Her Odette Varon - Vassar*

Newspaper THE NEWS, 23.1.2023: Her book, published in 1989, was the first in Greece by a camp survivor. In the new version and the epimeter, the evolution of the memory of the Holocaust is highlighted.

The first reading of Berrys Nahmia's manuscript, in the distant summer of 1987, was seminal for me. It was as if the author, my beloved aunt who had never spoken to me about the subject, took me by the hand and put me into the world of the camp: the world of death for the many and survival for the lucky few, world of absurdity, where there is no reason, where arbitrariness is law, men have no name and women have no hair. Where there is no "why". The reader travels with her piled on the train, enters the camp and faces the radical evil, but also the enormous difficulties in daily survival in a universe that has nothing to do with the normal world.

Displacement

In April 1944 Berry Cassuto is a twenty-year-old girl living in Kastoria in a large Jewish family. The Kastorian Jews, like the Thessalonians and all the Jews of the cities of Macedonia and Thrace, were Sephardic, i.e. descendants of the Spanish-speaking Jews who came persecuted from Catholic Spain and found refuge in the welcoming cities of the Ottoman Empire. So rooted for nearly four and a half centuries on the shores of Lake Kastoria, the Jewish community lived and prospered in the district called "Ebraida". Berry herself was very attached to the place of birth and loved her special homeland very much. Her pre-war world, as she understood it, consisted of Kastorians, Jews and Christians.

In Kastoria, she will be arrested by the German Occupation authorities, along with her entire family and the entire Jewish community (approximately 1.000 people) on March 24, 1944. After being held for a few days in the Girls' Gymnasium, packed, frightened and fasting, they will be transferred to the camp in Harmankioi, a suburb of Thessaloniki, where on April 1st they will board the train with an unknown destination. On April 11, the expedition will arrive at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, an unknown destination at the time, even though the entire community of Thessaloniki had been displaced there a year earlier (spring of '43). The rest of the family, from her grandfather to her very young siblings and cousins, will be sent straight to the gas chambers. Young men like her brother and her uncle will not survive either. So are friends her age with babies. She and her slightly younger cousin Gita Zacharia are saved by the fact that they don't have babies, that they are young and strong and are chosen for work. And when Berry desperately tries to get into the truck with her father and the others, unaware that it is destined for the gas chambers, a German stops her, beats her and forces her to obey. First coincidence: if someone else in her position had not been so persistent, the girl would have had the same fate as the rest. The life of the survivors is made of infinite such coincidences.

The cry for tomorrow

Her book is divided into three parts: her life before the displacement, the camp and the return. The account of the camp experience takes up 160 pages out of 260. It begins, like most accounts, with the horrific journey to Auschwitz, continues with a ten-month stay in the Birkenau camp, then recounts the horrific march, "death race" , as he calls it, and finally the Nazi camps in Germany through which he passes and where the liberation will find him at the beginning of May '45. Fourteen months almost since her displacement. The remaining 100 pages are divided into the previous, the childhood and teenage years in Kastoria, the paradise lost forever, and the period from the liberation until the return to Greece.

In the camp she will learn about the horrible death of all her relatives in the gas chambers, she will know the fear of this death and for herself, the hardships, the cold, the hunger. The camp was starving. He writes about two slices of bread with margarine and jam, an unexpected gift, which he won one day after singing Jewish songs to a Polish woman Stubbova: "I looked at it, I looked at it again, I first put it in my nose to smell it, to nourish my heart , then to taste it. Then, before I even put it in my mouth, I remembered Dora and ran to offer her some of the surprise I won that day" (p. 136). The cold, the hunger, the fear, all that we may experience in normal life at some point, have nothing to do with what they experienced in Birkenau, other words would almost have to be invented. And he worked hard: the Canadian commando, sorting through huge piles of clothes and other items to be sent to Germany, was a great fortune. She could work inside rather than out in the open and "organize," as was the word in the prisoners' dialect for what they secretly took, at great risk, of certain articles which she exchanged at night for others more necessary to her, usually food. In other words, he learned to survive in the most unimaginable and inhumane conditions.

Liberation will therefore find her in Malchow, a camp near Berlin. Then and only then does she break down: "As soon as I saw the Russian doctors, something strange happened to me: I abandoned myself and left myself in their hands. I didn't want to react anymore. Enough, I said" (p. 223-224). She was saved by the Russian doctors and nurses, who took great care of her. That was one of the moments he came very close to death.

Return

The return was not pre-ordained, Berry made many decisions about her life since the day Malkhov was liberated. For the Greek Jewish survivors there is no way to return to Greece. They have to make it on their own. The return odyssey is one of the most fascinating sections of her book. After recovering, he meets a group of Greek "free workers" who had gone to work in Nazi Germany and were looking for a way to return. He sneaks with them from the Russian sector of Berlin to the American sector, and the Americans send them to Brussels. There, a wealthy childless Jewish couple offers to adopt her, to study her, to take care of her. Denies. He insists on returning to Greece, and succeeds. She has become an emancipated young woman. Her narrative ends while she is on the military plane that takes her from Brussels to Athens. There it stops, a meteor in the air. Then, it will be another era.

The reason for the camps

The silence surrounding the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis, with the help of their allies and loyal collaborators, was heavy and lasted for many decades. More generally, however, the discourse produced by the experience of the Nazi camps, camp literature, as it was later called, was a difficult discourse. Most witnesses would not write immediately, but several decades later even if they had not been deported as Jews but as political prisoners in Nazi camps. Jorge Sembrun, a political prisoner in Buchenwald, in his book Writing or Life (Xixteenth, 1995) analyzes the reasons for this outdated writing. Memory/writing led him back to death, while oblivion/life brought him back to life. They had to leave behind the dark memories, go through a period of therapeutic oblivion, for these young people to meet life again. Primo Levi, again, who belongs to the exceptions who published very early, in 1947, would not achieve his fame until the 60s and 70s (If this is the man, Agra, 1997). This dialectic of forgetting and memory, of silence and writing torments the author of The Scream as well. She says so from the very beginning in her prologue, when she is tormented by two voices, one telling her to sink into the past and writing, and the other dissuading her. She already said it in a way in the first sentence of her first text of 1946 in the newspaper Yisraelitikon Vima entitled: "I wanted to no longer remember and erase from my memory my horrible tortures. (...) He came back one January 18, to bring me back to the hell of the hostage". On January 18, 1945, Auschwitz was evacuated and the death marches began, in which a very large number died.

She kept absolute silence from the return until 1981, when she made her first speech. The personal reason that comes back to memory in the 80s is that the sudden loss of her husband, Mendes Nahmias, in 1980 allowed and forced her to redefine herself. Family life has taken a different turn, her children have long been adults, she now has grandchildren, she has no other obligations. The new identity she will build for the rest of her life is the survivor identity fighting for this memory. And this is a very political position. Berry Nahmias never claimed to be a "victim." He wasn't looking for pity. She instead demanded that she join her voice with others to denounce the heinous crime of Nazism and anti-Semitism. And to save the memory of those who were lost, and to speak for all those who were not able to write themselves, even if they had known the same experience. Berry's experience was not a wall that cut her off from the outside world. It was the bridge to communicate with the world. Hence the title of the book Cry for Tomorrow. She looked forward to a better tomorrow and that's why she worked, she was concerned with the future, not the past. This is also her legacy.

The memory of the Holocaust

If in 1989 when the book was published Berry Nahmias was the author of a book, the first published by a female author, this book could not be published today without mentioning what else the author did. If most witnesses complete the debt of memory by writing their testimony, for the author of the Scream the publication was not the end, but only the beginning. So for this action of hers, but also for the rest of her life, I wrote a 90-page essay. The book in the new edition also contains an extensive biography and study of her action. As I've been studying the emergence of Jewish genocide memory in Greece for more than a decade, when I bent over Berry's archive at the Jewish Museum of Greece to document my image of her action, I discovered this: there was no aspect of Holocaust memory in which he had not engaged, often in a decisive way. All the channels through which the formation of this memory passed in Greece from the end of the 80s until 2007, when she withdrew, were given flesh and blood through the action of Berrys Nahmia. I could narrate the formation of this memory in Greece through its activity.

Berry Nahmias is no longer only the author of one of the first and most shocking testimonies about the deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau, she is also an activist who served with her action the emerging Holocaust Memorial in Greece and left her mark in most fields . I give a few examples: how did Kastoria, a city without Jews after the war, acquire a Holocaust memorial in 1996, a year before Thessaloniki and 14 years before Athens? Thanks to its activation. The reactivation of the Union of Israeli Hostages of Greece, of which she was president from 1988 to 2006, is her work, as is the founding of an association in 1992 with the name "Descendants of Holocaust Victims".

Berry spoke at the first Seminars of the Jewish Museum of Greece for teachers and at the first visits of students to the Museum. She was open to any invitation. Finally, he welcomed official guest Simon Weil on stage at one of the first Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies on January 27, 2006. In a Greece that was just beginning to "remember" and honor both the centuries-old presence of Jews in this place and and their brutal extermination.

*Odette Varon-Vasard is a historian and author of the books "The coming of age of a generation. Young and Young in the Occupation and in the Resistance" (Estia, 2009) and "The emergence of a difficult memory. Texts about the genocide of the Jews" (Estia, 2013)

SOURCE: THE NEWS, 23.1.2023

ABOUT:

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