Inside the Gas Chambers E-Book

Shlomo Venezia

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 334

Beschreibung

This is a unique, eye-witness account of everyday life right at the heart of the Nazi extermination machine. Slomo Venezia was born into a poor Jewish-Italian community living in Thessaloniki, Greece. At first, the occupying Italians protected his family; but when the Germans invaded, the Venezias were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and sisters disappeared on arrival, and he learned, at first with disbelief, that they had almost certainly been gassed. Given the chance to earn a little extra bread, he agreed to become a 'Sonderkommando', without realising what this entailed. He soon found himself a member of the 'special unit' responsible for removing the corpses from the gas chambers and burning their bodies. Dispassionately, he details the grim round of daily tasks, evokes the terror inspired by the man in charge of the crematoria, 'Angel of Death' Otto Moll, and recounts the attempts made by some of the prisoners to escape, including the revolt of October 1944. It is usual to imagine that none of those who went into the gas chambers at Auschwitz ever emerged to tell their tale - but, as a member of a 'Sonderkommando', Shlomo Venezia was given this horrific privilege. He knew that, having witnessed the unspeakable, he in turn would probably be eliminated by the SS in case he ever told his tale. He survived: this is his story. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Leseprobe

INSIDE THE GAS CHAMBERS

INSIDE THE GAS CHAMBERS

EIGHT MONTHS IN THE SONDERKOMMANDO OF AUSCHWITZ

SHLOMO VENEZIA

in collaboration with Béatrice Prasquier

Foreword by Simone Veil Historical notes and additional material by Marcello Pezzetti and Umberto Gentiloni Edited by Jean Mouttapa Translated by Andrew Brown

polity

Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

First published in French as Sonderkommando – Dans l’enfer des chambres à gaz © Éditions Albin Michel S.A.-Paris, 2007

This English edition © Polity Press, 2009

Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-8376-8

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The assertions, arguments and conclusions contained herein are those of the author or other contributors. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk

I dedicate this book to my two families: my family from before the war, and my family from after it. My first thoughts go to my dearest mother – only forty-four years old at the time of these events – and my two young sisters, Marica and Marta, then fourteen and eleven, respectively. I often think sadly of the difficult life my mother had, being widowed very young with five children. Making many sacrifices, and struggling against almost insuperable difficulties, she brought us up in accordance with wholesome principles, such as being honest and respecting people. These sacrifices and these sufferings all counted for nothing, as they were wiped out at the same time as were my young sisters, no sooner than they had climbed out of the cattle cars onto the Judenrampe of Auschwitz-Birkenau on April 11, 1944.

My other family came into being after the great tragedy. My wife Marika and my three sons, Mario, Alessandro, and Alberto, know many things better than I do and base their lives on the essential principles of honesty and respect for others. My wife’s tenacity has meant that they have managed to grow up into men I can be proud of. Marika has also taken great care of me, and lightened the burden of the infirmities that ensued from my imprisonment in the camps. She deserves more than my silent affection. Thank you, Marika, for all you have done up until now and all that you continue to do with our six grandchildren: Alessandra, Daniel, Michela, Gabriel, Nicole, and Rachel, and our daughters-in-law, Miriam, Angela, and Sabrina.

Your husband, father, and grandfather, Shlomo Venezia

The whole truth is much more tragic and terrible.

Zalmen Lewental*

*  Zalmen Lewental’s manuscript in Yiddish was discovered in October 1962, buried in the yard of the Auschwitz Crematorium. It was written shortly before the outbreak of the Sonderkommando revolt, so as to leave an eye-witness account and some trace of the extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers. Lewental seems to have died in November 1944, only a few weeks before the Liberation. Taken from “Des voix sous la cendre: Manuscrits des Sonderkommandos d’Auschwitz-Birkenau,” ed. by Georges Bensoussan, Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, no. 171 (January– April 2001).

CONTENTS

Foreword by Simone Veil

Note by Béatrice Prasquier

Acknowledgments

1  Life in Greece before the Deportation

2  The First Month in Auschwitz-Birkenau

3  Sonderkommando: Initiation

4  Sonderkommando: The Work Continues

5  The Revolt of the Sonderkommando and the Dismantling of the Crematoria

6  Mauthausen, Melk, and Ebensee

Historical Notes:

The Shoah, Auschwitz, and the Sonderkommando

by Marcello Pezzetti

Italy in Greece: A Short History of a Major Failure

by Umberto Gentiloni

About David Olére

by Jean Mouttapa

Selected Bibliography

Shlomo (age twenty) at Athens in 1944, a few weeks before his deportation. (D.R.)

Portrait of Shlomo at Auschwitz, wearing the blue and white scarf of former deportees (March 2003). (D.R.)

Aerial view of part of the Auschwitz complex with Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The railway situated between the two camps, the Judenrampe, was used as an arrival and selection ramp for transports of Jews until May 1944, when it was replaced by the Bahnrampe, which brought victims right into the camp, near Crematoria II and III. (Mémorial de la Shoah/CDJC.)

Aerial photo taken by the RAF on a reconnaissance mission over Birkenau, August 23, 1944. At the top of the picture, smoke is rising from the mass graves of Crematorium V. (The Aerial Reconnaissance Archives.)

Detailed view of Crematoria II and III at Birkenau, annotated by Jean-Claude Pressac. (Mémorial de la Shoah/CDJC.)

Plan of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Yad Vashem/Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah.)

A main guard service with watch tower BI first sector of the camp BII second sector of the camp BIII third sector of the camp, under construction (Mexico) BIa women’s camp BIb initially, men’s camp; from 1943, women’s camp BIIa quarantine camp BIIb family camp for the Jews from Theresienstadt BIIc camp for the Jews from Hungary BIId men’s camp BIIe Gypsies’ camp (Zigeunerlager) BIIf prisoners’ hospital C Kommandantur and barracks for the SS D storage area for objects pillaged from murdered prisoners (Kanada) E ramp where the transports were unloaded and selection took place G pyres where corpses were burned H mass graves for Soviet prisoners of war K II Crematorium II gas chamber and ovens K III Crematorium III gas chamber and ovens K IV Crematorium IV gas chamber and ovens K V Crematorium V gas chamber and ovens M 1 first provisional gas chamber (white house) M 2 second provisional gas chamber (red house) S showers and registration (Sauna) Latrines and washbasins

This snapshot is one of a series of five photographs secretly taken by someone called “Alex,” an unidentified member of the resistance network at Auschwitz. Taken from inside Crematorium V in August 1944, it shows (here in detail) the naked women entering the gas chamber of Crematorium V, after undressing in the open air. (Archive of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.)

Photo of Crematorium III, annotated by Jean-Claude Pressac. (CNRS Éditions, 1993, APMO 20995/507.)

Visualization of Crematorium II. In basement on left, the room for undressing. On the right side, also in the basement, the gas chamber. (Klarsfeld Foundation.)

From The Auschwitz Album, a photo taken by an SS officer on the arrival of a transport of Jews from Hungary. Behind the people being sent to Crematorium II, the façade of the oven room of Crematorium III is perfectly visible. (Public domain/Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah.)

General view of the ovens of Crematorium II a few weeks before it started to operate. (The archival collection of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim.)

Ruins of Crematorium II at the Liberation. In the foreground, tree trunks had been piled up at the end of summer 1944 to camouflage the spot. (Mémorial de la Shoah/CDJC.)

Shlomo bearing witness in front of theruins of Crematorium II at Birkenau. Next to him, historian Marcello Pezzetti, who specializes in Auschwitz (March 2004). (Sara Berger.)

Shlomo and Avraham Dragon (also a former member of the Sonderkommando), Israel, July 2004. (Marcello Pezzetti.)

Shlomo and Lemke (Chaim) Pliszko (member of the Sonderkommando and former kapo of Crematorium II), Israel, July 2004. (Marcello Pezzetti.)

From left to right: Avraham Dragon, his brother Shlomo Dragon, Eliezer Eisenschmidt, Yakob Gabbai, Josef Sackar (behind), and Shaul Hazan at Birkenau. (Marcello Pezzetti.)

Shlomo (right) with his brother Maurice Venezia (left) and his cousin Dario Gabbai (center). (Marcello Pezzetti.)

FOREWORD

by Simone Veil

Shlomo Venezia arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau on April 11, 1944; I arrived there myself, from Drancy, four days later. Until September 9, 1943, we had lived – he in Greece, I in Nice – under Italian occupation, with the feeling of being, at least provisionally, safe from deportation. But, after the capitulation of Italy, the Nazi vise immediately tightened, both on those who lived in the Alpes-Maritimes and on those in the Greek archipelago.

When I speak of the Shoah, I often refer to the deportation and extermination of the Jews of Greece, since what happened in that country illustrates perfectly the fierce tenacity with which the Nazis pursued the “Final Solution,” hunting down the Jews even in the smallest and most remote islands of the archipelago. So it was with particular interest that I read the story of Shlomo Venezia, a Jew, an Italian citizen, who speaks not only Greek but also Ladino, the dialect of the Jews of Salonika where he lived. His name, Venezia, refers to the time when his ancestors, in the years of wandering that followed the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, had traveled to Italy before moving on to Salonika, the “Jerusalem of the Balkans,” ninety percent of whose Jewish community was exterminated during the Second World War.

I have read many accounts written by former deportees, and each time they take me back to life in the camp. But the story told by Shlomo Venezia is especially overwhelming because it is the only complete eye-witness account that we have from a survivor of the Sonderkommandos. Now we know precisely how they were condemned to perform their abominable task, the worst task of all: that of helping the deportees who had been selected for death to get undressed and to enter the gas chambers, then of taking away all those corpses, bodies intertwined with each other in their death struggles, to the crematorium ovens. As they were unwilling accomplices of the executioners, almost all of the members of the Sonderkommando were murdered, just like those they had led to the gas chambers.

The force of this eye-witness account comes from the irreproachable honesty of its author. He relates only what he himself saw, leaving nothing out: neither the worst, such as the barbarity of the man in charge of the Crematorium, nor the summary executions or the uninterrupted functioning of the gas chambers and the crematorium ovens; he also speaks of what might attenuate the horror of the situation, such as the relative mercy shown by a Dutch SS officer, or the less atrocious conditions of survival that the members of the Sonderkommando received relative to those of the other deportees, since the Sonderkommandos were the indispensable servants of the machinery of death. Another thing that makes his account exceptional is that only when he engaged in this dialogue with Béatrice Prasquier did Shlomo Venezia dare to mention the most macabre aspects of his “work” in the Sonderkommando, adding details of unbearable horror that bring out the full extent of this abominable Nazi crime.

With his simple words, Shlomo Venezia gives new life to the emaciated faces, with their exhausted, resigned, and often terror-stricken eyes, of those men, women, and children whom he is seeing for the last time. There are those who are unaware of the fate that awaits them; those who, coming from the ghettos, fear that there is little hope of surviving; and finally those who, being selected in the camp, know that death awaits them – but then, for many of the latter, death comes as a deliverance.

A glimmer of humanity sometimes lightens the horror in which Shlomo Venezia tries to survive in spite of everything. There is his meeting, at the threshold of the gas chamber, with his uncle Léon Venezia, who is now too weak to work, and Shlomo’s attempt to give him a final bite to eat. The younger man can lavish one last gesture of tenderness on the older and then recite a kaddish in his memory. There’s also the harmonica Shlomo sometimes plays. And finally, there are those gestures of solidarity which help him remain a human being.

Shlomo Venezia does not try to hide the episodes that might give rise to criticism, should anyone dare to formulate it. It redounds entirely to his honor that he is brave enough to speak of his feeling of complicity with the Nazis, of the selfishness he sometimes needed to survive, but also of his desire for vengeance at the liberation of the camps. There are those who might suggest that, having been in a kommando where he was given better food and better clothes, he perhaps suffered less than the other deportees. Shlomo Venezia asks such people: what is a bit more bread worth, or extra rest, or a few more clothes, when every day your hands are steeped in death? Because he also experienced the “normal” conditions of life in the camps which he describes with exceptional precision and truthfulness, Shlomo Venezia unhesitatingly declares that he would rather have died a slow death than have had to work in the Crematorium.

So how to survive in that hell, when the only thing to which one can look forward is the moment when one is going to be killed oneself? To this question, every deportee has his or her own answer. For many people, such as Shlomo Venezia, one had to stop thinking. As he says: “During the first two or three weeks, I was constantly stunned by the enormity of the crime, but then you stop thinking.” Every day he would have preferred to die, and yet each day he struggled to survive.

That Shlomo Venezia is still here today represents a double victory over the process of extermination of the Jews; for, in each of the members of the Sonderkommando, the Nazis wanted to kill the Jew and the eye-witness, to commit the crime and eradicate all trace of it. But Shlomo Venezia has survived and has told his story, after a long period of silence, like many other former deportees. If he, as did I and many others, spoke only belatedly, it is because nobody wished to listen to us. We had returned from a world where they had tried to banish us from the human race; we wanted to say as much, but we encountered incredulity, indifference, and even hostility from others. It was only in the years after the deportation that we found the courage to speak because, in the end, people did listen to us.

That is why this account, like those of all deportees, needs to be understood by each person as an appeal to reflection and vigilance. Over and above what he teaches us about the Sonderkommandos, Shlomo Venezia reminds us of that absolute horror, that “crime against humanity”: the Shoah. Shlomo Venezia’s voice, like that of all the deportees, will fall silent one day, but this dialogue between him and Béatrice Prasquier will remain, a dialogue between a witness who saw everything, one of the last to do so, and a young woman, a representative of the new generation, who was able to listen to him because she herself has for years been devoting a large part of her life to the struggle against forgetting. She deserves our thanks, particularly for having the courage to accompany Shlomo Venezia in his overwhelming return to the past.

It is now the task of this younger generation not to forget, and to ensure that Shlomo Venezia’s voice will be heard forever.

Simone Veil President of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah

NOTE

by Béatrice Prasquier

This account was compiled from a series of interviews I had with Shlomo Venezia in Rome, with the help of the historian Marcello Pezzetti, between April 13 and May 21, 2006. The conversations were conducted in Italian and then translated and transcribed as faithfully to the original as possible and revised by Shlomo Venezia so as not to diminish the authenticity of his story.

Since he was at the heart of that machine designed to pulverize human lives, Shlomo Venezia is one of the few survivors able to bear witness to the “absolute” victims, those drowned amid the multitude of forgotten faces not saved by chance and an exceptional fate.

His witness goes beyond an act of memory; it is a historical document that sheds light on the darkest moment in our history.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am very grateful to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee for all that they did for me and for many survivors throughout Europe. It’s thanks to them that I am still alive today.

I must also thank the Prasquier family, from Paris, of whom I am very fond. Thanks to all the people who were with me and gave me the moral support that enabled me to get through the terrible moments of the Second World War.

Finally, I would like to thank all the historians, researchers, teachers, and pupils whom I have had occasion to meet during my various appearances in their institutes or during visits to Auschwitz, especially those who, in one way or another, have contributed to this book: Marcello Pezzetti, Umberto Gentiloni, Béatrice Prasquier, Maddalena Carli, and Sara Berger.

S.V.

1

LIFE IN GREECE BEFORE THE DEPORTATION

My name is Shlomo Venezia, and I was born in Salonika, Greece, on December 29, 1923. My family had been forced to leave Spain when the Jews were expelled in 1492, but before settling in Greece, they spent time in Italy. That’s why my name is Venezia. The Jews who came from Spain did not, at that time, have family names; they were called (for example) Isaac son of Solomon. On arriving in Italy, they chose for themselves family names corresponding to the name of the city to which they had moved, in this instance Venice. That’s why many Jewish families bear the names of cities. In our case, this was what enabled us to keep Italian citizenship.

There were five children in our family, two boys and three girls. My older brother, Maurice, was two and a half years older than I; next came Rachel, who was one year and two months older than I. Then the last two daughters, Marica, born in 1930, and, after her, Marta, born in 1933. For the first years, my family lived in a house. It wasn’t very big, but it was better than the wooden shacks in which most of the poorer Jews of Salonika lived. As the family grew, the house became too small. I must have been five when we sold it and built a bigger, two-story house next door, on a piece of land belonging to my grandfather. My father was a bit egocentric, and he had his name written in red bricks on the path leading to the front door. The upper floor was rented out to Greek families. The money from their rent helped my father to pay his taxes. Unfortunately, things changed with his death, which happened very early. It must have been 1934 or 1935, and he left five fatherless children behind.

So you were very young. How did you react to his death?

I was eleven, I was at school when one of my father’s female cousins came to take me to see him in the hospital. He’d had an operation for a kidney problem, but nothing further could be done. In any case, I didn’t even have time to see him; he died before I arrived. All at once, we found ourselves almost alone, without material support. My father had run a small barbershop that his father had built for him. I obviously couldn’t step into his shoes on his death, since I was still too young. So his assistant took it over in exchange for a small percentage that he paid my family every week. But it wasn’t enough to feed a family of five children. It was only thanks to the help of my mother’s four brothers that we managed to have enough to eat every day. I went to their place every Thursday to pick up a bag of vegetables – eggplants, onions, and other things that they grew and put aside for their sister. This help was indispensable but not enough; as a result, one year after my father’s death I had to leave school to find a job and to help support my family financially. I was barely twelve years old.

And what did your older brother do?

He was sent by the Italian consulate to study in Milan. My father had fought in the First World War, and he was an Italian citizen, so he’d had the right to certain privileges. And that also meant we had one fewer mouth to feed. When the racial laws were passed in Italy in 1938, my brother was excluded from the Marchioni Technical Institute in Milan and sent back to Greece. So he never finished his studies either.

My father never lived to see the years in which the Fascist regime showed its true face. He felt so proud to be an Italian in Greece that he didn’t hesitate to wear the black shirt of the new regime and to march proudly along in the processions whenever the occasion presented itself. In his view, Mussolini was a socialist, and he never understood the real nature of Fascism. We were too distant to see which way this regime was drifting. As an ex-soldier, he took part in all the demonstrations and parades organized by the Italians. It was his only break from everyday life. It gave him a feeling of prestige vis-à-vis the other Jews of Salonika. Not very many of the Jews who’d come from Italy had kept their Italian nationality. Most of them adopted the same attitude as my father: they saw the realities from a distance, without really understanding what was happening in the Italian cities.

Did you sense any difference in Salonika between Italian Jews and Greek Jews?

Of the sixty thousand Jews in the city, there must have been not many more than three hundred of us Jews of Italian origin. But we were the only ones who were authorized to send our children to the Italian school. In comparison with the others, who in general went to the Jewish school, this gave us certain advantages: we got everything free, we didn’t have to pay for our books, we could eat in the canteen, we were given cod liver oil…. We wore really smart uniforms, with airplanes for the boys and swallows for the girls.

During this period, the Fascists were trying to promote Italian prosperity over all else. This was propaganda meant for the eyes of other countries, but we reaped the benefits. So, on Saturdays at school, there was the “Fascist Saturday,” which all the pupils were supposed to attend. I felt proud to join in these processions; I felt different from the others, and I enjoyed this feeling. I even went twice to a holiday camp in Italy, with the Balilla,1 whereas at that time hardly anyone ever traveled. And then we had several other advantages, since the Italian Embassy gave us a great deal of help. For example, on certain holidays, the consulate would hand out shoes and books to Italians who weren’t so well off. For us, these things made quite a difference. Actually, the Jewish community in Salonika was divided into three categories: a tiny number were very rich, a marginal group managed to scrape by, but the vast majority of people would head off to work each morning not knowing whether they’d manage to bring back enough money to feed their families in the evening. It’s difficult to admit, but at home I couldn’t just say “I’m hungry, I’m going to have something to eat,” since we had nothing. It was completely different from these days when you need to force children to finish up what’s on their plates. Back then, everything was in short supply, and everyone had to do whatever they could to find something to eat. I remember that we had some neighbors who were even poorer than us. My mother always tried to help them, even though we were going short ourselves. This gives you an idea of the extreme poverty in which we found ourselves. All of this forged my character. I’m convinced that, when you have to go without all the time, it makes you a stronger person.

What was Jewish life in Salonika like?

There must have been five or six Jewish districts in the city, all very poor. They were generally designated by the number of the tramline that went there. But the main one was called Baron Hirsch, after a rich donor who’d helped the Jewish community of Salonika. Over ninety percent of the population who lived in this district were Jewish. Actually, we lived just outside this part of town, but I spent pretty much all my time with Jews. At home, everything was kosher. Not because my family was religious or really strict, but because all the shops in the area were kosher. Meat in particular, which we bought on the few occasions when we could afford it. We ate it on Fridays, with beans; that was how the poor feasted. If you wanted to eat non-kosher, you really had to be determined and look for it a long way outside your district. On the other hand, the food at school wasn’t kosher, but this wasn’t a problem as far as I was concerned. The main thing for us was just to eat so we wouldn’t starve to death.

A lot of the Jews we lived amongst were religious. But probably not like in the little villages of Poland, where everyone really was very strict. When I had my bar mitzvah ceremony, I couldn’t read Hebrew, so I learned my portion by heart. My father had already passed away, so it was my grandfather who took me to the synagogue. From then on, every time I went to sleep over at his house, he would wake me up at the crack of dawn to go and recite the morning prayer with him. Like all thirteen-year-old boys, who prefer to stay in bed, I’d roll over, grumbling, trying to get out of prayers.

What were the relations between Jews and non-Jews?

There weren’t any particular problems. Even if most of my friends were Jewish, I also hung around with Christians. There could be the occasional scrap, though, when certain youths from other neighborhoods came into the Jewish district to provoke us and pick a fight with the Jews. But these were mainly just tussles between kids. I don’t know if the word “anti-Semitism” was relevant here. I remember one episode that almost turned out really badly for me; I must have been twelve or thirteen. In those days we’d often go out on a Saturday evening to take a look at the girls from the other districts and maybe meet them. But the boys soon started to get jealous and tried to send us packing – it was their territory. Once, I found myself with four or five friends confronting a gang from another part of town. My friends turned and fled, but I was unaware of the danger and continued walking. When I saw how angry they were, I started to pretend I had a limp. As they went by they said, “We’ll let you off since you’ve got a limp – otherwise ….” I limped along for another dozen steps or so, and then took to my heels. These are things that all children do.

But you didn’t sense there was any particular hostility towards the Jews …

The only time when you felt an unpleasant tension was the Orthodox Easter. In the cinemas, you could see short films that fueled anti-Semitism, saying that the Jews killed Christian children and used their blood to make unleavened bread. Those were the most difficult times, but I don’t remember it turning violent. On the other hand, you did feel that being Jewish wasn’t easy when there was a change of government and a Fascist government came to power. Then Jews had a lot more problems. Even when it was the other boys who came spoiling for a fight, the Jews were always held responsible. But in other ways we were so out of it all that few of us knew what was happening in Germany all this time. Anyway, right up until the end, nobody ever could have imagined it. You know, we didn’t have a telephone, and no radio except in the two town taxis. One of the two drivers was Jewish and when we went past his car we could hear someone talking in a strange voice; it was the radio. We were intrigued by this, and wanted to know how this radio thing worked. But in any case, I was too young to take any interest in what it was saying.

So at the age of twelve you had to look after yourself and leave school to get a job …

Yes, I didn’t have any external support to encourage me and help me with my studies. My mother had been born in Greece but didn’t even speak Greek; that was because her parents, like a lot of Jews, didn’t want their daughters to socialize with non-Jews. The language I spoke at home was always Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish dialect. But with my friends, out in the streets, I always spoke Greek. I spoke it perfectly, without the accent and intonations that were particular to the Jews of Salonika. All I knew I had picked up in the streets. I hadn’t been to the Jewish school, and hardly to the Italian one either. My father was no longer around to teach me about life and my mother merely gave me a bit of practical advice. In poor families, the main worry wasn’t education but just getting enough to eat. We just grew, out in the open air.

So at twelve I started to do small jobs. I’d do anything I could find, just to take a bit of money home and help my mother. For instance, for a few months I worked in a little factory that made mirrors. I was still just a lad, but they put me on the press; I had to attach the mirror to the handle. Then I worked in the factory of one of my father’s friends, an Italian – he wasn’t Jewish. He produced thermosiphons. Right near where we lived I also worked in a factory that made beds. I did odd jobs, carrying this, fetching that … it wasn’t much, but it made all the difference to my mother.

My brother was still in Italy and neither my mother nor my sisters worked. My mother had married while still very young and had gotten nothing out of life apart from us, her children. She devoted herself entirely to her family and did all she could for us. I remember that her only relaxation, when we were still little, was going out on Sunday evenings. My parents would take us to a little place that sold various kinds of beer and cheese. They’d sit down at a table and order a beer or two and the waiter would bring a little cheese. We never left them alone, we were always asking for a little bit. In the end, my mother had none left for herself. I have kept these memories, even if they make me sad. I’ve often thought about what I could have done to help my mother. I loved her so much and I know that she was especially fond of me. Her name was Doudoun Angel Venezia. I know all the sacrifices she made for us, I made an effort to help her as much as I could, but I’d like to have done more.

But I was still young and I, too, wanted to enjoy life. For instance, I tried to put a few coins aside so I could rent a bicycle for a little while. I loved doing that. After all, I got by on my own. Since I couldn’t buy a bike, I managed to build myself a kid’s scooter. I used a long piece of wood, with another one as the handlebars, two wheels that I’d found – and I racked my brains to invent some way of getting the handlebars to turn. I managed it, but before I could go scooting, I had to walk two or three hundred yards to find a road I could use. This scooter was the occasion of my first big disappointment as a child. The first day I went out to give it a try, I was proud and very happy. I slung it across my shoulders, and walked past a cart that had come to a stop. The road was really muddy and the horse couldn’t pull the cart. When he saw me coming by, the man driving the cart took my scooter without so much as a by-your-leave, and used it to thwack the horse, which took fright and heaved itself out of the mud that was holding it back. My scooter lay on the ground, completely broken. All I could do was start to cry. He took my scooter, broke it, the horse got out of the mud – and I was stuck in it. You can imagine how disappointed a youngster must have been when he’d put all his energies into putting this toy together. It was one of life’s lessons.

Did things change when your brother came back from Italy?

He came back in 1938, after the promulgation of the laws excluding the Jews from school in Italy. The situation at home didn’t change much. I was a bit cross with him – instead of thinking about the family, he was thinking only of himself, going off to have fun…. I think he resented my mother for having sent him so far away. He and I weren’t all that close: he had his gang, and I had mine. Even though my sister was older than I, I played the role of the big protective brother with her. I even remember that, one day, I tore a blouse that she’d sewn herself – I thought it was too low-cut….

The war was brewing. How did the people around you react, and how did the start of hostilities affect you?

We didn’t really realize what was happening. The community leaders got together to discuss it. They were worried, and they searched in the Torah to try to interpret events. But it was all so far away from us. We’d heard certain things about Germany. All we knew was that the German regime had it in for Jews. We were so hungry and had so many problems with our own lives that we didn’t have time to wonder about the future. This is why, later on, the Germans had no difficulty at all in deporting the Jews from Greece. The Germans easily persuaded them that the occupation forces were going to allocate lodgings to them depending on the size of each family – the men would go off to work and the women would stay at home. We were naïve and didn’t know what was happening politically. And then, I suppose that people thought the Germans were precise, decent people. When you bought something “made in Germany” it worked properly. It was precision-made. People believed what they were promised. They didn’t have enough to eat, and here people were offering them a place to live in exchange for their labor – it didn’t seem such a big deal….

For us, the war really started with the invasion of Albania by Italy.2 Even before entering Greece, Italy bombed the city of Salonika. The bombs set fire to the houses and terrified the populace. When Italy declared war, the Greek police immediately came to arrest all men of Italian nationality. I wasn’t of age yet, so they left me, but they took my brother Maurice. A policeman I knew told me I could stay for the time being, but I’d need to make sure I didn’t have anything in my pockets that might cause problems. I didn’t immediately realize what he meant, but the fact was, if someone was found with a mirror in his pocket, he might be accused of having been signaling to the planes.

So they took my brother, but only him. They also took all the Italians, Jews and non-Jews, and put them into a big block in the city center. It wasn’t a prison, but they weren’t allowed out. The problem was that it was precisely this zone that the Italians bombed. Luckily, they weren’t killed. They were then transferred to near Athens, and they weren’t liberated until the Italians arrived. My cousin Dario Gabbai, who was there with them, with his brother and his father, told me that a Jew who was quite well-off had paid for the Italian Jews to be kept in a hotel under guard. At least they got to eat better there than at home.

All this time, I used to climb every day up onto the roof of a house occupied by soldiers of the Greek army. I knew that a truck came every day at the same time to hand out food to the soldiers. I’d made friends with them and, as they didn’t suspect that I was of Italian nationality, they gave me some food as well. I had nothing to do, but at least I could eat. Things remained like this for three months: the Italians advanced, and were then driven back by the Greek army, they invaded and were then pushed back. Eventually, the Germans entered Greece from the north to help their Italian allies. This was bad news for us. Salonika, the main city in the north of Greece, was immediately occupied by the Germans. If the Italians had bombed the bridges and strategic sites instead of bombing the cities, it would have been easy for them to win – Greece didn’t have much of an army. But instead of that, it was the Germans who overran Greece without encountering the slightest difficulty.

The day the German troops entered Salonika we were in a shelter situated under some big buildings, near the port and the warehouse. The house was right next to the railway station and the area was likely to be bombed, so we moved over to where my uncles lived. As usual, I was always on the lookout for something to eat. I saw there were people coming back from the port carrying supplies. They were helping themselves so as to leave nothing for the Germans. So I went down there and took a barrel of oil that I rolled back to where my family had taken shelter. On my way there, a restaurant owner came up and asked me if I was selling. I thought I could easily sell it and go back and get another one pretty quickly. We haggled a bit and he immediately gave me a nice bunch of banknotes. I left the oil with him and went back to the port, but there was nothing left. I returned to my mother and told her what had happened. “What have you gone and done?” she shouted. “We could have done something with that oil, but the money’s no use at all.” I went back to the restaurant owner with her. She begged him, and he finally agreed to give back half the oil I’d sold him.

On another occasion, I was luckier. I found a pancake-griddle and I managed to come away with a few of the cakes, since I knew my way round the warehouse. Everybody wanted to buy them from me, so I started to sell them, then I went back to the place I’d found them. In the meantime, people had closed it all up, but I spotted a little hole through which I managed to slip. I took everything I could get my hands on, and went back home with the pancakes and the money.