Talking Until Nightfall by Isaac Matarasso

Author:Isaac Matarasso
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472975874
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

After the Atrocity

Pour qui a vu les ruines du Ghetto

Les faits humains ne sont pas à refaire

Tout doit changer sinon la mort s’installe

Mort est à vaincre ou bien c’est le désert

Paul Éluard*

The Baron Hirsch concentration camp, known for its sorry role as the site of an appalling sum of physical tortures and moral suffering, now lay silent and abandoned. Not long after, the small houses were pulled down and the demolition materials bought for next to nothing by the traitor Nikolaidis, who resold them immediately at a huge profit.53 Today nothing in the suburb remains intact except the synagogue and what was once the mental asylum, and those two only because they were being used by the German transport company Schenker.

Once the Jews were gone, the Jewish suburbs they had left stood empty and abandoned: notably suburb no. 151 and those of Kalamaria, Regis-Vardar and Aghia Paraskevi. The first two were put out to tender by the Germans and sold to entrepreneurs for demolition. Today there are only ruins. Yet they could have been used to accommodate the refugees from Thrace, providing homes for at least 15,000 people. There would be a good case for taking proceedings against the speculators who instigated the sale of these suburbs and enriched themselves through their demolition. The synagogue of suburb no. 151 and the beautiful Beth-Saul Synagogue were also pulled down.

There were left in total some 15 Jews married to Aryan women: Greek, German, French and Italian. They had been granted the favour of not being deported, and the official certificate confirming this read as follows:

The Jew X married to the Aryan woman Y is exempted from restrictions laid on Jews of Salonica who are Greek subjects, such as the wearing of the yellow star and living in the ghetto, and this for as long as the marriage lasts.

However, no shop already confiscated from these Jews was returned to them, nor were they allowed to pursue any legal commercial activity.

Early in 1944, one of these 15 Jews, whose wife was of Italian origin, had the great misfortune to lose her after she gave birth. The Germans deported the husband, leaving their eight-day-old infant, a little girl, ‘free’ in Salonica. Naturally, all the worldly goods of this unfortunate Jew were confiscated and his house was ransacked.

These few Jewish men – a tiny island – stood powerlessly by, witnesses to the destruction of all Jewish property, the product of the honest work of generations. The wealth, shops, offices, workshops and factories owned by Jews were put by the Germans in the hands of managers: it was a free-for-all. These managers in their turn bought major commercial firms and businesses for derisory sums.

A number of collaborators and informers in the pay of the Germans made a fortune from this windfall. Thus Papanaoum got himself awarded all the tanneries and leather depots.54 A man devoid of scruples and on the German payroll for ten years or more, Papanaoum knew the Jewish business world of Salonica like the back of his hand.

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