Reactions to the Persecution of the Jews of Thessaloniki, 1942-1943
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University of Macedonia Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies Reactions to the Persecution of the Jews of Thessaloniki, 1942-1943 Leon Saltiel Supervising Professor: Nikos Marantzidis Members of Committee: Stratos Dordanas, Ireni Lagani Thessaloniki April 2017 1 To all the great friends who walked along with me 2 Outside Thessaloniki, 1942 The accountant sits chewing through the misty arithmetic of crop yields on lined paper that curls and yellows in wet heat, flies buzzing like Messerschmitts. In the dry dirt at the courtyard’s perimeter, rats occupy themselves with the bureaucracy of consumption. Splatterings of sunlight break the shade like incendiary bomb fires. He draws lines, forms columns, the only sound the perfunctory clang of an olive pip spat into the basin of an upturned helmet. Tim Clare 1 October 2011 The Poetry Takeaway @Tate Britain 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 6 Foreword 8 Chapter I: Historical and Theoretical Background 13 Chapter II: The Destruction of Thessaloniki’s Jewish Cemetery 55 Chapter III: What People Knew: Contemporary sources on the Holocaust 94 Chapter IV: Reactions of the City Authorities 119 Chapter V: Reactions from the Institutions: the Church, the Courts, the University 140 Chapter VI: Reactions of the Professional Associations 178 Chapter VII: Conclusion-Aftermath 196 Appendix I: Short bios of key figures 208 Bibliography 215 4 Maps, Graphs and Charts Map I: Division of Greek Territory by Axis Power 11 Map II: The Jewish and Refugee neighborhoods in Thessaloniki, 1930 25 Map III: The areas of the ghettos in Thessaloniki, 1943 36 Map IV: A historical city map of Thessaloniki in 1914, indicating the Jewish cemetery 57 Table I: Jewish losses in Greece during World War II 12 Table II: Deportation trains of Jews of Thessaloniki, 1943 37 Table III: Changes of streets with Jewish names 125 Chart I: Timeline of Measures against Jews of Thessaloniki 32 5 Acknowledgements When I embarked upon the project of this Ph.D. thesis, I have been deeply grateful that I have been able to count on so many people, for their advice and expertise, but also for their support and encouragement. I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Professor Nikos Marantzidis, for accepting to be my academic supervisor and guiding me through this project, together with the other two members of the committee, Stratos Dordanas and Ireni Lagani. I also appreciate Professor Paroula Perraki, an exemplar educator, for encouraging me to pursue this degree. Before I even embarked on this project, the Group for the Study of the History of the Jews of Greece was providing space, inspiration and support and I would like to thank, in particular, its able coordinators and friends Paris Papamichos-Chronakis and George Antoniou. The online discussion group provided many years of interesting and stimulating discussions and exchanges on academic and other matters: George Gedeon, Sam Hassid, Yacov Schibi, Benny Natan, Paul Hagouel, Alkiviades Triantafillou, Sakis Meir, Jean Cohen and Abravanel. I would also like to thank many friends and colleagues for the discussions and information which they willingly shared with me, including Hagen Fleischer, Evanghelos Hekimoglou, Andrew Apostolou, Alexis Menexiadis, Nikos Stavroulakis, Gabriella Etmektsoglou, Maria Kavala, Maria Vassilikou, Katerina Kralova, Joel Kotek, Angel Chorapchiev, Devin Naar, Leon Nar, Pepos Vaenas, Nikos Tzafleris, Tal Bruttmann, Vaios Kalogrias, Richard Breitman, Miltos Pechlivanos, Sofia Christoforidou as well as Ioannis Megas, Andreas Assael and, in particular, Christos Kavadas for generously sharing their private archives with me. I was able to count on many friends for their help and support, including Vassilis Christakis, George Georgoudis, Kallissa Apostolidis, Lavinia Abbot and Lucia & Michael Hessel. In addition, my colleagues at UN Watch for their support and patience during my long discussions of my research. Special thanks go to my friends who patiently helped me with translations, including: Phil Taussky, Julian Voloj, Mathias Hirsch, Elliot Hentov and Mattia Zanazzi. The research involved consulting archives in Greece and some eight countries around the world. I would like to thank the librarians, archivists, museum staff as well as the staff of 6 the Greek institutions and associations for their kind assistance in providing me with the requested access and documentation. I would also like to acknowledge the kind assistance of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, its President David Saltiel, as well as Marcel Hassid, Ida Nahmias and Erika Perahia. As I was developing the argumentation and gathering the documentation, I have been honored by the invitation to present the progress of the research in several fora around the world, as well publish parts of it in prestigious academic journals. The comments and feedback allowed this research project to be significantly improved and enriched and for that I am deeply grateful. While everyone merits an individual mention, regrettably the list would be rather long. I would like to thank in particular the editors and reviewers of Yad Vashem Studies, the Yearbook of the Center for Research on Antisemitism of the Technical University of Berlin, as well as Sychrona Themata for their contributions and feedback during the publication process of the articles. I should also thank the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris for trusting me to curate their special exhibit entitled “Salonika: epicenter of the Destruction of the Jews of Greece,” which gave me additional perceptive and a broad overview. The Ph.D. Research Fellowship awarded to me by Yad Vashem allowed me to thoroughly study the archive of this important institution and consult its extensive library to widen my knowledge on the Holocaust. The discussions with Dan Michman, Dina Porat and David Silberklang have been extremely helpful. I would also like to thank Bnei Brith Lausanne and its then president David Hachuel for their symbolic grant. Finally, I would like to thank my parents and my family for their love and support during this process. Of course, any mistakes or omissions are exclusively my responsibility. 7 Foreword Within a few months of 1943, the overwhelming majority of the members of the historic Jewish community of Thessaloniki were transported from their homes, in cattle cars, to be exterminated at the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. Thessaloniki, a major port city in the Balkans and Greece’s second largest city has the sad privilege of having lost one of the largest percentages of Jewish population during the Second World War compared to other cities in Europe. Almost 95% of the city’s 50,000 Jews did not survive the war, most of them deported and exterminated in Nazi-occupied Poland. This was not a fringe event in the history of Greece’s second biggest city during World War II. Rather, the Jews constituted a large percentage of Thessaloniki’s population, with a long presence in the city, who contributed to the social, economic, political and cultural life. Their suffering was felt by all the citizens in the city and beyond. The Holocaust occurred all over Europe, in different times and regions, with varying levels of success. One of its most successful outcomes was the city of Thessaloniki. This Ph.D. thesis—the first in a Greek University on a subject related to the Holocaust in Greece—will try to look into the reasons for this big loss. Examining in detail many of the local actors, the study will detail the particularities of Thessaloniki in relation to the rest of Occupied Greece and Europe in general. Some of actions that took place are unique for Thessaloniki and this makes the city an ideal case study. Several explanations could be brought up to justify the large number of Jewish deaths. Molho and Nehama provided eight such reasons in their monumental work In Memoriam, the first effort to document the Jewish Genocide in Greece and an homage to the murdered victims of the Holocaust.1 Yet, even if they wrote that “examples of self-abnegation and self- sacrifice [by Greek Christians] exist of course in Thessaloniki but can be counted in the fingers and cannot counterbalance—as big as is the gratitude owned to those who made this sacrifice—the pressures, the blackmail and the betrayals that the Jews went thought trying to save themselves,”2 the attitudes of the local population during this period had not been studied until recently. Only in the last few years have historians integrated this local 1 Michael Molho and Joseph Nehama, In Memoriam: Dedication to the memory of the Jewish victims of Nazism in Greece (Greek) (Thessaloniki: Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, 1974), pp. 126–127. 2 Ibid., p. 150. 8 perspective in the research of the Holocaust in Thessaloniki and started to look into the stance of the war-time Greek-Christian elite of the city, how they reacted to the antisemitic agenda of the Nazis, and the moral priorities they held during that period. The dissertation focuses on Thessaloniki’s Greek Christian elites and examines their role during the Holocaust. By enriching the existing knowledge with new sources and analysis, the study is able to highlight the role of local actors in key events regarding the Holocaust. These include the call for slave labor of all Jewish males, the destruction of the Jewish cemetery of the city—a unique event in occupied Europe—and, lastly, the implementation of the Nazi antisemitic laws on the local level. The dissertation will also endeavor to document the complex relations between Christians and Jews from the interwar period to the post-war, mainly through the lens of transition from empire to nation state, nation-building and state consolidation. Although several actors were involved, both local and outside ones, these processes continued throughout the turbulent first half of the 20th century and have culminated in a city today where the Jews is a distant—and often forgotten—memory.