Rhodes -- a favorite island stop for cruise ships
on the Aegean. For Jewish visitors, it is also a place to remember, and for some
to discover, that the long arm of the Nazi Holocaust had decimated a historic
Jewish community here. In what was once "La Juderia", the Jewish
quarter where Sephardic life bustled, there are now memorials. A plaque lists
the names of families killed in the German camps in 1944-45. Only a handful of
Jews now live on the island."
It is said that of the two
thousand members of the Juderia 104 survived the camps; however, [it is
doubtful] that even that many made it through alive." So writes Laura Varon,
one of the few survivors, in her recently published book, The Juderia: A
Holocaust Survivor's Tribute to the Jewish Community of Rhodes. This is the
first book in English that is a personal memoir of the Holocaust in Rhodes. It
is beautifully written, with vivid descriptions of life on the island and the
Juderia, and the events that changed, and ended, that life.
The story in the book starts in
1938, with the chapter titled "Joy". Laura, a twelve-year-old Jewish
girl, is living a normal, joyful life among her family, friends and neighbors.
Ages-old Sephardic traditions give shape and meaning to their lives:
"Mother and Father made sure we carefully observed the rituals of our faith
and the customs of our community. Our lives revolved around our Jewish heritage,
and our special days...were always met with extensive preparation and sincere
observance. I can still remember the Succah we built in our little courtyard for
the celebration of Succot. Father constructed it meticulously, and we adorned it
with palm branches and myrtle. How the sweet smell of the leaves mingled with
aromas of blossoming orange trees, or the grape vines that found toeholds in the
cracks of the house walls. We would pray and study the tikkun beneath that
simple splendor, ensconced in our observance and surrounded by Mother's
biscochos (cookies) and fruit we had hung on the Succah branches"(3).
Social interactions with Greeks
and Turks on the island were generally peaceful, though not intimate.
"Prejudice anong the many peoples on Rhodes ebbed and flowed like the
tide," Varon writes. But despite her "occasional spats with Greek
children (which) were carried on by adults ...on a much larger scale,",
Laura's view of the worled remained optimistic. During a Purim carnival in
"La Kaye Ancha" (The Wide Street), a Gypsy fortune teller warns her of
upcoming danger from "uniforms," a cryptic message that Laura
understood only much later. In 1939, the war in Europe brought changes to
Rhodes, too. The Italian Fascist administration changed life "from simple,
rustic splendor to an oppressive quiet"(14). Anti-Jewish measures, a rise
in omni-present Greek anti-Semitism, and occasional bombardments shattered the
peace. (Italians had naval and air bases in Rhodes and Leros, a nearby island.)
Even then, the community still managed to continue its life and customs.
"...our Judaism could not be thought of as a religion... in the sense of
the Christian view of observance. In the Juderia, keeping kosher and keeping
tradition was ... simply, a part of each and every one of us, an ancient core of
what we were as individuals and as a community.... "(19) Real terror
arrives with the Germans and grows, as innocent eyes witness death and
brutality. Before the deportation, a friendly Turkish family, tries to keep
Laura with them and secure a journey to Turkey for her, but Laura refuses,
unable and unwilling to separate herself from her family.
The unrelenting determination of
the Nazis to destroy the Jewish people everywhere and at whatever cost is
illustrated by their deportation of far flung Sephardic communities such as that
in Rhodes. Like most of the Dodecanese islands, Rhodes was under Italian control
until late in the war. After the Italians signed the armistice with the Allies
in September of 1943, the Germans occupied Rhodes. By spring of 1944 they were
being defeated by the Red Army in the East and by the American, British, and
Canadian forces in the West. Yet the Jews of Rhodes were rounded up on July 20,
1944, their property confiscated, and three days later loaded onto three small
cargo ships for a last journey from their ancient home. (Forty two Jews escaped
deportation through the intervention of the Turkish Consul Selahattin Ulkumen,
now a "Righteous Gentile" at Yad Vashem). Varon describes the ship on
which she and her family were crowded: "Nearly seven hundred people were
crowded into a ship designed to carry cargo and a crew of six and, with a stop
at the island of Kos to pick up another hundred, we became even more crowded ...
the smell of hundreds of people ... would have been overwhelming had we all not
been immersed in it (42). And again: "... It was only 250 miles from Rhodes
to our destination in Piraeus, but with constant fear of submarines and a stop
on the island of Kos to pick up Jews there, the trip took eight days. For me it
was a time of feeling as if my very soul had been stripped from me. Like the
rest of what remained of the Juderia, I had become nothing more than a speck on
the vast Aegean Sea. ... Just another small bit of culture torn apart and awash
in the seas of war"(43). Persons who died on board, "of heat or
several of the maladies related to their plight" were "unceremoniously
dumped overboard each evening, as soon as the ships were underway...There was
little room for the living, let alone the dead"(43). The Jews of the island
of Crete, who had similarly been put into a small boat, never made it to
Piraeus. The Aegean became their grave when their boat was sunk by Allied
bombardment.
The miserable sea journey to
Piraeus, Greece, "the transition, for each of us, from one life to the
other," was followed by detention at the Haidari concentration camp,
"our introduction to the Nazis' bestiality, and it had a death-rattle
message all its own." Then, the group was taken to the trains, and shoved
into boxcars. "Most of us had never seen a train before, and no one knew
exactly where we were being taken. ... [There was] the eerie sound of a thousand
shuffling souls and the grating noise of the rail car doors being shut against
the future of most of them"(55).Three weeks of misery later, the train
arrived at its last stop -- Auschwitz -- and the innocent arrivals had their
first sight of "two odd-looking men in dirty striped uniforms". A
German soldier's shouts of "Schnell! Schnell!" were translated into
Spanish by one of the men in stripes, presumably a prisoner from Salonica. The
chapter in the book dealing with Auschwitz is appropriately titled "Into
the Abyss." As everyone who had arrived before them, as anyone would be,
they were totally unprepared for the horrors that awaited them. But Sephardim
also faced added difficulties: having come from a mild and gentle climate, they
suffered from the harsh winter in Poland. Furthermore, they did not understand
or speak Yiddish, the language of most of the other Jewish prisoners, nor
German, the language of their oppressors. (This point is not elaborated or
stressed in the book.) The horror in Auschwitz "buried Rhodes and the
beauty of my life there; it was smothered like the faceless shadows of my
family." (116). "Despair" is the chapter describing the deathly
march to Ebensee in February, 1945, and then to Bergen-Belsen.
Rescue, and the end of the
horrors, eventually comes. Laura, now weighing 50 pounds, is sent to Sweden to
recuperate. Later she is reunited in Italy with some members of her family whom
"the God of Chance" allowed to survive. In 1947, Rhodes became part of
Greece, and Laura, as other survivors, could not bear the thought of going back
to Rhodes, where life could never be the same again. She joined her uncle in the
Belgian Congo, where she reconstructed her life and lived for eleven years.
Today Ms. Varon lives in Seattle, and lectures widely on the Holocaust. She has
never been back to Rhodes. "I fear too much I would hear the whispers of my
people in the streets...see my mother at the door admiring the heavy purses of
her Purim-costumed children. But most of all, I've not returned because there is
nothing left to return to...only the shell of what was. There is only now a
foreign place, like so many other foreign places I've been." (166)
The topic of the Rhodian Jewish
population in the Holocaust has not received much attention. In his book, The
Jews of Rhodes (Sepher Hermon Press, 1978), the first in English to give a
detailed account of the Holocaust in Rhodes, Marc D. Angel writes: "The
Sephardic community in Rhodes was born as a result of the expulsion of the Jews
from Spain. It died in the ashes of the German concentration camps." (152)
In 1987 Sephardim and the Holocaust, edited by Solomon Gaon and Mitchell
Serels, published by Yeshiva University, included the relevant chapter from
Angel's book, because no one else had written much about it until then. Isaac
Jack Levy, a Rhodes native, included a history of the Holocaust on the island in
his Jewish Rhodes, a Lost Culture (Judah Magnes Museum, 1989). Personal
recollections of the Sephardic culture of Rhodes before the war is also the
subject of Rebecca Amato Levy's I Remember Rhodes (Sepher Hermon Press,
1987). In recent years there have been articles published in various, mostly
Sephardic, publications by Holocaust survivors from Rhodes. The Juderia: A
Holocaust Survivor's Tribute to the Jewish Community of Rhodes is the first
book written by a survivor, but that is not the only reason for its importance.
In the Afterword of The Juderia
Varon writes: "In 1993, Laura Varon visited the National Holocaust Museum
in Washington, D.C. She spent more than a week absorbing everything in the
various exhibits. She was dismayed, however, to discover that the islands of
Rhodes, Kos, Corfu, and Crete were missing from a map that displayed the areas
of Europe that had been scarred forever by the Nazis. Laura drew the attention
of the museum curators to this oversight and received a letter promising to
correct the omission"(166).Other Holocaust museums also have committed such
"oversights", as has much of the Holocaust literature. The Juderia:
A Holocaust Survivor's Tribute to the Jewish Community of Rhodes helps to
fill the void left by these omissions, and gives a moving tribute to the people
who were murdered by the Nazis. The pictures in the book help us know what many
of the people looked like, and visualize the joy of their togetherness before
the Holocaust engulfed them. But it is the masterful style of writing that
brings each person to life and allows us to feel the pain of their oppression
and death.
One wonders, however, if the
obvious concern with style and creating a beautiful piece of literature, did not
lead to some romanticizing, even creating some fictional details in the story.
Was there really a Gypsy that foretold the "danger from uniforms"? Did
that Russian girl who helped Laura in Auschwitz really speak Italian? Did they
really kill the rabbis at the Haidari (Haydar) holding camp? ("Beginning
with the rabbis, anyone the Germans knew or thought held a position of
leadership was systematically brought to the wall, tied, and shot." p. 49.)
No other account mentions this, and though Rabbi Angel indicates that "ten
more died" at Haydar ("Jewish Rhodes p. 152) he says nothing about
rabbis.
The book's Acknowledgments Varon
credits Sharon Gricol, "without whom my memoirs would never have been
written" and Roger Hoffman, without whom "my story would have never
been written so beautifully." Though we wonder why Mr. Hoffman has not
received more, perhaps all, credit for writing the book, the result of the
cooperation of these three people has produced an important and eloquent book
that belongs on the bookshelves of Jewish homes, and all libraries.
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