Family Papers by Sarah Abrevaya Stein

Author:Sarah Abrevaya Stein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

VITAL

I expected to discover victims in the Levy family papers, as no Jewish family in Salonica eluded the Holocaust. What I did not expect to unearth was the tormenting story of a great-grandson of Sa’adi who was a documented perpetrator, who was said to carry a whip and wear an SS uniform. He was said to have raped and sexually humiliated hundreds of women; and to have painted the backs, faces, and eyes of men in the midst of deportation, as well as the train cars on which they were herded, to mark them for annihilation. He was said to have reserved particular cruelty for Jewish veterans of the Greek-Italian War. To have killed children in front of mothers and mothers in front of children. His own wife called him a sadist. Later, in trial, he laughed at his accusers. Vital Hasson (d. 1948), known as “the Jews’ nightmare,” was the only Jew in Europe tried as a war criminal and killed by a state, Greece, at the behest of its Jewish community.

Vital descended from a scandalous past, but of an entirely different nature. In the late nineteenth century, Sa’adi and his son Hayyim were dragged through the streets of Ottoman Salonica by rabbinical henchmen, chased by a mob furious at their challenges to the authority of the religious elite. During the Second World War, in a horrific twist better suited to fiction than fact, Hayyim’s grandson Vital, son of Lentien (Leah a-Levi) and Aron Hasson, served the SS as head of occupied Salonica’s Jewish police (or so-called Civil Guard).

A native of Salonica, Vital moved to Palestine in 1933. When and why he returned to the city of his birth is uncertain—a number of survivors suggested he was already a murderer when he did so, yet there is no evidence to support this claim.1 Some remembered that Vital was appointed to his wartime post by Rabbi Koretz and even that the Jewish Community supplied him with an office on Gambetta Street. In other accounts, he volunteered, or was employed directly by the German occupying authorities. It is known that Vital assumed the position of head of the Jewish police of Salonica in late April or early May 1943, when Jacques Albala (the previous chief of the Jewish police) was promoted to preside over the Jewish Community in place of Koretz. As chief of the Jewish police, Vital had authority over some two hundred unarmed men, all Jews from Salonica.2

Among Vital’s first official acts was to volunteer himself as a bounty hunter. In May 1943, he crossed from German-occupied Greece into Italian-occupied Greece in pursuit of Jews fleeing the Nazis. Some of the Jewish women, men, and children who had fled southward, into Italian-occupied Greece, did so with legitimate Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian papers issued before the war—documents of the sort that Vital’s cousins Ino, Leon, and Estherina had acquired earlier. Other refugees managed to obtain quasi-legal Italian papers during the war from two Italian consuls in Salonica, Guelfo Zamboni and Giuseppe Castruccio.

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