Thessaloniki, Greece
Got up at 3:30am in Tel Aviv for my 7 am flight on Olympic Airlines to Athens. Israeli airport security for obvious reasons is a very demanding process just like the Rome to Tel Aviv leg. In the first line you go through the psychological screening before you check your bags. Where are you going, what did you do here. What was the area and purpose of your visit, etc? Flight only two hours to Athens and then pick up another little Greek airline to Thessaloniki. My destination is the second largest city in Greece-up in the North towards the Albanian border. My Father’s family lived there since his ancestors were expelled in 1492 from Spain during the Spanish Inquisition. I arrived at the airport, took a cab to the hotel. Actually, I was lucky to get a cab since all cab drivers were going on a one day strike the next day. On top of this, the gasoline haulers were already in their fifth day of a wildcat strike in the entire country protesting their regulated rates which they claim were insufficient to haul gasoline. After I arrived at the hotel, I was joined by Fanni and Babys who met many of my friends last year when ten of us did the Mediterranean cruise and they rode their motorcycle six hours to Athens. Fanni and Babys took me out to a wonderful Greek taverna where we sat outside and had so many types of roasted meats that I lost count. Lamb prepared in more ways that you could imagine with incredible Greek salads. The one annoying issue was that it felt like I was eating in Santa Monica on the Promenade with so many weird people panhandling. The Nigerians have cornered the market in bootleg DVD sales and a different Nigerian comes to your table every 60 seconds waving DVD’s and CD’s. During the lull, the gypseys from Rhomania and Albania harrass you to buy their cupie dolls and keychains.
After our incredible feast, we then went to a pastry shop like I really needed to sample all the deserts that they ordered. Very good and fat deserts. Of course we were bothered by the same street people. Fani and Babys told me that the quality of life is definetly affected by the illegal immigration and the aggressive panhandling. It certainly is not the Greece that I had come to visit at least 20 times in my life.
Monday
I had an open day, so I walked the entire city which has the hustle and bustle of your typical large metropolitan center. I walked over to the port area and there was a collection of every taxi cab that worked the city parked in two very long rows with every cab driver standing under a banner saying something in Greek which I could not decipher. The cab drivers were on a one day wildcat strike protesting their inadequate fares in view of rising gas prices. This was done as a result of the ongoing strike by the gasoline haulers which was in the sixth day was already crippling the entire country as every gas station had a sign on the pumps indicating they were out of gasoline. Later on that evening, I had dinner with Fannis family. Her brother Yannis, his wife Maria and their son joined his Mom for dinner with me.
The mother Maria was married to Theodore who died in the mid 80’s. They have a special relationship with my family as they were given my Grandparents home by the City of Thessaloniki during World War II. It was part of the Nazi final solution to remove the Jews from Greece and then have the Greek government redistribute the wealth to the non Jews. After the war, my father went back to his house after the concentration camps with his new bride. When he was greeted at the door and explained the house was given to them by the Greek government and now owned by Mr.and Mrs. Noulikas Of course, there was no compensation to my father as the sole family member survivor of the Nazi holocaust. Noulikas instead invited by Father and his new bride to live them which they did for the first year. During that first year, my father was drafted into the Greek Guerllla army to serve during the Greek Civil War and my sister Esther was born while he was at war in 1949.
The dinner on Monday night was a spectacular seafood banquet. We must have had ten different plat4es of seafood-octopus, quid, calamari, swordfish, white fish, trout, and on and on while we were all drinking Ouzo. Salads and then bunelos in honey for dessert.
Tuesday
I met the tour group who were my Sephardic March of the Living tour partners. All 17 were from Haifa, Israel. Now the challenge that I realized was that the tour is in Hebrew which I do not speak. . But they found me three people in the group who were fluent in English who stuck by me during the lectures and tours to make certain I understood everything. Being with Israelis meant that more than half of them were chain smokers. The tour began immediately after breakfast. Thessaloniki as the center of Sephardic Jewish culture was the agenda of the day.
The Turks conquered what is now Thessaloniki in 1430. Those same conquerors decided to expand the population of 11,000 with the rescue of the Jews who were brought to this area in very large numbers during the Spanish Inquisition (1492). At that time, the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire recognized the importance of the Spanish Jews who numbered 15,000-20,000 being expelled by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The Ottomans gladly brought the Jews to their land for their technological contributions and skills so badly needed. Quickly following that, the Jews of Italy, Portugal, Sicily and Northern Africa were also brought to the Ottoman Empire area now known as Thessaloniki.
By the 1890s, the port of Thessaloniki was closed on the Sabbath because the city was 50% Jewish. Shortly later, the rulers demanded that the port be closed on Sundays rather than Saturdays. In 1912, Thessaloniki once again became part of Greece. In 1917, the Jewish Quarter which represented one third of the land area of the city was subjected to a ravaging fire caused by a woman preparing her eggplant and burned so much of the Jewish community. It was never rebuilt and nearly 55,000 Jews lost their homes and businesses, as well as 31 synagogues. During the period between the two world wars, many Jews emigrated to what is now Israel, particularly after a disastrous arson fire in 1931 in which so many Jewish homes were destroyed again. Approximately 16,000 Jews settled in Israel and the Jewish port workers of Thessaloniki created the port of Tel Aviv. The Jews of Thessaloniki also emigrated to the USA, France Italy and Latin America. This certainly was the start of the slow spiral downward that culminated with the arrival of the Nazis in 1940 as an occupying force. The Nazis in 1941 passed their anti Jewish laws which banned Jews from going into pasty shops, cafes, etc. Jewish libraries and archives are destroyed, homes of Jews are confiscated and Jews banned from the Hirsch Jewish Hospital. .
We did a real lot of moving about the city with a large bus for the 19 of us. There was an elderly couple with us from a kibbutz in Israel. The gentleman by the name of Benyamin had left Thessaloniki after his return from the concentration camps and moved permanently to Israel. He had not been back to Greece since the end of the war. Throughout the day, he gave first hand accounts of his experience in Thessaloniki and in the concentration camps. . Our stops included the restored synagogue in Thessaloniki (which is used only four times a year), the Jewish Day School for K-6 that has 20 students of which half are not Jewish, but friends of the Jewish community, the Hospital that was a Jewish institution up until the war, and the “new” Jewish cemetery.
It is referred to as the new Jewish Cemetery because there was a major dispute between the City and the Jewish Community before World War II. Despite the fact that the Jewish Community goes back to 90 BC, the city wanted the Jewish Cemetery removed so that they could expand the University which is now the largest in the country. The Jewish community refused to unearth the graves and relocate them. When the Nazi’s came into Thessaloniki in 1941, one of the first things they did to both get the confidence of the Greek community and to start their harassment of the Jews was to destroy the cemetery. The graves were unearthed, and the tombstone destroyed and discarded. Many tombstones were redistributed into the community for building supplies such as sidewalks. Thus, the old Jewish Cemetery with so much historical significance was destroyed to make way for the University expansion. Desecration of the Jewish cemeteries was a very common degredation of the Jewish communities everywhere the Nazi killing machine went through the war. It was a cornerstone of their reign of terror which started with demoralizing the Jewish population with insults like this activity.
By February 1943, the Nazis required Jews to wear the yellow Star of David and forced them to live in specific areas. This continued harassment was marked by the event referred to as Black Sabbath when all Jewish men were required to assemble at the City square by the sea and were subjected to the humiliation of calisthenics and exercise. We went to the site where a beautiful sculpture was erected. in memory of that occasion. We also went to the site of the old railroad station that was used by the Nazis for the transport of Jews from March to August 1943 when 50,000 Jews of Thessaloniki were transported in rail cattle cars for the four day trip to Auschwitz/Berkinau concentration camps in Poland. In that period, 19 train transports left Thessaloniki which was the southernmost train transport to the camps. These trains were averaging 3,000 Jews with as many as 300 crammed into cattlecars with no heat, sanitation or sense of compassion were dispatched for their tasks. Roughly 50,000 Jews of Thessaloniki perished in the concentration camps. This represented 96% of the Jewish population of Thessaloniki and roughly 98.6% of the Jewish population of all of Greece. According to the Holocaust Museum of Los Angles, only the country of Belorussia with an extermination rate of 98.8% had a larger percentage population loss during the Holocaust. The story was told that the Grand Rabbi of Thessaloniki provided the names of the Jews of the city in the belief that the transports were resettling that population to a better place. Very few people avoided the transports. My father was one of th few that did not get sent out of Greece. He tells me that his Father told him to leave Greece because of the Nazis. However, my father was captured in Bulgaria and accused of being a British spy and sent to the camps anyway. At the same time, my mother who traces her roots to Turkey was routed out of her home with her entire family during the Kristelnacht roundup and violence in Vienna, Austria before her teenage years.
The purpose of this trip is to trace my ancestors trip by rail in the forced transports to the concentration camps. I will be spending the next few days on trains from Greece to Sofia, Bulgaria, through Serbia, Romania, Hungary and on to Poland to understand what went on with the Nazi machine and in these death camps. Some people are asking me why I am going on a trip like this. The answer is because I want to learn about my past and trace that route of my ancestors that I was deprived of the opportunity to ever meet. My father is the only one out of his large family to survive. He lost everyone. My Mother was liberated from the death camps with her Father and Brother. She lost everyone else.
Tags: Travel
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