FROM THESSALONIKI TO AUSCHWITZ AND BACK
MEMORIES OF A SURVIVOR FROM THESSALONIKI
ERIKA MYRIAM KOUNIO AMARIGLIO
VALLENTINE MITCHELL 2000
Translated into English by Theresa (neé Amariglio) Thessaloniki 1998
PART II
Chapter 2: German Occupation and Deportation
• On the first day of September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. That was it! The Second World War had begun.
• Our house was full of newspapers, both Greek and foreign ones. Every evening my parents would listen to the news and follow the rapid development of events.
• In 1940 the Germans were on the March. They conquered one country after another: France, Belgium, Holland, but for me the most devastating thing was my grandmother’s illness.
• 15 August 1940: The Greek battleship Elli was sunk. We all hovered around the wireless to listen to the news.
• 28 October 1940: Metaxas’ big NO to the Italians. Army mobilization. War.
• I remember that I went to the neighborhood news kiosk to read the head lines of the newspapers we didn’t subscribe to, and I read about the victories of our army: Korytsa, Tepeleni, Argirokastro, Chimara, Agii Saranta.
• Winter came earlier that year. Frost and snow in the mountains. ‘Keep on knitting girls, waste no time, our soldiers are cold!’
• The first few weeks went by and then the first casualties arrived. Feet with gangrene, amputated legs. The first dead, and then more and more. All the terrors of war. The cold was getting more severe.
• On 26 December 1940, my darling, my most beloved grandmother, Theresa, passed away. It was my first experience of death. Why did people die? I could not cope with it. Today, 50 years later, I realize how lucky she was to die in her bed, surrounded by her children.
• The year 1941 began, more gloomy than any previous year. The Italians were surrendering and we were gaining ground. But our biggest threat was from the north. Gradually the Germans were conquering all of Europe. The casualties with amputated limbs were multiplying, and the number of deaths rising. Shock and horror!
• The ‘Metaxas line’ was overrun. The Germans had crossed our borders. People emptied the warehouses and took as much food as possible. On 9 April 1941 the Germans entered our city. We locked ourselves in our house.
• Two Germans carrying metal badges on their chests climbed out of the car and asked for my father. What a relief we felt when we saw him return a few hours later safe and unharmed. They needed film and cameras; they took them, and after getting what they wanted they let him go home.
• Two of our house’s rooms were requisitioned for a Gestapo officer. Father went back to work as usual and we started school again.
• A letter from a colleague in Germany announced that his son Helmut was being transferred to Thessaloniki, asking to look after his son. For my parents it was the obvious thing to do, to give a home to a friend’s son.
• Fifty years later I wondered if his father had known of the Nuremberg laws? Was he aware of how much the Jews were being persecuted; did he not know that they sent them to concentration camps; had he not heard of ‘Kristallnact’? Had he not heard the anti-Semitic speeches full of hatred and virulence against the Jews? How did he dare to send his son to find a family atmosphere in the house of a Jew? Was he not afraid of censorship when he wrote letters full of gratitude for the hospitality his Jewish friend was showing his son?
• There was little food now. At home we counted the portions, and mother spared on oil and sugar. With the premature cold weather our houses froze and our hunger grew. Corpses were picked up every morning.
• Then it was 1942. Finally spring had arrived. The German borders spread. There was a war going on in Africa, and another in Russia. They were taking more and more hostages. The resistance was growing, and we heard of sabotage by the partisans.
• A German decree called for all Jews aged eighteen to forty-five to gather in Elevtherias Square at 8.00 am on 11 July 1942. Three German police cars stopped in front of our house. Wild-looking Germans entered our home. They searched it.
• They asked my father our ages and to my surprise I heard him taking some years off our actual ages. My brother and I, bewildered, watched them get into one of the cars together with our grandfather and drive off.
• I considered going to the Gestapo, talking to them, pleading with them. I looked the guard straight in the eye and in German asked him for permission to meet Officer So-and-So – and in fact he brought me to his office!
• I said that I had come to obtain permission to bring my mother’s medicine to the place where she was being held. She was very ill and required a strict diet. With the paper clutched in my hand I left.
• I went to the Gestapo prison every day at noon, knocked on the iron door, showed the authorization paper, and they accepted the pot containing my mother’s food.
• Friends and acquaintances did their best to arrange their release. We were constantly afraid, because every so often we would hear that they had taken hostages from the prison and shot them in reprisal. A month later we heard the good news: they had moved to the Eptaphyrgion where we could visit.
• ‘What happened, why did they put you in prison? The reason was Helmut, our German friend’s son who had visited our home. He was in an anti-Nazi movement and was being closely watched. Helmut got drunk one night and cursed Hitler in the most explicit way. He was condemned to death
• It must have been November, still 1942, when one evening – as we did every evening – we were listening to the BBC news on the wireless. Two Polish Jews had escaped from a camp named Lublin where the mass murders of Jews was going on.
• Around mid-October we heard that all the men compelled to do forced labor had returned. They were ill, thin, wretched. Many had died.
• The hardships of the occupation were enormous; there was less and less food; people were dying from cold and hunger.
• Father transferred the title of his shop to a photographer friend from Serres, so that it wouldn’t be expropriated by the German army. From then on his shop was not registered under his name.
• January slipped by and then it was February. It was very cold and the streets were frozen. It was Saturday when father came home from the shop bringing us some very bad news. ‘A special SS committee came, led by two men named Brunner and Wisliceny,’ I heard him say to mother. ‘I don’t like the look of things.’
• On 8 February, at noon on Monday, news began to circulate that the Germans had decided to impose the Nuremberg laws in Thessaloniki. All Jews were now required to put a yellow star on every piece of clothing they wore. Jews were not allowed to use public transportation. All the Jews had to move to special areas the SS had specified, i.e., ghettos.
• We had hardly stayed a week in our new house when a new SS order forbade us to be outside the ghetto after sunset. Now I had to return from school very quickly, to be there before sunset.
• A few days later the Jews were forbidden to leave the ghetto even in daytime. Every day there were new orders. To confiscate all the Jew’s assets. To put a yellow star on every shop, house, office.
• Our old neighborhood postman came to see father in our house. I heard him saying to my parents, ‘Give me the two children and I will take them to my mother, to the village, just outside Veria. They will be fine there – you must not worry.’
• And my father’s answer, ‘No, thank you. Thank you very much, but I don’t want my family to be split up.’
• It was 10 March 1943 when, early in the morning, an SS car stopped in front of the house. They ordered father to collect our most necessary clothes and said we must leave in the next two hours to go to Baron Hirsch, a part of town near the railway station.
• My father learned the reason later from a militiaman. One of the informers, either Boudourian or Papanahum had betrayed us to the SS. He had told them that father had given his shop to a Christian in order to save his assets.
• Father went back to the ‘offices’ to find out what was happening. He came back very upset to tell us that the ‘deportation’ was beginning. That they would take us to Poland and we could even change Greek drachmas for Polish zlotys, so we wouldn’t arrive there without money.
• The German trap was well prepared, and their great deceit very well studied.
• With a sense of great anxiety and misery our second day in the Baron Hirsch ghetto came to an end. The next day everyone was talking about the railroad cars at the train station. Michael Molho writes in his book In Memoriam that there were 40 railway wagons. Forty wagons! An endless line, and they were waiting to be loaded.
• Eventually father came in a rush to speak to mother – not to us – to ask her what she thought about our leaving with the first transport.
• One of the community clerks suggested taking him off the list so we could leave later. One never knows what will happen. But our fate had already been decided! Mother, discouraged by the terrible living conditions, said to him, stressing every word: ‘Salvator, whatever will be, let it happen as soon as possible. Let’s leave at the first opportunity.’
• That was it, we would leave with everybody else in the first transport. The cards were on the table, without much discussion or hesitation. And in the midst of our misfortune, this was our luck, to be in the first transport.
• I have often wondered what it was that made possible the survival of my whole family – father, mother, my brother, and myself? Luck, destiny, coincidence? Maybe all three together, and one of the coincidences was that we found ourselves in the first transport.
• Fifty years later, I cannot believe how everything happened! How were the Germans able to trick and mislead so many people? They prepared their plans so systematically and cleverly and slowly set their trap, so that in a single month – after they revealed their true selves – they managed to assemble so many people and convince them that nothing terrible was happening.
• In my mind all their orders about the yellow star, the confiscation of property, the prohibitions, first not to circulate on the main roads, then not to leave the ghetto at all – all these orders seemed to have been given over a period of months. It seemed as though after each order several weeks passed before a new one was given.
• When – in 1976 – I read Michael Molho’s book Thirty years after the Persecution for the first time, I could hardly believe that the measures against the Jews began to be imposed on 8 February 1943 and by 25 February 1943 the whole Jewish population had been moved to the ghettos. And 17 days later the first transport departed, with 2,800 panic-stricken people crammed into 35 railway wagons – destination Poland.
• Unbelievable, unimaginable! And ever since I read this, each time I recall what happened, I experience the same awful feeling of wonder and exasperation, that it could not have been possible.
• Looking back now, 50 years later, I believe it would not have been possible for the Jews to have reacted differently. The orders fell like blows from a whip, one after the other. Confused, overwhelmed, terrified the Jews succumbed to their fate. Optimism and fate always had the upper hand.
• Some, courageous and perceptive persons without families, escaped to the mountains. And some of the wealthier people managed to hide on an island or in some remote village – but there were very few who did.
• I have tried to understand in order to explain to my seven grandchildren, and especially to my eldest grandson – 25 years old – who I know cannot understand or excuse that so many thousands of people – nearly 50,000 – let themselves be herded like sheep to the slaughter.
• How can I make him understand the times we lived in? Eighty per cent of the Jewish population spoke Spanish better than Greek. It was only in 1932 that a new law was passed that all Greek children should have compulsory education in the Greek school system for the first six grades. Parents and grandparents spoke only Spanish, so their children learned both Spanish and Greek.
• How could he understand that to hide or to reach the mountains was difficult, because Jews could be recognized as non-Christians by their accents and risked being betrayed to the Germans.
• And even to hide they needed money – a lot of money which they did not have. Eighty per cent of the Jewish population were poor workers, porters, artisans or small merchants.
• My husband, who spoke German, was employed as an interpreter in the fire brigade where there was a resistance movement. One of their activities was helping people flee to the mountains, German and Italian deserters among them. Having this ability – to get people to the mountains – he urged his Jewish friends, his classmates, to flee to the mountains. He always got he same response – ‘How could I leave my family?’
• The next morning, very early – at dawn – we set off with our suitcases ready. All of a sudden an incessant commotion all around us. Mothers calling for their children, men carrying bundles which they dropped every so often. The SS, together with the civilian guards, were pushing people to go on faster, faster, faster… And I stood there together with my family, and for a little while I watched the incredible spectacle, wide-eyed, speechless, my heart thumping like crazy.
• We arrived in front of the railway cars. ‘Don’t move from here,’ father said. ‘We will wait…’ Screams, yelling, wailing, in front of the railway car doors… people were disappearing, disappearing into the depths of the cars, more and more…
• Suddenly I heard a different noise, very loud. They started to close the doors of the railway cars and attach locks…
• Germans, not SS-men, would accompany the train. Later I learned that they were policemen – Schupos. The head Schupo – I don’t know how he had learned that my father spoke German – approached father and said: ‘Wait, don’t get in yet, I need you as an interpreter.’
• This was another coincidence. My father’s knowledge of German helped us to survive. Of all the people in the first group, nobody, but nobody at all, spoke German! Most were simple people, workers and artisans, porters, small merchants who spoke Spanish and many who also knew French, but no German-speakers. People were needed to act as interpreters and translate German orders.
• The cars were painted in a rusty red color, they had no windows at all apart from a skylight, very high up, left and right, protected by wire. As the doors shut you could not see anything inside; you could hardly hear anything. You saw only an occasional hand through a skylight.
• Bamm! Bamm! The doors closed one after the other. We too got in. Our car was completely filled. There was no place to stretch our legs. Men, women, children and elderly people were talking, crying, complaining all at the same time. In one corner of the railway car there was a sack full of biscuits, wormy figs and olives. In the middle of the car was a pail for our ‘bodily necessities’.
• After they shut the doors the train started to move. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, the train went on without stopping. Night fell, and the babies did not cry as much any more. Silence filled the car. Only the moans of the sick were heard. Each of us was alone, sunk in our deep despair and the loss of hope.
• Suddenly it stopped. What had happened? What will happen? Moschiko again climbed up on his father’s shoulders to peep through the skylight to see where we were.
• The door opened and a Schupo called to my father to come out. My father went from one car to the next explaining what must be done. Nobody, but nobody, was allowed to get out as long as we were at the station. Only a few men would go to empty the buckets and some to fill bottles with water.
• The first full day of our journey was over. The situation in the wagon was becoming more and more unbearable. A whole day spent in darkness. The light that filtered through the skylights was weak. It didn’t reduce the darkness – and the babies cried constantly.
• Thanks to my father’s efforts, on the third day the head of our transport agreed to stop the train somewhere away from a station and permitted people to get out of the cars for half an hour. We must have been in Yugoslavia. The surroundings were deserted, not a soul to be seen. Father went from one car to the next trying to comfort people.
• The Schupos, guns ready, watched us, and whenever someone strayed too far they ordered him back. They did not allow us to get out of the cars again.
• Three more days passed in this way. The train made frequent stops, and people would try to peer out through the skylights to find out where we were. As if it would have made any difference to know exactly where we were…
Chapter 3: Arrival in Auschwitz and Birkenau