Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (71 page)

At bottom, the problem was a political one. In the spring of 1945 many of the wartime caretakers were sufficiently worried at being branded collaborators to pass on their properties to third parties; but
by the summer, as the political climate changed, they had lost these fears and were already beginning to mobilize in a more overt fashion. In fact, they formed a “Union of Trustees” to put pressure on the governor-general’s office, and built up close ties with the Venizelist Liberal Party in particular; the pre-war link between Salonica’s Liberals and anti-Jewish sentiment had survived the war, and intensified as the party did well in elections locally. In late 1945 a judge decided that since the Jews had “abandoned” their properties during the war, they had no automatic right of return. Then a new governor-general froze all transfers. “We haven’t the strength to control ourselves any longer and keep quiet about this scandal,” wrote one Jewish journalist in 1946. “Our interest is also that of Greece as a whole: the country cannot identify itself with a handful of collaborationist caretakers.”
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But others disagreed. As elsewhere in Europe, post-war arguments over the restitution of properties intensified anti-Jewish feelings. One public prosecutor in the city exclaimed that “the persecution which the Jews endured at the hands of the Germans has now turned since Liberation into a persecution of Christians by Jews.” A local Liberal politician complained it was “not fair that every Jew should inherit fifteen shops.” The governor-general—and then the Athens government—advised the community to restrict its demands lest it create what they described as a “social problem” in the city. By the summer of 1947 there was a full-scale press campaign in Salonica against Jewish claims. The poverty of the refugees was contrasted with the supposed wealth of the surviving Jews. “To get rid of my boredom and sorrow I bought a newspaper. To my great astonishment I read that I’d become stinking rich,” commented a survivor in a satirical Jewish sketch. “All the Jews have become filthy rich, it said. I am a Jew—what I went through in Hitler’s camps proves it—so I must be filthy rich too.”
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The contrast in the way Athens and Salonica approached these issues was as apparent after the war as it had been during it. In February 1945 Salonica welcomed Archbishop Damaskinos, the most senior figure in the Greek church, who was then serving as regent of the country. Damaskinos and his counterpart in the city, Gennadios, both made speeches at a ceremony to celebrate liberation. But while Damaskinos included explicit references to the suffering of “our Jewish fellow-citizens,” Gennadios did not mention the deportations at all, even though they had affected his flock far more directly.

Meanwhile, the municipality’s pursuit of its own interests continued to cause conflict. The inauguration of the new university hospital “
on top of Jewish bones” (as one newspaper put it) was boycotted by the Jewish community’s officials. The old cemetery was still being looted for buried treasure and, more alarmingly, despoiled by council workers; carts were carrying away gravestones daily. The mayor promised a Jewish delegation that they would be collected and returned to the community, but eleven months later little had been done. There were further painful negotiations both locally and nationally over the expropriation of the Hirsch hospital, and the rubble-strewn area where the 151 neighbourhood had once stood. In January 1949, a Jewish newspaper published an open letter to the mayor accusing him not merely of a “lack of interest” but actual discrimination against Jewish claims.
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Weakness forced Salonica’s Jews to seek support outside the city, and the newly formed Athens-based Central Jewish Council (KIS) lobbied ministers on its behalf and liaised with American Jewish organizations and U.S. government officials. But KIS’s very creation—and location—was a reminder of how far the fortunes of Salonican Jewry had fallen. Before the war, the city had housed two-thirds of the country’s total Jewish population and had been the centre of its intellectual and cultural life; after 1945, however, only one-fifth of the approximately eleven thousand Greek Jews who had survived the war lived there and the spotlight shifted to the nation’s capital. The Salonicans were suspicious of the Jews in Athens, claiming they were less educated and politically inexperienced: they had formed KIS to protect their own interests, they were slow to worry about the plight of their fellow-Jews in Salonica, and they were led by Zionists, who would compromise with the Greek government on the property issue in order to facilitate emigration to Palestine. There may have been some truth on all counts; far more important was that KIS itself, like the Salonican community, was racked by political infighting.
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In the end, after several years of hard bargaining and thanks to behind-the-scenes American intervention, an agreement was reached with the Greek government by which a new, Jewish-run successor to YDIP would administer the large amount of property left unclaimed after the war. Greece had been quick to recognize the need for restitution in principle, noted one Salonica journalist, but slow to implement it in practice. YDIP was wound up in 1949, and the new organization started to negotiate directly with the caretakers and the municipal government. By 1953 it had regained control of 543 homes, 51 shops, 67 plots of land and 18 huts.
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The political repercussions of the wartime property free-for-all
had not, however, been laid entirely to rest and the quick rehabilitation of collaborators in the conservative climate of post-war Greece created many hostages to fortune. In 1957 Max Merten, the wartime military administrator of the city, visited Greece to testify at the trial of his former interpreter. To the shock of the West German embassy—which had assured him he would be safe—and the Greek government itself, which was taken entirely by surprise, a zealous public prosecutor in Athens had him arrested and charged with war crimes. On trial for his activities in Salonica, as one survivor after another recounted the events of 1943, Merten made the explosive allegation that among his wartime contacts had been members of the current Greek government, and other individuals very close to the prime minister, Konstantine Karamanlis. The timing could not have been worse, for Greece was in the middle of negotiations to enter the Common Market. Karamanlis could not prevent the trial from going ahead, but he quietly agreed with the Germans that, in return for Bonn’s backing of his country’s membership application, Merten would be transferred to the Federal Republic as soon as the trial was over. The sordid bargain was struck, and after a perfunctory second trial there, Merten was released.

In Greece, there was speculation that Merten’s real motive for returning had been to recover his loot. Even today divers scour the rocky sea-bed off the south of the Peloponnese for the treasure Merten supposedly sank there. So far they have not found anything. In any event, to focus exclusively on Merten is something of a distraction. He was a career bureaucrat, whose real responsibility had been to allow the city to run smoothly in the interest of the German war effort throughout the 1943 deportations. To the extent that he had done this, it had been with the help of other bureaucrats among the local and regional Greek authorities, and the network of other interest groups they had brought into play.
Their
priority had been to keep out the Bulgarians, and to ensure that Greek control over Salonica was unimpaired. They had not sought the deportation of the Jews, but they had not obstructed it either since it enabled them to complete the process which had started twenty years earlier—the Hellenization of the city.

V
ANISHED
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ASTS
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ROBLEMS

T
HE DRAWN-OUT POST-WAR QUARREL
over the restitution of Jewish property can only be understood against the backdrop of the
infinitely more urgent political problems Greece as a whole faced in the late 1940s. After months of tension, fighting broke out again between leftist guerrillas and the government in 1946, and the country was plunged into a bitter civil war which turned it into the first international battle-ground of the Cold War. The resulting damage was in some ways even greater than had been caused by the Germans. Thousands died and hundreds of thousands of villagers were forcibly relocated as government troops with British and American advisers battled against a highly effective guerrilla insurgency organized by the communist Democratic Army of Greece. Only in August 1949 did the government regain control; by then, it had rounded up tens of thousands of suspected leftists, executed several thousand by firing squad, and built up a new network of shady anti-communist paramilitary units on whom it relied for several decades afterwards. Never before or since had the authority of the Greek state looked so fragile. Compared with this, the issue of Jewish property was a side-show.

In what novelist Nikos Bakolas called “the season of fear,” Salonica itself was deeply traumatized. Thousands more refugees fled there for shelter, and the city was rocked by assassinations, round-ups, mortar fire and occasional gun-fights between left and right. The insurgents were in the hills and in January 1949, they kidnapped a group of schoolboys from the nearby American Farm School. With a strong left-wing presence in the worker suburbs, the authorities felt nervous and hundreds of people were incarcerated. Fear of the communists blended with memories of the long-running struggle with the Bulgarians; the rebels were written off as a Slav fifth column, fighting once again to tear Greek Macedonia away for incorporation in a Balkan communist federation.

Anti-communists who had worked alongside the Germans in the early 1940s now gave their services to the British and Americans: in no country in Europe were the trials of collaborators wound down so soon. As Cold War fever reached its height, UFOs were spotted over the city and there were rumours of Russian planes on their way from the north. The church was drawn into the fray, and Christian youth groups warned the city’s residents not to be tempted by the godless left. Saints—one was “well dressed, freshly shaved, wearing blue clothes and a white shirt”—were reported politely getting into taxis at the station and being driven to local churches before vanishing: once again, they seemed to have taken the city under their protection. Ghostly images of the Virgin Mary appeared in the windows of department stores
and apartment blocks. In 1951, barely a year after the fighting ended, the funeral of Metropolitan Gennadios, the religious leader who had shepherded his flock ever since 1910, provided a show of strength for the church and the right. His corpse was dressed in the regalia of office, and after lying in state for several days in Ayios Dimitrios, it was paraded through the crowded streets on a throne draped in the national flag. Through the celebration of Gennadios’s remarkable life, the defeat of the left was linked to Hellenism’s other triumphs over Turks, Bulgarians and Germans alike.
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The 1940s left the city polarized politically and economically destitute. Even in 1951 its population was not much larger than before the war. But in the decades which followed, the country’s economy took off and Salonica grew faster than ever. The refugees who had landed in 1922 now became the old guard as thousands of new migrants arrived from the countryside looking for work, part of the drift out of the rural economy which was transforming post-war Greece, and Europe. They packed into the old buildings and land densities soared. Salonica’s population increased faster than Athens’s, and by 1971 it had risen to over half a million. Most of the newcomers had no knowledge of the city as it had existed before the war, and did not remember its now-vanished mosques and synagogues.

The little that did survive from those days was quickly being sacrificed to the bulldozers. As land became more valuable, the old low houses were torn down and replaced with multiple-storeyed apartment blocks. Constructors and developers were the city’s new rich. Within not much more than a decade in an unregulated orgy of construction, what remained of the Ottoman urban fabric was largely demolished and gardens and greenery gave way to concrete. The tramlines were torn up overnight and replaced by buses, a cheaper form of public transport which allowed the suburbs to spread in all directions and killed off the ferry-boats that used to carry passengers across the bay. Bara and the Beshchinar gardens disappeared under new warehouses and factories. As the roads leading into town were widened, Vardar Square was modelled and remodelled, and the last of the faded Ottoman cafés was torn down. Workers’ apartments spread over the hills and pushed up against the old walls. In-fill created a new seafront promenade. The elegant Royal Theatre by the White Tower disappeared under the bulldozers, as did the neo-classical mansions along the old Hamidié, and the Alliance Israélite headquarters in the centre of town which was replaced by a tourist hotel. New faculty buildings,
a swimming pool and observatory went up on the site of the Jewish cemetery, where tens of thousands of students now studied. Kalamaria, remembered one local author, was transformed from a muddy village into a “luxury suburb which justified … the effort and the tears of the refugee element.” Only in the Upper Town, still inhabited by the poorest, did lack of money protect the old gable-fronted Ottoman homes.
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When a British foot-soldier who had slogged through the Macedonian mud in 1915 returned nearly half a century later he was struck by the change. The seafront villas that survived were mostly empty and had a “sinister air”; the minarets (bar one) had vanished and the Muslims with them, and all around he saw “blocks of offices and flats … indistinguishable from their counterparts in Lisbon, Stockholm and London.” A Turkish woman, who had grown up on endless stories of the Hamidian city told her by her mother, found it impossible to reconcile these with the reality: “The great houses had been torn down and the gardens destroyed … It was all gone.”
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