Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (67 page)

W
ISLICENY AND
B
RUNNER

D
URING LATE 1941
highly secret discussions on the Final Solution took place in Berlin as the innermost circles of those concerned with “the Jewish question” came to terms with the vast dimensions of the task they had set themselves. Neither emigration out of Europe, nor resettlement inside it, now seemed to provide the answer, and near the end of 1941 Hitler decided upon “biological annihilation.” After that came the building of extermination camps, and the coordination of the complex diplomatic, financial and transportation arrangements for bringing hundreds of thousands of Jews to them. The spring of 1942 saw mass deportations from Vienna, Prague and many towns in Germany itself. Jews from Croatia, Slovakia and occupied France, including many hundreds who had emigrated from Salonica before the war, were killed in Auschwitz, which was rapidly being expanded into the largest combined concentration- and death-camp in the SS system.
¹⁷

Extending the Final Solution to Greece ran up against the problem that the Italians, who controlled much of the country, did not share the German desire for action. Salonican Jews with Italian citizenship were reassured that they would be protected from German racial policies if these were introduced and in May 1942, the Italians told the Germans that they saw no need to make Jews wear a star. That July, the SS complained about the Italians’ attitude, and the foreign office was told that if agreement with Rome were not possible, the Germans would press ahead and “show the way.”
¹⁸

Months went by, the SS grew impatient and in January 1943, Adolf Eichmann sent his trusted deputy, Rolf Günther, to Salonica. It was the first time an official from the infamous department IV B 4 for Jewish affairs of the Main Reich Security Office had come to Greece, and Jewish officials he met there were struck by his “harsh and disdainful” attitude. He demanded information on the community and left for Berlin almost immediately. Some days after, Eichmann ordered one of his closest aides, Dieter Wisliceny, to go to Salonica “to make arrangements with the military administration to find a Final Solution for the Jewish problem there.” Wisliceny had already sent women and children from Slovakia to the gas chambers, and was fully briefed on the
newly comprehensive Final Solution now under way. In Vienna he was joined by Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner who had been entrusted with the technical aspects of the deportations. Their instructions were to have the whole matter wrapped up in six to eight weeks.
¹⁹

S
ATURDAY, 6 FEBRUARY 1943:
Wisliceny and Brunner, accompanied by about one hundred German police, arrived in Salonica and installed themselves in a suburban villa outside which they draped a large black SS flag. That Monday they told Chief Rabbi Koretz that Salonica’s Jews would have to wear the yellow star, mark their shops and dwell in a ghetto. Instructions issued a few days later were more specific: the star must be ten centimetres in diameter and have six points. It was to be worn by all Jews over the age of five on the left breast. New identity cards were to be issued. For the first time, a racial definition of being Jewish was provided, based on the Nuremberg laws. Then came further prohibitions—on changing residence without permission, on using the trams or telephones and on walking in public places after dark. By 25 February, all Jewish homes had to be marked as well.
²⁰

Trying to carry out all these instructions led to a frenzy of activity for Koretz insisted that the German orders must be obeyed in full. “At the head of this multifarious and multifaceted organization,” wrote Yacoel, the community’s legal adviser, “stood the Chief Rabbi, Dr. Koretz, occupying himself personally, from morning to late at night, with the smallest and least important details, neglecting the examination of the greater problem: the fate that awaited the Jewry of Salonika.” Koretz was persuaded, against his will, to ask Wisliceny whether it would be possible to create two Jewish quarters instead of one. This was accepted, and so one area was marked out for Jewish settlement on the west of the city above Egnatia Street, and another in the eastern suburbs. The almost entirely Jewish working-class districts on the outskirts were not affected, and the SS agreed that for the time being their inhabitants could remain in their homes. Everyone else had to move into one of the two designated zones by 25 February. Since Christian inhabitants in these areas were not evicted, they quickly became extremely crowded. Although they were not enclosed, large black six-pointed stars were drawn on walls to mark their boundaries. “Finally!” exclaimed
Apoyevmatini
on 25 February. “Did you see Thessaloniki this morning? The streets were filled with bright stars worn by filthy Jews.”
²¹

In January and early February, those who could transferred assets to Christian friends and associates in order to save them from the Germans. In front of the Hirsch hospital, crowds gathered as Jews sold off their possessions for food, clothing, rucksacks and handcarts. Eventually they were prohibited from selling their belongings at all. Meanwhile, a Jewish police force was made up of young men, mostly from well-off families, under the control of the SS’s Greek collaborator Laskaris Papanaoum. Led by their Jewish heads, Hasson and Albala, they went around with German guards closing up shops, expropriating them and terrorizing people. At their trial after the war, the president of the court intervened to say to Hasson: “I heard many things about you … The whole neighbourhood of Ayia Triada had to deal with you. You went about on horseback, whip in hand, and threatened them.” Another witness, a leather merchant, watched helplessly as Hasson’s men “took out anything they liked from his house for the Germans and loaded it up onto carts.”
²²

Next the Germans ordered all clubs, unions and professional organizations to dismiss their Jewish members, effectively cutting them off from municipal and state allocations of goods, allowances and pensions. On 1 March, all Jews were instructed to make a declaration of their assets. Meanwhile, Jewish workmen were ordered to turn the Baron Hirsch quarter, down by the station, into an enclosed camp with barbed-wire fences and lighting for the guards. It was a sad irony that this neighbourhood had originally been built in the late nineteenth century to house Ashkenazi refugees from Tsarist pogroms. Wooden fences went up around its perimeter and left it with only three tightly guarded exits—two onto adjacent roads and the third leading directly to the station. Without warning, its impoverished inhabitants were cut off from the world, and went two days without food before the community managed to organize a soup ration for them. Brunner’s idea was that once its original inhabitants had been deported, it would become the transit camp from which the rest of the city’s Jews could be easily put onto the trains nearby. Yet even at this stage, few people realized what the Germans planned. When one of the Jewish engineers involved in the lighting of the Hirsch encampment learned that the Jews were not merely to be subjected to the Nuremberg laws and confined, but also deported, the news struck him “like a bombshell.” On 5 March, Koretz—who denied there was any truth in the rumours of deportation—felt obliged to call for calm and to remind people “not to give credence to alarming rumours, entirely unfounded.”
²³

Friday, 6 March: All the areas designated for Jewish settlement in the city were suddenly blocked off with checkpoints. Greek and Jewish policemen checked papers and did not permit Jews to exit, though Christians could come and go. The next day, Brunner called a meeting of Jewish notables. His message was a harsh one. Through Koretz, who translated, he warned his audience that had not the chief rabbi guaranteed their obedience with his life, they would all be in a concentration camp as hostages. He demanded their full cooperation and told them that the community was now responsible for organizing soup kitchens and distributing clothing. After Brunner left, Koretz announced that no Jews were allowed to work any longer outside the specified Jewish zones. Their shops would only be opened to allow them to retrieve possessions. Otherwise they would be kept shut and the keys handed over to the occupation authorities who were creating an organization to find caretakers to run them.
²⁴

With almost all the city’s Jews confined to their new “ghettoes,” the disruption to trade was immense. As services previously provided by them became unavailable, prices soared. Debts could not be collected; shoes and watches awaiting repair could not be collected by their owners. Vegetables, eggs and perishable goods began to rot. Stalls and shopfronts, especially in the commercial districts, were shuttered and closed and factories lay idle. “Following the closure of very many Jewish shops, the diminished circulation in the streets and the lack of a public in cinemas and restaurants and cafés,” the Italian consul wrote, “the city has suddenly acquired an unexpectedly sad appearance.”
²⁵

On 14 March, Koretz was ordered by the Germans to call a public meeting inside the barricaded Hirsch quarter. There, for the first time, he told people that they were to be deported to Cracow. He attempted to put a brave face on what awaited them—work according to your aptitude, a new life on the land in a Jewish settlement—but the meeting dissolved into catcalls, wails and cries of outrage and despair. The next day there was a train waiting with more than thirty carriages on the tracks and the deportations began. It was just over five weeks since Wisliceny and Brunner had arrived.

T
HE
D
EPORTATIONS

S
UNDAY
, 15 M
ARCH:
Approximately 2800 people left on the first train, around 80 tightly packed into each carriage, guarded by a
contingent of German policemen. They could carry 20 kilos of baggage each but no valuables, jewellery or other money. Previously they had been made to exchange their drachmas for what were in fact fake zlotys. What they left behind was supposed to be deposited in the administrative offices in the Hirsch camp; in fact many simply abandoned their possessions in the muddy streets or threw them away. As the over-crowded train began the five-day journey to Auschwitz in southern Poland, the camp lay temporarily empty.

Just a few hours later on the same day, however, it filled up again. The adjacent neighbourhood of Ayia Paraskevi was surrounded by soldiers, and its inhabitants were given 20 minutes to gather in the streets before they were marched there under guard. The following day, the residents of the nearby settlement of the Stazion Chiko, or Little Station, were made to join them. These two groups were sent in the second convoy, which left Salonica on 17 March. Then it was the turn of Regi Vardar—better known as “Ramona”—whose nearly 15,000 inhabitants were evicted in less than an hour shortly before dawn. The working-class Jewish neighbourhoods on the city’s western outskirts were now deserted. Despite a police warning against looting, the empty homes and shops were quickly plundered by Greek gangs looking for valuables which had been left behind. Robbers were shot by German soldiers.
²⁶

Among the Jews who remained in the centre and in the eastern suburbs, a rumour spread that it was only the “communist” workers’ quarters in the west that had been destined for deportation. But on 17 March Koretz appeared at the central Monastirioton synagogue and dispelled this illusion. He told a crowded gathering that there was no alternative for the Jews but to resign themselves to their fate. Their behaviour was worthy of praise—he cited the selflessness of the rich who were assisting the poor, the wonderful number of marriages which were being contracted on the eve of departure—and this would help to ensure that when they arrived in Poland they would be able to preserve “the good name of Salonica.” But his words no longer sounded plausible or reassuring: there were shouts of “traitor,” and Koretz was attacked and only escaped without injury thanks to his Jewish guards who bundled him into a waiting car and sped him out of the ghetto.
²⁷

O
PTIONS

W
HEN ASKED BY THE
I
TALIAN CONSUL
on 27 March, Merten said that the Jews were being deported to “a locality near Warsaw where there is a coal mine. They will live together, administer themselves and work in a synthetic rubber factory.” This was the official line. In fact, without necessarily knowing the precise details, Italian diplomats realised many of the deportees would be killed. Another consular official, Lucillo Merci, noted in his diary on 21 March that in Poland “the physically fit among them are put to work, whereas the rest are eliminated. In the end, the physically fit will be eliminated too.”
²⁸

We do not know how widely such suspicions were circulating in the spring of 1943. A Jew with Turkish citizenship who left the city for Istanbul in early July knew nothing more than that the deportees had been sent in the direction of Nish. Others knew even less. On the other hand, an escapee from Salonica reported in mid-August not only that German officers when asked where the Jews had gone, reportedly answered “Heaven,” but also that one officer had told him that “they were forced in large groups to enter an empty cleaning establishment, [and] the gas was then turned on until all perished.”
²⁹

Nothing as precise as this has surfaced for the spring months themselves. But there had been vague indications and warnings of what lay in store. The BBC’s broadcast in December 1942 accusing the Germans of massacres in Poland had reached some. Yet when one elderly Jewish man from central Europe heard this in Salonica he remembered the First World War and dismissed it angrily as “English atrocity propaganda.” Jewish shopkeepers were sometimes alerted indirectly by German soldiers: one advised Alberto Saoul to “go to Athens where the air is better.” Another German told a Jewish acquaintance of his Christian girlfriend: “Why don’t you flee?” A third hinted to a Jewish photographic goods dealer that “the air of Thessaloniki will become very bad for the Jews,” and when asked what he meant said that the Nuremberg laws would shortly be introduced. A fourth bought some soap from a shopkeeper and then told him: “You aren’t doing well just staying here. I was in Romania and saw them drown Jews in a lake; all the Jews from one town they drowned in a lake.” The shopkeeper listened, and discussed it with his friends and came to the conclusion that “he was making propaganda to frighten us—how could they have drowned all the Jews?”
³⁰