Haifa 12/12/02

FREEDOM OR DEATH: The Jews in the

Steven Bowman, University of Cincinnati Visiting Professor, University of Haifa

“Better one hour of freedom than 40 years of slavery and prison”

Rigas Pheraios (1757-1798)

Neither the Greek Government nor the Greek people accepted the surrender of their trapped and exhausted armies in April 1941. Nor did the people of Crete who fought alongside the remnants of the Greek army and the British Expeditionary Force accept the German invasion and subsequent occupation. Resistance continued from the victory over the Italians and was the Greek response to the Axis invasions. Resistance took many forms. Urban resistance emphasized gathering of information, refusal to volunteer for labor in Germany, occasional acts of sabotage, demonstrations and protests, sympathy with and assistance to British prisoners of war; even survival was an act of resistance. Rural resistance, in the main, consisted of hiding food and offering sanctuary and assistance to escaped British POWs and to resistance fighters. Eventually the rural population contributed its sons – and daughters – to the new vision of Greece imposed by EAM-ELAS. The mountains however have justly claimed the historical high ground for resistance. It was to the mountains, as traditionally among the klephtes of the Ottoman period, that men and women ran from the occupying authorities and planned their attacks. The mountains, as Leon Uris described them, were angry, indeed as angry as a swarm of bees whose pastoral life was disturbed by rabid wolves. The resistance in Greece began as a continuation of the war against the Axis forces that had invaded, conquered, and occupied Greece. Independent bands of andartes formed out of the remnants of the armies that refused to surrender. Other bands emerged out of the klephtic tradition that had been part of Greek mountain life for centuries. These two sets of fighting groups, each consisting of numerous and unconnected bands of desperate men and adventurers, committed acts of sabotage and ambush as well as lived off the land in traditional brigand fashion. In both cases the support of the rural population was generally forthcoming. At the same time a spontaneous urban resistance blossomed to assist stranded Allied soldiers and to gather information that was sent to Cairo and Istanbul where it was processed by British SIS and SOE. By the Fall of 1941 a coalition of Leftist parties formed under the rubric EAM to organize the urban resistance. EAM was a coalition of a range of parties that had constituted the passive opposition to the dictatorship of John Metaxas. It was to include many supporters of the Liberal Party, the Venizelist officers retired under the dictatorship, and the refugee quarters surrounding the main urban centers that were increasingly subject to growing Communist influence. Those Republican officers who eschewed Communism founded EDES at about the same time. Soon EAM formed an army – ELAS – that, after a series of campaigns to reduce the independent bands and incorporate them into its structure, ultimately came to control some 90% of the Greek hinterland. EAM-ELAS was secretly controlled by the Greek Communist Party and quickly began to establish its new order under the guise of laokratia -–people's rule – during the occupation. Later it clashed with the liberation government that accompanied the British at the end of 1944, a clash that devolved into open civil war that tragically lasted until 1949. The decade of the 1940s may then be best described as a Greek tragedy whose heroic opening scene and brave resistance formed the first act. The last two years of the occupation represented the formation of the opposing sides in the forthcoming civil war that completed the destruction of the old order initiated by the Axis occupation. Most of the Greek population was involved in some way or another in the resistance. Many Greeks among the non-combatant population, as well as among the fighters and those under the protection of the resistance, suffered from the vicissitudes of the larger political battle for the future of Greece. These Greeks, who constituted the mass of the population, were squeezed between the political leaders who fought against or collaborated with the occupiers and the myriads of victims of Axis reprisals and maladministration. How they responded to the challenge of survival under these conditions and their traditional reaction to foreign persecution is a major theme of the Greek resistance story.

Our story of the Jews follows the vicissitudes of one of the many social and ethnic groups during this tragic period, namely the Jews of Greece who drank the bitter dregs both at home and in their final exile. The story of the Jews in the resistance is less known than their tragic annihilation at the hands of the Germans in the death camps of Poland and Germany. Even that story is treated seperately from the main themes of Greece’s history during the decade of the 1940s. Yet the Jews were Greek citizens and most of the youth were fully integrated into the culture and character of their contemporaries. Hence this paper will be an attempt to integrate their wartime resistance activities into the complicated history of the Greek resistance. During the war that chased the Italians out of Greece, some 13,000 Jews took part as officers, non commissioned officers, and enlisted men. They helped to defend the and stormed Italian defenses in the snow- covered mountains of , occasionally led by their own junior officers. Jewish doctors served at the front and in central hospitals. Many others were involved in logistics and supplies. A few joined the air force or served in the Greek navy. The highest-ranking officer to die on the field of battle was Lt. Colonel Mordecai Frizis of Chaliks, the hero of the Battle of Kalamas that turned the Italian flank in . He was soon designated one of the two national heroes by Metaxas during the war. A number of these soldiers refused to return home after the surrender of the encircled Epirus Greek army and remained in the mountains to fight with the emerging resistance. They were joined by a handful of survivors of the Metaxas forts. During 1942, after Stalin’s call for Communists to fight the Fascists and Nazis, Jewish and Greek Communists went to the mountains where their organizational skills quickly led to local leadership positions among many bands in , in and in the Aegean islands. Royalist dominated bands (some with Republican junior officers) emerged in the Epirus, the Peloponnesus, Crete, and in Thrace. Jews could be found among these as well; the main criterion for their participation in a given band was more often than not proximity rather than ideology. One did not volunteer to the andartiko, except for the Venezelist officers and the Communists. Rather most of the people in the andartiko escaped to it. From June 1941 until late 1942 the major Greek contribution to the war effort had been the plethora of information collected by individuals and networks in the urban centers, which was forwarded to British intelligence [SIS and later SOE] centered in Cairo. A number of Jewish networks of this kind functioned in Saloniki. For instance, Reich officers were quartered among the middle-class Jewish families, some of whom spoke German and learned much from casual conversation with the officers. On the other hand, the network of Sam Modiano functioned through the Italian Consulate. Other groups existed in where the Italian occupiers were even more slack in security. Urban women were particularly effective throughout the war in reporting troop movements and unit identifications, key information for military intelligence. Recent work has shown that British intelligence, inefficient at best, was overwhelmed with data from Greek and German sources that is perhaps of more assistance to historians than it was to the contemporary beleaguered clerks. The arrival of the British Mission under Brigadier Edmund Myers, a staff officer at the British War College in Haifa before being vetted to lead the mission into Greece to destroy the Bridge in November 1942, opened a new phase in the Greek resistance. Myers was assisted by two effective bands operating in Central Greece: EDES under the leadership of , a sometime Republican officer who later became a royalist at British urging, and , a recanted Communist who was a kapetan of ELAS. Myers, by the way, was a Sephardi Jew whose family came to Britain in the 17th century. By curious coincidence he was the cousin of General Bernard Freyburg who led the New Zealand Division and had commanded the British show in Crete. These two Imperial Jewish officers directed two of the major British military adventures in Greece. Both were partially successful in their limited military objectives. After accomplishing his initial mission Myers was ordered to organize the Greek resistance. By the summer of 1943 he had negotiated the National Bands Agreement which was an attempt to stave off the internecine fighting between ELAS and the other bands. Shortly thereafter Myers was replaced by his second Christopher Woodhouse, who pursued a royalist and anti-Communist campaign dictated by the Foreign Office in London. Hence the earlier British military approach to the resistance changed into a political approach that further exacerbated tensions within the . In the meantime thousands of Jews had been sent on forced labor to repair the railroads and bridges destroyed by British sappers during their April-May retreat. One group of those sappers was led by Captain William Hammond and consisted of Palestinian Jews whom he had personally trained. These Jews and others parachuted into the Balkans from 1942 to 1944 were part of the sustained cooperation between the Sochnut and British Intelligence Services during the war. Greek Jews however were sent to slave and die in the chrome and other mines vital for the German war effort. The developing resistance tried, with occasional success, to recruit among these slaves. A few did escape and join, although harsh German reprisals tended to discourage such action. A number of those who did escape later became kapetans in ELAS fighting units, such as Itzhak Mosheh (“Kitsos”), Robert Mitrani(“Hippokrates”), David Broudo and Iddo Shimshi (“Makkabaios”). The number of Jews in the fighting resistance by the end of 1942 was still small, as was the general number of andartes at the time. It would increase dramatically during the Spring of 1943 during the period of deportations from Saloniki which sent over 45,000 Jews with Greek citizenship to their deaths in Auschwitz. During that same Spring an estimated 500 young Jews joined the resistance bands, according to Itshak Mosheh (known as Kapetan Kitsos), mainly in the region of Naoussa. These were recruited for the most part by Greek and Jewish Communists and Socialists and included a number of active young women as well, such as Daisy Carasso. These Jews were committed to the mountain resistance since they had no homes or families to return to nor relatives in the mountains. The Nazis were embarked on a policy to destroy every Jew who came under their jurisdiction. Those excluded from their clutches were Jews who held the citizenship of Reich allies and those Jews in the Italian zone of occupied Greece. The Bulgarians were more accommodating. They deported the Jews of their zone of occupation to Treblinka where every man, woman and child was murdered in primitive gas chambers upon arrival. The local Italian commander, on the other hand, refused to hand over the Jews in his zone to the Gestapo. Returning to our topic, we can now distinguish five periods of Jewish enlistment in the andartiko: Those who went to the mountains in the wake of the Greek surrender in Spring 1941; those who escaped forced labor in the Autumn of 1942; those who fled Salonika in Spring 1943; those who escaped Athens in Autumn 1943; and those of the former Italian zone who chose to escape the roundups of Pesach 1944. In other words we can identify the majority of Jews in the andartiko on the basis of the German persecutions of Greek Jewry. That is to say, most Jews in the Resistance were not part of any ideological persuasion that contributed to the civil war; rather they were fighters against the invaders of their homeland. Many were to suffer persecution by the post war rightists for having fought on the losing side in the emerging civil war. The particular contributions of the Jews to the andartiko, on the one hand, and to the revolutionary program of EAM-ELAS, on the other, define the importance of the Jews in the resistance and justify emphasizing their particular ethnic story during the war. It is estimated that some 8000-10,000 Jews were in the mountains of Greece during the occupation. Of this number I estimate that as many as 1000 Jews served in the andartiko, that is about one third more than Joseph Matsas, the historian of the Jews in the resistance estimated. [We should note that some of these fighters were from Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Central Europe, and the British Empire including Palestine as well as possibly elsewhere.] True, these Jews went sta bouna (to the mountains) at different times as we noted; nevertheless this is our rough estimate from the end of the occupation. What made the Jews special? The Jews were a highly urbanized population with special skills in languages, commerce, medicine, which they had used to good effect during the war against the Italians. Forced into the mountains, their skills were now put at the disposal of the resistance. Young men trained to fight in Albania fought in the Greek mountains and assisted the specialized sabotage teams supplied to the British and American missions in the mountains. Young Jews eager for revenge against the Germans who killed their parents in Greece, such as Marco Carasso, were picked for ELAS’s officer training school established in September 1943 and died leading their men in attacks on the enemy. Others, in particular German-speaking refugees from Central Europe, helped demoralize the enemy be appealing to specialized German units – in particular the punishment battalions that garrisoned much of occupied Greece - to defect to ELAS and fight against the SS and Gestapo, which they hated. Jewish males and females recruited among the peasants for ELAS and EPON. Jewish girls trained local females in the basics of nursing and raised their consciousness as females in the male dominated traditional society of rural Greece. Some fought as well, such as kapetanissa Sarika of Evvoia who led her own troop of women against German targets. Young Jews eager for revenge against the Germans who killed their parents in Greece, such as Marco Carasso, were picked for ELAS’s officer training school established in September 1943 and died leading their men in attacks on the enemy. Jews were also to be found as fighters, some of whom were trained Communist leaders, and most had military experience in various units during the Albanian war. They were among the first to be given rifles at the beginning of ELAS’s armed resistance. As Kapetan Kitsos recalled, Naousa was liberated with one rifle that could not fire and with the 100 rifles they captured they were able to recruit local officers. As Jews came to mountains in the Spring of 1943 they were given captured German rifles commensurate with their military experience.

Many served in other important non combatant functions. Jewish males and females translated for ELAS and at Woodhouse’s headquarters.[The Americans sent to the mountains were drafted from Greek Americans in the American army and did not especially need local translators. Even so the Jews knew French, Italian, and occasionally German which was of inestimable use.] Jewish merchants familiar with the mountain villages of Macedonia from their pre-war trade served as scouts for the Allied Missions. Even more important they coordinated logistics to feed the various resistance units. They even established agricultural cooperatives in the mountains that helped to revolutionize the peasant economy. Jews too used their skills to write and print resistance newspapers that served to educate the population to EAM’s program of social revolution. Others served as intermediaries between the German occupying units that swept through the mountains foraging for food and the local peasants. Still other specialized in logistics based on prewar commercial skills and organizational training in university courses on agriculture and economy. Doctors, pre-medical students, and trained nurses were to be found throughout the mountains in hospitals and among fighting units. The resistance – both ELAS and EDES - valued its Jewish members for their various skills as well as for their contacts outside of Greece. EAM in Evvoia requested and assisted several Jews with Turkish citizenship – the Barki brothers - to organize their own ferry service to get Jews out of Greece and to bring medical supplies and equipment into Greece. That escape network included urban Jews of Athens working with Venizelist politicians at one end; Jewish organizers in the middle passage of Evvoia working with local ELAS leaders; and, on the other side, Jewish agents from the United States -- alongside American, Greek, and British military and civilian personnel – working in Turkey. This network resulted in the rescue of some 1500 Jews from Occupied Greece. ELAS even asked Rabbi Barzilai, after it helped to rescue him (perhaps kidnap is to be understood), to broadcast appeals to the Allies for equipment to the ill-equipped army that controlled 90% of occupied Greece. The victory of the Greeks over the Italians was an important factor in maintaining Allied morale and in providing the opportunity for British reconquest of territory in Africa lost to Italy in 1940. The Greek resistance was important in the overall British strategy to keep the Germans concerned over sabotage and rebellion among the occupied countries. However, the Greek experience, heroic as it was, was sacrificed to broader aims than the preservation of Greek liberty. The Greek Jews too suffered from overall British policy, which led to the German occupation. Ninety percent of them died in the Holocaust as a result. Those Jews who went to the mountains continued the fight, and like their synagonistes they suffered the vicissitudes of British policy after liberation. Silent for the past half century their stories are now appearing and will be included in a forthcoming book on the Jews in the Greek Resistance which will be a long overdo andarta la-andartes. As a postscript it is not out of place to recall here the Greek Jewish participation in the Warsaw revolt of August 1944 and to their contribution to the Sonderkommando Revolt in Auschwitz in . The latter was a suicidal battle by slaves already condemned to death. Yet their continued fight against the Nazi oppressor gave a ray of hope to the helpless slaves in the various subcamps of the Auschwitz complex. Its timing was coincidental to the slaughter inflicted by the andartes in Greece against the retreating Axis forces.

NOTE: The material summarized in this lecture is documented in my forthcoming study: Andarte le Andartes. The Jews in the Greek Resistance.