by Arnold Zable
‘On 30 April we spent the night by a river. In the morning it was snowing. The SS were gone. They had vanished into the night. There were three thousand of us. We were bombarded by US airmen who mistook us for the enemy. Eight hundred died from the cold as we walked to the nearest village. At midnight we saw American armoured cars. We could not believe we were free, and that we could eat our fill. Those who overate died from dysentery. I took only tea and sugar. I knew this was the best thing to do from my school days.
‘I spent three months with the US army. I worked as an interpreter. In September I was invited to continue working in Japan. I said no, I have had enough. I went by train to Munich. The world around me was in ruins. I just wanted to see my old home as soon as possible. I returned to Greece by plane.
‘Never once in all this time did I weep. It was only after I returned to Thessaloniki that I gave in. Do you know what it is to be alone? With not one living soul from your family to greet you? I walked the streets of Thessaloniki, through the old Jewish quarters, and could find no one from the past. And I sat down and wept. For the first and only time.
‘I am not a man who continues to weep. With these tears I resolved to make a new life. I found a cousin who had survived as a Greek partisan. Everyone else was gone. We joined together and revived the family business. We still have it. We import knitting machines from Italy, Taiwan, Belgium and Germany.
‘I married in 1947. My wife was a cousin, born in Thessa-loniki. When she was five years old, her family had moved to Istanbul. This is why she survived.
‘At first we lived in one room, on Sygrou Street. Two sons were born in that room. We had three children. One son has a doctorate in linguistics. We have teenage grandchildren. We founded a brotherhood. We established this centre. We have a community here of twelve hundred. We celebrate the Sabbath. We turn off the television. Let go of the passing week. Visit each other, and read the Torah. Do you know what a treasure it is to study the Torah? We return to a wisdom that is three and a half thousand years old.
‘Yet I still dream of being hungry. In Katowice I was whipped fifty times because my room was not spotlessly clean. I dream of eating herbs dug up from the ground. I dream of the crematoria flames. I do not want these dreams. But that is how it is.’
Victor is not appeased. There must be more to this than recurring dreams and catalogues of horror. He wants to retrieve something of value. It is an obsession, a form of madness. He moves about the centre in search of tales that he records in his journals; always in the same notebooks, with black covers and red cloth binding. Made in China. These journals are his most valued companions.
When the last Sabbath guest departs, Victor returns to his temporary lodgings in the Averof Hotel, on Leontos Sofou. He glances at his reflection in the mirrored foyer. He smiles as if trying to find a way back to his normal self, but sees a grimace instead. He ascends a flight of stairs that smells of itinerant lives. There is a single sink in his room, a desk, and a double bed. There is little space for anything else. A shuttered door leads onto a small balcony. He closes the shutters to subdue the noise.
It is the first night of the weekend and the city is on the streets. Cars and motorcycles continue circling late into the night. Groups of passers-by trail laughter in their wake. In the adjoining room can be heard the sounds of a couple making love. The lounge room directly opposite, across the narrow landing, is full of men en route to somewhere else. Their animated talk flows for hours on end. And through it all, Victor sits at his desk over his history books and takes notes, whilst around him the city whirls upon its own axis, without a thought for the darker recesses of its recent past.
‘There is an American rabbi,’ someone had told him at the community centre. ‘He is a retired professor. He is here for a rabbinical conference. He has something to show anyone who is interested. He claims that it can restore a person’s faith. He is staying in the Makedonia Palace Hotel. Wait until the Sabbath is over. After all, he is a pious man.’
On Sunday afternoon, Victor is welcomed into the rabbi’s rooms. The rabbi offers his guest a drink, and comes straight to the point. He hands over a sheaf of papers, photocopies of the original documents. ‘You can have them,’ he says. ‘These are the stories that should be told. This is where humanity resides. Now take them away and read.’
To find a coffee shop in a Greek city is the easiest of tasks. There are so many it is hard to know which one to enter. Victor prefers the back-street ouzeria, where men gather to play backgammon and talk. What else is there to do as life draws to a close?
Victor sips his coffee, metrio, medium black. He listens to the click of the counters, the undertow of conversation, the eruptions of arguments. He overhears incessant talk of politics and food, and of the delicious fish that one of the men seated at the neighbouring table had eaten the night before. Only in Greece can a single fish occupy such a lengthy conversation.
Victor returns to his journal, and writes of his encounter with the rabbi. He takes out the sheaf of papers the rabbi had given him and is drawn into an extraordinary tale. He names it: ‘The Testament of Yolanda Avram Willis’.
Yolanda was born in Thessaloniki on 2 October 1934, to Salvator and Karolla Avram. When she was still a child, the Avram family moved to the city of Larissa. When the Nazis entered the city, the family fled to the island of Crete. With the aid of a network of Greeks, they kept one step ahead of disaster. They moved from hideout to hideout, from Crete to Athens, from a flower farm to a bakery, from one family to another.
At war’s end, Yolanda moved to the United States. She studied. Completed a doctorate in sociology. Raised a family. It was the death of her brother in 1992 that turned Yolanda back to her childhood memories. She began to research her past in detail. And she rediscovered the acts of courage that had saved her life. ‘We were hidden by ordinary Greeks, often total strangers, who risked not only their own lives, but their children’s lives,’ she writes.
There was the forger who provided Christian documents in Crete, and the family who hid them in the mountains. There was the captain who did not betray them when he ferried the Avrams back to Athens, the owner of the pasta factory who found them a temporary haven in a flower farm, and the baker who provided refuge once the flower farm was raided.
Yolanda sings the praises of two young men who worked at the bakery and moved her parents, every night, from one hideout to another. She acknowledges the baker’s brother, the tailor, who took them in; and the fifteen-year-old boy who warned the baker’s brother of an imminent raid of the SS; and the baker’s sister-in-law who transmitted messages from her kiosk; and the woman who lent them her home for secret meetings.
There was the air force officer who fronted for Yolanda’s father at the pasta factory when he was wanted by the SS, and the policemen who supplied the Avrams with a succession of new IDs. And the seamstress who pretended to be her brother’s aunt, and the army officer who pretended to be his uncle. There was the widow who hid her, and pretended she was her dead husband’s niece; the widow’s sister and their old mother who cooked for her and kept her safe; and the widow’s brother and communist wife who did not betray her.
Yolanda is anxious not to overlook anyone. ‘How many people did it take to save your lives. Have you kept count? Did you miss anybody?’ she writes. She does not restrict her testimony to her own tale. She documents the stories of other Jews who were rescued by Greeks. She interviews survivors who had shared a similar experience. There were residents of entire villages, controlled by the resistance, who provided refuge for Jews, or warned them to disappear. There were others who took them to hideouts in mountain caves and villages to escape the Nazi net. The grand rabbi of Athens, Elias Barzilai, was spirited out of Athens into resistance-controlled mountain havens in central Greece. Damaskinos, the archbishop of Athens, vowed to ‘save as many Jewish souls as I can’. He ordered his priests throughout Greece to tell their congregations to shelter Jews in their monasteries and homes.
One tale in particular captures Victor’s imagination. Yolanda writes of the rescue of the Jewish community of Zakynthos. This was perhaps the only instance in the history of the Annihilation that an entire community was saved.
Victor is anxious to trace this story. He wishes to see it first hand, or at least come as close to it as the passing of time will allow. He decides to visit the island, and embarks on a journey that will take him almost the full length of Greece.
He leaves the city by train for Athens. As he travels he reflects on the past nine days in Thessaloniki. During his stay there had been a cover of clouds, hanging like an oppressive ceiling over the city. He awoke, day after day, to the same miasma. He is acutely aware that he was on the rim of a region with a long history of tribal vendettas and blood feuds. Not far from the city limits, to the north, the Balkans were, yet again, descending into chaos.
As the train draws close to Athens, the sky is clearing. There are tints of rose, slivers of silver and transparent blues heralding the fall of night. The world is emerging from its tones of grey. Or is this merely the imagination of an obsessed man?
From Athens Victor travels south-west, through the Peloponnese. The landscape flits by. It barely registers above his blanket of thoughts. All he retains are fleeting images of ranges with craggy peaks, and industrial towns with run-down houses and peeling walls. He glimpses a solitary cypress on an inaccessible ridge, a pile of abandoned cars beside a village stream. He glances at a rubbish dump in a field of winter flowers.
After his many weeks in the wintry north, the southern light is sharp. It pierces his fatigue. It demands attention. The train is now travelling on the west coast. It moves by a succession of boat yards and marinas, ferry terminals and dust-ridden harbours.
Zakynthos lies in the southern extremities of the Ionian Sea. Victor departs from the mainland port of Killini at nightfall. As he moves on board, a procession of trucks lumbers into the hold. They appear like monsters, being sucked into the entrails of the boat. And Victor moves beside them. It is as if he has lost any say in it. The journey has taken hold. The momentum has become an end in itself. The ropes are untied and hurled back onto the decks. He is elated as the boat casts off, and sails out upon unknown seas.
The passengers retreat inside the lounge. Friends and strangers are gathered around tables. They play cards, gaze at television soap operas and the evening news. Children are stretched out upon their seats, fast asleep. A group of women sits around a mother nursing a newly born child. The young mother is in a state of fatigued calm. She is encircled by older women who know how to navigate her domain. They take turns in holding the child. They move with practised ease. It is a scene of mystery and grace.
Victor is drawn outside, despite the cold. The moon is waxing towards its fullness. Smaller islands float by. In the distance the first glow of a larger landmass appears. As the ferry draws closer, he sees huddles of lights that mark the locations of isolated villages on mountain heights. As the harbour approaches, he sees the wink of the two globes, one blue, the other red. They are sentinels that guide boats through the narrow entry into the port.
The ferry is manoeuvred to its berth. A fleet of buses and trucks emerge from the belly of the boat. Victor observes the warm greetings of family and friends. He envies those who are spirited away by their loved ones. He envies the crewmen who have done their work for the night. He longs to be one of them. This is the moment when a traveller’s sense of strangeness intensifies. Especially now, as winter approaches, and the summer tourists are long gone.
Victor’s hotel is rundown, untended now that the high season is over. But he is glad for the warmth, the respite of sleep. And he is glad for his dreams. He is flying the length of the land, from Thessaloniki to the south, over mountains and rocky heights; above chapels perched on remote peaks and medieval fortresses sinking into the shadows of ravines. He is moving out to sea, over islands that wink in the night. He is falling in love with the land. He is beginning to know the toil that sustains it. This is where his family had lived for generations.
In the morning Victor walks the footpath which runs the full sweep of the bay. He moves through squares, plazas, arcaded streets and shopping malls. Zakynthos remains a Venetian city, rebuilt after the massive earthquake of 1953, a city that measures itself according to the eruption, to the before and after. Before was the time of opera houses shaped by baroque minds. Before was the time when poets sang the island’s praises, and glorified it as ‘the flower of the Levant’. Now is the time of replicas and re-creations; the city is yet to find its way back to its former self.
Victor returns to the waterfront. He stops to watch a caique unload its night catch on the quay. He is being drawn off course. He is slowing down to the leisurely pace of an Ionian day. It takes some effort to awake from his reverie and reorient himself to the task. He opens out his street map and locates the neighbourhood where the synagogue once stood.
All that remains is the old facade behind a wrought-iron gate. The gate is set within an arched entrance. On the apse, carved in marble, there is an open book, with one page in Greek, and the other in Hebrew.
For over three hundred years they had lived here, the Jews of Zakynthos, congregated in the Jewish quarter. From Smyrna, Constantinople, Crete and Corfu, they had made their way to this town, and maintained their ways as Sephardi Jews.
Inside the synagogue gate there is a courtyard paved in marble. Within the courtyard there stand two vertical marble scrolls, side by side. On one scroll, embossed in copper, can be seen the bust of Lukas Karrer, on the other, Bishop Chrysostomos. Victor is here to pay homage to these two men. And to recount the tale.
There are several versions of what happened. The full story may never be known; many documents were lost in the earthquake of 1953. This appears to be the most common variation: when the Germans occupied Zakynthos there was a Jewish community of 283 people. The island’s Nazi governor ordered Lukas Karrer, the mayor of Zakynthos, to provide him with a list of the island’s Jews. Karrer approached Bishop Chrysostomos for advice. The bishop advised Karrer to burn the list, and arranged for the governor to be bribed.
In mid-1944, Nazi officials ordered Karrer to assemble all Jews within twenty-four hours or face execution. Again the mayor consulted the bishop who told him to burn the list. Karrer alerted the Jews of Zakynthos and urged them to flee before the night was over.
When the Nazis approached Bishop Chrysostomos for the list, he signed his own name 283 times. So one story goes. ‘Here are your Jews,’ the bishop is reported to have said. ‘If you choose to deport the Jews of Zakynthos, you must also take me and I will share their fate.’
In the meantime, the Jews stole out from their quarters into the hinterlands where they hid in barns or caves or the homes of Greek friends. The following day the streets were deserted, their homes empty. The people of Zakynthos knew what had happened, but not one person betrayed them. Lukas Karrer remained a wanted man. He fled the island by caique under cover of night.
Victor has accomplished his task. He has moved from one end of the country to the other. He has recorded the fate of an entire community completely annihilated, and another entirely saved. He recalls the words of Elie Wiesel: ‘There are stories that are meant to be transmitted. Not to tell them, would be to betray them.’ This, surely, is one such tale.
We leave Zakynthos towards nightfall. Alexander stands beside me on the upper deck. We watch the Venetian fortress that stands above the town disappear. Alexander is now a seasoned traveller. He moves about the boat without fear. We lean on the rails as
we sail into the night. Lights appear and vanish on passing isles. We have come to love this suspension of time, the intervals between landfalls. We are being conveyed into the dark. The sea is calm, the boat’s engines a restrained hum.
Having stood that afternoon at the gate of the former synagogue, the question arises: why is it that in one place people welcome strangers, while in others they stand by and condone the murder of neighbours? Perhaps it has something to do with an ancient practice, encapsulated in the term filoxenia.
Filoxenia, ‘the love of strangers’, is the sacred bond between host and guest. It is the practice of welcoming the outsider, the passing seafarer. In the old kafeneion of Stavros, on Ithaca, which lies to the north of Zakynthos, I once asked Panayotis if he had heard of the practice. Panayotis is in his eighties and walks with a limp. His limbs are beginning to tremble, but his mind is fully alert. He is one of the regulars who gather in the kafeneion to exchange gossip and while away time.
‘Filoxenia is a wonderful custom,’ Panayotis replied. ‘First the stranger is welcomed, bathed and fed. Only then do you ask for his name and his business. This is how Homer describes it in The Odyssey. On his long journey back to Ithaca, Odysseus was welcomed many times. In those days people believed that a stranger could be a god in disguise.’
Panayotis speaks with precision and an ironic smile. ‘It is a beautiful idea,’ he says, ‘but hard to put into practice. Yes, we Greeks know filoxenia, but at the same time we may not talk to a neighbour for ten years because of a petty dispute.’
Perhaps there are more mundane concerns that govern the practice. Islanders live in a fluid world. They experience a constant flow of strangers. Especially here, in the Ionian Sea, where boats sail in and out of port day and night.
The islanders are not naive. They know also that strangers can become enemies. The history of the Ionian islands can be read as a succession of invasions. People were often forced to retreat to the heights, where they built fortified villages with lookouts and stone walls. Odysseus himself, and his crew, plundered the islands for their spoils. But islanders also know that, with just an abrupt change in the winds, they too can become strangers.