by Mark Mazower
The truth was that Venizelist Liberals especially, and many others in the civil service and the army, shared some of the attitudes that motivated the rioters. They were more sophisticated in their expression, and more conscious of the need to consider the impact of anti-Semitism upon Greece’s international image. Nevertheless, Greek nationalism—riven with anxiety in the aftermath of the Asia Minor disaster—operated through an ethnocentric view of the world, much as Zionism did. It saw Jews in communal terms, and under-estimated the variety of views and opinions that existed among them. And despite their public statements, few people really believed that Jews, however assimilated, could become Greeks.
A startling illustration of how deeply such attitudes had penetrated the administrative elite is provided by the confidential memoranda of the director of the Thessaloniki press bureau, an intelligence service set up (revealingly) in the foreign ministry to monitor the city’s Jewish press. On 5 July 1931, he analysed the background to the Campbell riot. Its root cause he attributed to Jewish “provocation” to Greek sentiment over many years. The very formation of the Maccabi groups was one such act; as for the press, no one could deny, he wrote, “that the Jewish newspapers have always been provocative.” He went on to imply that it was the failure of leaders of the Jewish community to reply publicly to Makedonia’s original allegations that had led to the “sad and bloody actions against the Jewish population” when, as he put it, “Greek public opinion—rightly or wrongly—took to the streets and engaged in acts of violence.”30
And yet it was not always simply a matter of being for, or against, Jews. In early April 1933, special services were held in some synagogues to protest anti-Jewish persecution in the Third Reich, and Salonica’s rabbis ordered Jewish shopkeepers to shut their premises. Although the governor-general of Macedonia tried to persuade the president of the community not to go ahead with the shop closures, the police took a different line: their view was that since the matter had arisen during synagogue services, the closures were a matter of individual conscience and should not be blocked. In the event, they went even further than that and actually enforced the shop closures in one or two cases where Jewish proprietors had either deliberately or through misunderstanding failed to comply, provoking angry protests from fellow-Jews. The main concern of the city police in this case was simply to preserve public order and to forestall fights between Jews which might cause a disturbance. They patrolled the streets and kept watch outside synagogues where well-attended services were in progress. Their interest was thus local and quite different from that of the political elite, who were far more concerned about the impact of the protest on relations with the new German government. By and large, the police succeeded in their aim, though later that night nationalist youths paraded through the deserted market quarter singing patriotic songs and hailing Hitler, while others painted the letters “EEE” on the central Monastirioton synagogue, and scrawled large red swastikas on walls and pavements.31
Yet after the tensions of the post-1922 crisis decade, the steam was going out of organized anti-Semitism. In national elections in 1932 and 1933 the city’s Jews—disillusioned with Venizelos and shocked by the aftermath of the Campbell riots—swung overwhelmingly behind the anti-Venizelists. The latter relied on Jewish votes (as they had in 1920) and were vehemently against the refugees, whom they regarded as the main cause of Greece’s troubles. Anti-Venizelists wanted to gerrymander Salonica’s electoral districts to marginalize the latter rather than the Jews. In January 1934, one anti-Venizelist deputy even described Salonica’s Jews as “more Greek” than the refugees—a remark which was hardly meant to be taken seriously but did point to the fact that the process of Hellenization had more than one target: after all, the leader of EEE spoke Turkish better than he did Greek. The following month, the anti-Venizelist mayor Manos was elected for a second time, a man with a well-founded reputation for pro-Jewish sympathies.32
The failed Venizelist coup of 1935, the return of the king, the collapse of parliamentary democracy and the establishment of the Metaxas dictatorship all weakened those political forces which had been most inclined to agitate against the Jews. EEE was among the many political organizations disbanded under the dictatorship, which lacked the racial dimension of central European fascism. A new chief rabbi was appointed—an Ashkenazi called Zvi Koretz—with a reputation for a modern outlook, and he established close relations with the Greek authorities. King George made his feelings towards the Jews clear by visiting Salonica’s Beth Saul synagogue. The decade after 1931, in short, was more harmonious in terms of Greek-Jewish relations than the preceding one had been. It would not be much of an exaggeration to suggest that an authoritarian regime saved the Jews from the tensions and dangers to which parliamentary politics had exposed them.33
ATTITUDES AND MENTALITIES
THE GREEK STATE might have formalized the structure of the Jewish community, and treated it for most of the interwar period as a collectivity, distinct from the Christian majority, but at the level of daily life the boundaries between the two religions and communities were permeable, and becoming more so with time. Political affiliations created ties across the ethnic divide. And even more than in Ottoman times, the city made its own demands, and created realities quite different from those established by law or imagined by the political elite. In the large mostly Jewish 151 quarter, for instance, Avramatchi, the Jewish grocer, sold his kezo blanko (white cheese) to Greek and Jewish housewives alike. The very language of shopping combined Turkish words which everyone still used—bakkal for grocer, the bakkal defteri for the book containing his customers’ accounts—Judeo-Spanish and Greek. Jewish women talked of going home to their sinyor (husband) but were themselves known as nikotcheras, after the Greek word for housewife (noikokyria). Greek and Jewish children played games like aiuto together in the streets, shouting Judesmo terms that refugee kids were quick to pick up.34
Few Greeks, it is true, ever acquired more than a few words of Judeo-Spanish. One of the few who were fluent was the so-called “Jewish” Panayiotis Constantinidis, who had worked from a young age for Jewish customs-brokers near the docks. “Panayiot” liked to play practical jokes such as dressing up and impersonating the rabbi who went round on Fridays at dusk telling the Jewish stallholders to close for the Sabbath, or, on another occasion, alarming local women at their prayers by entering the church where he served on the administrative committee dressed as a Jewish salesman and pretending to sell them candles. Stories of his pranks circulated for years precisely because his skill was so unusual.
On the other hand, even though Judesmo remained in use at home, most male Jews and younger females knew enough Greek to pursue a living. Elderly wandering street-sellers advertised their wares—shirts, tumblers, oranges, tomatoes—in a broken Greek which amused their clients. Poor Jewish women worked as wet-nurses for the Ayios Stylianos orphanage, while seamstresses like Luna Gattegno had “Jewish and Christian clients.” Although many of the city’s trade guilds were exclusively Christian Orthodox or Jewish, a surprising number had a mixed membership: in 1922, for example, the Praxiteles guild of marble carvers had four Greek, eleven Jewish and one Muslim member; the old vegetable-sellers’ guild included fourteen Greeks and thirty-three Jews, while fishmongers, street porters and traders in the central market all promoted their interests together. Ethnic homogeneity was certainly not the rule even for the small businessmen, traders and sellers who dominated the city’s economy. Among the workers in its factories and warehouses there was a strong vein of inter-communal association and solidarity, especially in the unions and left-wing political groups. For the city’s business elite, the exclusive Club de Salonique, which had been founded in the late nineteenth century to provide a place to receive foreign visitors, still provided a discreet and civilized setting for influential Greek businessmen and officials to meet Jewish fellow-members. The balance of power was shifting, and the Greek membership now outnumbered Jews. But like most clubs it was proud of its
rules and traditions, and continued to accept Jewish members even after the German occupation began in 1941.35
Faith remained the key marker of ethnic difference. Greek liberals and socialists accused Jews of preserving what they called their “Ottoman mentality,” by still seeing themselves as a separate collectivity. And indeed among Jews the term “Greek” was often used as a synonym for “Christian”—as when one man described his sister, who had converted, as having “become Greek.” Similarly, for the elderly Uncle Bohor in the Judesmo press satire, a man with a rather traditional outlook, a Greek barber is simply “one of them.” But then in his eyes Jewish “atheists,” like his neighbour upstairs who had shaved off his beard, were not much better. The older generation was still devout, attendance at both church and synagogue was high, and families paid regular visits to the cemetery. A handful of weddings each year took place across the religious boundary, but this remained a fraught business for both faiths. When a refugee priest baptized a young Jewish woman without having first consulted Metropolitan Gennadios, his action provoked an angry response from the chief rabbi, and Gennadios, who was himself a product of the old Ottoman system and well understood the sensitivity of the matter, ordered the priest to be punished. The city’s diocesan archives contain at least seventy-eight applications from Jews, mostly young women, seeking to marry Greek Orthodox men during the interwar period. But in the old days, converts had risked ostracism by marrying out; by the late 1930s this was less of a worry.36
And the much-maligned “Ottoman mentality” was not to be found only among Jews. Greek society itself still harboured deeply rooted prejudices against them. As Judaioi they were linked in the popular imagination to the figure of Judas, the betrayer of Christ. The journalist who translated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Greek in 1928 also published Judas through the Ages, an equally nasty tract welcomed by none other than the Archbishop of Athens. Had the Jews not crucified Christ, after all, and had they not desecrated the corpse of the Greek Patriarch in Constantinople in 1821? Their supposed religious and national crimes were thus easily merged. In the summer of 1931, Makedonia serialized a fictional story of unhappy love between a Jewish girl and a Christian boy: the moral—that befriending Jews led Christian families to ruin—was powerful enough to be taken up in one of Greece’s most popular post-war novels, The Third Wedding Wreath.37
Religious anti-Semitism and a sense of ethnic rivalry and competition coloured the atmosphere of the interwar city. But as we have seen, they only became a recipe for violence when politicians sought to use an anti-Jewish policy for their own electoral advantage. Stereotypes facilitated but did not cause the Campbell riot. Nor did stereotypes prevent the Greek authorities from recognizing and supporting Jewish life in various ways. Indeed, an anti-Venizelist administration made Yom Kippur a public holiday in Salonica—to the consternation of Nazi diplomats. Although the anti-Semites fulminated, there is no indication that this was an unpopular move among a majority of the city’s inhabitants for whom co-existence and increasing interaction were facts of life. The metropolitan, Gennadios, and the chief rabbi, Koretz, preserved cordial relations, and tried to ensure that their subordinates did too. Thus in the mid-1930s, the sources of communal tension were largely fading even as official anti-Semitism intensified in Germany, Poland and Romania. Left to themselves, Greeks and Jews might well have sorted out their differences. In the Second World War, hundreds of young Jewish men from the city fought in the ranks of the Greek army, and some of these went on to join the resistance. But they found themselves now up against an infinitely more deadly and highly organized form of anti-Semitism—not the petty discrimination of Greek officials, nor the mob violence of provincial right-wing louts, but the genocidal capabilities of the most advanced state in Europe.
22
Genocide
ON 6 APRIL 1941, German troops attacked Greece from the north, and three days later, they entered Salonica. By the end of the month, the king and his government had fled Athens, the British expeditionary force had been pushed back to Crete, and a puppet government had been formed. The country was partitioned. The Germans assigned the Peloponnese, central Greece and most of the islands to the Italians, and the Bulgarians were allowed to take over eastern Macedonia. Salonica and its region were among the strategically vital areas which remained under the control of the German army.
Military occupation need not have brought the city economic distress for in the First World War, fortunes had been made there and business flourished. But in 1941 it had still not recovered from the depressed conditions of the 1930s, and unemployment was high. To make matters worse, 48,000 refugees now fled into the city from the Bulgarian zone. Fifty thousand were being fed in soup kitchens in October 1940; a year later, the number had probably doubled. Housing was scarce, for many homes had been damaged in Italian bombing raids.1
Very quickly the authorities found the city was running out of food. There was little they could do about it. Requisitioning crops was hard when the drachmas and occupation marks given to farmers were made worthless by inflation. As winter approached, even the armed convoys sent out to collect grain encountered resistance; the villagers preferred to sell their produce through the black market. “My mother sold whatever valuables she had,” wrote one child of Smyrna refugees. “The roads and footpaths that led to the villages were crowded with people coming from the towns to give jewellery, clothes, salt, soap, empty bags, glass, porcelain, pictures, carpets, sewing machines … just to find something to eat and above all some flour to make bread.” Some left to settle in the countryside where food could be found more easily, but neither the refugees nor the Jews had strong family links to the villages.2
Within an astonishingly short time, therefore, hunger began to spread through the streets on an alarming scale. “The causes of this economic disintegration are known,” the French consul informed Vichy six months into the occupation. “They are the war, defeat, pillaging, the entry of the victorious armies, the Greek demobilization, then inflation coinciding with the scarcity of foodstuffs, the almost absolute control of the Aegean by the English navy which prevents the provisioning of Greece by sea, the influx of refugees chased out by the Bulgarians and finally and above all the massive requisitions effected by the Occupation authorities in a poor country deprived of a part of its production and all its imports.” By November, shop shelves were bare and black-market prices had soared.3
The wife of the Swiss consul, who returned home at the end of 1941, painted a grim picture of city life. Emaciated adults were collapsing on the pavements; their bodies were later removed on open carts “drawn by gaunt horses, staggering in their traces from the effects of hunger. Subsequent burials are carried out without coffins owing to the lack of wood.” As the death toll rose, fear of famine gripped the population. The Greeks, she reported, blamed the Germans for their plight and called them “locusts.” “The spectre of a contrived extermination of a whole population,” she concluded, “cannot be dismissed as a hallucination conjured up by starved stomachs but rather viewed as a logical appraisal of German behaviour in Greece since the invasion of Russia.”4
In fact, the Germans certainly did not plan to exterminate the population and even imported a little food from other Balkan countries. Yet in the spring of 1942 hundreds of people were still dying of hunger, and that summer, malaria—the city’s traditional scourge—killed many more. Not until the spring of 1943 did death rates return to something close to normal levels or births begin to outnumber deaths. In all, more than five thousand people died of starvation—far fewer than in Athens, or the islands, but a catastrophe without parallel for Salonica. And yet, frightening as this was, for the city’s Jews it was only the beginning.5
THE ROSENBERG COMMANDO
THE FIRST SIGN that the Jews might be singled out came right at the start of the occupation when representatives of the communal council called on the German commander and were dismissed without being seen. A few days later, the en
tire council was arrested, and Chief Rabbi Koretz was sent to Vienna. Gestapo officials raided Zionist clubs, while the previously banned anti-Semitic EEE party was re-formed. On 29 June, a week after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Jewish homes on two streets—Miaoulis and Misrachi—were requisitioned for the use of German families fleeing Allied bombardment; Christian-owned homes were not touched.
More damaging than this were the activities of Hitler’s ideological commissar, Alfred Rosenberg, who was setting up a research centre in Frankfurt for the study of world Jewry. When Greece fell, he immediately sent a team to Salonica—“one of the main Jewish centres, as you yourself know,” he told Martin Bormann. Led by a German Hebraicist, the Sonderkommando Rosenberg plundered its Jewish libraries, clubs and synagogues, seizing tens of thousands of books, archives, manuscripts and rare objects to send back to Germany. To men more habituated to the world of East European Jewry, Salonica was unfamiliar territory: in August, one enquired where the ghetto had been located, only to be politely informed by a local scholar that after more than twenty years of his own historical research, “he had never encountered in any manuscript, or any document of whatever kind, the least indication allowing one to believe that there existed at any time a ghetto in Salonica.”6
The Rosenberg commando left Greece laden with looted Jewish goods, some of which would turn up, many decades later, in the KGB special archive outside Moscow. But after appointing a new, more pliable president of the community, the Germans apparently lost interest in the Jews. Jewish businesses continued to play an important part in the life of the town, and at school and university Jewish and Christian children found that life went on little changed. The members of the pre-war communal council were released, Chief Rabbi Koretz returned to Salonica, and the quisling Greek prime minister stated publicly that “there is no Jewish question in Greece.” The Sonderkommando Rosenberg agreed; its final report concluded with evident disappointment that “for the average Greek there is no Jewish question. He does not see the political danger of world Jewry.”7