Inside the Gas Chambers
Page 20
On March 20, 1943, the first transport leaving Salonika arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau via Belgrade and Vienna. Eighteen other transports were to follow, until the last one, on August 18, 1943. All told, 46,000 persons were deported from Salonika to Auschwitz.7
The second, larger zone came under Italian control and included Thessaly, the center of Greece, Attica, Corfu, the Ionian islands, and part of Crete. The island of Rhodes and the Dodecanese already had belonged to Italy since the war in Libya, 1911–12. Nearly 14,000 Jews lived in this zone and were relatively protected in spite of Nazi demands. Until the end of summer 1943, the anti-Jewish laws in force in Italy were applied in only a limited manner to occupied Greek territory. Things changed radically with the fall of the Fascist regime.
The third zone was assigned to the Germans’ most controversial ally: Bulgaria. This country, an enemy of Greece, did not take part in the hostilities, but in spite of this it was given the fertile territories of western Thrace, part of Macedonia, and direct access to the Aegean Sea. Bulgaria, which joined the Axis on March 1, 1941, thus became a country halfway between an ally and a satellite. It did not join in the attack on the Soviet Union (with which it maintained diplomatic relations until September 1944), but held itself in reserve in the Balkans. There were nearly 50,000 Jews in Bulgaria. There were 15,000 more after the conquest of the new territories. The Jews of Bulgaria proper were subjected to repeated discriminations and persecutions, but they were not deported. On August 31, 1944, anti-Jewish laws were repealed in Sofia. On the other hand, things were quite different in the conquered territories when Greece was divided up: the Bulgarian administration there applied the Nazi directives rigorously, and organized the deportation of Jews to the extermination camp at Treblinka. In this way, 11,000 Jews were exterminated: 4,000 came from Thrace (the first convoy left Gornadûumaja on 18 March 1943 and passed through Sofia before reaching its final destination), 158 persons were deported from the commune of Pirot, and more than 7,000 from Macedonia (in three successive transports, the first of which left on March 11, 1943).8
German occupation meant that the economic situation in Greece became catastrophic: food supplies plummeted, agricultural production was systematically hoarded by the occupiers, inflation rocketed, and a black market developed. These effects were felt very severely in the winter of 1941–2, and led to 360,000 deaths out of a population of 8,000,000 inhabitants;9 but the country remained marginal to the preoccupations of the great powers. The invasion of the USSR by German troops in June 1941 and the United States’ entry into the war in December 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, broadened the extent of hostilities.
A painful phase of stagnation in Greece now began, lasting until the crucial summer of 1943, when major events started to follow each other thick and fast, particularly in Italy. British and American troops landed on the coast of Sicily, Rome was hit by air raids, and Mussolini and the Grand Fascist Council fell on July 25, 1943, which opened the way for the provisional government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio and eventually the signing of the armistice with General Eisenhower, commander-in-chief of the Allied armies in the Mediterranean, announced on September 8, 1943.10 Days later, Italy was divided between the provisional government controlling the south and the Italian Social Republic based at Salò, in the north, led by Mussolini and continuing to fight the war on the side of Germany.
In the zone that came under German control, Nazi policies were imposed on everyone, especially on the Jewish population. In Greece, the Wehrmacht took just a few days to occupy the territory hitherto under Italian control. The Jewish families whom Italy had protected rapidly found themselves facing the same fate as the Jewish communities in the rest of Occupied Europe. On October 3, 1943, the man in charge of the SS and the police, Walter Schimana, ordered a census of all Jews. In March 1944, a series of round-ups apprehended nearly 5,400 Jews. Two transports left for Auschwitz (April 11) and Bergen-Belsen (April 16). The last transports contained deportees from the Greek islands: more than 2,000 persons were deported from Corfu in June, and 2,000 Jews from Rhodes and Kos were deported in mid-August 1944.
The precise number of victims from the region still is difficult to determine. It generally is acknowledged that nearly 65,000 Jews were deported: 54,000 were deported to Auschwitz from the zone of German occupation, and 11,000 deported from the Bulgarian zone and killed in Treblinka. Two thousand, five hundred people died as a result of the occupation of Greek territory. Thirteen thousand Greek Jews survived the war, which came to an end in Greece shortly after the entry of British troops into Athens on October 3, 1944.
Umberto Gentiloni
Professor of Contemporary History at the
University of Teramo
(Italy)
1 Cf. N. Labanca, “Mediterraneo,” in V. De Grazia and S. Luzzatto (eds), Dizionario del fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), vol. II, pp. 117–19.
2 For the main contributions to these themes, see D. Rodogno, Il nuovo ordine mediterraneo: Le politiche di occupazione dell’Italia fascista in Europa (1940–1943) (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003); N. Labanca, Oltremare: Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002).
3 Cf. D. Rodogno, “Campagna di Grecia,” in De Grazia and Luzzatto (eds), Dizionario del fascismo, vol. I, pp. 635–8.
4 Corriere della Sera, October 29, 1940.
5 G. Bottai, Diario 1935–1944 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1989), p. 228.
6 R. De Felice, Mussolini l’alleato, vol. I: L’Italia in Guerra 1940–1943, part I: Dalla Guerra “breve” alla Guerra lunga (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), pp. 322–6.
7 The transports arrived in Auschwitz on March 24, 25, and 30; on April 3, 9, 10, 13, 17, 18, 22, 26, and 28; on May 4, 7/8, and 16; on June 8; on August 13 (Bergen-Belsen) and 18, 1943. See the table of deportations in H. Fleischer, “Griechenland,” in Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer der Nationalsozialismus (Munich: DTV, 1991), p. 273, and in A. Récanati, Mémorial de la deportation des Juifs de Grèce, 3 vols (Jersualem: Erez, 2006), vol. I, p. 48.
8 On anti-Jewish policies in Bulgaria, see H.-J. Hoppe, “Bulgarien,” in Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords, pp. 275–310; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Third Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
9 Cf. M. Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941– 44 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
10 Cf. C. Pavone, Una Guerra civile: Saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991); E. Aga-Rossi, Una nazione allo sbando: L’armistizio italiano del settembre 1943 e le sue conseguenze (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003).
ABOUT DAVID OLÉRE
by Jean Mouttapa
The works reproduced in chapter 3 are by David Olère, born on January 19, 1902 in Warsaw, and naturalized as a French citizen in 1937. David Olère, a painter and poster artist of the École de Paris, frequented artistic circles (Max Ernst, Modigliani, etc.) in the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, in Montmartre and Montparnasse. Mobilized in 1939 in the 134th Infantry Regiment, he lost his civilian job in 1940 and suffered the humiliations imposed on the Jews by the Vichy Government. Arrested on February 20, 1943 by the French police, he was deported from Drancy to the camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in transport 49 on March 2, 1943. Throughout his period of detention, he was a member of the Sonderkommando, with identity number 106144. Evacuated with others on January 19, 1945 ahead of the advancing Red Army, he survived the “death march” that took him to Ebensee (Austria), where he was liberated by the US Army on May 6, 1945. On his return from the camps, he ceaselessly bore witness, through his drawings and paintings, to those years of horror. His special status in the camp made him an eye-witness of the Nazi extermination machine.
David Olère died on August 2, 1985, near Paris.
His main works were published in a book by his son Alexandre Oler, prefaced by Serge Klarsfeld: Witness: Images of Auschwitz (North Richmond Hills, TX: West Wind Press, 1998).
The publishers, Albin Michel and Polity Press, would like to thank Alexandre Oler, a friend of Shlomo Venezia, for his kind collaboration.
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