*The following text is the speech delivered by Columbia professor Mark Mazauer, on Sunday 29/1/2023, at the Thessaloniki Concert Hall, as part of the events for the National Day of Remembrance of Jewish Heroes and Martyrs
I would like to thank the Israeli Community of Thessaloniki and its president David Saltiel for giving me the opportunity to speak to you tonight. Today, a day of remembrance for the Greek Jews who died during the war, we think of those who were killed, about 45.000 Thessalonians and over 60.000 throughout Greece. Along with those who were killed, however, let us think for a moment about those who were never born. Two and three generations of children who never came into the world, after those who would have been their parents were killed. They would be the descendants of those who perished and they would be the ones who, under other circumstances, would mourn the dead. But since children died in the camps in addition to adults, and these children who never grew up to do their own thing, we take on the task of remembering.
Pliny tells us "memory is the greatest gift of nature, and the most necessary of all others for this life." But time itself renews and transforms the work of commemoration: what we will remember is fixed if at the same time constantly changing, and so we who must remember must be prepared to think anew. Tonight I want to ask how what we are asked to remember is related to who and where we are who remember - how are those who were killed related to us, today, here in Thessaloniki.
I will start from the end of January, as we are at that point in time today. The end of January 1943 was a turning point in World War II. It was the moment when the Soviet troops succeeded in Stalingrad to cut the sixth army of the German army in half, and what was left of it was thus isolated in two small sectors of the city, and so it was forced to surrender. The RAF was carrying out its first daylight raids on Berlin. Anglo-American forces had landed in North Africa. The course of the war was unfavorable for the Axis powers.
In Thessaloniki, this second winter under German occupation was difficult. Crowds of refugees who escaped from the Bulgarian occupation zone in the east thronged the city. Many of the inhabitants were hungry and some were starving. At the end of January, a group of students invaded the offices of the rector of the university and demanded that those who had been banned be given sissiti. Resistance was just beginning to be organized in the city of Thessaloniki, and acts of sabotage and other forms of defiance of the invaders were increasing in the countryside. That winter the number of reprisal executions skyrocketed. Christians and Jews, teachers and students, townspeople and villagers, most prisoners in Eptapyrgio or the Pavlos Melas camp. In January 1943 the new prime minister Konstantinos Logothetopoulos in his speech he denounced the communist rebels. The fight against what he called the "Slavocommunist monster" put Thessaloniki at the forefront. For the Jews of Thessaloniki, January 1943 was also a turning point. It was the moment when the Jewish community, largely ignored by Berlin for many months, became a target.
The so-called "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" was now in full swing and the genocide had spread to Poland and the occupied Soviet territories, through extermination camps and death squads. But from the summer of 1942 there was an unexpected diplomatic resistance in other parts of Europe and even from Germany's own partners. The governments of Slovakia, France, Denmark, and Romania were less and less willing to obey Berlin's orders and hand over their Jewish subjects. That autumn the deportations from Slovakia stopped, the Belgians balked and the Romanians revised their views. The Hungarians, realizing that Stalingrad was changing the course of the war, refused the Germans, the Italians were deliberately delaying. One of the reasons was that the news had begun to leak internationally. In mid-December 1942 the ongoing "cold extermination" of Jewish communities throughout Europe was condemned in a simultaneous Joint Declaration of the Members of the United Nations, a declaration which was, so far as I know, the first formulation of the United Nations alliance against the duration of the war, from its inception and one of the first documents of its kind formulated by the UN.
Experience indicated to the Reich's "Jewish experts" that the Jews were most vulnerable where the Reich exercised greatest control.And Greece was a defeated, occupied and dismembered state. Although it had its own government, it was extremely weak, had lost control of some of its territories, and was apparently powerless to feed its people, while also failing to silence them. Protests were growing and armed resistance in the mountains was becoming a real problem for the Axis. It is revealing that the Greek government, unlike others, expressed no objection when its own citizens were included in the massive anti-Jewish measures in Western Europe. Nor had he protested against the first measures of persecution, which were implemented in Thessaloniki in the summer and autumn of 1942. For the Greek state officials in the wartime city, who in their view were holding the line of defense against the Bulgarians, loyalty and indifference were closely linked. Loyalty to the nation meant preserving what territorial gains of the Balkan wars remained and taking no action—including protests against anti-Jewish measures—that might endanger them. In short, their idea of Greece did not include the lives of their fellow Jews. In the destruction and looting of the huge Jewish cemetery, at the end of the year, many played a role: the Commander-in-Chief on behalf of the state, but also the Municipality, the Church, local bodies and businessmen.
Exactly eighty years ago, in January 1943, his deputy, Adolf Eichmann, visited Greece and to prepare the ground for the deportations from Thessaloniki. Eichmann entrusted the supervision of the proceedings to his trusted colleague and friend Dieter Vislichny, whom he recalled to Berlin from his post in Slovakia. As we know from the post-war testimonies of the two men, Eichmann explained to him his new mission in terms that left no room for doubt. It was early February when Visliceny and his team arrived here. They developed a close collaboration with the military administration's political advisor Max Merten. The two men issued a series of directives targeting the Jewish community, which continued throughout the month.
The gruesome story is now well known.The chief rabbi's obedient and destructive compliance with the whole process. The shootings, extortions, beatings and tortures by the Germans, together with their collaborators and the gendarmes. The upheaval of children suddenly having to leave their schools, shopkeepers saying goodbye to colleagues and friends they had known for years. The few, sporadic and ineffectual protests as families were uprooted and forced from their homes, to be forcibly transferred to special zones, before it was their turn to march through the city to Baron's makeshift detention camp Hirsch, next to the railway station to wait, as they were told, though fewer and fewer actually believed, for their resettlement, somewhere in Poland.
The first train left Thessaloniki railway station on 15 March and arrived at Auschwitz on 20 March. About 2.800 people of all ages were crammed into the carriages. Of these, according to camp records, 2.191 were immediately taken to the gas chambers. In my estimation it was the largest transfer the camp had ever received, indicative I think of the haste of the Germans, and was followed by at least 18 more. By mid-summer 1943, over 45.00 people had been deported and most were killed immediately. after their arrival. Few escaped. A very small group was hiding in the city itself. Almost overnight, with astonishing speed and little protest, the historic Jewish community that had stamped the city with its presence, that had helped it prosper for so many centuries and shaped it into something so unique in the world, had been utterly destroyed.
These events took place eighty years ago, and I would like to dwell a little on the significance of this interval. I started studying the history of the city in the early 80s, about the middle of the period from the first displacement in 1943 to the present day. Looking back on my memories, some moments stand out. I think the first was, as soon as I arrived here, a feeling that I was in a real city, in a way that was unlike any other in Greece. If I were to ask myself why I felt this way I would say it was that unique mix of Byzantium, Ottoman atmosphere in the Upper Town and fleeting images on the way from the airport of magnificent mansions of the late 19th century, with the characteristic Sephardic Jewish names. But the more I read about the city, the more I was amazed at how much of that mix had disappeared or remained or remained unspoken. This was particularly noticeable when I was trying to find out what had happened during the war.
The volumes of Nehamas were available at the offices of IKTH, years out of circulation and hard to find elsewhere, and not much else. Molho's old bookstore was still in Tsimiski, a gateway to the past, and I remember my conversations with the owners, Solomon and Rene. But despite the efforts of one or two pioneering researchers, the issue of Jewish Thessaloniki, which today flourishes, had been ignored. As for the Holocaust, the official state avoided dealing with it. And yet his signs were everywhere. In fact, it was not difficult to locate vivid memories of those years. He would only have to be someone the age I am today to have a story to tell. Sometimes you had the feeling that anyone you met over 60, Jew or Christian, had some kind of secret, almost complicit knowledge of events, which were then only very hesitantly beginning to be discussed openly. And often the subject came up almost immediately.
I remember a woman sitting next to me on the plane, who grew up in Thessaloniki, in the Forty Churches, and told me that as a child she used to play with her friends among the scattered bones that were all that remained of the old cemetery, before the campus covers it completely. It had seemed like mere play to her then, now the memory filled her with horror. One day, I wandered down to where the old Settlement 151 was with a survivor who had grown up there, and we were standing in the street chatting, when two men about his age appeared. They were curious to know and after I explained my historical interest, they told us how well they remembered that day in 1943 when the Jews of the neighborhood were forced to leave, because they themselves were students then and among those persecuted were their classmates. They were watched as they left and then each challenged the other to enter one of the empty houses and explore.
None of these stories were, nor are they, unusual. Like I said it was everywhere, it was just rarely said out loud. One morning they showed me some old dusty bags that hadn't been opened since the end of the war. They were filled with official documents from the Occupation and when I opened them, the contents fell to the floor. Typed forms, one after another, with requests for that store or that apartment. Written on the flimsy, poor-quality, almost transparent paper of the time, all the applications were from 1943, and I thought back to those schoolboys and empty houses. The sacks turned out to contain the records of the Israel Property Management Agency, and their files attested to the enormous impact the sudden displacement of Jews had on the city. I suddenly realized that the academic stories I was reading and teaching his students were missing something important. The story of the "Final Solution" did not end at Auschwitz. It resonated in the cities that the victims left behind and continued to resonate for many decades after the end of the war. This was probably true of many other cities, and many wars.
Today, eighty years later, fewer and fewer people have personal memories of those years. When the UN general assembly voted in 2005 to establish an international day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust, it was in recognition of the fact that over time the memories of war survivors fade and disappear. The UN resolution was a call to create another kind of memory, more durable, through learning and culture, and ongoing debate. In this process, the very nature of memory is called into question, because the "we" we are called to remember increasingly refers to generations too young to have experienced the events. In fact, what "we" are called to remember is history. History and memory are two different things.
Perhaps you know the excellent short story of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Boeches Founes the Mnimon. In it, Boches talks about a man called Irenaeus Funes, he is the son of a housekeeper, who, after an accident, acquired the gift or curse of not being able to forget anything at all. Funes is a man who can reconstruct the events of an entire day, every star in the sky, every feature in a landscape he glimpsed. The result, Borges tells us, was that Funes was not very capable of thinking. "In the suffocating mind of Funes there were only details, almost immediately present." For memories to be useful to us, Borges means, there must also be forgetting, and to be useful they themselves must have meaning, be part of an explanation. And here comes the role of history.
The late Yosef Yerushalmi, a distinguished colleague of mine, once wrote a work entitled Zahor, on Jewish Memory and History, to explain what was gained and what was lost as modern Jews had begun to turn more and more to history in place of memory. For Jerusalem, memory was rooted in faith and holy books and traditions and helped to maintain the immediacy of the believer's connection with God, while history was the application of arguments and evidence to the past and the recognition of cause and effect. . In more psychological terms, memories are often deeply personal, momentary flashes of the past that mysteriously connect us to ourselves in earlier times, while history is out there, out in the open, becoming a matter of dialogue and argument, unaffected by who we are or how we feel. that day.
Memories of course can be shared. French historian Maurice Halbwachs, who died in Buchenwald in 1945, devoted much of his life to understanding the significance of these memories. Collective memory for Halbwachs was one of the keys to modern life that united people. Halbwachs wanted to show that even something like memory, seemingly personal and connected to the psyche, is not an isolated and subjective experience, but something that can have a powerful collective function as a connective tissue in a social group. But we can see today what Halbach could not, that what brings people together can also tear them apart. Because collective memories can begin to compete with each other, and thus cultivate a form of indifference. So for us the challenge is to find forms of collective memory that overcome this barrier and bring us back together.
Perhaps it is because we are gathered here in this admirable city, which has undergone so many slow transformations and sudden transformations, that I began to think whether we should reflect on collective memory from the beginning - not as a characteristic of individuals or groups but of the place itself. What the city remembers, is a question that interests me more and more, it is what underpinned my whole approach to its history. This city, that doesn't take sides, that has seen peoples come and go and embraced them all. Which does not act politically and knows little about who ordered what and was responsible, but remembers the daily lives of those who lived in it, their habits, moments of conflict and unimaginable change – an expulsion, a fire, a new road through a old quarter. Where better than Thessaloniki to explore a model of remembrance that includes rather than excludes, that does not simply recognize in its suffering the lonely fate of each group, but traces its connection to the others?
The YDIP archives, for example, are a treasure trove of such memories since 1943. Take a common example, among hundreds: a tailoring shop at 39 Valaoritou Street. Until the spring of 1943 it belonged to a certain Avraham S., after the displacement it was given to a certain Vassilis K., who, according to the records, presented for he had lost his house in Drama, possibly escaping to escape the barbarities of the Bulgarians. How can we disentangle the memory of one from the memory of the other? Can't we just let memory guide us and follow its connections?
In Thessaloniki successive layers of history await archaeologists. The necessary work has actually begun because the public memory of the city is much more active and richer today than it was 40 years ago. The silence of those years has been lifted and two full generations of distinguished historians and archivists have patiently unearthed such evidence and made it available to the public. Brilliant teachers in inner-city schools encourage their students to explore the identities and destinies of children who attended the same classes and lived in the same neighborhoods before them. These stories children explore without guilt or shame, and seem to intuitively understand the importance of this shared past with others who lived before them.
A child who witnessed the events of 1943, if still alive, will be close to 90. If he or she is Jewish his or her parents were probably born in the decade of wars that shaped the city and made it Greek. His or her grandparents probably grew up in Abdul Hamit's time and may have spoken little or no Greek. Therefore, it is biologically possible to meet someone in this hall whose grandparents remembered the time when the wall of Thessaloniki still stood on the sea and a railway station to Europe did not even exist, not even in the imagination. If he was a Christian, the parents and grandparents of this 90-year-old man today, were likely born outside the city, spoke a dialect in an inland village, or one of the coasts of Asia Minor or the Black Sea, and they brought their own traumatic memories of flight and lost homelands. The layers of our memory travel through time and space with incredible speed.
Because Thessaloniki in 1943 was made up of the memories that surrounded it from other cities - Trabzon, Smyrna, Livorno, Córdoba, which their inhabitants brought with them when they arrived here. And the city itself remained alive in the hearts as they left and took it with them, in the way that some, as we know, remembered Tsitsani's song In the Narrows of Thessaloniki, even inside Auschwitz.
That same year the old town was brought back to life by a 49-year-old ailing mathematician, sitting in the kitchen of his farmhouse in the hills of the Hudson Valley, when the smell of freshly baked bread took him back to "memories of a past so distant that it makes you to wonder if you are really that old', memories of a time before the war, of the sounds of the muezzin and the market, of the day he stood on the deck of an Italian steamer in 1915, and saw Salonika, his birthplace, disappear into the horizon for the last time time. A multitude of memories came pouring out and these were what this writer, Leon Siaki, recalls in his life memoir Farewell to Thessaloniki.
In closing, I would like to say that the our primary obligation today is to remember those who were murdered. But precisely because the Jews of Thessaloniki have always been an integral part of the city, the significance of their loss should not be isolated from the larger history of the city itself. It is in the nature of history to change over time, just as we and the questions we have about the past change. There are things that are no longer possible to remember today because those who remembered them are no longer with us. But there are other things that it is our responsibility to remember because they have only just become known. In short, when we mourn the useless and horrible calamity inflicted on the Jews of Thessaloniki 80 years ago, we remember the beginning and the world of which they were a part. Only then, I believe, can we begin to grasp the enormity of what was lost and reflect on what is really required of us today.
SOURCE: makthes.gr, 31.1.2023
ABOUT:
MESSAGES
POST OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC ON HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
MESSAGE OF THE PRIME MINISTER FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
POST OF THE ISRAEL AMBASSADOR ON HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
EVENTS IN GREECE
#WE REMEMBER 2023 HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL CAMPAIGN
EVENTS FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023 AT I.K. GREECE
EME & GAITE INSTITUTE ORGANIZE FILM SCREENING FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
BOOK PRESENTATION "SHOUT FOR TOMORROW"
EVENT IN THESSALONIKI FOR THE NEW ERT SERIES "THE BRACELET OF FIRE"
BOOK PRESENTATION "ELIAS PETROPOULOS. For the Jews of Salonica"
TRIKALA: HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
THE KISE FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023 - Meeting with the Special Envoys on Anti-Semitism
KIS FOR THE HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY 2023 -Meeting with the Special Envoys on Anti-Semitism
PRESENTATION OF THE BOOK "BERRY NAHMIAS - CRY FOR TOMORROW"
THE THEATER PERFORMANCE "Saturday" PRESENTED IN LARISA FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
THE EVENT OF THE REGION OF ATTICA & THE I.K. ATHENS FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
THE EVENT OF I.K. CHALKIDAS FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
EVENTS OF THE THESSALIA REGION AND OF THE I.K. VOLOU FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
THE EVENT OF THE EPIRO REGION AND THE I.K. IOANNINE FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
SPECIAL MEETING IN THE PARLIAMENT FOR THE MEMORIAL DAY OF THE GREEK JEWISH MARTYRS
PAKETHRA TOURS STUDENTS TO XANTHI JEWISH MEMORIAL SITES FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES OF ARTAS MUSIC SCHOOL FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
THE 2ND PRIMARY SCHOOL OF TRIKALON HONORED HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
EVENT IN CHANIA FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
EVENTS OF THE THESSALIA REGION AND OF THE I.K. VOLOU FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
PIERCE SERIES OF EVENTS FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
ACTION OF THE 2ND EPAL OF RETHYMNO FOR THE INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
OPENING OF THE EXHIBITIONS OF THE MUNICIPALITY OF ATHENS – WE FOR THE HOLOCAUST
OUTDOOR PHOTO EXHIBITION OF THE MUNICIPALITY OF ATHENS ON THE HOLOCAUST
THE "NEVER AGAIN" OF THE CHILDREN IN LARISA FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
3rd GEL KAVALAS: LEARNING THE HISTORY AND TRAGIC FATE OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF KAVALAS
EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES OF THE 1ST GE.L. KILKIS FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY
EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES OF THE 8th GEL IOANNINE FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY
EVENTS ABROAD
THE PLENARY OF THE PARLIAMENT OF CYPRUS OBSERVED A MINUTE OF SILENCE ON HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
EVENT OF THE CONSULATE GENERAL OF GREECE IN NEW YORK FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
ARTICLES – INTERVIEWS – TESTIMONIALS
BERRY NAHMIAS: A TESTIMONY. A SCREAM. A LIFETIME
INTERVIEW OF GEN. SECRETARY KISE ON HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023
ARTICLE OF GEN. SECRETARY KISE ON HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023: "EVERY PERSON HAS HIS NAME"
ARTICLE LEON SALTIEL: Thoughts on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2023
ARTICLE OF GEN. SECRETARY KISE ON HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023: "EVERY PERSON HAS HIS NAME"
"THE BRACELET OF FIRE": BEATRIKI SAIA MAGRIZOU SPEAKS TO ERT ABOUT THE REAL STORY BEHIND THE SERIES
"THE CRYING GIRL" - THE SHOCKING STORY OF A PHOTO FROM THE EXTERMINATION OF THE JEWS OF JOHNINE
NAKI BEGA, AUSCHWITZ PRISONER 77092 SAYS TO "K": "LET US DIE NOW. DENBORUMELLO"