By Stavros Jima, DAILY, 21.3.2023. Hela Metalon was twelve years old when one day her father appeared in the living room of their house with an old, empty aquarium. The little fishes had died and little Hela, like her other three siblings, were waiting for him to replace them with others.
Instead of fish, however, Heinz Cunio put in a lamp and “some, strange to my eyes, things. It was a piece of wire mesh, a glass and inside it a piece of bush, a diary, an old rosary and a bar of soap!'
Kunio, a Jew from Thessaloniki who survived the Holocaust, had "set up" Auschwitz in his house! The aquarium was the first "acquaintance" of his children with the trauma that their father carried inside him. Cunio fiercely fought death in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany and (sur)lived "to talk", as he said. "You ask all these things if you're a child," Kunio's daughter tells "K" today.
"Dad may not have answered us directly, but he probably wanted to make us ask. I can't explain it any other way. We were asking, still children, what is one, what is the other in the aquarium and finally it was a part of his life, the most dramatic. Instead of fish, he had put inside the diary in which he had recorded his experiences immediately after liberation while in the Red Cross hospital in Ebenze, Austria, a piece of barbed wire from Auschwitz, a bar of soap that must have been one of the famous "soaps" ” they say they made people, at least that's what they were told. And there I started to ask and learn, I first came into contact with the Holocaust and what happened to my father. After my twelve years."
Eighty years have passed these days since the departure (March 15, 1943) of the first train, which carried Jews from Thessaloniki bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau and from there to death. The family of fourteen-year-old Heinz Kunio was on the first mission, which started today for Poland. More will follow, a total of 18, until August. Only 1.200 of the nearly 48.000 survived. And those who returned fell into silence. They avoided talking about what happened, fearing that they would not be believed. They felt they had to explain to friends, neighbors, society, how it happened and they lived and everyone else perished. How were they able to manage the mental traumas that followed them for the rest of their lives and did not let them forget? Only nine are still alive in Thessaloniki and are no longer able to speak due to advanced age.
From today's silent march in Thessaloniki, for the first time, witnesses to the most terrible crime ever committed by the human mind will be absent. Cunio, who upon his return from Auschwitz became the "cry of the silent", confined to his bed, fell silent too, at the age of 96... However, their children live and remember. "K" talked to some of them about how their lives went with a father or mother who went through so much.
"My father still has nightmares at 95"
"As a child I grew up in an extremely happy home, with a father who worked a lot as a merchant, while when he was at home he was devoted to us. Nothing betrayed what had been etched into him his entire life. At least we didn't realize it. But I believe that he hid it from us so as not to create trauma for us", Hela Metalon told me. "In hindsight I understood that he always had nightmares, he thought about it, it tormented his soul. Fifteen years later, in 60, my father went to Auschwitz alone. What soul power must he have had? She was torturing him, but she hid it. »
He had a dual attitude. He was trying to protect us, but in general he was looking for it and torturing himself by doing projects, such as recording 37.000 names of exterminated Jews of Thessaloniki, which constantly kept his mind there. As I grew older I saw him devote himself more and more to the community and speak more publicly about the Holocaust. When I was 18 years old, his book, "I experienced death", was published, which at first he did not want to publish. “Who cares, are you okay? do you think everyone wants to learn about the Holocaust?” he said. "Then I understood why he said that and what was happening to those who returned. Because these people returned from the camps and no one believed them. The Jews themselves, not only did not believe them but also experienced the survivor's syndrome, they blamed them because they returned and the others did not."
However, the mark on the hand, the terrible number-tattoo, could not go unnoticed by children's eyes. "That was the first thing I asked him. He told me the truth, he didn't hide anything from me. I asked him if this was getting out of hand and he said "no, and I don't want it to go away". "When I asked him how he managed and survived this hell, he told me sometimes miraculously and sometimes that he lived so that the world would know what happened in there. He was telling us about his imprisonment in the Auschwitz camp and there his words were blocked.
He told us that they suffered a lot and he lived because he knew German. That's why he insisted that we learn German. I have been learning German since first grade. He desperately wanted us to learn this language, perhaps because it saved him - and I wasn't even digesting it." At some point, Cunio started an information crusade about the Holocaust in schools and abroad, in Europe and America. The daughter was with him in this effort and describes. “The big push for that was writing his book. That was what gave him the will and the courage to speak out. You know, Kounio's book was the first living testimony that came out in Greece in a book. Released in '80. Then he started pressuring the community to open up to this issue, holding exhibitions, lectures, speeches.
"Where I saw him break out was in the Ebenze camp in Austria. We had been invited for the presentation of the book and on the occasion he asked to visit Ebenze, the camp from which he was liberated. They had been taken there from Auschwitz by death marches, on foot and by trains in open wagons usually. My father suffered terribly in the Ebenze mine. More so than Auschwitz. They had to work endless hours in the mines and galleries to hide the Nazis' munitions and planes. A man with a height of 34 m had reached 1,86 kg.
"When we arrived at the mine, we entered the gallery where he worked. He was walking alone ahead with the cane. We let him go to the end of the corridor. He stood there and began to weigh the rock with the stick. Meanwhile back we were all the family, my mom, my sister. He was beating the wall with his cane and shouting: “Damn Hitler where are you? You have turned to dust, I am here with my grandchildren and children. You are the one who was destroyed." And it was heavy, bam-bam the wall. First time I saw him in such a state.
"The fact that my father made it his life's purpose to talk about the Holocaust was partly the healing of his wound. But he was never completely cured. Now he is suffering, at 95, more than ever. He suffers from nightmares, wakes up at night, sees bullets impaling the balcony."
Hasdai Capon "They regretted living"
“On their return they went through a long period of mourning combined with regrets that they lived and others, their own people, died. And only in the last 15-20 years, feeling that they are also passing away, who were the last witnesses, they started talking to us," says Hasdai Capon, son of survivor Benjamin Capon. "They wanted to pass on to the younger generations what happened there and as a sign of honor to the people who left. It took years for them to overcome their grief and regrets and try to record the events with oral or written testimonies," he adds. “My father spoke to us in old age and we went to camp together. The grandfather didn't even want to discuss the matter." Benjamin Capon made it out of the Bergen-Belsen camp alive and had spoken to "K" about a shocking moment when they were forced to eat corpses to stay alive. "There you didn't see dirt, you only saw dead people, all dead in piles and on the dirt. We had the dead as a pillow, another was eating the dead – not to mention that I was also eating – there was no food, there was nothing…”.
Chrysoula Paliadeli "How to tell the truth?"
It was Maundy Thursday and the mother of Mrs. Chrysoula Paliadeli-Saatsoglou was dyeing red eggs for Easter. "I remember her painting while crying. I asked her, mom why are you crying? Why do Christians believe that like today the Jews crucified Christ, he answered me." Ms. Paliadeli's mother, Jean Saikarto, is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who, upon her return, married a Christian. A Jewish woman who returned from the concentration camps with serious wounds, like everyone else, in the soul and found herself a bride in a Christian family. It was not a common thing back then. "In order to marry my father, she had to become a Christian, there was no civil marriage then. I don't know how difficult her decision was, but afterwards she was okay with her obligations to both one religion and the other. This contradiction between tradition and her life at the time was something she carried. My grandfather - from my father - used to say that "the most Christian of my brides is the Jew".
This coexistence of the two religions in the same family atmosphere was good for both me and my brother, in the sense that we transcended the boundaries of a certain group, we became a little more tolerant of diversity. Of course, on a psychological level, the number on the hand, was inside our house. Once while traveling in Athens by train, a fellow passenger asked her what this number was and she replied: My home phone number. And when I asked her, mom, why didn't you tell him the truth, she answered: Where should I start and what should I tell him so that he understands? A hundred years old today, Saikarto no longer remembers. In recent years, he led the march of silence in a wheelchair. She was the first, perhaps the only one, of those who survived to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, thus sending a message to society.