Unit IV

Aftermath of the Holocaust in Greece

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UNIT IV AFTERMATH OF THE HOLOCAUST IN GREECE

Lesson 1 LESSON: "Where do I go now?" COMMON CORE STANDARDS: RH 2 Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas. SL 3 Evaluate a speaker's point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric. Social Studies Standards (NJ): [6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6] KEY QUESTIONS/ISSUES ADDRESSED:

• What is the importance of recording first person accounts by survivors for the historical record as well as for remembrance and the determination of the human spirit?

• How were the experiences of survivors influenced by their geographic location and the people with whom they had contact (fellow prisoners, rescuers, resisters, collaborators, perpetrators, liberators, etc.)?

LESSON GOALS/OBJECTIVES:

• Students will be able to identify the different categories of Greek survivors based on their location and experience during the Nazi occupation of Greece.

• Students will be able to recognize the challenges and the choices that death camp survivors had to face after liberation.

KEY TERMS:

• Death Camp - Death March - Auschwitz - Birkenau • Mauthausen/Ebensee • Kapo

MATERIALS needed:

• Access to Internet for resource information (http://www.ushmm.org) • Reprint, (Athens—Auschwitz, Errikos Sevillias, copyright 1983, Lycabettus Press. pages

81-87) Reprint, (A Liter of Soup and Sixty Grams of Bread, Heinz Salvator Kounio, copyright 2003, pages 161-164)

BACKGROUND information:

• Some prior study of the Holocaust. INSTRUCTIONAL ACTIVITIES/PROCEDURES: 1. Students will view a film clip of the liberation of Mauthausen/Ebensee Death Camp, the

location of the large majority of Greek Jews who survived the death march from Auschwitz. (Site specific addresses may change slightly but a search of the site will lead to several film clips that may be accessed if there is a problem with this specific clip.)

http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/phistories/viewmedia/phi_fset.php?MediaId=1201

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2. Students will read several first person accounts of the experiences after liberation written by

two Greek Jewish survivors. (Athens — Auschwitz, Errikos Sevillias, copyright 1983, Lycabettus Press, pages 81-87) and (A Liter of Soup and Sixty Grams of Bread, Heinz Salvator Kounio, copyright 2003, pages 161-164)

3. Students will form into pair-share groups to contemplate who might be categorized as a survivor. They will then note in their journals where survivors were located and what their experiences might have been during the war (eg: In hiding versus in a death camp.) As students report their conclusions, a student or teacher will record them on a central board.

4. With their conclusions on the board, students will then discuss their reaction to the question posed after liberation, "Where do I go now?" according to the experience one might have had either being in a camp or in hiding. Students will be encouraged to apply their own feelings in answering the question.

EVIDENCE OF UNDERSTANDING: 1. Class journals 2. Class discussion 3. Write a paragraph explaining some of the factors that might influence a survivor's response

to the question "Where do I go now?". EXTENSION ACTIVITIES: 1. Accessing the site of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

(http://www.ushmm.org), search for firsthand accounts of their stories by survivors. Select several of these accounts and read and review them for factors that may help account for their survival and for the post liberation choices that each made in answer to the question "Where do I go now?".

2. Write an essay that includes information about each survivor's story and responds to the following questions. • Are there any common factors to be found in the different accounts? • What significant differences are there? • Where did each decide to settle to begin a new life? • What influenced their choices?

3. In cooperation with your teacher(s), arrange for a Holocaust survivor or offspring to visit your class to speak with the students. Provide fellow students with basic biographical information about the survivor in preparation for the visit. (country of birth, age at beginning of Holocaust period, current city/town of home, etc.) Also, students should have received at least a basic study of the Holocaust prior to the visit. If the class has or is going to study incidents of human rights violations and/or genocides, arrange for a visit by a survivor of that genocide when possible. Following each visit by a survivor, students should record their reactions to the survivor's story in a journal. Also, a written "thank you" note should be sent to the survivor for visiting and sharing her/his story. If it is not possible to arrange for a visit by a survivor, video recordings of survivors telling their stories are available from a variety of sources and these may be used also. (Athens—Auschwitz, Errikos Sevillias, copyright 1983, Lycabettus Press. pages 81-87)

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Freedom! May 6, 1945 An excerpt from “A Liter of Soup and Sixty Grams of Bread”, Heinz Salvator Kounio. We didn't hear a sound. Not a leaf was moving on the trees. I went to the window. The sentries were still at their posts, only now they were military guards and not SS. About 10:00 in the morning, as we were in bed, we heard shouting in the square: "The Americans are coming!”. With whatever strength I had left, I lifted myself up, and hurriedly dressed. I ran with the others to greet our liberators. It was another hallucination! There was a German on horseback, wearing a khaki uniform. He was coming towards the camp! I returned to my block and fell into bed both physically and emotionally exhausted. I stayed there until noon. At our midday meal, our block captain informed us that we would be given bread three times a day and that our food would be more nourishing. "It's still the same margarine and bread made from wood scraps", he added. Our joy was indescribable. It was 3:30 in the afternoon, and I was standing by the window, deep in thought. I saw a crowd running towards the square. It was real. The Americans were finally arriving! Unbelievably, the sentries were still at their posts. I could not believe what I saw next. Armored tanks were entering our camp. An American sergeant opened the door of his jeep and shouted to those of us who were running to the large entrance gate of the camp: "Prisoners, your time has come! You are free! You are no longer slaves of Fascism!" Imagine how we felt, hearing those words. We started to cry like babies. We began to line up in groups according to our nationalities. We began to sing, each group singing its national anthem. Flags appeared, hurriedly made from our louse-infested rags and uniforms. To make the Greek flag, we needed white and blue. We used the dirty sheets from the hospital for the white, and old blue clothing for the blue. We raised our makeshift flag high and sang our national anthem. Then we calmly returned to our block. The Americans brought us the news of our freedom and then left. We hoped they would return and that, by tomorrow, we would be eating as free men. We were alone. What about the 16,000 of us that remained in the camp? Were we really free or would the Germans return? The Russian prisoners began to tear apart the storage sheds. They began marching towards the city. The block captains tried to escape without being noticed, fearing for their lives. Inmates ran after them to revenge the death of thousands who had lost their lives at their hands. The block captains did not escape the wrath of God! We heard gunshots sounding out in the night. Prisoners had taken guns from the wooden huts where the SS had stored them. With every shot that rang out, we knew that another block captain had received his just punishment. The vermin ran like hunted animals. Voices could be heard begging for help. Most of the block captains were lynched. Nothing could save them from the furious rage of the newly freed inmates. They could not escape. No matter where they fled, they were quickly captured.

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At 11:00 in the evening, we were awakened by loud noises and the sound of people running. The large wooden can used to store gasoline had been set on fire. There was fear that the whole camp would burst into flames if the wind carried the fire in the wrong direction. American troops ran over to contain the fire and to prevent it from spreading to the neighboring buildings and trees surrounding the camp. The fire was finally contained later that night. At daybreak, I heard a voice calling out for help. I looked out the window to see what was happening. The inmates were stoning a kapo known throughout the camp for his cruelty. It was the infamous Gypsy from Melk. The inmates were taking their revenge for the thousands he had killed or tortured. More than one hundred Russians and Jewish inmates surrounded him. They were stoning him. The scene was wild. A Russian grabbed a large heavy stone and flung it at the kapo's head. It found its mark, and the Gypsy fell down. He appeared to be dead. However, he started to get up again. It was not so easy to kill this vermin. The inmates lifted him up and took him to the hospital, but it was not his fate to survive their rage. The blood of his victims was seeking revenge. Other inmates in the hospital decided to burn him alive. They carried him to the crematory. The crematory was no longer functioning and had to be relit. The kapo was lying on a stretcher. Awakened from his lethargy, he got up and crawled towards the wall and tried to leave undetected. He stared at the flames of the oven and realized what was in store for him. He tried to raise himself up and began to scream. I was leaning against the wall, watching all of this. I closed my eyes to block out the abominable sight. They placed the kapo on the stretcher, the same one that had carried corpses as they were thrown into the oven with a large iron hook passing through their legs. The Gypsy kapo would now suffer the same martyrdom. Without mercy, they punched him in his bloody face, and prepared to throw him directly into the crematory oven. He was aware of everything. He tried to get up, screaming for help. There was no help for him. It was too late. The fires were lit. They attached the hook to the stretcher and threw him into the oven. I shall never forget this terrible sight. The flames engulfed him and he tried to push open the door. He screamed in agony. It was the most horrible of deaths. The image of the Kapo's last attempts to free himself is deeply engraved in my memory. I can still see him trying to free himself from the oven and save himself from the flames that were engulfing his body. His death was quite mild compared to the death of his victims. He should have suffered like his victims did. His death should have been prolonged. The minutes should have dragged on. He should have undergone the excruciating torture of knowing that he was going to die like his victims did. Like in ancient times, the Furies had taken their revenge. RETURN: As soon as we were ready, we took food for three days and documents saying that we were prisoners and went to the station. There we would take a train to Hungary and would return to Greece via Serbia as many others had done. At the station we found a Pole who was returning to his country. We asked him which train to take because he said he knew the schedules. We asked him to help us get to Hungary. He suggested that we go with him and he promised to show us where to get off and which train to take to Hungary.

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We travelled all night and in the morning we stopped because a bridge had been destroyed and we had to continue on foot for about three kilometers in order to catch another train. Because I was so weak I had a lot of trouble walking. Fortunately, I found a German on the road with a bicycle, and I asked him to put me on it and he took me to the station. If it hadn't been for him I would not have managed to arrive in time and would have missed the train as well as my companions, who had left me behind on the road and gone on without helping me at all. When I got to the train I was exhausted. Then I understood how stupid I had been to leave the hospital. In the afternoon, when the train stopped, we saw that the Pole was missing. He had gotten off at one of the stops, leaving us to our fate. Since we didn't know where we were going, we got off at the next stop. When we asked the station master, he said that we were in Poland. We had taken a completely different train that the one we should have taken to get to Budapest. We slept that night in the station and in the morning began asking whatever Pole we met which train to take. Unfortunately, however, all of them were inhospitable, and no one took the time or trouble to give us exact information. So, in the end, we took a train by chance, without knowing where it was going. After three hours we arrived at Auschwitz, the place the Germans first brought us when they caught us. When we got off the train we began to walk without knowing where we were going. I was extremely tired and bitterly regretted my foolishness. Fortunately, however, as we were walking, some Russians saw us who, when they heard what had happened to us, directed us to take the next train. They told us that it would take us to Gleiwitz where they would help us return to our homeland. Gleiwitz was a big city. When we arrived, some Red Cross representatives took us in hand and directed us to a building where there were other prisoners. There they gave us beds and plenty of food. They also took care of my boils and changed the dressings. In this way I recovered from the hardships I went through for the three days on the road. We stayed there for five days, during which we took walks in the town. We also went to a Jewish community where they gave us money, various useful things, and a lot of food. On the fifth day we were put on a train with a lot of others and taken to Katowice, a much bigger town that Gleiwitz. There the Russians took us to a camp where there were many other Greeks. The food was plentiful. Every day they gave meat and a loaf of bread to each one of us. I rested well there and got excellent medical care. I stayed there twelve days, during which I visited all the city. It was beautiful and clean. Thanks to the food and the sweets I bought I regained my strength. From Katowice we went by train to Leipzig in Germany to a camp where there were thousands of prisoners. After four days there we were transferred to the Russian zone where we were given to the Americans in exchange for Russian prisoners the Americans had. When that was over the doctors came and examined us. Since I was thin and wrapped in bandages they put me in a hospital car of a train which had eight beds. Soon the doctor returned and, after examining me carefully, told the nurse to change my bandages every morning and evening and to apply an ointment which he gave her. After each of us was given a package containing canned food, chocolate, sweets, and cigarettes, our train got under way. Our trip took three days, during which time the nurse who was with us looked after us so that we had no discomfort at all. We had plenty of food.

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Finally, we arrived in the city of Spenheim where ambulances met us and took us to an enormous and beautiful hospital. There doctors examined us again, telling me and one other that we should remain since we needed treatment. I fell into a depression as I was in a hurry to return to Greece to see my wife and child, whom I still had not been able to notify that I was well. The post office wouldn't accept letters for any place; we were constantly told to have patience and that when they could accept letters they would tell us. I told the doctor that I wanted to leave but, before I could finish, a French doctor took me to the ward where I had to stay. The others went to Mannheim where they would be sent to Greece. When I went upstairs they put me in a bath, then they gave me pajamas and took me to a very clean bed in a ward with ten beds, each patient of a different nationality. Soon after I was settled a Greek came to visit me. He told me that there were twenty-two Greeks in the hospital and that he was acting in a way as their leader, looking after all of them. If I wanted anything, I was to tell him. From the window he showed me the place in the gardens, which were double the size of our Royal Garden, where the Greeks gathered every afternoon to pass the time. The sick of the other nationalities went elsewhere in the gardens. Each group had its own corner and everywhere were scattered lawn chairs so that we could sit comfortably. That afternoon I went down and had a good time with the others speaking our own language. The care here was more thorough and even better than the care we had at the other hospitals. And the food was plentiful. A few days later the Americans brought us some cards to fill our which they would send, at last, to our homes. This was the first time since I had been released that I sent news that I was well, and I imagined my family's joy when they would receive it. The card, however, reached Greece two months after I did. Time passed very pleasantly in the hospital. Every afternoon all the Greeks met and we thought about the time when we would be able to go to our homeland. After about one month I had gained enough weight, thanks to the good care and the good food, but I was still covered with boils that tortured me. I had a French nurse who felt sorry for me, seeing how much I suffered, and she tried as best as she could to relieve the pain. Every evening she would drain the boils because they hurt me a great deal and this relieved the pain, but in the morning there would be more. Finally, three doctors, an American, a Frenchman, and a Pole, examined me thoroughly and, after a long consultation, gave instructions to the nurse and then left. In a short while the French nurse came and gave me an injection, telling me that it would cure the boils but that I was not to worry if I got a fever as it would be a result of the injection. It was better that I recover even if it did mean the discomfort of fever. She gave me an injection in the right buttock and told me not to eat any of the food given to the others as long as I had fever. She said that she would bring me what I should eat. During these days, since I couldn't go downstairs, some of the Greeks came and kept me company. When they weren't with me I passed the time speaking with one of the Italians, who was in my room. On the seventh day my fever began to subside and the results of the injection began to show. I stopped having any new boils and the old ones began to dry up. On the tenth day, as both the fever and the pain in my leg had disappeared, I went down to the garden where my comrades met me with great joy. So the same life began again, except that now I was free from the boils and I was very happy that this torture had finished. Forty days after my arrival in the hospital I weighed and saw that I had reached 62 kilos, as compared to the 32 when I had been released and the 48 when I had left the other hospital.

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On the 12th of August some men came from the camp at Mannheim to take us since they had begun to send the prisoners back to their homelands. I was full of joy thinking of my family. From the twenty-two of us sick, only sixteen left because the others were still too ill to travel. Before leaving I went to the nurse who had stood by me so well. She did not stop looking after me until the last moment. When I told her that I was leaving she was very moved. I said goodbye to her and she gave me a package of biscuits and sweets. I was so touched that I couldn't find the words with which to thank her. When I arrived at Mannheim I found the Greeks with whom I had travelled before. It surprised me as I thought they had long since returned to Greece. They found me much changed and fat. The next day we left for Munich where we were sent by air to Greece. On our arrival, however, we were told that our flight had been postponed for a few days. This made me very unhappy. The closer I got to home the more impatient I became. We stayed in Munich for ten days. They looked after us well, particularly the sick, of whom I was one. All day we wandered about the city, often going to pass the time at the marvelous zoological gardens. On the 22nd of August we left by train for Italy. We spent one day in Rome before going on to Bari, where we were put into a military camp surrounded by a wire fence and were forbidden to leave it. On the night of the 25th of August they took those of us who were still weak to send us to Athens. We went by train to Taranto where the (Queen) Elizabeth, the ship that was to take us to Greece, was waiting. It was an enormous ship with over 2,000 passengers on board. Englishmen, Indians, and we Greeks who numbered 300. As we boarded they gave each of us a life jacket, showing us how to put it on and telling us to keep it with us always as there were mines in the sea and the journey would be dangerous. We left at 3:00. Fortunately, the ship was very large and, although the sea was rough, it didn't roll much and I didn't get seasick. At night I had nightmares and kept waking up thinking we had hit a mine. Fortunately, however, nothing happened. I had run out of cigarettes and was bothered that I didn't have money to buy any. I started talking with some Indians, who were all very nice and immediately offered me cigarettes. So that problem was taken care of. At 11:00 the ship's siren blew. I was terrified. They told all of us to go on deck wearing our life jackets. When we got there we were checked by an officer who again told us how to put on the life jackets. These precautions were taken because we were going to cross a very dangerous zone and, therefore, we needed to be ready for anything. We were instructed to stay on deck until we were given permission to go below. Hearing this I was terrified because I didn't know how to swim. Fortunately, at 1:00 they told us that most of the danger had passed and that we could go down to eat but without taking off our life jackets. After eating I went on deck and began to wait anxiously to see land because they had told us that at 7:00 we would arrive in Piraeus. I was full of joy, making plans about how I would meet my wife and child. At 5:00 we could see the mountains of Lavrion and at 6:00 we began to see Piraeus. The closer we drew, the more impatient I became. We entered the harbor at 7:00, but we dropped anchor far from shore. I got ready to go ashore among the first, but then I saw that nothing was being done about disembarking. Soon an officer came and told us that we would stay on board that night as it was forbidden to disembark after the setting of the sun. I felt as though I had been stabbed when I heard this. It made me crazy to think that I was so close to my family but couldn't get to them. At night, after dinner, I went on deck and looked at Piraeus, smoking incessantly in my depression. That night I hardly slept at all. Every minute seemed a century. Finally, dawn broke and I could

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hardly wait to leave. It was Sunday, the 22nd of August. After breakfast, at 9:00, at last, lighters came to get us. I got off among the first and, after passing customs, went to leave, but an officer stopped me and said that they would take us all to Athens and release us there. Another torment! Immediately we got into some vans that were waiting for us and ours started off first. In a short while we arrived in Athens and were taken to the Eighth Gymnasium, which had been cordoned off with barbed wire. There an officer told us that we had to wait to be given identity cards and, afterwards, whoever wanted was free to leave. Whoever had no place to go could stay at the school to sleep and eat. In the meantime, the second van had arrived. Two of the men who got off told me that, just as I left, three women had come with my photograph asking for me. When told that I had just left for Athens, they couldn't believe that I was alive. I understood that it was my wife and my agitation increased. In one hour I got my I.D. and I was just getting ready to leave when a soldier called my name and said that three women were asking for me. I went out immediately and saw my wife and my two nieces. I'll never forget what I felt at that moment. We were all crying like small children. We took a taxi and went home immediately. At the door stood my daughter, waiting for her mother who was late. When she saw me she fell on me, hugging me continuously. At that moment my joy was so great that I forgot all I had suffered. My house filled with people asking about their relatives. Many years have passed since then. Nonetheless, many times I see in my dreams that I am in the camp and I jump up thinking it is true. Afterwards, I can't sleep for the rest of the night. Other times I think that all I went through was no more than a nightmare I saw in my sleep. Immediately, however, the number 182699 on my left arm brings me back to reality. This was the story of my imprisonment. Reprint, (A Liter of Soup and Sixty Grams of Bread, Heinz Salvator Kounio, copyright 2003, pages 161-164)

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Unit IV Aftermath of the Holocaust in Greece

Lesson 2 LESSON: “What happened to you?”

Common Core Standards: RH 1 Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text. RH 2 Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas. Social Studies Standards (NJ): [6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6] Key Questions/Issues Addressed:

• Why did the different experiences of Jewish victims of the Holocaust cause tension among them?

• Why did relations develop between the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and Greek Christian survivors of the Nazi occupation?

• How and why did the influence of the Greek Jews in Salonica/Thessaloniki change after the Holocaust?

Lesson Goals/Objectives:

• Students will be able to identify the strained relations between survivors who returned from death camps with survivors who were in hiding.

• Students will be able to identify the strained relations between Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and Greek Christian survivors of the Nazi occupation.

• Students will be able to examine through population statistics the shift in influence of Greek Jews in Salonica before and after the Holocaust.

Key Terms:

• Anti-Semite • Protocols of the Elders of Zion • Synagogue • Mosques • Minarets

Materials needed:

• Reprint, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 by Mark Mazower (copyright 2004 pages 388-391).

• Reprint, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 by Mark Mazower (copyright 2004 pages 417-428).

Background information:

• Some prior study of the Holocaust

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Instructional Activities/Procedures: 1. Students will read a chapter segment from Salonica, City of Ghosts. This will detail

population demographics for Salonica before Nazi occupation. Also, students learn the significant influence on daily life in the city attributable to its Jewish history. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 by Mark Mazower (copyright 2004 pages 388-391).

2. After reading the assigned piece, students will work in their pair groups to identify the specific reasons that Salonica could be distinguished in the world as a city heavily influenced by its Jewish identity. Journal entries will be followed by class discussion.

3. Students will read about the awkward aftermath of survivors returning to Greece after repatriation to face survivors who had not been in the death camps as well as Christians who now owned Jewish homes and businesses. Students will also consider the basis for strained relations among survivors as to why some went to death camps and some were able to survive in hiding. (Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950, pages 417-428)

4. Students will then use their pair-share groups to consider how to administer justice when Jewish survivors returned to Greece to reclaim property and possessions and found that they had been “purchased” by non-Jews.

Evidence of Understanding: 1. Class journals 2. Class discussion 3. Write a short paragraph explaining one of the following:

Why can restitution and compensation be very difficult to achieve? Or

Why may tension develop among individuals of very different experiences during a genocide?

Extension Activities: 1. Draw up a procedure and a plan to provide for restitution for persons who have been

victimized by the Holocaust or a genocide and have lost all property. What are some factors that you think would be essential to consider? • What forms of property might be restored to the individual or heirs? • What forms of property might be compensated but could not be restored? • If several generations have passed, what provision, if any, would you make for the 2nd

and 3rd generation who have current “ownership” of the property? 2. The city of Salonica, like many cities after a war, underwent tremendous changes.

Research some of the changes that occurred in Salonica and other war-torn cities and identify some of the cultural heritage damaged and lost to future generations not only as a result of the war but also as a result of the renovations and rebuilding of the post war years. • What are some of the reasons that make the preservation of cultural heritage so

important? • What are some of the factors that must be weighed when heritage and modernization

seem to stand in conflict? Reprint, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 by Mark Mazower

(copyright 2004 pages 388-391).

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Attitudes and Mentalities: The Greek State might have formalized the structure of the Jewish community, and treated it for most of the interwar period as collectivity, distinct from the Christian majority, but at the level of daily life the boundaries between the two religions and communities were permeable, and became more so with time. Political affiliations created ties across the ethnic divide. And even more than in Ottoman times, the city made its own demands, and created realities quite different from those established by law or imagined by the political elite. In the large mostly Jewish 151 quarter, for instance, Avramatchi, the Jewish grocer, sold his kezo blanko (white cheese) to Greek and Jewish housewives alike. The very language of shopping combined Turkish words which everyone still used – ‘bakkal’ for grocer, the ‘bakkal defteri’ for the book containing his customers’ accounts – Judeo-Spanish and Greek. Jewish women talked of going home to their ‘sinyor’ (husband) but were themselves known as ‘nikotcheras’, after the Greek word for housewife (noikokyria). Greek and Jewish children played games like ‘aiuto’ together in the streets, shouting Judesmo terms that refugee kids were quick to pick up. Few Greeks ever acquired more than a few words of Judeo-Spanish. One of the few who were fluent was the so-called “Jewish” Panayiotis Constantinidis, who had worked from a young age for Jewish customs-brokers near the docks. “Panayiot” liked to play practical jokes such as dressing up and impersonating the rabbi who went around on Fridays at dusk telling the Jewish stallholders to close for the Sabbath, or, on another occasion, alarming local women at their prayers by entering the church where he served on the administrative committee dressed as a Jewish salesman and pretending to sell them candles. Stories of his pranks circulated for years precisely because his skill was so unusual. On the other hand, even though Judesmo remained in use at home, most male Jews and younger females knew enough Greek to pursue a living. Elderly wandering street-sellers advertised their wares – shirts, tumblers, oranges, tomatoes – in a broken Greek which amused their clients. Poor Jewish women worked as wet-nurses for the Ayios Syylianos orphanage, while seamstresses like Luna Gattegno had “Jewish and Christian clients.” Although many of the city’s trade guilds were exclusively Christian Orthodox or Jewish, a surprising number had a mixed membership. In 1922, for example, the Praxiteles guild of marble carvers had four Greek, eleven Jewish and one Muslim member; the old vegetable-sellers’ guild included fourteen Greeks and thirty-three Jews, while fishmongers, street porters and traders in the central market all promoted their interests together. Ethnic homogeneity was certainly not the rule even for the small businessmen, traders and sellers who dominated the city’s economy. Among the workers in its factories and warehouses there was a strong vein of inter-communal association and solidarity, especially in the unions and left-wing political groups. For the city’s business elite, the exclusive Club de Salonique, which had been founded in the late nineteenth century to provide a place to receive foreign visitors, still provided a discreet and civilized setting for influential Greek businessmen and officials to meet Jewish fellow-members. The balance of power was shifting, and the Greek membership now outnumbered Jews. But like most clubs it was proud of its rules and traditions, and continued to accept Jewish members even after the German occupation began in 1941. Faith remained the key marker of ethnic difference. Some Greek liberals and socialists accused Jews of preserving what they called their “ottoman mentality,” by still seeing themselves as a separate collectivity. And indeed among Jews the term “Greek” was often used as a synonym for “Christian” – as when one man described his sister, who had converted, as having “become Greek.” Similarly, for the elderly Uncle Bohor in the Judesmo press satire, a man with a rather traditional outlook, a Greek barber is simply “one of them.” But then in his eyes Jewish “atheists,” like his neighbor upstairs who had shaved off his beard, were not much better.

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The older generation was still devout, attendance at both church and synagogue was high, and families paid regular visits to the cemetery. A handful of weddings each year took place across the religious boundary, but this remained a fraught business for both faiths. When a refugee priest baptized a young Jewish woman without having first consulted Metropolitan Gennadios, his action provoked an angry response from the chief rabbi, and Gennadios, who was himself a product of the old Ottoman system and well understood the sensitivity of the matter, ordered the priest to be punished. The city’s diocesan archives contain at least seventy-eight applications from Jews, mostly young women, seeking to marry Greek Orthodox men during the interwar period. But in the old days, converts had risked ostracism by marrying out. By the late 1930s this was less of a worry. And the much-maligned “Ottoman mentality” was not to be found only among Jews. Greek society itself still harbored deeply rooted prejudices against them. As Judaioi they were linked in the popular imagination to the figure of Judas, the betrayer of Christ. The journalist who translated the Protocol of the Elders of Zion into Greek in 1928 also published Judas through the Ages, an equally nasty tract welcomed by none other than the Archbishop of Athens. Had the Jews not crucified Christ, after all, and had they not desecrated the corpse of the Greek Patriarch in Constantinople in 1821? Their supposed religious and national crimes were thus easily merged. In the summer of 1931, Makedonia serialized a fictional story of unhappy love between a Jewish girl and a Christian boy: the moral – that befriending Jews led Christian families to ruin – was powerful enough to be taken up in one of Greece’s most popular post-war novels, The Third Wedding Wreath. Religious anti-Semitism and a sense of ethnic rivalry and competition colored the atmosphere of the interwar city. But as we have seen, they only became a recipe for violence when politicians sought to use an anti-Jewish policy for their own electoral advantage. Stereotypes facilitated but did not cause the Campbell riot. Nor did stereotypes prevent the Greek authorities from recognizing and supporting Jewish life in various ways. Indeed, an anti-Venizelist administration made Yom Kippur a public holiday in Salonica – to the consternation of Nazi diplomats. Although the anti-Semites fulminated, there is no indication that this was an unpopular move among a majority of the city’s inhabitants for whom co-existence and increasing interaction were facts of life. The metropolitan, Gennadios, and the chief rabbi, Koretz, preserved cordial relations, and tried to ensure that their subordinates did too. Thus in the mid-1930s, the sources of communal tension were largely fading even as official anti-Semitism intensified in Germany, Poland and Romania. Left to themselves, Greeks and Jews might well have sorted out their differences. In the Second World War, hundreds of young Jewish men from the city fought in the ranks of the Greek army, and some of these went on to join the resistance. But they found themselves now up against an infinitely more deadly and highly organized form of anti-Semitism – nor the petty discrimination of Greek officials, or the mob violence of provincial right-wing louts, but the genocidal capabilities of the most advanced state in Europe. Reprint, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 by Mark Mazower

(copyright 2004 pages 417-428).

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Survivors: The Germans finally pulled out of Salonica at the end of October 1944, two weeks after the liberation of Athens. The previous eight Jews had been discovered in hiding and shot. Another five or six survived until liberation. Several hundred, who had escaped into the mountains, or gone to fight with the partisans, now made their way back. Hundreds more had survived by hiding in or around Athens and many of them also gradually returned. But first-hand news of the fate of the tens of thousands who had been deported to Poland did not come until March 1945 with the appearance of the first survivors from Auschwitz. The first to arrive was an Athenian Jew named Leon Batis who reached Salonica from the north on March 15. That evening, tired, irritated and suspicious, eager to return to Athens to see whether his family was still alive, he told his story over ouzo to a large audience in a café. Journalists demanded the facts, while the Jews who had come wanted to know about their relatives and friends. “This was the first time we heard these terms: gas chambers, selections. We froze and dared not ask for details,” wrote one of the listeners. “Batis spoke coldly, without regard for our emotions…He thought everyone knew [these things].” The next day, his account was in most of the city’s newspapers. It was a precise and largely accurate description of the fate of the community. “They burned all the Jews from Thessaloniki in the crematorium,” was one headline. A few weeks later others brought further details, including for the first time reports of the sterilization and other medical experiments performed on many women. By August, two hundred had returned and more were on the way. One year after liberation, there were just over one thousand “Poles” – as the others called them – who had come back from the camps. The survivors found Salonica transformed and unrecognizable after Nazi occupation. Yehuda Perahia, a tobacco merchant who had gone through the war in hiding, recorded his feelings in verse: How into rusty iron pure gold has been transmuted! How what was ours has been changed into a foreign symbol!... I walk through the streets of this blessed city. Despite the sun, it seems to stand in darkness

Jewish tombstones were to be found in urinals and driveways, and had been used to make up the dance-floor of a tavern built over a corner of the former cemetery itself. Because graves had been ransacked for the treasure that had been supposedly hidden there, “many Jewish skulls and bones are visible.” The Hirsch quarter was demolished except for the synagogue and lunatic asylum which were being used as warehouses. Other synagogues had been dynamited by the Germans, and lay in ruins. Trying to cope with an acute housing shortage in 1945, there were sixty thousand refugees from eastern Macedonia in the city. The over-stretched local authorities did not provide any Spartan assistance to Jewish returnees. Without homes, and for the most part, no work, the survivors faced destitution. Relief workers reported an urgent need for clothing, mattresses and blankets. Many were sleeping on benches or on the floor in the remaining few synagogues. The overwhelming short-term priority – as throughout Greece at this time – was for food, shelter and medical assistance. The UN Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) was active in the city helping Jews and Christians alike and one of its officials, Bella Mazur, who had been seconded from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (better known simply as the “Joint”) spent her spare time “trying to help organize the community so that it can have the semblance of a normal and official set-up.” Like many in the city, Jewish survivors were dependent on UNRRA for food and clothing.

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Mazur gave each former concentration camp inmate, most of whom lacked anything other than the clothes they had returned in, underclothes and double blankets which served as mattresses. Some received old pairs of shoes. Several communal buildings were cleaned up, renovated and whitewashed for refugees from the Bulgarian zone had squatted in them during the war – to house the neediest occupants. There was no disguising the disappointment, anger and bitterness many felt on their return. “The deportee was filled with hopes glamorizing his return home to friends, some relatives, a place in which to find a job and the future,” wrote one observer. “These hopes are shattered on arrival.” Unexpected though it might be for us, those returning from Auschwitz were “greeted coldly” by those who had survived war in Greece itself; they were asked “why they, and no others, had made it through the camps alive” – the unspoken and sometimes not so unspoken implication being that they had collaborated and allowed the others to go to their death. “The questions is almost always asked” why are you alive and not my relative – my mother, my father, sister and so forth,” wrote an aid worker in December 1945. “This led to the usual generalization on the part of the leading people…that in the end only the worst elements of the Jews survived the concentration camps.” Angered by such charges, many returnees claimed that “they had been better treated in Germany than here,” and accused those who had stayed of hoarding their wealth and failing to help them out. An unemployed former camp inmate threw a stone through the glass window of Haim B.’s shop, and then shouted to the crowd of onlookers that men like the shop’s owner “had taken all the millions of the world while men like these die of hunger.” To the police he declared that he had wanted “to take revenge on all the rich Jews who did not care about the fate of the poor and never set foot in the community except when they need certificates of the death of their relatives or other favors.” For his part the shopkeeper blamed the community authorities for not doing more both to help the needy, and to clamp down on such incidents – of which this was evidently not the first. The 1157 “Poles” formed their own party for the communal elections early in 1946 and thanks to their numbers won the largest share of the vote. Yet in truth, their program scarcely differed from that of their rivals – the Zionists, and the so-called (mostly left-wing) Resurrectionists. Each wanted greater control over the communal assets, a more active welfare program and pressure on the Greek authorities to give back their property. Even after the “Poles” won, they spent most of their time attacking the foreign Jewish relief agencies for their condescending approach. This aggressiveness was really an outward manifestation of the suspicion, individualism and anxiety that harrowed survivors’ lives. But such attitudes made it frustrating for outsiders to work with them. Relations deteriorated as the new communal authorities tried to insist proudly on their right to handle all funds from abroad. By 1947 the quarrel had gotten so bad that the main Jewish relief agency actually withdrew from the city. Its subsequent verdict on the way the survivors were handling their affairs was that they were poorly led, lacked any communal solidarity, and allowed party politicking – the old curse – to get in the way of proper organization. Restitution: None of this helped in the battle to get Jewish property back. After liberation, the new Greek government had repudiated the wartime legislation passed by its predecessors and thus, in theory at least, committed itself to restoring Jewish properties to their former owners. But in the city itself such a policy collided with the interests of the wartime beneficiaries and their patrons, and it soon became clear that they were not going to give up without a fight.

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At first things went well. For four months the city was run by EAM/ELAS – the left-wing national resistance movement – which was broadly sympathetic to the plight of Salonica’s Jews. Its officials had lists of collaborators who had taken properties, and warned them to hand them back or face charges: several dozen complied. But in the winter of 1944-45 relations in Athens between EAM/ELAS and the British-backed government broke down and the crisis eventually led to the “December events” in which the two sides fought openly in the streets, and RAF planes strafed leftist suburbs. In Salonica an uneasy understanding was preserved but this conflict and the victory for the right that followed entirely altered the balance of power. After February 1945 the once-powerful EAM/ELAS was gradually marginalized and the middle ground in Greek politics disappeared, and the British-backed government (and its successors) came to rely on anti-communists and former collaborators. In far-off Athens, governments were weak and changed frequently. Despite making all the right noises for international consumption on the issue of Jewish property, they found it hard to combat the increasingly organized opposition to restitution in Salonica itself. After March 1945, the hand-over slowed down to a trickle. Under EAM/ELAS, forty to fifty properties had been restored, and others had been reclaimed through various forms of direct action as the old owners simply evicted the new ones, confident that the police would not intervene. But over the following year only another thirty-seven were handed over, and the police started to behave less sympathetically. In early spring 1946, there were stories of claimants being assaulted, and of the wartime caretakers appealing to the courts to try to get eviction orders rescinded, demanding “their” shop back. A vegetable merchant who had thrown a Jewish grocer out of his shop across the street in 1945 challenged an eviction order three years later and managed to persuade the court of appeal to find in his favor. One reason why the courts were reluctant to intervene was the severe housing shortage afflicting the city as a whole. At least ten thousand refugee families were still living in the primitive huts they had inhabited since the 1920s and many of the newcomers who had come during the war were worse off still. Cement worker Georgios D., his wife and six children lived in a large damp hole within the Byzantium walls. The family of Constantine T. inhabited a one-room shack three and a half meters square; another family, refugees from the Bulgarian zone lived in an “old half-destroyed wooden hut” with no mattresses, blankets, clothing, plates or utensils – at least according to the relief workers that visited them: for meals they boiled wild herbs. One downtown shop was shared between seven families; another group of eight families, again wartime refugees, camped out in a vacant house near the station. There were hundreds of such stories. The housing shortage also provided an excuse to protect politically well-connected clients; and even when courts did issue restitution orders little was done. YDIP continued to function in 1945 and 1946, under a new director, and remained part of the governor-general’s office: on several occasions the governor-general, a political appointee, instructed it to ignore court instructions to hand properties back. Douros was reassigned to his old job running the city’s mortgage office and publicly protested accusations of collaboration, claiming he had been threatened by the Germans as a “saboteur,” and insisting he had never wanted the job in the first place. Alexander Krallis, the former president of the Chamber of Commerce, and Simonides were arraigned as collaborators at the end of 1945, but the trial against them was suspended. Wartime YDIP personnel were tried later and mostly acquitted. Legally speaking, too, restitution was not a straightforward matter. It was not just survivors who were claiming their properties; others made claims on the basis of kinship to, or even business associations with a deceased owner. Children and siblings were usually considered to inherit automatically; but survivors demanded that more distant degrees of consanguinity be accepted as well. Lack of witnesses to the death of most of the Jews meant that lawyers and religious authorities found themselves having to make the macabre adjudication on whether parents and

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children had been gassed simultaneously or not in order to rule on whether claimants really were justified in presenting themselves as the heirs of the dead. To prove kinship applicants needed special certificates from the town hall, a process which the local authorities began to obstruct to slow down the rate of return. “If the citizen is called Nikolaos, Georgios or Ioannis,” wrote one journalist angrily, “he is freely given the certification of kinship which he needs to inherit the property of his parents or more distant relatives. But if he is called Avraam, Isaac or Iakov, it is not issued. Fine logic!” By the spring of 1949, the mayor’s office had been blocking the issue of such certificates for more than a year. 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 later 1945 a judge decided that since 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 enough 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.” 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 not turned since Liberation into 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 sketch. “All the Jews have become filthy rich, it said. I am a Jew – what I went through in Hitler camps proves it – so I must be filthy rich too.” 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. Damasikinos and his counterpart in the city, Gennadios, both made speeches at a ceremony to celebrate liberation. But while Damsikinos 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.

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There were further painful negotiations both locally and nationally over the expropriation of the Hirsch hospital, and the rubble-strewn area where the 151 neighborhood 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. Weakness forced Salonika’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 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. 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. 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 Mertin, 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 completely 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.

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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. Vanished Pasts, New Problems: The 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 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 of 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 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 Maceconia away for incorporation in a Balkan communist federation. Anti-communists who had work 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 rumors of Russian planes on their way from the north. The church was drawn into the fray, and the Christian youth groups warned the city’s residents not to be tempted by the godless left. Saints – one who was “well-dressed, freshly shaved, wearing blue clothes and a white shirt” – were reported to be 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 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. 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, creating the drift from the rural economy which was transforming post-war Greece, and Europe. They packed into the old buildings and land densities soared.

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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 which did survive from those days was quickly being bulldozed and sacrificed to redevelopment. As land became more valuable, the old log houses were torn down and replaced with multi-storied apartment blocks. Contractors and developers were the city’s new life force. 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 suburbs to spread in all directions. As they killed off the ferry-boats, which used to carry passengers across the ba Bara and the Beshchinar, gardens disappeared under new warehouses and factories. As the roads leading into town were widened, Varden Square was modelled and remodelled, and the last of the faded Ottoman cafes 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 landmark White Tower disappeared under the bulldozers, as did the neo-classical mansions along the old Hamidie, and the Alliance Israelite headquarters in the center of town which was replaced by a new tourist hotel. New faculty buildings, 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 a lack of money protect the old gable-fronted Ottoman houses. 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 to 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.” For returning Jews the experience was a haunting one. Jacques Strousma was a young engineer who had helped construct the Hirsch camp, and had survived Auschwitz, where his parents and his pregnant wife had been killed. After the war, unwilling to return home, he had left for good. When eventually he came back for a brief visit, he spent hours sitting on his hotel balcony and looking out over the sea: “I was smoking cigarette after cigarette for fear the tears would come. A Greek Orthodox friend found me alone around midnight and said: ‘I understand you, Jacques, you don’t really know any more where to go in Salonica, the city where you once knew every stone.’ And that’s how it was.”

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Unit IV Aftermath of The Holocaust in Greece

Lesson 3 Lesson: “Is Greece Still Home?” Common Core Standards: SL 2 Integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats, including visually, quantitatively, and orally. Social Studies Standards (NJ): [6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6] Key Questions/Issues Addressed:

• Why did Greek Christians and Greek Jews interpret the concept of Hellenization differently?

• How did the demographics of the various populations in Greece change by the end of the World War II? What accounts for the different rates of change among the groups?

Lesson Goals/Objectives:

• Students will be able to analyze the difference in demographics for the Jews of Greece between Northern Greece (Salonica and Ioninna) and the rest of the country.

• Students will be able to assess why the difference in Jewish population before the war versus after the war influenced Jewish emigration from Greece.

• Students will be able to identify what Hellenization meant in the mid-twentieth century and evaluate why it became a code word for national pride to Greek Christians and a threat to security for Greek Jews.

Key Terms:

• Demographics • Hellenization • Equity • Justice • National identity • Restitution

Materials needed:

• Reprint (A Liter of Soup and Sixty Grams of Bread, Heinz Salvator Kounio, copyright 2003, page 201) and other academic resources. (chart from p. 201 at end of lesson plan)

Background information:

• Some prior study of the Holocaust Instructional Activities/Procedures: 1. Students will work in small groups to retrieve population statistics and demographics for the

ethnic composition of Greece before World War II. Students will be referred to the Heinz Kunio Diary, (A Liter of Soup and Sixty Grams of Bread, Heinz Salvator Kounio, copyright 2003, page 201)

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2. Students can prepare a short skit reflecting on the issues and emotions of a Greek Jew

returning home to Salonica compared to a Jew returning to Athens. 3. Students will also consider in their skits the equity and justice issues of settling competing

claims for property and possessions between returning Jewish survivors and the Greek Christians who purchased them in their absence.

4. Students will also write a journal assessment comparing and contrasting the impact of Hellenization and national identity on Greek Christians versus Greek Jews.

Evidence of Understanding: 1. Class journals 2. Skits 3. Class discussion Extension Activities: 1. Research the emigration of Greek Jews after liberation and the end of World War II. 2. Create a chart indicating point of origin, destination(s), and numbers of emigrants. 3. Write a brief explanation of the reasons for Greek Jewish emigration and the things that

influenced the choice(s) of destination.

Region 1940After

Deportation 1947 1959 1994 2001 DeportedThrace 2853 161 74 38 0 0 2692

0Macedonia 62800 11638 2309 1410 1015 1207 51162Thessaloniki 56500 10409 1950 1279 1012 1200 46091

0Thessaly 2727 2322 1831 856 624 440 405

0Mainland 3825 2045 5100 2669 3614 3265 1780

Athens 3500 1810 4930 2557 3524 3200 16900

Epirus 2584 200 169 115 92 50 23840

The Islands 4625 770 667 135 80 119 3855Corfu 2000 205 185 85 45 80 1795

Zakynthos 275 275 275 0 0 0 0Crete 350 90 7 1 0 1 260

Rhodes 2000 200 200 49 35 38 18000

Total 79414 17136 10019 5223 5425 5081 62278

Jewish Population of Greece

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

1940 1944 1947 1959 1994 2001

Thrace

Thrace

0

10000

20000

30000

40000

50000

60000

1940 1944 1947 1959 1994 2001

Thessaloniki

Thessaloniki

0

50000

100000

1940 1944 1947 1959 1994 2001

Total

Total

95

Unit IV Aftermath of The Holocaust in Greece

Lesson 4 Lesson: “Is Greece Still At War?” Common Core Standards: WHST 3 Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details and well-structured even sequences. WHST 7 Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation. Social Studies Standards (NJ) in Lesson: [6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6] Key Questions/Issues Addressed:

• Why would Greek Christians and Greek Jews react quite differently to the Greek Civil War?

• What were the goals of each, the Royalist and the Communist movements, in the Greek Civil War in addition to the power to govern?

• What role did the Greek Civil War play in the coming of the international Cold War era? Lesson Goals/Objectives:

• Students will be able to analyze the impact of the Greek Civil War for the differing reactions on its Christian and Jewish citizens.

• Students will be able to identify the difference between the Royalist and Communist movements in Greece.

• Students will be able to connect the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Greek Civil War(s) on the demographics of Greece today.

Key Terms:

• Royalist • Communist • Civil War • Demographics

Materials Needed:

• Reprint (A Liter of Soup and Sixty Grams of Bread, Heinz Salvator Kounio, copyright 2003, page 201). (chart from p. 201 at end of lesson plan)

• Access to the Internet and library/media center for research Background information:

• Some prior study of the Holocaust and its aftermath

96

Instructional Activities/Procedures: 1. Students will research the advent of the strife between Monarchist (Royalist) parties with the

rise of Communist movements during and after World War II. Information should include but not be limited to the ideas of each on the proper role of government, the role that each faction played in Greece during WWII, source of support in Greece for each faction, connections to other nations, strategies and tactics of fighting, etc.

2. Students will then write a journal entry speculating how two young Greek families, one

Christian and one Jewish, might respond about planning for the future in light of the civil war.

3. Students will also examine population demographics in modern day Greece to evaluate the aftermath of the Holocaust on the Greek population. (see Kounio, page 201)

Evidence of Understanding: 1. Class journals 2. Class discussion 3. Quality of research Extension Activities: 1. Research information about the role of the Greek Civil War in the development of the

international Cold War. Prepare two maps. The first map will be a map of Greece with major sites that played a role in the Greek Civil War, major battles indicated, and two different colors to indicate areas controlled by the Royalists vs. those controlled by the Communists. The second map will be a world map with areas that became centers of Cold War tensions and incidents shaded on the map. Write a brief paragraph explaining the advent of the Cold War, the causes of the “war”, and the events marking the end of the Cold War.

2. Research the necessary information to create a timeline of Greek history from the year 1920 – 2012. Indicate important events, crises, and celebrations during these years on the timeline. Highlight those events occurring during the Holocaust and during the Greek Civil War.

Region 1940After

Deportation 1947 1959 1994 2001 DeportedThrace 2853 161 74 38 0 0 2692

0Macedonia 62800 11638 2309 1410 1015 1207 51162Thessaloniki 56500 10409 1950 1279 1012 1200 46091

0Thessaly 2727 2322 1831 856 624 440 405

0Mainland 3825 2045 5100 2669 3614 3265 1780

Athens 3500 1810 4930 2557 3524 3200 16900

Epirus 2584 200 169 115 92 50 23840

The Islands 4625 770 667 135 80 119 3855Corfu 2000 205 185 85 45 80 1795

Zakynthos 275 275 275 0 0 0 0Crete 350 90 7 1 0 1 260

Rhodes 2000 200 200 49 35 38 18000

Total 79414 17136 10019 5223 5425 5081 62278

Jewish Population of Greece

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

1940 1944 1947 1959 1994 2001

Thrace

Thrace

0

10000

20000

30000

40000

50000

60000

1940 1944 1947 1959 1994 2001

Thessaloniki

Thessaloniki

0

50000

100000

1940 1944 1947 1959 1994 2001

Total

Total