Book review
Introduction: The perils of indifference
Elie Wiesel’s millennium address on the ‘perils of indifference’ contains eternal truths and pinpoints the essence of all decent civilization. “We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two world wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations, bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence; so much indifference.”
“Our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler’s armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies. If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once. And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew”
“The distressing tale of the ‘St Louis’ is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo – nearly 1,000 Jews – was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnact, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already in the shores of the United States, was sent back. I don’t understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn’t he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people – in America, the great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?”
“Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save their victims during the war? Why did some of America’s largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?”
“Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences?”
A friend has died
A friend, Erika Myriam Kounio Amariglio, recently died. She left with us her memoirs From Thessaloniki to Auschwitz and Back, a sad reminder of the indifference an earlier generation showed to his fellow man. More than ever, having had this wonderful lady in our house, I was reminded that it is up to me to fight evil whenever and wherever I find it. I will be judged and judged severely, by my children if I take the easy way out, if I choose to pass by on the other side, if I turn a blind eye.
FROM THESSALONIKI TO AUSCHWITZ AND BACK
MEMORIES OF A SURVIVOR FROM THESSALONIKI
ERIKA MYRIAM KOUNIO AMARIGLIO
VASLLENTINE MITCHELL 2000
Translated into English by Theresa Sundt (neé Amariglio) Thessaloniki 1998
PART I
Biographical note
Erika Myriam Kounio Amariglio was born in Thessaloniki. In March 1943 she and her family were among 2,800 people who were deported with the first transport to Auschwitz extermination camp. She remained there for two-and-a-half years. Due to her knowledge of German, she worked as a scribe in the camp’s Gestapo office.
The Library of Holocaust Testimonies
It is greatly to the credit of Frank Cass that this series of survivors’ testimonies is being published in Britain. The need for such a series has long been apparent here, where many survivors made their homes.
Since the end of the war in 1945 the terrible events of the Nazi destruction of European Jewry have cast a pall over our time. Six million Jews were murdered within a short period; the few survivors have had to carry in their memories whatever remains of the knowledge of Jewish life in more than a dozen countries, in several thousand towns, in tens of thousands of villages, and in innumerable families. The precious gift of recollection has been the sole memorial for millions of people whose lives were suddenly and brutally cut off.
For many years, individual survivors have published their testimonies. But many more have been reluctant to do so, often because they could not believe that they would find a publisher for their efforts.
In my own work over the past two decades, I have been approached by many survivors who had set down their memories in writing, but who did not know how to have them published. I realized what a considerable emotional strain the writing down of such hellish memories had been. I also realized, as I read many dozens of such accounts, how important each account was, in its own way, in recounting aspects of the story that had not been told before, and adding to our understanding of the wide range of human suffering, struggle and aspiration.
With so many people and so many places involved, including many hundreds of camps, it was inevitable that the historians and students of the Holocaust should find it difficult at times to grasp the scale and range of such events. The publication of memoirs is therefore an indispensable part of the extension of knowledge, and of public awareness of the crimes that had been committed against a whole people.
Martin Gilbert
Merton College, Oxford
Prologue
In the course of the years many people urged me to write down my experiences in the concentration camps. My answer was always spontaneous and always the same: ‘Why should I write about events that so many others have already described, especially so many important people…’ I said this over and over, and I thoroughly believed it.
The years passed, and many things happened. Today, half a century later, we hear more and more people saying that the Holocaust never happened, that it was not as tragic as people describe it, that it was not six million Jews who were killed, as if there were fewer victims and it was not human beings like you and I who died … and ‘after all,’ certain people say ‘the Second World War had so many more victims. So many thousands of soldiers, for one thing, so many hundreds of women and children killed by bombs, hunger and hardship. So many thousands who fought and died in the resistance.’
But six million people did nothing more than to be born of the wrong womb.
These stories are not just survivors’ tales, there is irrefutable proof in the camp archives confirming that there were gas chambers and crematoria – ‘ovens’; the testimonies of survivors and the documents, meticulously detailed lists the Germans kept of everything that happened in the camps day-in, day-out; detailed documentation of orders and decisions that the commanders made; records of the experiments they made on human beings; descriptions SS officers themselves made, i.e., the diary of the camp administrator, Rudolf Hoess … and many others; pictures the SS put in their private albums and in their archives; films the Nazis made that still survive in various museums.
Year after year, I hear that more and more people are denying and distorting the truth about the Holocaust.
My remaining years are growing shorter all the time, and soon my contemporaries and I will no longer be among the living. The last of the witnesses to the Holocaust will some day be gone.
Fifty years later, I too now feel a need to write my own testimony and to memorialise my cousins, my relatives, my three beloved friends and classmates, Dorin Kovo, Rita Saltiel and May Benrubi, who went through the first selection and were admitted to the camps, not in order to survive, but to live as long as they could endure the hardship, the forced labor and the hunger, and the friends I met and loved so much inside the concentration camps who did not survive.
Fifty years later everything is still vivid in my memory. Although the pain has dulled, my wonder and astonishment grows steadily, confronted by the inconceivable, by something the soul cannot accept no matter what the rationale, the justification: how is it possible that they deceived so many millions of people with such skill and psychological subtlety? How were they able to conceive of and operate such an efficient machine of death? Why didn’t the people living near the different camps, who knew what was happening inside, do anything? How? How? Why?
Many years passed, and I could not recount or talk about the two-and-a-half years I spent in the concentration camps where I found myself without having done anything to deserve this outrage. I was born Jewish, only that …
One day a door suddenly opened in my mind. Why not? So I started to write down my own memories. Many times I became discouraged – and there were many of these times – but each time Franpiski Abazopoulou, Rika Benveniste and my husband were always at my side to offer so much understanding and encouragement. For that I thank them.
Erika Myriam Kounio Amariglio
Preface
When my mother’s book was first published, 50 years after the liberation, it was a revelation to me. We were brought up in the shadow of the concentration camp, closely sheltered by mother’s profound love and solicitude for us. We were nurtured with the powerful optimism and thirst for life of a survivor and the deep and desperate sadness of a person who has seen evil eye-to-eye. But it was only when my mother wrote down her experiences that I first understood the magnitude of her trauma and the anxiety that years of bottling it up had caused her.
When her book was first published (in Greek), my eldest son Charles was 16 years old – the same age as my mother when she was transported to Auschwitz. There were times when reading and later translating the book that I found myself putting Charles in her place, trying to see through his mind’s eye and crying for him and for my mother as a young innocent girl of the same age. At times the juxtaposition of these two people, both so dear to me, made me so anxious that I had to force myself out of the nightmare and back into the present. Then I would run to hug and kiss an astonished Charles and call my mother in Greece on the telephone just to say ‘Hello!’
When translating the book, I had to work carefully, weighing every single word and phrase of the text – no skimming through the painful sections, I had to concentrate on every word. I cried and mourned for the people who suffered, who were tortured, who died, who lost forever the sunshine in their hearts. It was a nine-month-long memorial service to the victims of the Holocaust. A sad and burdensome winter. I wished the translation to be finished, dreading the ghosts waiting for me on the dining room table to tell me their frightening stories. I could easily understand why people did not want to listen to the survivors when they came out of the camps. Their stories were too horrifying to bear in the difficult years after the war.
Fifty years later the last of the survivors are being encouraged to talk about the Holocaust so that people will know about it. There are even those who claim that the systematic extermination of the Jews never happened. The sad thing is that the Holocaust did happen, as did many ‘smaller’ Holocausts, going on even at this very moment. Fifty years after the liberation, the Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Kosovans are at each other’s throats because of their ethnic origins. I heard a young woman who escaped from Croatia interviewed on the radio: ‘They killed my parents, my brothers, my aunts and uncles and they destroyed our house just because we are Croatian.’ My mother asks the troubling question in this book of why she and her relatives were persecuted when their only crime was to be Jewish. Sadly, history has a habit of repeating itself over and over again. Human nature can be absolutely magnificent – or totally destructive.
My translation stays as close to the original Greek text as possible; I have tried to endow it with a feeling of the everyday language my mother uses in her book. Hopefully the text will evoke some of the freshness of her account as seen through the eyes of a 16-year-old.
I wish to thank my mother for giving us in writing such an important part of herself to treasure forever and for our children and grandchildren. I also thank her for all her efforts and struggles to make my brother and me into decent human beings.
Thank you mama, I love you very much.
Theresa Sundt (neé Amariglio)
Surrey, England, January 1998
To the memory of the 23 members of my family who perished in Birkenau concentration camp and to my beloved friends and classmates, Dorin Kovo, May Benrubi and Rita Saltiel, who perished together with them.
Chapter 1: A happy Childhood in Thessaloniki
In 1924 my father, Salvator Kounio, then twenty four, already had a small shop where he sold photographic equipment. Industrious and eager to learn, he acquired many good customers right from the start. He supplied all the street photographers that came to his shop with photographic paper and anything else they needed for their work. They admired and respected him greatly, because he was always there to advise and help them to become more successful. Many of them later opened their own photo shops, and their friendship with my father continued to grow.
Some of them, the younger ones, are still alive. They remember him and still speak fondly of him. One of these is Jannis Kiriakidis, the well-known photojournalist from Thessaloniki – who doesn’t know of him in this city? Every time he meets me and has a few minutes to spare, he tells me how much Salvator Kounio helped him to get started in his own business.
In those days my father used to import photographic paper from Germany, and every year he visited the exhibition in Leipzig, the biggest photographic exhibition in Europe at that time. In 1924, through a mutual friend, he met Hella Loevy, a third-year medical student at the University of Leipzig. They fell in love at first sight, and my mother decided to abandon her studies and follow him to Greece.
• In June 1925 they were married in Karlsbard and our house was built in one of the most beautiful areas of Thessaloniki. A year later, at the end of March 1926, in that same house, I was born – in those days children were born at home, not in a hospital.
• Summer began officially on St Constantine’s day (21 May), but we started swimming as soon as the weather permitted. We spent all day by the sea, fishing, in our boat, swimming or holding swimming competitions and contests to see who could dive the best.
• During the summer we took our meals on the veranda, morning, noon and evening, and we enjoyed the lovely view of the sea, in which colors and shapes changed constantly as the sun moved across the sky.
• From our veranda we could see in the distance the town and the upper town. When the sun set, its rays often fell on the panes of windows. The orange color of the sunset made the windows light up. Later, when night came, Thessaloniki emerged like a multi-colored brooch decorated with colourful gems. How much I loved to sit there alone and watch my beautiful town.
• Together with the start of the school year, we celebrated the most important Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur. My father explained its meaning: ‘It is a day of great repentance and of fasting. It is a day when you do nothing except recollect your deeds throughout the past year: if you did wrong, if you lied, if you offended a friend, if you were arrogant! You fast all day and you pray to God, asking him to forgive you and ask forgiveness of the people you have been unjust to. We go to the synagogue where we all pray and in the evening, at the conclusion of the holiday, the whole family gathers together to start a new year with love and unity and resolve to do the best that is humanly possible in the new year.’
• Yom Kippur, and in the springtime, Passover, was what made us sense the religious differences between us and our Christian friends. But this did not affect our relationships. We never felt different, we were all the same and we all believed in the same God.
• My mother’s parents lived in Karlsbad. Every summer we used to stay with them for several weeks. In those days it was really a long trip. We took the train, on which we slept for two nights until we arrived in Prague. The last time we went there was in 1937.
• In 1938 another new year began. I heard troubled discussions by my parents. Hitler’s name was often mentioned. ‘We are not going to Karlsbad this summer,’ my mother told us, ‘but don’t worry, grandfather and grandmother will come to us, to stay for ever and ever.’
• I was possessed by a great question and a great disappointment. I wanted to become a member of the youth organization (Neolea) that all my friends belonged to. But Jews were not welcome in the Metaxas youth organization. It was the first time I realized that I was not on equal terms with my Christian friends.
• My disillusionment grew more when my friend Rosa’s eldest sister was not permitted to join the tennis club, because they did not accept Jewish members! She wanted to become a member but was rejected.
• It was 1939. A new year. Our parents were even more subdued, and my mother prepared the guest room for grandpa and grandma. The Germans had overrun the Sudetenland and there was no place for Jews there anymore. Those who could flee did so.
• The clouds over Europe were thickening more and more, and in Germany people’s admiration for the man who was called a ‘buffoon’, for Adolf Hitler, was growing stronger and stronger. The German people cheered him louder and louder.
• I can still hear Hitler’s screams broadcast over the radio, the cries of ‘Sieg Heil’ and the German people’s standing ovations. But children as we were, we managed to enjoy our daily lessons and play periods.