, and English sources and studies. In many instances, the spelling of a name varies even in the same source, and, accordingly, individuals sometimes become two or three separate people, as I learned to my dismay in compiling a list of Jews who were in the andartiko (Bowman, Jewish Resistance in Wartime Greece [London, Vallentine Mitchell, 2006], appendix 1).

e9780804772495_i0004.jpg

Map 1. Greece, including twentieth-century Jewish settlements

Introduction

The need for a history of the Holocaust in Greece in the English language necessitates no apology. It is a fairly neglected topic that has seen documentary research only in recent years. In addition to the abiding neglect of Greek studies by Jewish and general scholarship, the complex problems of Greek Jewry and its sources almost seem to encourage scholars to avoid the topic for better-plowed fields. Yet Greek Jewry is a fascinating subject and its broad neglect by scholars of the modern period and in particular those of the Holocaust is difficult to rationalize. Greek Jewry has many unique qualities about it, the Holocaust experience notwithstanding. It is the oldest Jewish community in Europe; it gave to the West Christianity via Saint Paul of Tarsus and a working model integrating philosophy and Bible study via Philo of Alexandria; it gave to Greece one source (koine) for its modern Greek dialect via the Septaugint and the New Testament; it was the medium through which Palestinian Jewish traditions passed to the lands of Ashkenaz (Germanic-speaking Europe); it had two great diasporic periods, the Greek-speaking and the Judeo-Spanish–speaking; and its percentage of loss during the Holocaust was exceeded only by that of Poland.

The history of Greece during the modern period is complex; how much more so for Jewish history in Greece. This complexity is the subject of the first chapter, whose purpose is to orient the reader to a variegated background and to the influence that it had on the Holocaust in Greece. As part of this orientation, it is necessary to identify the rhythms of Greek Jewish society over the past several millennia and their effects on the differing Jewries found within the borders of modern Greece as they expanded through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each of these Jewries had its own traditions and local history. This approach to Greek Jewry can be understood only against the background of the emergence of modern Greece, its chronological and territorial complexities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and some requisite background in the major political themes of Greek history.

By the nineteenth century, two Jewries—one Greek-speaking Romaniots and the other Judeo-Spanish–speaking Sephardim—were long established on the mainland and islands of the geographic area we call Greece. An obvious question: can a Judeo-Spanish–speaking Jewry who lived under Ottoman domination since the 16th century be considered a Greek Jewry in the same way as those Greek-speaking Jews who lived for one to two millennia under a host of masters? Is the term Greek then a function of language or of territory?

For the majority in the Hellenistic period, the term Greek, or Hellene, referred to anyone who spoke the language; in the Byzantine period, Hellene designated an apostate Christian if not outright pagan (pace Gennadios Scholarios). In the nineteenth century the term became geographic, and Greek nationalism used language as an ethnic identifying factor. These definitions continued alongside each other during the modern period. The borders of the modern Greek state were continually expanding from the period of the Revolution (1820s) until the end of World War II, when the Allies awarded to Greece the areas that had been annexed by Bulgaria and those annexed at various times during the twentieth century by the Italians. We have chosen to define Greece, for the purposes of this book, by the borders she had at the end of World War II. Chapter 1 briefly surveys the story of the Jews in Greece from antiquity and points out the regional differences that, subject to myriad local factors, contributed, each in its own way, to the story of the Holocaust in Greece.

The vicissitudes of chronology form an important theme; the most crucial question in Chapter 2 is the limited time available to the Jews of the newly acquired northern territories to adjust to the post–World War I realities in the Balkans. We shall find it necessary not to pursue a strictly chronological sequence from chapter to chapter. Events parallel each other from region to region just as they differ. There is in Greece a local rhythm, a regional, and a national, each of which has its own historical development. In traditional studies of Greece, moreover, there has been a distinction between history, politics, and laographia (folklore). Because Jewish society usually follows the Weltanschauung of the host society, Jewish scholars writing about Greek Jewry inevitably follow the pattern. Our story is structured somewhat differently and also includes some new interpretations of the Jewish experience in Greece.

Both Greeks and Jews have their own millennial traditions of diaspora, namely the phenomenon of individuals possessing a common language and culture and living in communities outside the borders of the mother country. Until the rise of modern Zionism and establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, all Jews lived in diaspora or galut (exile). The rise of nationalism in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Balkans demanded that the Jews choose whether to join the new state and society as citizens or remain an autonomous, religiously structured ethnic community, which had characterized their settlements outside of the land of Israel for the past two and a half millennia. This question is specifically addressed in Chapter 2 with regard to the internal and external problems surrounding Salonika (or Thessaloniki in Greek) and in Chapter 3 with respect to the Jewish response to World War II in Greece. The territorial theme raises its head again with the occupation of separate areas of Greece by Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria; to paraphrase Caesar’s observation about another conquest, omnia Graecia in tres partes divisa est. Different administrative units, armies, policies, and rhythms justly challenge an integrated picture of the occupation period. The Holocaust was effected in differing ways in each area, but it was effected nonetheless by the order of the Germans and the cooperation of the Bulgarians. It was deliberately delayed by a year in the Italian zone until that area came under German administrative and military control after Italy left the war.

How the Jews structured their communities in diaspora will also be of importance for an understanding of the Holocaust in Greece, if not elsewhere in Europe. The traditions of self-government and communal institutions geared for social relief, within the framework of a religious community centered about the study of Torah and its commentaries, created a system that was essentially loyal to the government in power. The inability of the traditional Jewish community to recognize the dangers inherent in a malevolent government that would use those communal institutions and traditions of loyalty to destroy that very community is one of the tragedies of the Holocaust period. This theme is examined in Chapters 3 and 4. Perforce, the contemporary and postwar judgments on the role of the chief rabbi of Salonika and the Community Council during the war will have to be reexamined in light of our understanding of the Nazi manipulation of the Judenrats of occupied Europe.

The horrors of the deportations and subsequent destruction of the arriving groups is chronicled in Chapter 5. This information is based on analysis of the materials made available by scholars working in the Auschwitz Archives. A serious concern among scholars of the period and of modern Jewish times in general is the question of numbers. How many Jews were in Greece before the war? How many were killed by the Nazis both in the camps and elsewhere? How many survived the war? How many emigrated to Palestine and elsewhere? These questions, though it is necessary to answer them, tend to overlook the fact that people, not numbers, were involved. Hence it is important to chronicle the deaths of the various trainloads of Jews who went to Treblinka and Auschwitz; yet the stories of individual survivors and the memory of their experiences must be integrated into the story. The question of history and memory is discussed later.

But the Holocaust is not only about death and destruction, although these themes understandably take a front seat in the reader’s attention. The mechanism of the process and the methods used are of interest, the participants important to note, and the goals or reasons of each of them necessary to understand. One of the subthemes of the period is the despoliation of the Jews’ wealth, which the Nazis exploited for their own benefit and to reward their supporters. Interestingly, Bulgaria took Thrace as its reward but put some of the personal effects of the Thracian Jews whom it deported in escrow. Some of that liquid wealth was recently turned over to the Greek government, which in turn entrusted it to the Jewish Museum of Greece. Much of the real property was returned to the Greek Jewish survivors by the postliberation government; however, the tobacco warehouses somehow remained in the hands of Austrian merchants. These questions of wealth and property are discussed in Chapters 5 and 10.

One of the unique accomplishments of the Nazis was to reduce the enslaved masses deported to concentration camps to a series of numbers. The numbers were temporarily reusable, given the three-month average life expectancy for slaves, and thus were recycled by a neverending supply of fresh slaves. For example, in spring 1943 Greek Jewish women were tattooed with the same numbers that Greek Jews deported from France had been assigned in November 1942. This was the ultimate victory of the amoral technological thinking that finds mathematics and science more important than unique individuals whose vagaries of thought and action cannot be absolutely tabulated or predicted. We look at these numbers and the people who bore them in Chapters 6 and 7 to ascertain what happened to those who entered the camps. Chapter 6 tries to find out where and how they died; Chapter 7 records the experiences of the survivors. Because the Greeks (both Christians and Jews) endured nearly all aspects of the Nazi concentration camps, it is useful for the reader to follow the vicissitudes of their experiences to gain a broader view of the Holocaust through one ethnic group. There is unfortunately relatively little literature on the Greek Christians who were sent to German POW and concentration camps; this lack is also discussed in this book.

The role of the Jews in Greece during World War II has been restricted in the general literature to the destruction of their communities. Their role in the military story has been quite ignored save for memoirs in various collections; this story includes both native Greek Jews and Palestinian Jewish volunteers in the Italian and German campaigns. Moreover, the complicated story of the Jewish contribution to the Resistance, and the Resistance attitudes toward the Jews, has not been seriously explored in the general literature.¹ These and other themes are examined in Chapters 3 and 8, although the paucity of memoirs and absence of official sources means that the complete story cannot be known.

Could anyone help the Jews? Did anyone help the Jews? Did anyone warn them? Chapter 9 explores the potential and the actual assistance that was proffered to the Jews of Greece during the Occupation and its aftermath. There we discuss the local and international agencies that attempted to render aid or organize rescue, the problems they faced, and the results of their actions. One problem in doing history is evaluation of source material; sometimes those who were the least important have left the most records about their efforts. It is our responsibility to note and possibly adjust this imbalance in terms of both the surviving material and the self-congratulatory use to which it has been put. Those readers anxious to follow the fates of the survivors may go directly to Chapter 10 and then return to read of the attempts made before and during the war to render assistance to Greek Jewry.

The Germans left Greece in October 1944; the war ended in May 1945; the survivors did not return before the following summer. What did they find? How were they received by their co-religionists and by their fellow citizens? What was the fate of the Jews who took refuge in the mountains and fought with the Resistance? What happened to the Jewish property confiscated by the Nazis and distributed to quisling (or collaborationist, to follow Greek terminology) Greeks? Greece is the only occupied country in which there were war crimes trials (albeit for individuals) involving Jews; it is significant that these trials were carried out with the support of (and even instituted by) the surviving Jews. Another theme is the redemption of the survivors in Israel, or rather the emigration of survivors from Greece to Palestine and the United States. What was the attitude of Palestinian Jews, of Greek origin or in political power, to the remnants of this proud Jewry that they had to some extent ignored during the war? Chapter 10 discusses this role and other local problems that affected Greek Jewry during the last year of the war and the beginning of the Civil War that was to be even more disastrous for Greece than the Axis Occupation.

The question of sources is the most serious problem for the historian. In the modern period, there is a plethora of source material, official government documents of varying degrees of value, and memoirs of officials and private individuals. One of the great discoveries of modern scholarship is that governments do not always tell the truth, despite their claims to the contrary. Governments pursue their own interests, and oftentimes the latter are contrary to what their citizens, allies, or enemies think to be those interests. We are fortunate to have a great deal of captured Italian and German documents telling us much about what they did and why they did it. We do not have as much Bulgarian material (although more has recently become available), but enough has been collected to understand their actions against the background of policy. We do not have much access to Greek wartime documentation. This has allowed a chaotic situation to develop among those who restrict themselves to discussion of Greece without recourse to the national archives of the British and Americans, especially because the discussion has been obfuscated by ideological arguments and selective interpretation for the purpose of scoring political points. In the postwar years Greek political points have been made more by the sword than by the pen—so much so that in Greece many scholars tend to ignore secondary Greek material in their historical studies unless they are summarizing some ideological argument.

The task of the historian is critical reading of many kinds of sources and judicious selection from them to produce a coherent narrative. I shall try to make the story as comprehensive as possible, both as a guide to future researchers and as a counterbalance to the available literature. As I have noted, the Greek Jews have not been integrated into the general story of wartime Greece. Among Jewish scholarship, there has been until recently only one comprehensive treatment of the Holocaust in Greece (Michael Molho and Joseph Nehama’s In Memoriam, published in Salonika in 1948, reedited in Hebrew and Greek translations) alongside an increasing number of memoirs that are appearing annually in Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and English. Molho and Nehama’s treatment was, interestingly, the first historical study of the Holocaust in any one country. Comprehensive for its time, it is nevertheless more than fifty years out of date in terms of scholarship, sources investigated, and material included. Moreover, the survivors’ passion for revenge has clouded an historical understanding of the forces and individuals involved in the story. Yet it is still valuable and a tribute to the efforts of its authors. Unfortunately, much general scholarship on Greece relies on In Memoriam for its brief (and inadequate) surveys of the fate of Greek Jews during the war years.

My earlier essays in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust were a first attempt to summarize and integrate new material. Michael Matsas’s The Illusion of Safety² uses In Memoriam for the background story but contributes many new memoirs on the camps and Resistance to the literature. Bernard Pierron’s Juifs et Chrétiens de la Grèce³ is a comprehensive survey of the period 1821–1945 that summarizes his more expanded and detailed dissertation.

Hence much of our information for various aspects of the story is necessarily dependent on memoirs of individuals. This category of sources is so problematic that certain historians have refused to use them at all. Raul Hilberg, for instance, based his monumental work almost exclusively on German archival documents. This approach leads to other problems for the historian, the most important of which is knowing what happened outside the archival records. Much material and novel facets of the story can be recovered only from memoirs. (For the general story of Greek resistance, see now André Gerolymatos’s Guerrilla Warfare and Espionage in Greece 1940–1944,⁴ which judiciously expands the received story on the basis of a critical reading of official sources and memoirs.)

But how to read these sources? How to critique material that is based on memory, occasionally fictionalized even where the author does not intend fictionalization (let alone where the author does intend it)? What is the relationship between memoir and literature (as in the works of Elie Wiesel) for historians attempting to reconstitute past events? Also, how do we critique the time factor? A memoir immediately after the event has a different value from one written decades later; yet there is a phenomenon of forty-year memory that occasionally recalls events and conversations more accurately than a memory closer in time to the event. Some individuals have better memory than others; some have photogenic or auralgenic memory. In other words, some individuals are better witnesses than others. No doubt the same critique can be made of contemporary interpretations in the archives, including those of policy makers. Occasionally the latter deliberately obfuscated their reports, as in the general Nazi trend to use euphemisms to obscure the Holocaust. It is no wonder that archival historians, like prosecuting attorneys, prefer the abstract and unchanging written word to the variable oral testimony.

In the vast literature of Holocaust memoirs, it is surprising to find numerous stories of Greek Jews. They seemed to be everywhere in the Nazi zone, in all the camps, in the Warsaw Ghetto, and definitely in the experience of numerous survivors. These stories, though occasionally embellished, seem to ring true and are all the more trustworthy because there does not seem to be any ulterior motive in their recording other than their exotic nature. At least they attest to the ubiquity of the Greeks. More valuable are the testimonies given by individuals under cross-examination in a formal interview or in court. These statements were elicited for judicial evidence and hence can be treated with more confidence. Not all, however; after the war some survivors returning to Salonika gave court depositions regarding the fate of deported property owners that do not always stand the light of investigation. On the other hand, the same individual’s witness as to the fate of beloved relatives can be treated less circumspectly. Memoirs by trained professionals such as doctors, lawyers, nurses, or others who survived are usually matter-of-fact memoirs by individuals trained to observe and report; those by the less educated are not so useful, yet occasionally they provide interesting data—as in the case of one Greek Sonderkommando slave. It is a matter of historical interest that the first published postwar Holocaust memoir was that of a Greek Jewish doctor, Marco Nahon, from Dhidhimotikhon, a small town in Thrace on the Greek-Turkish border. We may rely on one axiom: a memoir recording personal experience is more valuable than hearsay, although the former is to be treated cautiously unless independently confirmed. Even so, we shall have to use all memoirs judiciously. But first, we have to meet the people and their background.

One

The Jews of Greece to World War I

The present work tells the story of the Jews in Greece during the period of the Holocaust. Although the destruction of Greek Jewry occurred from 1943 to 1945, the suffering lasted for a subsequent decade, and their adjustment to that experience continues to the present.

The physical attack on Greek Jewry began in 1941 with the Nazi conquest, but an economic, social, and political assault predated the vicissitudes of World War II. To understand the experiences of Greek Jewry during the Holocaust, it is useful to trace their varied encounters with the Modern Greek state. Hence, the introductory chapters summarize aspects of the prewar period to acquaint the reader with the decline of Greek Jewry, which paralleled a number of contemporary developments that seemed to promise a better future. Unfortunately, Greek Jewry was doomed to succumb to a renascent Greek nationalism that, like its Hellenic forebears, was strong enough to absorb (at least culturally) all the disputant ethni within the borders of the new state. The failure of the new Greek polity to Hellenize and integrate the newly acquired ethnic groups of the Southern Balkans was later exploited in the Nazi occupation policy of divide and control. Additionally the occupiers ex-acerbated

*Part of this chapter was presented at a symposium on ethnic minorities in Greece hosted by Richard Clogg at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, in January 1995 and in expanded form appears in Minorities of Greece: Aspects of a Plural Society, ed. Richard Clogg (London, 2002), 64–80. See also the collected articles of Rena Molho in Salonica and Istanbul: Social, Political and Cultural Aspects of Jewish Life (Istanbul, 2005). For an overview of the broader context, see Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804–1999 (New York, 2000) and André Gerolymatos, The Balkan Wars (New York, 2002).

the endemic stasis [civic strife] in Greek political society to their own advantage.

On the eve of World War II, there were still three distinct worlds of Greek Jewry, each with its own layer of polyglot culture and historical experience. These three areas corresponded to (1) the South, comprising the Peloponnese, Attica, and Boeotia of ancient times and called Morea since the late Byzantine and Ottoman periods; (2) the West, or Epirus and Akarnania; and (3) the North, with Thrace and Macedonia stretching southward into Central Greece (or Stereohellada). The islands of the Ionian and Aegean Seas were, until after World War II, heavily influenced by Italian domination, which effectively colonized the urban environment; Corfu and Rhodes exemplify this tradition, and Italian is still spoken by the older generation. Finally there was Crete: subject to Venice and then the Ottomans, it became part of the new kingdom of Greece in 1913. The Greek Orthodox population of these islands maintained their Greek identity during centuries of foreign domination; the urban Jewish populations, however, adopted in addition the language of the government in power.

The wealthy and sophisticated Hellenistic cities surrounding the Aegean attracted a large Jewish diaspora in the Roman period, but Jews may have been living in the area as early as the last days of the First Temple (6th c. BCE). The continuity of the Jewish settlement in the Peloponnese and Attica through the period of Roman domination is assured; however, data from the middle and late Byzantine periods are scarce and only suggestive of this continuity. On the eve of the fifteenth-century Ottoman conquest of Morea, Jews were still to be found from Thebes to Mistra; during the Turkokratia¹ they were located in all the major centers from Patras to Kalamata and Tripolis to Corinth, with smaller settlements in Thebes and Euboea (Evvia).²

Southern Greece

The sketchy and still untold story of the Jews in the South came to an end with the Greek Revolution of the 1820s. Marked as allies of the Turks, they fell victim to persecution and massacre by the insurgent Greeks. The massacres of 1821 are unique in the story of Greek Jewry and are a consequence of the animosity against Ottoman Turks with whom the Jews were usually allied during the Turkokratia and among whom they took refuge. The massacres were usually carried out by Albanian regulars who were seeking booty, occasionally by Greek Orthodox irregulars and others stired up by the hanging of the Patriarch Gregory V in April 1921 and the Ottoman-assigned role of the Jews in the disposal of his corpse. The butchering of the Jewish populations of the Morea from Vrachori to Tripolitza was recorded by contemporaries and only Patras and Chalkis escaped similar fates.³

Aside from this incident, in general Jews within Greece and throughout Europe supported the Greek revolt, which fired the Romanticism of Europe. Many volunteered their political and public influence, while the Rothschilds, among others, contributed their money. In turn, the success of the Greek Revolution was to stimulate the incipient stirrings of Jewish nationalism, later called Zionism.⁴

The newly established kingdom of Greece attracted Jews to its capital Athens from both Ottoman areas and Central Europe, a trend that would continue through the middle of the twentieth century. Among those who immigrated were Sephardi merchants from Smyrna (Izmir), on the east coast of the Aegean Sea, and Volos on its northwest coast, as well as Romaniots from Yannina (Ioannina) in the western Epirus.⁵ The Greek government finally gave official recognition to the growing community in 1889. By this time, a second generation of Greek Jews was matriculating from the University of Athens and entering professional life, especially law and journalism.⁶

Central Europeans came as merchants and professionals to