by Mark Mazower
With almost all the city’s Jews confined to their new “ghettoes,” the disruption to trade was immense. As services previously provided by them became unavailable, prices soared. Debts could not be collected; shoes and watches awaiting repair could not be collected by their owners. Vegetables, eggs and perishable goods began to rot. Stalls and shopfronts, especially in the commercial districts, were shuttered and closed and factories lay idle. “Following the closure of very many Jewish shops, the diminished circulation in the streets and the lack of a public in cinemas and restaurants and cafés,” the Italian consul wrote, “the city has suddenly acquired an unexpectedly sad appearance.”25
On 14 March, Koretz was ordered by the Germans to call a public meeting inside the barricaded Hirsch quarter. There, for the first time, he told people that they were to be deported to Cracow. He attempted to put a brave face on what awaited them—work according to your aptitude, a new life on the land in a Jewish settlement—but the meeting dissolved into catcalls, wails and cries of outrage and despair. The next day there was a train waiting with more than thirty carriages on the tracks and the deportations began. It was just over five weeks since Wisliceny and Brunner had arrived.
THE DEPORTATIONS
SUNDAY, 15 MARCH: Approximately 2800 people left on the first train, around 80 tightly packed into each carriage, guarded by a contingent of German policemen. They could carry 20 kilos of baggage each but no valuables, jewellery or other money. Previously they had been made to exchange their drachmas for what were in fact fake zlotys. What they left behind was supposed to be deposited in the administrative offices in the Hirsch camp; in fact many simply abandoned their possessions in the muddy streets or threw them away. As the over-crowded train began the five-day journey to Auschwitz in southern Poland, the camp lay temporarily empty.
Just a few hours later on the same day, however, it filled up again. The adjacent neighbourhood of Ayia Paraskevi was surrounded by soldiers, and its inhabitants were given 20 minutes to gather in the streets before they were marched there under guard. The following day, the residents of the nearby settlement of the Stazion Chiko, or Little Station, were made to join them. These two groups were sent in the second convoy, which left Salonica on 17 March. Then it was the turn of Regi Vardar—better known as “Ramona”—whose nearly 15,000 inhabitants were evicted in less than an hour shortly before dawn. The working-class Jewish neighbourhoods on the city’s western outskirts were now deserted. Despite a police warning against looting, the empty homes and shops were quickly plundered by Greek gangs looking for valuables which had been left behind. Robbers were shot by German soldiers.26
Among the Jews who remained in the centre and in the eastern suburbs, a rumour spread that it was only the “communist” workers’ quarters in the west that had been destined for deportation. But on 17 March Koretz appeared at the central Monastirioton synagogue and dispelled this illusion. He told a crowded gathering that there was no alternative for the Jews but to resign themselves to their fate. Their behaviour was worthy of praise—he cited the selflessness of the rich who were assisting the poor, the wonderful number of marriages which were being contracted on the eve of departure—and this would help to ensure that when they arrived in Poland they would be able to preserve “the good name of Salonica.” But his words no longer sounded plausible or reassuring: there were shouts of “traitor,” and Koretz was attacked and only escaped without injury thanks to his Jewish guards who bundled him into a waiting car and sped him out of the ghetto.27
OPTIONS
WHEN ASKED BY THE ITALIAN CONSUL on 27 March, Merten said that the Jews were being deported to “a locality near Warsaw where there is a coal mine. They will live together, administer themselves and work in a synthetic rubber factory.” This was the official line. In fact, without necessarily knowing the precise details, Italian diplomats realised many of the deportees would be killed. Another consular official, Lucillo Merci, noted in his diary on 21 March that in Poland “the physically fit among them are put to work, whereas the rest are eliminated. In the end, the physically fit will be eliminated too.”28
We do not know how widely such suspicions were circulating in the spring of 1943. A Jew with Turkish citizenship who left the city for Istanbul in early July knew nothing more than that the deportees had been sent in the direction of Nish. Others knew even less. On the other hand, an escapee from Salonica reported in mid-August not only that German officers when asked where the Jews had gone, reportedly answered “Heaven,” but also that one officer had told him that “they were forced in large groups to enter an empty cleaning establishment, [and] the gas was then turned on until all perished.”29
Nothing as precise as this has surfaced for the spring months themselves. But there had been vague indications and warnings of what lay in store. The BBC’s broadcast in December 1942 accusing the Germans of massacres in Poland had reached some. Yet when one elderly Jewish man from central Europe heard this in Salonica he remembered the First World War and dismissed it angrily as “English atrocity propaganda.” Jewish shopkeepers were sometimes alerted indirectly by German soldiers: one advised Alberto Saoul to “go to Athens where the air is better.” Another German told a Jewish acquaintance of his Christian girlfriend: “Why don’t you flee?” A third hinted to a Jewish photographic goods dealer that “the air of Thessaloniki will become very bad for the Jews,” and when asked what he meant said that the Nuremberg laws would shortly be introduced. A fourth bought some soap from a shopkeeper and then told him: “You aren’t doing well just staying here. I was in Romania and saw them drown Jews in a lake; all the Jews from one town they drowned in a lake.” The shopkeeper listened, and discussed it with his friends and came to the conclusion that “he was making propaganda to frighten us—how could they have drowned all the Jews?”30
Vague warnings such as these left most people in a state of deep anxiety. “One day they sent some carts to Ptolemaion Street to load up the belongings of the Jews who were going to be sent to Germany,” recollected Sarina Beza in 1945. “Until that point there had not been any cordon around the area. The Jews gathered in the streets in groups and began to talk uneasily about the future that awaited them.” Many were worried by the especial “brutality” and the “particularly harsh circumstances” of the “German persecutions.” Salonica’s inhabitants remembered the forced population exchange which had led to the departure of the city’s Muslims; some had fled from Russian pogroms themselves before the First World War, and of course many Asia Minor refugees had their own deeply traumatic experiences of deportation at Turkish hands. These historical memories encouraged people to believe the German stories that they were going to be resettled elsewhere, but also added to the sense of foreboding. The Muslim emigration, after all, had extended over more than a year following the population exchange agreement; but the Germans were trying to move many more people, in a far harsher manner, in a matter of weeks.31
One of the most remarkable documents to have survived from this period is a series of letters sent by a woman called Neama to her sons in Athens. In the first letter, dated from 5–7 March 1943, when the cordons were placed for the first time round the Jewish zones, she writes: “When God will unite us, we do not know … Will God have pity on me not to fall ill if they do not exterminate me? What we are seeing is not very encouraging.” The next day she answered a letter from her sons: “I see you are not very well informed about what we are going through. This week we are enduring scenes that we have seen only in the cinema and in history books … For two nights we sat on the bed, dressed, waiting for the knock on the door to wake us and take us away. Everyone is selling things in the streets to buy food … The cries, moans and tragedy cannot be described … The streets are crowded with people who are falling upon the others like hyenas on a dead horse to steal their things from them.”32
It was not just the German SS officials whose harsh behaviour seemed so frightening. The Hirsch camp became notorious as a place where the leade
rs of the Jewish police tortured, extorted and killed their fellow-Jews in order to force them to reveal where their possessions were kept. The ring-leaders escaped in the summer of 1943 to Albania and survived the war, only to be captured and brought back to Salonica to be put on trial at the demand of what remained of the Jewish community in 1946. At this extraordinary event, survivors told tale after tale of how they had been interrogated, tortured and tricked into giving up their valuables. So overwhelming was the sense of desperation that many Jews decided it was better to depart as quickly as possible to escape the hellish conditions they faced in Salonica itself. “Forty-eight hours in those conditions were enough to make us wish to leave one hour earlier for Krakow,” remembered one.33
The obvious alternative—fleeing the city—was a highly risky option. On the night of 18 March, the Germans played a cynical trick to deter would-be escapees: they kidnapped a well-known Jewish doctor who worked for the International Red Cross—his status and Italian citizenship had allowed him immunity from the restrictions imposed on other Jews—and put him and his wife straight on a waiting train. The next day they announced that he had escaped, and declared that twenty-five Jews had been immediately taken as hostages and would be shot if there were any further escape attempts. And with large sums of money changing hands, many efforts to flee failed at the first hurdle. Some policemen got Jews to pay them to get out of the ghetto, and then handed them over. A Greek fisherman betrayed three Jews who had hoped to flee south; they had contacted him through his wife, but the couple turned out to be unreliable.34
Nevertheless, many Christians were urging Jews to go underground. Eleftheria Drosakis’s grandfather, himself a refugee from Smyrna, visited an old Jewish friend in the town ghetto—Christians could enter without hindrance—and offered to hide him. The postman told Erika Kounio’s father to give him his two children: they could stay with his mother outside Verria. Railway workers, sometimes for money and sometimes out of sheer compassion, hid Jews in goods wagons heading south. Leftists organized a network which spirited more than seventy out of the city, and offered help to many more.35
Yet going underground put the helpers at risk as well: Anastasios Maretis was imprisoned in the Pavlos Melas camp for hiding Jews and was interned in the Hirsch camp—this happened to several Christians—and beaten up. It is therefore not surprising that Christians hesitated to help Jewish friends. “The day before yesterday the chemist’s daughter came to see me and I pleaded with her to tell her father that I want to visit him and to rest there for a while,” wrote Neama on 8 March. “He refused. Today she came again and gave me a small jar of marmalade and a small tsoureki [bread] and asked me to forgive him for his refusal.” Leon Hayouel “tried to remain in Salonica but was unable to.” “To flee to the mountains,” recalled Leon Perahia, “I had to find a contact with the men in the mountains … Obviously I didn’t bother with the star. I went to Kalamaria where most of my comrades were hanging out. For three days I came and went until I found the right guy.”36
Opportunities to get away did sometimes present themselves which were rejected for fear of splitting up the family. Most of the actual and potential escapees were relatively young, mobile and usually single: they spoke fluent Greek and had many Christian friends and workmates, whereas the older people spoke Greek, if at all, with a heavy and easily recognizable accent. Young people turned down chances to escape when their parents decreed the family should stay together. Others chose to stay, because they felt that abandoning their older and younger relatives was irresponsible. Sam Profetas was urged by his boss to head for Athens, and told he could get him false papers. Then he heard that the Germans had rounded up the inhabitants of Regi Vardar, where his mother and sisters lived, and taken them to the Hirsch camp. “Thank you for your suggestion,” Profetas told him. “But you must bear in mind that we Jews have two religions: first comes the family, and after that God. I can’t leave my mother who has struggled hard all her life to bring me up.” And he presented himself voluntarily at the camp entrance.37
Yet hundreds of Jews did escape—on foot, by boat and by rail, into the villages of the Chalkidiki peninsula, the mountains of western Macedonia, the Greek islands, Turkey and above all Athens, which remained still under Italian occupation. They were helped by scores of individuals, as well as the burgeoning left-wing resistance movement—still in its infancy in the Macedonian hinterland—and even by the Italian consular authorities in the city, who negotiated strenuously with the SS to issue as many passports as they could. In the early hours of July 15—after all but the final 2000 Jews had already been deported to Auschwitz—the Italian consulate managed to transfer a train with 320 Jews under its protection to Athens. In Salonica there were left only the “privileged” Jewish elite, several hundred Jews with Spanish papers, and more than 1,000 men who had been building roads for a military contractor in central Greece. These men made up the last transport. The communal leadership, including Koretz and the Spanish Jews, were sent at the beginning of August to the “privileged” camp of Bergen-Belsen. Having seen the bulk of the deportations through, Brunner had already gone at the end of May. Wisliceny followed him in August.
Almost no Jews now remained in Salonica. Fifteen or so were exempted because they were married to non-Jews—some well-connected Greek men with Jewish wives had protested angrily to the Germans and managed to save their families—and up to one hundred were hiding with friends. Two women were helped by men they later married; another older woman was hidden by a Christian relative. An unknown number of children were adopted—five of these were returned by the city orphanage in 1947—despite stringent German prohibitions against doing this. All those left faced a terrifying underground existence in the city itself where searches for hidden Jews continued until liberation. At least three Jewish men, married to Christian women, were later arrested and deported. Evgenia Abravanel, a Christian shopkeeper, was blackmailed by one of her customers. “She was taking my dresses, she was taking my robes,” she recalled. “Every time she wanted more money so that she would not reveal that I have a Jewish husband and that I am hiding him.”38
REACTIONS
ON THE STREETS, many Greeks showed their revulsion at the German measures from the moment Jews were forced to wear the yellow star. Yacoel noted the relief Jews felt when they observed “the decent conduct of the Christian population” and their “many expressions of compassion and sympathy.” He tells a revealing story from 25 February, the first day the star had to be displayed:
The writer’s housemaid, a young Jewish girl, whose speech and external appearance could in no way betray her religion, went out on the balcony above the street for a household chore, without having worn the distinguishing Jewish sign. While there, she observed a scene involving a Jewish woman wearing the Jewish sign going down the street, timidly passing a Christian woman going up the street. The Christian, probably seeing that sign for the first time, addressed a comforting word to the Jewess. Perceiving then the writer’s housemaid on the balcony smiling and assuming her to be a Christian, she raised her head and chided her for her behaviour, saying: “Why are you laughing, child? You ought to feel compassion for them over their plight. They are people just like us. Can you be sure that perhaps tomorrow it won’t be our turn?”39
Solidarity was shown by many friends and neighbours when the Jews were forced out of their houses and confined to the ghettoes. They went to make their farewells, promised to look after property and valuables—though this too would become a risky matter—and exchanged gifts and tears. “Everyone was out and crying,” recalled one. “The Christians were sad we were leaving our homes; we sat with the Greek women who wept as we left.”40 As long lines of hundreds of people, all ages, pushing carts and carrying heavily laden rucksacks, trekked through the centre of town to the Hirsch camp, many Christians gathered on the pavements to see them go. Leon Perachia noticed the sad faces of those watching as he went past. Another recalled that “we walked down Leoforos Stratou an
d Egnatia. On the way there were many people, Christians, and they looked on helplessly. Some cried.”41
“By the station, my path was interrupted by a river of Jews coming down from the camp to the train,” recollected Eleftheria Drosakis, then a young girl from a refugee family. Living near the station, she witnessed several such forced marches, and would rush out hoping to see the friends she used to play with. “And my joy was great when I didn’t see one of them, because we hoped they would escape.” On the other side of the city, among the Pontic refugees in the suburb of Kalamaria, someone greeted the apparently endless line of Jews trailing past with the comment “They deserve it for having crucified our Lord.” But Georgios Andreades, then only seven, asked himself what the poor people he saw before him—“for me the sight was a painful one”—had to do with Christ’s crucifixion.42
Whereas individuals displayed their unhappiness at what was happening, there was little sign of this on the part of the city’s professional associations and organizations. The one exception was the Greek ex-servicemen’s association which reacted angrily when disabled Jewish war veterans were made to take part in the forced registration in July 1942. On several occasions after this, the leaders of the Christian association of war wounded tried to intervene on behalf of their Jewish comrades. Eventually the Germans threatened to execute them if they went ahead with planned demonstrations. They were the only ones to take protest so far. Yacoel, the community’s lawyer, could not hide his disappointment with the frostily detached attitude of men he had long known and had assumed would feel differently. As he wrote in his 1943 memoirs, written shortly before his own deportation and death, the city’s professional classes, in particular, the major merchants and businessmen, showed “a total lack of comradely solidarity.” Following the forced dismissal of Jews from Salonica’s guilds and associations, Yacoel called on “the president of the largest and most outstanding economic organization of the city”—presumably a reference to the Chamber of Commerce. Despite the man’s many and strong ties to Jewish firms—so strong indeed that he spoke Judeo-Spanish—he remained “cold and passive” and refused to do anything.