Dr Leon Saltiel, a historian of the Holocaust in Greece and Director of Diplomacy of the World Jewish Congress, was in Australia two weeks ago, to deliver talks in Sydney and Melbourne on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the deportation of the Jewry of Thessaloniki to the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943. Dr Vassilis Adrahtas from Western Sydney University met with him on behalf of Greek City Times for an interview on an array of topics ranging from the causes of the Greek Holocaust to his personal experience of the silenced story of the Jews of Greece, and from the presence of antisemitism in modern Greek society to the documentation of the tragic events leading up to the Holocaust through the testimony of eyewitnesses.
(The interview took place after Dr Saltiel’s first talk in Sydney, organised by the Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies, and the Department of Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies, The University of Sydney, and sponsored by the Consulate General of Greece in Sydney and the Mandelbaum House.)
I will start with a personal, so to speak, question that relates to your job.You work at the UN and the World Jewish Congress. at exactly is your job there and what exactly do you do at the Congress?
The World Jewish Congress serves as the federation of all Jewish communities around the globe. For instance, here in Sydney there is the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, which ‘comes under’ the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, and they ‘come under’ the World Jewish Congress. The local community oversees the relations with local government agencies, which means that here in Australia the Jewish community looks into the relations with the country’s authorities, along with the Executive Council, whereas we as World Jewish Congress deal with the international level, that is, we represent the Jewish communities at the global level.
My position is that of the WJC Director of Diplomacy and one of my roles is to coordinate diplomatic activities at the global level. I also represent the World Jewish Congress at the United Nations, Geneva, and the UNESCO, Paris. I am the person in charge of the office in Geneva and my job involves being in contact with embassies, with various departments of the UN, and to promote the issues that are important for the Jewish community. Some of these issues are fundamental for our agenda, such as combating antisemitism, defending the Holocaust memory, promoting inter-religious dialogue, working against all kinds of hatred and discrimination, supporting the State of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, combating terrorism, and other such issues that constitute basic parameters of our activity. Apart from all this, I deal with issues that might come up on an everyday basis, and I normally would deal with them through the channels of my activity at the UN, UNESCO and the other international bodies in Europe I engage with, such as the European Council, OSCE, etc.
Currently you are visiting Sydney for two talks. The first one is about your second book, namely, Don’t Forget Me, and the second one is on the topic of your doctoral thesis and in particular the book that came out of it and it’s about the Holocaust of Thessaloniki. How do you see the link between these two talks? How are they related? Is it the small vis-a-vis the big picture, the small versus the great narrative of history?
My doctoral research at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki focused on the Holocaust of Thessaloniki. This research, like all historical research, led to a text that is, as you know well, full of references, footnotes, bibliographical details and other elements that makes the reading rather heavy for an average reader who is not a specialist. However, for the historian it is important for all this to be there as a documented text. During my research, though, I discovered three sets of letters from three mothers who wrote to their sons. The letters come from two different archives: one set comes from a private collection and the other two come from the Jewish Museum of Greece in Athens. Due to the originality and peculiarity of these materials, I decided to publish them separately as a book to emphasise their uniqueness.
As you put it in your question, you are right, for on the one hand there is the very academic work, with all its theory and the big picture about what was going on in Thessaloniki at the time of the war, and on the other hand you have the experiences of the average person during the tragic period of the Nazi Occupation, the antisemitic measures, and all the pressures up to the day before the deportation of the Jewish community to the death camps. Nevertheless, for me these are parts of the same whole and I regard them as shedding light on different sides or aspects of the same body of research.
At your talk on the mothers’ letters, you stressed a lot that the study of the Holocaust should be done having in mind the local character, the very specific circumstances of this or that place, even the personal or interpersonal nature of the relationships between the people involved. I believe this point to be methodologically quite noteworthy, and I would like to ask you to elaborate a bit further on that.
Since the end of WWII, the study of the Holocaust has gone through several phases. More specifically, right after the war, the priority was to have things documented, that is, to find out what were the plans of the Nazis, to discover materials, and so forth. For instance, the Nuremberg Trials had their own aim, which was to substantiate and put down the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazis. Then, in the 1960s, the Eichmann Trial took place in Israel with regards to the mastermind of the so-called ‘Final Solution’. There, again, what had to be substantiated was the way in which the Nazi machine was working and how it coordinated the different actions of its agencies. When we more or less understood what had generally happened in Europe and turned to the local level, then it became apparent that the Nazis didn’t have some kind of button which they pressed so that things were implemented uniformly everywhere. On the contrary, each place had its peculiarities both with regards to the Holocaust itself and its management, and many things depended on the local German commander and his personality, the local authorities and the extent to which they collaborated or not with the Nazis, the size of the Jewish community, how big or small the latter was, how much integrated or not it was into the broader society; also, if it was in a city or in the countryside, which specific period the deportations took place, and so forth.
Thus, the combination of all these conditions differentiates the way in which history happens. Let me give an example from Greece. We know about the yellow star, from movies and elsewhere, that the Germans used to put on people to designate who was a Jew. In Greece, this measure was implemented only in Thessaloniki. In other words, we do not find it in Giannina or Athens. The Bulgarians did use it, before the deportation of the Jews, at some point in the areas of Western Macedonia and Thrace they had annexed. Moreover, it seems that in Thessaloniki the Germans implemented it just a few weeks before the deportation. Although they entered the city in April 1941, the yellow star appears in Thessaloniki in February 1943, that is, almost two years later. In other words, there was no list of things that the local German commander had to do, whatever the city he found himself in. Each city was unique and to understand what happened and how it happened, one has virtually to go into the depth of things.
Thus, personally, although I have studied the case of Thessaloniki during that period and I feel quite confident to talk about it, when people ask me about Giannina, Athens, Larissa or Chania, I find it difficult to talk about them. I know the broader picture, of course, but I also know that the complexity of each case does not allow me to speak without first having consulted local papers, local archives, local conditions in general, in order to make general statements about what happened or not. I don’t feel comfortable doing this and if I were to do it, I believe that I would be sacrificing historical truth. My wish is that younger scholars come forth and do what I did in my doctoral thesis – which was based on archive research – and look into other cities of Greece and beyond. In this way we will get to know in a secure way what happened in Giannina, Serres, Rhodes. But this requires that they go to local archives, local chambers of commerce, Church archives, newspaper archives, municipal archives, the archives of different organisations, and document what exactly was happening, the key-dates regarding the implementation of Nazi policies.
And I believe that this is the direction we are heading at, for we must go to the depth of the local realities. And then, having at the same time the broader picture of a history that is in effect a European and not local one, we will bring forward more research aspects that will allow us also to compare. But to compare in an informed manner and not without the necessary evidence. Many a time, you know, and this is something I have heard from great scholars, that when they were doing their doctoral thesis in the 1960s or 1970s they were told that after this topic they should probably have to find something else to work on, for everything was known about the Holocaust and they wouldn’t bring forth anything original any more. Likewise, when I started my own research, people were telling me: ‘Why are you dealing with this topic? Everything has been written about it.’ However, we see all the time how many new avenues of research emerge through new research questions, new documentations, new materials, new interpretations and new comparisons. And not only about the Holocaust, but in general and this is how I acknowledge more and more the importance of local history. One cannot really understand historical developments if they do not delve into local history, something which we can see in the new historical specialisation called micro-history.
Your book on the mothers’ letters is in effect based, as you said, on unique documents. In what sense are those documents unique, and do we have similar ones at a European or even a global level?
There are many testimonies of Holocaust survivors that were written after the war. These are very important documents and that’s why, for instance, we ask survivors to speak at Holocaust memorial services. On the other hand, though, we should keep in mind that many a time memory plays games on us: we forget things, we don’t remember well, we remember different things, we regard something we read as if it refers to us, and so forth. So, imagine what it is like – especially after forty or fifty years, and after such a traumatic experience, whereby you have lost parents, siblings, a spouse or children – to be asked to relate things in a dry and objective manner. It’s simply impossible. From our everyday experience we know that you may have four people witnessing a car accident and when the police arrive at the scene you have four different accounts, and this involves no trauma that one suffered fifty years ago. Thus, the witness of the survivors is undoubtedly valuable, but personally as a historian I was interested in what the eyewitnesses had to say when the events were taking place and they had no retrospective knowledge. So, this is one of the aspects of the uniqueness of the documents I used in that book.
Secondly, at the European level you do have similar documents, that is, you have diaries, letters, and so forth, but for me what makes the particular letters unique is that first of all they have substantial volume, that is, 15-20 letters from each mother, that enable you not only to read about some thoughts or events, but most of all to enter their character, their everyday situation, their very life, and thus to reconstruct, somehow, their personality. In this respect, the letters are not fragmentary, but they offer a certain depth; you live along with the mothers their own everyday situation, as they write once a week what they are going through to their sons living in Athens.
The third thing is that they are three mothers, that is, they constitute a common motif: they live in the same city, during the same time, they go through the same ordeals, all of them are victims of the Holocaust, and they describe what is happening. So, you have a common pattern within the same geographical parameters, during the same historical moment, but it is three different eyewitness viewpoints that tell you what is taking place; so, you have a multi-dimensionality regarding the same phenomenon. This, I believe, is what makes the whole collection even more exceptional, for combining the three voices you obtain a very intriguing perspective of the events. If we had only one set of letters, however unique they may have been, I don’t think that they could make up a book or stand as something that could be used more generally as a historical witness.
Today, early in the morning, a friend of mine from high school in Thessaloniki sent to me a photo of my book and wrote that she bought it because her child is using it for a school assignment. What I want to say is that this book has already taken its place in the education system, students buy it, and because it is not that heavy as a historical book, but deeply humane, they use it for their projects and to create awareness in the younger generation. And I think that, not just for me but for any historian, when you start a book, you never can envisage what will come out of it. When you publish a book, it simply isn’t yours anymore; it belongs to society. But when you see that it acquires so many and so important uses, you feel satisfied, and I would also say overwhelmed.
Let’s turn now to the causes of the catastrophe that took place at Thessaloniki. Would you say that the Jewish community there, in a sense, fell prey to its own nature and character, which was so different compared to other Jewish communities in Greece?
You could say that, in the sense that the Holocaust hit a generation of Greek Jews of Thessaloniki who had been included as a community into the Greek State only in the preceding thirty years, that is, during the interwar period which was full of turbulence not only for Greece but also internationally. So, it was in the context of this turbulence that the Holocaust hit them. Perhaps, if it had taken place some years afterwards – I wish of course that it had not taken place at all – although such ‘if’ questions don’t really have a place in history, and if the community was more integrated and if the Greek State was much more open towards them, as was the case with the Jewish community of Athens, then most likely the result would have been somewhat different.
What I found through my research is that during the persecutions of the Jews, there was a huge effort in Athens to save the Jews of Thessaloniki. At the head of the whole endeavour was Archbishop Damaskinos through two letters, along with all the Athenian elite, the presidents of the different chambers, the Academy of Athens, and others. And all those wrote both to the Greek collaborationist Prime Minister and the German authorities. They tried through the Red Cross, the Italians, and they mobilised all the politicians in Athens, even Prime Minister Logothetopoulos himself felt the pressure to write letters to the Germans, and all this so that the Jews of Thessaloniki might be saved. However, at Thessaloniki there was nothing that could even come close to this. I mean, one can clearly see that the Athenian society did much more to save the Jews of Thessaloniki than the local society itself. Of course, this is for me an oxymoron, which I try to explain in my study, that is, why the establishment of the city at the time was so phobic, and I put forward some theories to account for it.
Another aspect which I found very interesting in your talk is that you emphasised the Holocaust as an organic part of modern Greek history – not as something that incidentally happened in Greece – as something that belongs to our history, and we must deal with it as such. Could you please elaborate on this historical moment, which to be honest most Greeks are not aware of?
When I first decided to proceed with my research, I chose to do it at a Greek university. It was then that I realised that my thesis was the first one at a Greek university that was focused exclusively on the Holocaust. In other words, we had to wait until 2017 to see such a thesis being submitted. There were works by colleagues in which they deal with the Holocaust in one or two chapters, but these works are not only about the Holocaust. On the contrary, my thesis is dedicated on the Holocaust.
Now, there is a big question regarding the positioning of the Holocaust in modern Greek history, which by the way is also a political problem. For instance, some years ago there was an issue with the Network of Martyr Cities and Villages, that is, a network of cities in Greece which had suffered so-called holocausts or mass executions by the Germans, and some wanted Thessaloniki to be included in this network, since the Germans deported and killed 50,000 Jews from Thessaloniki. But the authorities of the city objected by saying that first of all those Jews were not Greeks, and secondly that the crime did not take place in Greece. This caused an uproar, because Greek Jews were seen as non-Greeks and because for some reason the place of the actual execution made so much of a difference. Eventually, the City Council overturned the decision, but there was quite a reaction and there is still a feeling that the Holocaust does not really concern us as a modern Greek society.
Through my research and more broadly my academic career, I try to point out that not only this is not true, but that the Holocaust is a very important part of modern Greek history. In short, one cannot understand modern Greek history if they do not understand the Holocaust. Especially in cities such as Thessaloniki with big Jewish populations, but more broadly as well. For instance, if you take the Holocaust out of the Greek history of the last century, you lose a great part, and you cannot understand what really took place in the historical developments. However, I am very pleased by the fact that even the authorities have now realised the importance of the Holocaust and have brought it to the fore of the self-consciousness of the Greek people, the education system, the media, and so forth. In other words, the Holocaust is being integrated within modern Greek consciousness.
What would you say about antisemitism in Greece today? How would you describe it? Is it intense or incidental, systemic so to speak or what sort of roots do you think it has?
Studies that have been done regarding antisemitism, in particular one by the University of Macedonia in which I was part of the research team, have shown a large percentage of antisemitism in modern Greek society, while an international study that had been conducted 7-8 years ago had shown 70% of antisemitic sentiments in modern Greek society, amongst the highest rates in Europe and internationally. However, Greek antisemitism is basically of the conspiracy theory type, that is, it constitutes an antisemitic discourse which is not based on racial theories, like those of the Nazis, or does not come from some ideological circles of the Church, but it is an antisemitism of ignorance or, to put it in a colloquial way, a kind of coffee-chat antisemitism, whereby antisemitism serves as an easy solution for puzzling phenomena.
In Greece many a time you get in a taxi and start talking with the driver, and after five minutes they start saying things – especially during the economic crisis – such as the Jews who govern the world are to blame, the Rothchild, the Bilderberg Group, the Freemasons, and so forth, and all this is for them a kind of mishmash that comes out as antisemitism, but not as a violent one that will mobilise people to be aggressive in a targeted way and cause physical attacks. To be sure, though, there are cases of monument vandalism by certain people from the far-right, as in the case of the Golden Dawn, or from leftist circles, as an alleged criticism against what they regard as bad policies on the part of the State of Israel – although it’s really hard to see the connection between the victims of the Holocaust of Greece and the policies of the State of Israel.
So, on the one hand there is this conspiracy theory type of antisemitism, and on the other hand a sort of antagonism between Jewish history and Greek history, in the sense that people sometimes object by saying that the Greek people have suffered a lot, but nevertheless it is the Jewish Holocaust that features so prominently at an international level. This creates from time to time some tension. And, lastly, you have the antisemitism that is a criticism against the State of Israel. During the 1990s this criticism was conspicuously antisemitic; this can be seen in the media of the period, where the Israeli soldier is depicted as a Nazi and the Palestinian as a new Jew at Auschwitz, with lots of different versions of this motif. But this is essentially antisemitic, for it denies the Holocaust, its uniqueness, and it confuses things that should not be confused. This phenomenon, after Israel and Greece established recently very close relations, has ceased, that is, this type of journalism that promotes such motifs. These are the different forms of antisemitism in Greece, and unfortunately it has not been eradicated. Currently it has receded and there is a big effort to have it eliminated, but still it remains at some degree in modern Greek consciousness.
You spoke before about a paradox, namely, that we had to wait until 2017 to see in Greece the first doctoral thesis totally devoted on the topic of the Holocaust. I would like you to tell me what is happening currently with the study of the Holocaust in Greek research. Are there researchers working on that topic at universities? Does the Centre of Greek Jewry still exist?
No, the Centre is not around anymore, but a Chair of Jewish Studies has been established at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. There is a professor who teaches on these topics and of course on the Holocaust. Also, the latter is being taught by many at different university departments all over the country. Additionally, there is a new generation of researchers that has come forth and studies the Holocaust from a multitude of perspectives and in an interdisciplinary manner. And this is something I know first-hand, for many a time colleagues ask me about materials or information, not only in Greece but also from other places.
This is even more so, for when you talk geographically, you talk about Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and so forth, but Greece during the German Occupation constitutes a very peculiar case. It does not fit the picture of either Western or Central or Eastern Europe, and because it is so peculiar both geographically and administratively, that is, on the part of the Germans, and moreover because the Jewish community of Thessaloniki was in many respects peculiar, the study of Greek Jewry draws the attention of many researchers. To be sure, the subject was promoted as such by non-Greek scholars and then Greek scholars joined in, but now there is a pronounced interest from researchers from many parts of the world. Also, I believe that the new Holocaust Museum that has been decided to be built in Thessaloniki – the construction of which will start soon – will have a research centre, a library, archives, and will constitute a new research space that will allow for more collaboration amongst all these scholars, inspiring the new generation to work on that topic.
We know in Greece, generally speaking, that the Holocaust has been overlooked or silenced – if not totally ignored. In other words, it wasn’t something we learnt at school, at least during the school years of my generation. But what was it like for you, growing up in a Jewish family in Greece? What was your relationship with the Shoah.
This is a very good question and one I cannot answer easily, in the sense that being a kid and growing up in that community you do not engage in historical, political or social analyses. It is all about the experiences of a child who cannot analyse what they live, see or receive as images and take them in. The Jewish community itself, up until the 1990s, was still much closed to itself, which means that all these experiences did not find a way to be communicated into the broader society. It was actually in the 1990s, when Thessaloniki became the Cultural Capital of Europe, that a greater exposure started taking place and you had the community coming out to a great extent and the experiences were being externalised.
As a child I knew about these stories concerning the Holocaust; first of all, my grandparents, who were Holocaust survivors, had no relatives and so asking them about their siblings or their cousins and receiving as an answer that they were lost during the war, I started making my own connections, especially after watching relevant stories on TV. And I would ask myself whether I should concern myself with all this. I would also see people with tattoos from the death camps, for instance friends of my grandparents, whom you would come across at events. So, there was a kind of continuous experience, an experience you would live and hear about, but not being taught to you for its own sake.
You could sense it; you could see that there was a lack. And, also, there was this issue with the language that was used at times. My grandparents had this Jewish-Spanish idiom – although at home we grew up speaking Greek – and my parents had picked it up quite a bit and sometimes, when they didn’t want us to know what they were talking about in the road, for instance, they would switch to Ladino, and we would ask why they were speaking in this Spanish sort of language, and what was this language and which was the community that spoke it and what had happened to it, and so forth. And thus, everything was a kind of a quest, since you were trying to answer this and that, and the only thing you could see was a vacuum or things that didn’t make sense. And the question just came naturally: what’s going on here?
And to be honest, my doctoral thesis was the culmination of my personal journey of discovery. And when I did it, I realised that all the characters I was researching were already dead, but they were alive when my parents and their generation were growing up. And I would ask how come their generation did not engage with this issue, since both Christians and Jews were alive, and so one could have opinions from those who actually lived through the events. But it seems that they were not ready themselves; neither the grandparents wanted to speak, for their priority was to secure a living once again and they didn’t want to pass traumatic experiences to their children, whom they wanted to integrate socially as smoothly as possible. That was the experience of the times. Now, the historical depth and the distance we have from the events, along with the fact that the older generation has passed away, allow us, both Christians and Jews, to study, to discuss and to try to understand and to put forward new hypotheses. But at that time people were simply not ready yet. I had to wait for the end of that period and the beginning of a new one, in order to be able to talk about these topics as the relevant research area was just being formed.
My last question is one that has been triggered by the mothers’ letters you referred to in your talk and specifically the excerpt read by the President of the Hellenic Republic (in the video). In particular, I would like to ask you about the religiosity of the mothers. Because we know that in Europe after the war a ‘Theology after Auschwitz’ developed, or a ‘Theology of the Death of God’ or a ‘Theology of the Silence of God’, what would you say about the religious sentiment reflected in the letters? At least the one by Cazes, a lady of some good education, shows an intense religious outlook. Could you make a general sort of comment on the religiosity of those mothers?
Jewish women in Thessaloniki, especially as the 20th century unfolded, became more and more traditional and less religious, so to speak. For them religion was an aspect of their everyday life, since all of them lived together as a community, but they were not particularly religious in the sense of being devoted to praying and other religious practices. What is also stressed by historians is that after the Great Fire of 1917, when many synagogues and the archives were burnt, a large part of the religiosity of the community was lost as well. This was due to the fact that the community didn’t have any longer the infrastructure required for the perpetuation of religiosity – since seminaries, libraries and places of worship were destroyed. It was very difficult afterwards to produce the religious specialists required, such as rabbis and others.
The relationship of the three mothers with God is peculiar, and in my book I have a chapter in which I attempt to explain some elements. They believe in God, they pray to God, but they have an ambivalent relationship with God. For instance, in the letter you mentioned, Cazes says that she prays to God, but He doesn’t listen, but regardless of that she goes on with her praying, in order to see a miracle, why not, since they were innocent. And you have this sort of sentiment, that is, where is God, if of course there is a God; and it’s something recurring with Holocaust survivors. And you come across survivors who returned atheists altogether, and on the other hand you have survivors who said that since they survived there must be a God. This is a very peculiar topic, of course, that requires perhaps a psychological approach and not just a historical one, so that one may understand the religiosity and what it means to believe and where God comes into the whole equation and how all this is used and what it means for the people.
I heard also in Sydney people talking about the “CEO” that is, I heard also in Sydney people talking about the “CEO” that is, Christmas-Easter-Only Orthodox Christians. By the same token, one can understand most of the Jews of Thessaloniki, who behaved religiously on big feast days. Also, now the issue of kosher meat is becoming more prominent, but back then this was something one didn’t need to give much thought to, since the butcher of you neighbourhood was already a kosher shop, and the relevant structures were in place. So, in conclusion we are talking about a world of quite different conditions, but generally speaking I would say that the mothers come forth more as traditional and less as religious. That’s how I would describe them. They have of course a special relationship with
God, for after all they were going through some very tragic events in their lives.
Dr Vassilis Adrahtas writes a weekly Sunday column for Greek City Times called "Insights into Global Orthodoxy" that on the one hand capture the pulse of global Orthodoxy from the perspective of local sensitivities, needs and/or limitations, and on the other hand delve into the local pragmatics and significance of Orthodoxy in light of global trends and prerogatives.
Dr Vassilis Adrahtas holds a PhD in Studies in Religion (USyd) and a PhD in the Sociology of Religion (Panteion). He has taught at several universities in Australia and overseas. Since 2015 he has been teaching ancient Greek Religion and Myth at the University of New South Wales and Islamic Studies at Western Sydney University. He has published ten books. He has extensive experience in the print media as editor-in-chief, and columnist, and for a while he worked as a radio producer. He lives in Sydney, Australia, his birthplace.
