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FRIDAY, DECEMBER 25, 1987
Memoir Is 'Odyssey'
For Lost Greek Jews
JOSEPH COHEN
Special to The Jewish News
A
mong the six million
Jews martyred by the
Nazis in the
Holocaust, there were 67,112
Jews from Greece. While
these numbers are small in
comparison to the other
Jewish populations deci-
mated by the Germans, they
constituted 86 percent of
the total Greek Jewish com-
munity. The loss of these
Jews all but brought to an
end a Greek-Jewish com-
munity that was centuries
old. Until recently, their story
has remained untold. Now,
with the surfacing of the role
Kurt Waldheim played in the
destruction of the Jews of
Salonika, attention is being
focused on the devastation of
the Jews in Greece.
Two principal memorials to
the lost Jews of Greece exist.
In Athens last summer, my
wife and I went to the Jewish
Museum. We had expected to
find antiquities. What we
found instead, in the small,
almost oriental interior,
hamish and dimly lit, was one
room set aside to corn-
memorate the martyred Jews,
practically all of whom were
sent to the crematoria at
Auschwitz.
Looking at the artifacts and
the memorabilia in the hush-
ed quiet and the semi-
darkness, one could literally
feel the intensity and the im-
mensity of the tragedy. Let-
ters, pictures, identity cards,
the actual posters spelling
out the Nurenberg decrees
which were imposed im-
mediately after the Germans
occupied Greece in April,
1942, all combined to create
an atmosphere of grief and
desolation. I can compare it
only to the experience of
walking into a room filled
with people mourning the
unexpected death of a belov-
ed family member, taken
before his time. The impact
was awesome.
The second memorial is a
book containing an account of
his internment at Auschwitz
by a Greek Jew living in
Athens, Errikos Sevillias, one
of the few survivors. It records
the systematic extermination
of the Greek Jews in the
death camp. It is entitled
simply Athens - Auschwitz
(translated and introduced by
Nikos Stavroulakis, the pre-
sent director of the Jewish
Museum, and published in
Athens in 1983 by the
Lycabettus Press). It is as
remarkable a narrative of the
Holocaust experience as any
I have ever read, not as
sophisticated as those by Elie
Wiesel, Primo Levi, Aharon
Appelfeld or Chaim Grade,
because its author was not a
writer. But, in its own way, it
is as moving as any of the
works these more famous
writers have produced. Lucid
and directly narrated, Athens
— Auschwitz is the new
Odyssey for the lost Jews of
Greece, not lyrical, to be sure,
but certainly an epic.
Compelling in its own right,
Athens — Auschwitz will also
come to be read as another
document which sheds light
on the barbarism of Kurt
Waldheim, who was not, of
course, known to Sevillias,
but who was stationed at Ar-
sakli, a suburb of Salonika,
having arrived there just two
weeks after the first deporta-
tions to Auschwitz began.
(Waldheim's work at Arsakli
is described in some detail in
the just released book
Waldheim [Adama Books], by
Bernard Cohen and Luc
Rosenzweig). An American
edition of Sevillias' book,
Athens to Auschwitz, has just
been issued by the New York
University Press.
Sevillias was born in
Athens in 1901 to a poor
Jewish couple with nine other
children. His formal educa-
tion came to an end when, at
the age of 12, he was sent to
work in a leather goods shop.
At the age of 16 he opened his
own shop, but three years
after he closed it to serve in
the Greek Army in Asia
Minor. When a brother, also
in the service, was killed in
action, Sevillias was
furloughed home permanent-
ly. Released from the army in
1923, he again opened his
leather good shop, and in time
he became a respected mer-
chant. He married in 1936
and fathered a daughter.
He had never experienced
any anti-Semitism, partly
because the Jews of Athens —
unlike those in Salonika,
where over half the popula-
tion was made up of zealous
Sephardim and business was
conducted by everyone in
Ladino — were almost total-
ly Hellenized. To pinch
Joyce's line about Leopold
Bloom in Ulysses, Sevillias
was "greeker than the
Greeks!'
But his Hellenization didn't
save Sevillias from the Nazis,
though it made it easier for
some Jews to hide or to be
hidden by their neighbors. He
was among the first Athenian
Jews to be sent to Auschwitz.
During his 16 months of vic-
timization, he miraculously
overcame frequent en-
counters with death. His sur-
vival he regarded as bizarre,
and he wrote his book in an
effort, as he put it, to "catch
the meaning, the deeper
significance of what happen-
ed to me and to the millions
like me!' He did not seek to
publish what he had written.
On May 24, 1974, he was
struck and killed by a motor-
cycle. The manuscript was
found among his papers after
his death.
Athens — Auschwitz is grip-
ping in its accounts of the
horror-filled 12 day train
journey from Greece to
Poland, with people crammed
tightly into freight cars, of the
realization upon arrival that
most of the Jews would go
directly to their deaths, of the
brutality of the camp guards,
the severity of the work day,
the paucity of food, and of the
nature of the work inside the
crematoria where the
prisoners assigned to feed the
ovens would themselves
periodically be cremated to
destroy the eye-witnesses.
In Sevillias' sector of the
camp, adjacent to the
crematoria, stolen gold-filled
teeth became the currency for
bartering with the free Polish
employees of the camp for ex-
tra food, so that the involun-
tary dead helped a few of the
living to remain alive.
Determined to survive,
Sevillias did, though as much
by sheer luck as by grim
determination. His reunion,
once he was enabled to return
to Athens, with his wife and
daughter, told as simply as
the horrors he had experienc-
ed, brings tears of joy to the
eyes. This is a book that will
not be forgotten. It is a fitting
monument to the 67,112
members of a once exotic and
vital Jewish community that
is no more.
Copyright Joseph Cohen
"'I NEWS l'"'"
Read In Korea
Jerusalem — Articles by
two Hebrew University of
Jerusalem professors are
featured in the first volume of
the Korean Journal of Policy
Studies of Seoul National
University.