Travel

Irina Herman

Interviewer: Zhanna Litinskaya
Date of the interview: September 2003

Irina Herman looks young and beautiful. She lives in a three-bedroom apartment in a new district in Ternopol. Irina is slender, but she looks ill: she had a severe surgery recently. However, she keeps her apartment very clean and cozy. She has plain furniture in her apartment. There are embroidered pictures on the walls and embroidered covers on the sofa and beds that the hostess made herself. Besides flowered and fold patterns there are portraits of Taras Shevchenko 1, Sholem Aleichem 2, and … a rabbi. Irina speaks fluent Ukrainian and I conducted this interview with her in Ukrainian.

My mother’s parents, my grandfather Leizer and grandmother Esfir, died long before I was born and I didn’t know them. My grandfather’s last name was Nepomniashchiy, but I don’t remember my grandmother’s maiden name. They were born approximately in the 1860s in Tomashpol, Vinnitsa province, 250 kilometers from Kiev, where they lived their life.

Tomashpol was like any other Jewish town within the Pale of Settlement 3. There was a market square in the center of the town. Sunday was a market day. Ukrainian farmers from surrounding villages came to sell their products at the market. They also did shopping in local Jewish shops buying haberdashery, fabrics and shoes. There was a sugar refinery and a milk factory where workers were local Jews and Ukrainians from surrounding villages. 

There was also a small fabric factory in the town. It belonged to my grandmother’s relatives. There were few richer Jewish houses belonging to the doctor, notary and attorney. Jews mainly dealt in crafts. They were shoemakers, glasscutters, carpenters, tailors, etc. 

There was big and beautiful synagogue in the center of the town. It operated until the middle of the 1930s when the Soviet regime began to ruthlessly destroy everything religious 4 and the synagogue was closed. Jews went to pray in a prayer house.

There was a nice lake in the village from where a little river started flowing.  Local Jews often bathed in this river and lake on Friday before Pesach. After bathing they put on clean clothes.  

My grandfather Leizer was a craftsman, but I don’t know exactly what he was doing. He finished cheder, could read the Torah and Talmud and knew prayers. My grandmother Esfir had no education. She knew prayers by heart since her childhood. Theirs was a poor family living from hand to mouth.

It was common for Jewish women to be housewives after getting married, but the family was so miserably poor that my grandmother Esfir had to go to work. She worked as a yarn winder at the fabric factory.

The family owned a small house that almost rooted itself into the ground. There were two little rooms, a kitchen and a big Russian stove 5 in it, and a fore room in the house.

My grandmother and grandfather were religious. They followed the kashrut and strictly observed all other traditions. It was easy to follow the kashrut in their family since they hardly ever had meat. They saved to buy a chicken before a big Jewish holiday to keep it in their fore room till the holiday time. They mainly ate bread, potatoes and beans.

On Friday they did a general cleanup of the house. They scrubbed utensils and washed the floors to be prepared for Sabbath. My grandmother lit candles and grandfather recited a prayer. They followed all the rules. On Saturday my grandmother and grandfather went to the synagogue. They raised their children religious. My grandmother and grandfather died in the early 1930s and all I know about them is what my mother and relatives told me. 

According to my mother there were thirteen children born in the family. Most of them died in infancy from diseases. Only five children, including my mother, survived. My mother’s two older sisters moved to America in the early 1900s and there was no further contact with them. I don’t know their names. I only knew my mother’s sister Leya and brother Moishe.

The children didn’t get any education. They had to go to work at an early age. My mother’s sister Leya, born in 1898, went to work at the factory where my grandmother worked. She became a winder. She married a wealthy Jew when she was very young. He was a tailor named Gershl Spector. My grandmother tried to take advantage at least of the fact that her children were beautiful and she thought that Leya’s marriage was a very nice arrangement. Leya had a good life with her husband. They had a big two-storied house with a number of rooms and good furniture. There were housemaids in the house.

Leya had another baby every year. She had seven children. Her older daughter Sarra, sons Fishel and Boris were in the army during the Great Patriotic War 6. Fishel and Boris perished. Sarra married her fellow comrade/soldier. He is Armenian and they live in the Northern Caucasus now. Leya’s middle son Haim lives in Moscow and the youngest Etia died in Tomashpol recently. Two other children perished in the ghetto in Tomashpol where Leya and her younger children were during the war. Leya died in Vinnitsa in 1952.

My mother’s brother Moishe, who was about two years older than my mother, married a wealthy woman for money. His wife Shura was so ugly and Moishe could never forget that he was forced into his marriage. Moishe was a laborer.

His son Lezha and daughter Ida had higher education. Lezha and his family live in Moscow. Ida married a Jewish engineer from Vinnitsa. His name was Arenson. They lived in Vinnitsa and only left it during the war.

Ida died of cancer in the middle of the 1960s. Moishe and Shura had another son named Bulia. He was deaf and mute, but he was a very handsome, smart and kind guy. Shortly after the war he got lost in a forest searching for wood. He froze to death. They found him a few days later. Moishe was at the front during the Great Patriotic War. After the war he returned to Tomashpol. He died some time in 1984.

My mother, Hova Herman, nee Nepomniashchaya, was born in 1907. She was the thirteenth child in the family. My mother had no education whatsoever. She spoke Yiddish and Ukrainian like any other resident of Tomashpol. She knew prayers by heart and prayed all her life. She went to work at the factory at the age of approximately 13.

My mother was a reserved person. Perhaps, it resulted from her lack of education. Anyway, she never told me about her young years or how she met my father. All she said was that she married for great love which was not the case with her sister Leya and brother Moishe. My other relatives told me some details of her meeting and marrying my father.

My father’s parents, Perl and Bencion Herman, were against my father’s marrying my mother. They were wealthy and didn’t want their son to marry a poor girl. Perl and Bencion were of the same age, they were born in 1886 in the village of Alexandrovka, 25 kilometers from Tomashpol. There were three or four Jewish families in this Ukrainian village.

My grandfather Bencion’s brother lived in a village across the river. I don’t remember his name. I remember his daughters’ names: Etia, Haya and Esia. They often came to see their father.

Grandfather Bencion had education. He had Jewish education, could read and write in Ukrainian and even Russian. He was a postman in his village for many years and his fellow villagers respected and loved him.

Grandmother Perl had little education. I have a towel that her mother, my great-grandmother, embroidered for her wedding. I’ve always kept this wedding towel and even the colors on it haven’t faded. There is ‘To dear bridegroom and bride, good evening, all!’ embroidered on it.

Perl was a very active person. She took care of her big household. There was an orchard around the house and a vegetable garden where they grew vegetables for the family and for sale. Perl also kept poultry and cattle: cows and pigs. The family supported its well-being working tirelessly, but during the period of famine in 1932-33 7 authorities took away almost all their bread and food stocks and Perl, the only one of the family, starved to death. So I never met this grandmother.

My father’s parents were religious Jews. Grandfather Bencion was particularly religious. There was no synagogue in Alexandrovka and Jews from Alexandrovka and a neighboring village got together in one house to pray. My grandmother Perl was so busy about the house that she hardly had any time left for religion and prayers. 

Perl and Bencion had three children including my father: two sons and a daughter. A visiting melamed taught the sons. Vol’ko, the older son, was born in 1906. Vol’ko became an apprentice of a local carpenter. After finishing his training he became a skilled cabinetmaker. After the revolution 8 he moved to Leningrad where he finished a technical school and then he taught the carpenter craft in a vocational school.

During the Great Patriotic War he, his wife Raya and their small children Naum and Boris were in evacuation in Novosibirsk. Vol’ko gave up religion living in this big town. He didn’t pray, but he celebrated Jewish holidays as tribute to traditions. After the war their family returned to Leningrad. Vol’ko died in the middle of the 1970s. Naum lives in St. Petersburg and Boris and his family and his mother Raya live in Israel.

My father’s sister Rieva was born in 1910. Rieva had good education. After finishing a seven-year school she finished a Soviet Trade School and then a Trade College. Rieva was a member of the Communist Party and worked in the regional party committee in Vinnitsa. She married Samuel Rachelgauz, a Jew, who was a military, in 1939, and followed him to wherever he had to go on his military service across the country. They lived in the Far East and Siberia and when Samuel retired they returned to Vinnitsa.

Rieva and Samuel had three sons. All of them had higher education. They were very talented and became respectable members of society and skilled experts in their fields. Roman, the oldest one, born in late 1940 finished a Ship Building College. He became a doctor of science 9 and lives in the USA now.

Boris, the middle son, finished a Polytechnic College. He lives with his family in Voronezh, Russia. The youngest named Yevgeni finished the Moscow College of Physics and Mathematics. He was director of a plant. Now he lives in Moscow.

Rieva died in Vinnitsa in 1997. Her husband lived another year.

My father, Shmuel Herman, was born in 1907. Although he only had primary education and was deeply religious, most of his friends were Ukrainians from a neighboring village. Actually, he was like a Ukrainian guy himself being tall and stately. Many girls wanted to marry him: he was handsome and hardworking and came from a wealthy family.

I don’t know how my parents met, but they fell in love with each other for the rest of their life. This happened in 1927. My mother had typhus and my father, who wasn’t even her fiancé at the time, nursed her to recovery. She was thin and her hair was shaved, but he took her to his home to introduce her to his parents.

My grandmother Perl was horrified: besides being poor she was a plain and sickly looking girl. She didn’t give her consent to their marriage. She intended to find a rich fiancée for her son and took him on her sledge to another village where matchmakers found a match for my father.

The family legend says that the horses got stubborn at some distance from the village – and this was happening in a severe winter with a lot of snow – and Perl couldn’t make them move another step however hard she tried. She had to go back to Alexandrovka with my father and give her consent to their marriage.

They had a traditional Jewish wedding in summer 1928. The bride and bridegroom stepped under the chuppah at the synagogue in Tomashpol and then rode back to Alexandrovka where they had a wedding party with all relatives and fellow villagers present.

After the wedding the newlyweds settled down with my father’s parents. My mother was smart and hardworking and began to help Perl about the house. Soon my grandmother liked her as if she had been her daughter. My father started construction of their house, but during the period of famine in 1932 this unfinished house was disassembled for wood.

My father went to his older brother in Leningrad hoping to earn a little. He brought a bag of dried bread from there. There was a surprise waiting for him at home: my mother gave birth to their first baby after three years of marriage. The baby was named Lev after her deceased father: the first letters in the name of my older brother and my mother’s father are the same. 

In 1933 Perl died of hunger and my grandfather married my mother’s cousin sister Rosa who was much younger than my grandfather. Rosa became the hostess of my grandfather’s house in Alexandrovka.

My parents didn’t get along with my father’s stepmother and moved to the house where my mother had grown up in Tomashpol. The house was empty after my mother’s parents died. In 1936 my sister Polina was born in this house. She was named after my grandmother Perl: their names sound alike. In 1937 I was born there. I was named Fira after my mother’s mother Esfir. Later they began to call me Irina. It’s a Ukrainian name and it is written in my passport.

I remember our house dimly: it was a small house rooted into the ground. There was a fore room, two small rooms and a kitchen with a Russian stove. My mother was used to living in a village. She kept a cow and poultry in the shed in the backyard of the house. We had a good life before the war. My father was a worker at the sugar refinery and my mother was a housewife. 

Every Friday my mother cleaned the house, washed the floors and prepared for Sabbath. She left our Saturday meal in the oven and we sat at the table after we came from the synagogue on Saturday. I have vague memories about this time, but I remember that waiting for Saturday was festive.

I also remember Pesach when matzah was baked for the holiday and my brother and I made holes in matzah rolls. There was no synagogue in Tomashpol and all Jewish families made matzah at home.

I have dim memories about other holidays as well. I didn’t know their names, but I remember triangle pies with poppy seeds that my mother made for Purim, potato pancakes and doughnuts at Chanukkah. I remember that my parents fasted at Yom Kippur. My mother fasted the rest of her life, but our parents didn’t make us, children, fast. This was during the Soviet regime when authorities didn’t approve of religion. Our parents probably wanted to bring no complications into our life.

In 1940 my father was recruited to the army during the Finnish War 10. He returned home soon: he had lost his arm. From then on he worked as a janitor at a plant and spent much time at home helping my mother about the house and spending time with us, his children whom he loved dearly.

Our family often rented a horse-drawn wagon to visit Grandfather Bencion in Alexandrovka. He and Rosa had a son one year older than me. His name was Moishe. We were friends. We bathed in the river and played with a ball in the yard. My grandfather told us stories. They were probably chapters from the Torah, but I don’t remember what they were about. All I remember is how we sat there listening to him.

We spent summers in Alexandrovka. We were there when the Great Patriotic War began. I don’t remember how it began. We didn’t even have time to consider evacuation – two weeks after the war began German troops came into the village. 

My first bright memory refers to this time. It is probably imprinted in my memory for the rest of my life, this horror that I felt. Two days after the Germans came to the village I was playing in my grandfather’s yard. I don’t know where my parents, my brother and sister were. A half-drunk German soldier came to the yard. He began to pester my grandfather ‘Judas, Judas, give me chicken, eggs and milk’ pulling grandfather by his beard and threatening him with a gun.

My grandfather started walking toward the cellar with this German following him, when all of a sudden my grandfather jumped to me, grabbed me and jumped into the well holding the rope. We were lucky that it was a hot summer and there wasn’t much water in the well. We could hear the German cursing and shooting.

When it became quiet our Ukrainian neighbors pulled us out of the well. My mother and sister came. Although nobody thought it was a threatening incident our Ukrainian neighbors gave us shelter on the attic in their house: my mother and sister and I were hiding there. 

We didn’t know where my father, grandfather and brother were. A few days later my father came. He said that he and grandfather found shelter with our Ukrainian neighbor Zenyunka.

Zenyunka actually saved my brother. When the Germans met him they called him ‘Judas’ and told him to put down his pants to check whether he was circumcised when my grandfather’s quiet neighbor Zenyunka ran out of her house, grabbed my brother and said that he was her son and had nothing in common with Jews. My brother’s Ukrainian friends had taught him a Christian prayer ‘Our Father…’ and he recited it in Ukrainian and the Germans left him alone.

My father and grandfather decided to leave the village. They understood that the Germans were not giving up. Tomashpol was still under Soviet rule and my father decided to go home to Tomashpol. Our family and my grandfather and Rosa and Moishe and our Jewish neighbors were there and we decided to move across the woods. We covered the distance to Tomashpol of 25 kilometers in three days since we could only move at night.

When we came to the town there was actually anarchy there. We went to my mother’s sister Leya. She was baking bread and we were so starved that we pounced on a loaf of bread. It was fresh and smelled delicious.

Our neighbors and relatives came to see us. They didn’t believe what my father and grandfather told them about their victimizing Jews. They thought that the Germans were just frolic. Old people remembered World War I when Germans had a respectful attitude toward Jews and didn’t think they could do any harm. Many of them laughed that my father dug a shelter underneath our house to hide from the Germans. He dropped rags on the floor so that nobody could suspect an underground shelter. This shelter served us well during the occupation.

German troops came to Tomashpol shortly afterward. On 4th August the first terrifying operation against Jews was conducted. On that morning my father and grandfather went to pray in the prayer house as usual. My mother, my sister, I and my aunt Rosa and her son were waiting for them at breakfast. At that moment a raid began: Germans were coming to Jewish homes chasing Jews out of their homes with whips. Some managed to hide. My mother’s sister Leya hid in her basement.

We were taken to the square where Germans read an order issued by German commandment ordering us to go to work under the fear of death. They didn’t allow us to take anything with us. We were told to line up in a column and march across the town. There were guards with dogs on the sides. Nobody thought that this was a death march.

At that time we saw another column marching along the adjunct street. There were men from the prayer house in this march and we saw my father and grandfather. My father rushed to our column, but of course, he was forced to go back. This was the last time I saw my father.

My brother hit his foot and began to cry, but my mother begged him to move on. She was afraid that they would kill us if we didn’t keep the pace. At that time a German guard noticed us. He called us to come closer and told us to go home speaking German. I still don’t know why he did this. Perhaps, he liked my mother or we reminded him of his children in Germany. He ordered a policeman to take us home. My brother ran after the column where my father was.

My mother and I went back home. My mother started cooking dinner. She was waiting for my father and grandfather to come back home. She thought they were working somewhere. Time passed, but nobody returned. In the evening we heard shooting at a distance. There were wounded people with blood on them making their way home across the gardens.

My brother came in the evening. He told us that he followed the column for a long time until my father told him to go back home. He hid in a forest and saw fascists killing Jews, but he didn’t see my father or grandfather among those who were killed.

Later Ukrainian witnesses told us that the column covered about 20 kilometers almost as far as Yampol. On the hill where an old Jewish cemetery was located Germans gave prisoners spades and ordered them to dig graves. Somebody screamed that they had to run for their life. My grandfather Bencion was among the first ones who tried to escape. A fascist ran after him and cut his body in halves with a spade. My grandfather was thrown into a ravine and then they threw there other Jews who were still alive. 

A policeman, our fellow villager from Alexandrovka, who often visited us before the war, ran after my father. My father egged him to let him go and have mercy on his children, but this policeman beat him hard and then threw him into the ravine. He was still alive. People were saying that the earth was breathing for a long time afterward: there were many buried alive, including my beloved father.

After this horrible day my mother kept us in our shelter. She only went out to get some food. She took our cow to our Ukrainian acquaintance in Alexandrovka hoping that she would help us when we were in need.

About two weeks later I fell ill with scarlet fever. There were no medications available. My mother carried me to an infectious diseases hospital in Komargorod, about 15 kilometers from Tomashpol. Doctor Drozdovski, either Polish or Ukrainian, was the director of this hospital. The doctor knew very well that I was a Jew, but he ordered me to not say a word in Yiddish and taught me to cross myself. He told everybody else that I was his distant relative. He brought me food and toys.

I stayed there over a month until my mother took me back home. As it turned out I was not the only one whom Drozdovski helped. Fascists hanged the doctor for helping Jews in the central square in early 1942.

Vinnitsa region, including Tomashpol, became a part of Transnistria 11, i.e., was under the Romanian rule. In October 1941 a ghetto was organized in Tomashpol. Our street and a few adjunct streets were fenced with barbed wire and there were guards at the entrance gate. 

I cannot tell any details about our life in the ghetto. Few episodes are imprinted in my memory. They are associated with a common feeling of fear, hunger and cold. When we managed to get some potato peels we baked them on a makeshift stove and my mother made flat cookies of them. Fascists occasionally threw sausage and sandwich leftovers to the children as if we were dogs. This was a luxury.

My mother went to see our acquaintance in the village that had our cow to ask her for a little milk, but the woman refused. I remember that policemen captured my mother once when she was bringing food to us. She was made to run the gauntlet and each policeman hit her with a whip. She was almost beaten to death.

My mother couldn’t walk for a few days. An old woman from Moldova 12 attended to her. This old woman lived in our house. We also gave shelter to a 12-year-old boy from Tulchin living in our house. The old woman prayed beside my mother murmuring Jewish prayers. I need to say that even on the hardest days she started her day with a prayer. She fasted at Yom Kippur although almost each day in the ghetto was fasting. 

My brother was a very bright boy. He managed to get out of the ghetto and somehow he brought sugar beetroots from the sugar refinery that saved us. He was captured by policemen several times. Once they beat him so hard that he was ill for a long time.

I also remember when a Romanian guard came for my brother. He had a gun and wanted to shoot my brother when he saw our dog with its puppies near the doorway. The puppies were white and furry and the guard began to play with them and probably forgot why he came there. 

There was no more shooting, but inmates of the ghetto were dying from hunger, cold and diseases. In late 1943, before liberation, Germans took over the ghetto again. The situation grew worse.

We were ill. My sister had typhus three times: spotted fever, enteric fever and relapsing fever. She had high fever and my brother and I leaned on her to get warm. And the Lord guarded us! We were sleeping leaning over Polina, but we didn’t contract her illness, but we had lice. Cold, hunger and lice: these are my major memories of my childhood spent behind the barbed wire.

In late 1943 retreating German troops came to Tomashpol. They really became brutal. They made plans for the liquidation of the ghetto and drew up lists of Jews for extermination. Fortunately, they failed to implement their plans.

In March 1944 Soviet troops liberated Tomashpol. My uncle, Aunt Rieva’s husband Samuel Rachelgauz, came to the town with them. He didn’t know us and we had never seen him before, but Aunt Rieva, who was in evacuation in the Urals, kept writing her husband that if he came to Tomashpol he should find our family. She didn’t know about us. Rieva described her relatives to her husband: my father, grandfather, my mother and Aunt Leya.

I shall never forget this day. My sister had another attack of typhus and my brother and I were lying beside her covered with all rags that we could find in the house. Aunt Leya was trying to keep my uncle in the doorway telling him that we had lice and were infectious, but Samuel came into the house, took my sister in his arms and began to cry. Then he took a loaf of bread out of his bag. My mother screamed to him that he should give us only a little bit and my uncle began to give us small pieces. 

For a few days we had meals in a military field kitchen facility. Then the army moved on and we stayed in our house. Actually, our situation didn’t change. The cold and hunger were with us. My mother went out to do people’s laundry or look after their cattle and they gave her some food for us. Life was so hard. I still cannot understand how we managed to survive.

In summer 1944 my brother moved to Odessa 13 by a freight train. There he entered a vocational school and was accommodated in a hostel. He received a stipend and unloaded railcars for additional earnings.

After the war the father of a boy from Tulchin living with us came to pick him up. He was very grateful to my mother and asked her to marry him since fascists shot his wife in Tulchin, but my mother refused. She was faithful to my father for the rest of her life.

Our life was very hard. 1946-47 was a period of horrifying hunger and only our life in the ghetto could be compared with it. We were ill again. I had rheumatism and I was bedridden for almost a year. At night I cried from pain and my mother was sitting beside me.

In 1946 I went to a local Ukrainian school. Life was improving. My mother began to receive monthly allowances for us. They were peanuts. My aunt Rieva provided the most sufficient assistance to us sending my mother some money each month. We wouldn’t have survived if it hadn’t been for Aunt Rieva’s support.

My mother worked a lot washing floors, doing laundry, whitewashing and cleaning houses for other people. However, she couldn’t earn enough for a living and so my mother began to sell things. She went to purchase goods in Vinnitsa. She bought soap and paints and sold them a little more expensive in our village. It was against the existing laws and my mother was often arrested. I already knew that if my mother didn’t come back home in the evening I had to take her some soup or boiled cereal to a militia office. Sometimes she was released a few days later and once she was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment.

During this year my sister and I lived on what Aunt Rieva sent us. We also were provided free lunches at school for being orphans. I remember us taking turns to go to school in winter having one pair of winter boots. When my mother was released Aunt Rieva took my sister to the Far East and my mother and I remained at home.

There were many Jewish children in my class and there were no negative attitudes toward us before the Doctors’ Plot 14, when in the newspapers and on the radio they spoke about doctors being poisoners. This period of anti-Semitism made the attitude toward us at school much worse.

I studied well and my teachers often asked me to help other pupils who were not doing well. I enjoyed helping them. I went to help them do their homework and their parents often offered me food. I was always hungry.

I remember when Stalin died in March 1953 I was standing on guard of honor by his portrait at school. I didn’t take an active part in public life, but I became a pioneer 15 and joined the Komsomol 16 of course, since without this it was impossible to continue your studies or have a career. Besides, if I hadn’t done it, it would have raised suspicions and questions.

My mother tried to observe Jewish traditions after the war. She didn’t work on Saturday. There was no synagogue in Tomashpol, but my mother got together with other widows like her to celebrate holidays. They even baked matzah in our stove. She often visited my grandfather’s second wife Rosa. Rosa didn’t remarry.

Her son Moishe finished college in Kiev. He became an engineer and visited his mother with his family. I saw them once in the 1960s. I don’t remember Moishe’s wife’s or his son’s names. Rosa died in Tomashpol in the early 1970s and Moishe and his family moved to the USA in the late 1980s and I lost track of them.

I finished the 10th [last] grade in 1956 and moved to my brother in Odessa. There was nowhere to study in Tomashpol. My brother worked at a plant and rented an apartment. I was living with him. In Odessa I entered the Faculty of Economics in the School of Heavy Industry.

When I was in the 9th grade at school I met Yefim Rozenberg, a Jewish guy. Yefim was born into the poor Jewish family of a tailor in 1937. We met when he came on vacation during his studies in a Navy School. Then he went back to his school and corresponded. I liked him a lot. Yefim came to visit me in Odessa and proposed to me. I wrote my sister asking her consent. She was a year older and it was a Jewish custom that older daughters had to get married first.

In late 1956 we registered our marriage in a registry office in Odessa and that evening we had a celebration with our friends. In February 1957 we came to our hometown and celebrated our wedding at home. There were many guests. They were Jews from our town. There was Jewish food at the wedding: gefilte fish, chicken broth and stewed meat. Besides traditional food there were no other rituals observed at our wedding party.

We lived a few more months in Odessa: I was with my brother and he stayed in his hostel until we received a small room at the plant. My husband sailed on his boat and I worked as a rate setter at the clock plant. We lived in Odessa for a few years.

In 1957 our daughter Svetlana was born. After my daughter was born I entered a Soviet Trade School. Life wasn’t easy: my husband was away and I had to work and study. At the age of two Svetlana went to a kindergarten and I took her home on weekends.

My husband earned well and didn’t spend much considering that he was provided a uniform and meals. It seems this was the first time of my life that I had sufficient food and could afford to buy clothes rather than wearing my sister’s clothes.

In 1962 my husband was transferred to serve in Western Ukraine, Ternopol [350 km west of Kiev], where he worked in the maintenance unit of Ternopol military garrison. In 1962 my son Mikhail was born. We lived in a small room in the basement and in early 1970 we received this apartment.

Although I married for great love our marriage failed. He was a rude man and mistreated my children and me. He only cared about himself and he couldn’t care less about us. He didn’t know what grade his children were in or whether they were ill or well or whether I had any problems.

I didn’t have a vacation once in all those 19 years that we lived together while my husband spent his vacations in the Crimea and the Caucasus and he never offered to take our children with him. They spent their vacations with me at home and he was seeing other women. I divorced him in 1976. Now he lives with his third wife in Germany.

My brother Lev finished a school of dentistry and worked as a dentist technician in Odessa. His wife Sophia is a Jew. She taught the Russian and Ukrainian languages at school. Lev has two daughters: Bella, born in 1960, and Svetlana, born in 1965. Both of them have higher education. Bella is a chemical engineer and Svetlana is a philologist. In 1991 Lev and his family moved to Israel. They live in Haifa. He writes me letters. He is very satisfied with his life.

My sister Polina lived in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, over 7000 kilometers from Kiev, in the Far East, with Aunt Rieva. She finished a geological survey school and began to work in the field of geological survey. My aunt and uncle moved to Severodonetsk and Polina stayed in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.

Polina married Yuri Korotkov, a Russian, who was a geologist. He is a nice person and he treated her and my mother respectfully. Polina’s first baby died at the age of a few months. In 1966 her twins were born: daughters Svetlana and Yelena. My mother moved to my sister after her twins were born to help her raise the children and stayed to live there. 

My mother died in 1986. Five years later Polina died of cancer. They were both buried in the town cemetery. There was no Jewish cemetery in the town then. Unfortunately, I didn’t see them after they moved. It was very expensive to travel such long distances. We corresponded and sent each other photographs.

Polina’s daughters live in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Svetlana became a geologist like her mother and father and Yelena is a teacher of the Russian language and literature. I have no contacts with them.

I worked a lot. I was director of a small store where I did all kinds of duties: of accountant, shop assistant or loader. I unloaded trucks with bread and other food products. I realized I had to complete my education and entered the extramural department of Vinnitsa Trade College. After finishing it I went to work as an economist in the trade department.

I got along well with my colleagues. We celebrated Soviet holidays together. However, I didn’t have close friends. My colleagues were Russian and Ukrainian. There were no Jewish employees in the department and I always sensed some tense attitude toward me. I guess it had something to do with my nationality, though I can speak fluent Ukrainian.

I worked long hours and after work I always rushed home to my children. I sometimes went to the cinema with my children and occasionally – to the theater.

I am fond of Ukrainian embroidery. I learned embroidery from my mother. I started new embroideries at the hardest moments of my life and I found consolation in them.  

I actually raised my children alone. My daughter Svetlana finished an accounting school, but she didn’t work one day. She married Yanovski, a Ukrainian man. I tried to talk her out of it, not because he was not a Jewish man, but because he was rude and uneducated and that was why I didn’t like him, but Svetlana didn’t listen to me. He didn’t work and turned out to be a drunkard and an anti-Semite.

Svetlana has two children, born in 1985: Seryozha, born at the beginning of the year and Yulia, born in December. They live in Vinnitsa. My daughter’s husband beat his wife and children. They were always hungry and wore rags, but the worst thing is that he involved my daughter in drinking. I had a hard time trying to get her out of it. It took her a long time to recover.

Now Svetlana works as a home nurse of the social department in Vinnitsa. She has a low salary. I have to provide material and moral support to my daughter. After divorcing her husband she began to socialize with Jews. She is a member of the Jewish community now. Yulia studies in a Jewish school. In 1997 Seryozha went to study in Israel under an educational program, he lives and works there and is very proud of his new country. He rarely writes us.

Well, now, my son caused me a major problem. Mikhail was growing a nice kind boy. He studied well at school, was an active Komsomol member and was very reliable and accurate. When he was in the 10th grade he fell in love with his schoolmate Olga, a Ukrainian girl. She was an indecent girl. She married an ex-prisoner who worked in a chemical enterprise in Kherson.

My son went to the army. He studied at a school for junior sergeants in Moscow region. Later he finished a school of ensigns and went on service to the town of Yeniseysk in Krasnoyarsk region, 3000 kilometers from home. He was sent to pick military trucks in Ukraine and he came to see me in Ternopol. He happened to bump into Olga and went to see her without telling me a thing.

I don’t know what happened there, but he actually became a deserter. He failed to make his appearance in his military unit on time. I didn’t know where he was and the military office was looking for him. I went to Olga’s home several times, but it turned out they were hiding in a village where her relatives lived.

Then finally my son came home and departed to go back to his military unit. He was punished with one month in a cell and was expelled from the Komsomol. He had some other problems as well.

Sometime later Olga went to my son in Siberia and they registered their marriage, but she hadn’t divorced her ex-husband. She came here pregnant. I thought about it and decided ‘come what may.’ If he loves her so then she is his happiness. In 1987 her son Dima was born. I looked after the boy and after her.

Olga lived here with her mother for almost a year. I visited her every day bringing them food and gifts. Finally I managed to convince her to go back to Yeniseysk. Olga returned about two months later. She had a lover and they went to the Crimea. My son stopped writing her and was even upset that I continued to be in touch with her, but I was doing it for my grandson.

Later Olga got married the third time and had a daughter. However, she continued to drink and fool around. Dima was brutally punished at home. They called him ‘zhyd’ [kike]. My son brought her to court trying to get guardianship of Dima.

I became the victim of this: Olga’s brothers, ex-criminals, beat me near her home. They beat me for over an hour. They injured my liver and spleen. Her neighbors rescued me. I had to stay in hospital for over a month, but I was afraid of witnessing against them. I feared that they could just kill me the next time.

I stopped seeing Olga and my grandson. Recently I heard that Olga died of cirrhosis and Dima was homeless for two years. He lived at the railway station. Then he was in a boarding school. The Israel Embassy employees found him by his last name of Rozenberg. They support my grandson now. Dima stayed with me for some time, but we couldn’t find a common language: he is a very lonesome, embittered and absolutely uneducated boy.

A month ago the Jewish community arranged for him to go to a camp in the Crimea and on 1st September he will go to a vocational school near Ternopol. He will go to Israel then. I care about Dima.

My son Mikhail stayed to live in Yeniseysk of Krasnoyarsk region. He is a military and works in the militia. He remarried. His wife Svetlana is Russian. She is a wonderful wife. They have two daughters: Alyona and Christina. Mikhail supports us and sends money for Dima.  

I didn’t have time for holidays and celebrations, reading or politics in my life. I had to survive and help my children and grandchildren. Many historical events went past me. It is sad, but such is life. 

Hesed 17 and the Jewish community of Ternopol provide assistance to me. I’ve always wanted to move to Israel, but I couldn’t even think about it: life was hard and I had to think about raising my children and now I am old and sickly. I would dream to take a look at this country. I’ve always been interested in the situation in this country and felt spiritually attached to it.

Of course, I belong to the generation that grew up during the Soviet regime. I never observed Jewish traditions, except after the war when I lived with my mother. I speak Ukrainian, although I know Yiddish. I love Ukraine and I believe it’s good that it gained independence.

Many people have a hard life, but I receive a German pension as a former inmate of a ghetto. This enables me to support my health condition and even help my daughter and grandchildren. I find comfort for my soul in Hesed. I speak Yiddish with friends and we celebrate holidays: Pesach, Purim and Chanukkah. I try to forget about my problems, my hard childhood in the ghetto, but, regretfully, it is impossible to forget this.

Glossary

Judita Haikis
Interviewer: Ella Levitskaya
Date of interview: May 2004

Judita Haikis is a big woman with wise, understanding, a little said, but still smiling eyes. Judita is a wonderful and very hospitable lady. Though few weeks from now Judit is leaving for Germany to her grandchildren and is very busy in this regard, she keeps her two-bedroom apartment in a rather new building on the outskirts of Kiev clean and cozy and one can tell that its owner has made a great effort to make it comfortable through years.  She has 1960s-style furniture, carefully maintained, pictures on the walls and flowers in vases. Judita welcomes me as if I were some she knows well and tells me about herself and her family in detail, though I can tell that any of her memories are hard for her.

My family backgrownd

Growing up

During the war

After the war

Glossary

My family backgrownd

As for the beginnings of our family, I remember (from what my father told me) as far back as my paternal great grandfather Leopold Herman Edelmann. I need to emphasize here that all Edelmann folks have always tried to correspond to their surname that means a “noble man” in German.  I mean, they were honest, decent, men of principle, - noble men, in short.

My great grandfather Leopold Herman Edelmann and my great grandmother Terez Edelmann, nee Peterfreind, lived in the small Slovak settlement of Hrachovo. [Editor’s note: During most of the life of the great grandparents todays Hrachovo, Rimaraho at the time was in Northern Hungary. Today the village is in Slovakia.] They were farmers with an average income.  They had 12 children: six sons and six daughters. I knew few of them and know what my father told about the others. I don’t know the years of birth of my grandfather’s brothers and sisters.  My great grandfather’s older children were his sons Max and Moric, born one after another. The next was my grandfather’s sister Pepka. My grandfather Adolf, born in 1868, was the fourth child in the family. Then cane my grandfather’s sister Regina, and the next were his sisters Betka and Relka. Then my grandfather’s brothers Sandor, Pal and Jozsef were born. The youngest were sisters Anna and Etelka. I know nothing about my grandfather’s childhood. My father told me about him that he was the smartest and the most talented of 12 children. He learned to read and showed interest in all kinds of studies. My grandfather didn’t have a higher education, but he read a lot and always wanted to learn more. He studied Talmud and Jewish history. He didn’t do anything else, but study. My great grandfather’s family spoke German. Yiddish was not spread in this part of Slovakia. Leopold Herman and Terez wanted their sons to get a profession or education and their daughters to marry decently. I don’t know how religious my great grandfather and my great grandmother were, but judging from my grandfather, religion played an important role in their family. When they grew up, the children moved to other towns across Slovakia. [Editor’s note: Slovakia became independent as late as 1991, Czechoslovakia was created after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1918. The interviewee probably means the towns that became parts of Czechoslovakia later, after WWI and finally Slovakia in 1991.]

My great grandfather’s oldest sons Max and Moric Edelmann went to study in America in their teens at the age of 14 and 15 and stayed to live there. From what I know, my grandfather sent them to study in the USA after they finished the cheder. I don’t know for sure what Max and Moric studied in the USA, but I think they studied in secular educational institutions, rather than in a yeshiva. Max was married, but I don’t remember his wife’s name. They had no children. Moric married Anna, who had moved from Czechoslovakia, at the age of 20.  They had three sons: Harry, Richard and Alfred. In 1933 Max and Moric came to visit their relatives. This is all I know about them. Most of the children settled down in Kosice in Czechoslovakia. Kosice had more Hungarian residents, and the majority of its population spoke Hungarian. My grandfather’s older sister Pepka was married to Singer, a Jewish man. I don’t know his surname. They had four children: daughters Aranka and Regina and sons Nandor and Jeno. Pepka and her husband died at an early age, and my grandfather took their children into his family. Relka, called Relli [editors’ note: The interviewee probably confused thease names since neither Relka nor Relli are possible names in Hungarian.] in the family, was married to Bergman. During WWI Bergman perished at the front. His widow was to raise their four children: Mór, Albert and Alexander and daughter Ilona. Relly was my grandfather’s favorite sister, and her nephews and nieces admired her beauty and intelligence. My grandfather took care of his sister and her children, and after his death his sins, including my father, supported their aunt and her children. Relly lived with her daughter Ilona, who dealt in embroidery making her living on it. Pal Edelmann owned an inn in the center of Kosice, There was a restaurant on the 21st floor of this inn. Pal wife’s name was Betti, nee Deutsch. They had two children: older son Emil and younger daughter Terez, born in 1918. During WWI Pal was severely wounded at the front. He died from in 1926 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Kosice. His wife remarried. Her second husband loved his adoptive children and treated them like his own. My great grandfather’s son Jozsef also settled down in Kosice. He owned a grocery store. His wife’s name was Terez, nee Goldberger. They had five children: daughters Kato [Katalin], Magda, Judit, Eva and son Laszlo. Jozsef was also at the front during WWI and suffered from a splinter in his leg for the rest of his life. My grandfather’s daughter Etelka married Jakab Blumenfeld, a Jewish man from Kosice. They had four children: daughters Edit, Izabella and Marta and son Erno. My grandfather’s brother Sandor dealt in wholesale business and owned a wholesale store. Sandor was rather wealthy. He had two sons: son Ondrej (called Erno in Hungarian in the family) and daughter Magda, born in 1915. My grandfather’s other sisters lived with their families in Presov. Regina married Berger, a Jewish man. They had two children: son Simon and daughter Terez. Betka was married to Moric Gerstl. They had three children: daughter Ilona and sons Herman and Armin. Anna was married to Moric Hertz. They had eleven children: sons Aladar, Tibor, Marcel, Earnest, Pal and Alexander and daughters Sarolta, Ilona, Terez, Edit and Ester. This is all I know about the life of our relatives from Presov at that period.

My grandfather’s brothers and sisters were very close and kept in touch. Their children always visited their grandmother and grandfather in Hrachovo in summer. My father told me that the children always played in a big garden and three times a day their grandmother came onto the porch of the house shouting: ‘Kinder, essen!’ [German: children, to eat], and this whole bunch of them came for a meal. My grandmother cut freshly baked bread in big slices spreading butter on them and poured milk in mugs. My father liked these memories. 

My grandfather Adolf Edelmann also moved to Kosice. He married Amalia Polster from Kosice. She was born in the early 1870s. My grandfather and grandmother rented a small two-bedroom apartment, and across the street from there my grandmother’s older sister Frieda lived.  Frieda was my grandmother’s only relative, whom I knew. My grandmother was short and plump, but Frieda was a tall slender woman with regular features. Frieda’s husband was rather rich. They had a house and gave their children good education.  Two of her sons were lawyers. I remember that we were invited to Frieda and her husband’s golden wedding in the late 1930s. Regretfully, this is all I remember about my grandmother sister’s family. My grandfather was a wise, kind, very honest and decent man, and many Jews asked his advice. Kosice residents believed my grandfather to be wiser and smarter than any rabbi. He tried to help all giving money or advice. My grandmother Amalia was a breadwinner in the family. She owned a small grocery store. Grandfather spent all his time reading books. He didn’t help her in anything. My grandmother gave birth to 9 children, but only 7 of them survived.  Two children died in infancy. I only know the dates of birth of my father David Edelmann and his brother Mor. My father was born in 1905 and was the fourth child in the family. My father’s older brothers were Izidor, Elemer and Jeno.  My father’s brother Mor was born in 1906. Then my father’s only sister Etelka was born and the youngest brother was Armin. They must have had Jewish names, but I don’t know them. Besides their own children, my grandfather and grandmother also raised my grandfather sister Pepka’s children, who called my grandmother “Mama”.

Between 1867 - 1918 Czechoslovakia belonged to Austro-Hungary. [Editor’s note: Czechoslovakia was created on the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy after World War I. The new Czechoslovak state was made up of the Austrian provinces of Bohemia, Moravia and Silezia as well as of parts of Northern Hungary (Slovakia and Subcarpathia).] It was divided into two parts: the Czech lands that belonged to Austria, and Slovakia that was Hungarian. This probably explains why Kosice was populated mainly by Hungarians. In 1918 the First Czechoslovakian Republic 1 was established, with Tomas Garrigue Masaryk 2 the first President of Czechoslovakia. Kosice was a small town. [Before World War I it had 44 211 inhabitants (1913), mostly Hungarians but also Slovaks, Germans, Poles, Czechs and Ruthenians.] There were bigger houses in the center and one-storied houses on the outskirts.  There was no anti-Semitism in Kosice during the Austro-Hungarian period. Jews were encouraged to take official posts. There were many Jews in Kosice. They were mainly craftsmen: some could hardly make ends meet and others owned shops and stores. There were Jewish doctors, teachers and lawyers. There were few synagogues in Kosice: for orthodox believers, neologs 4 and Hasidim 5. There were mikves and shochets and few cheder schools in the town.

My father’s parents spoke Hungarian. My grandfather and grandmother were very religious. I never saw my grandfather and cannot describe his looks or manners. My grandfather spent almost all of his time reading religious books. My grandmother wore a wig and long dark dresses. She prayed a lot at home. She took her book of prayers and when she was praying she paid no attention to anything else. My grandmother made charity contributions to the synagogue and Jewish hospital and to help the needy. My grandparents celebrated Sabbath and all Jewish holidays. On Friday my grandmother went to mikveh. On Sabbath and Jewish holidays my grandparents went to the synagogue. My father and his brothers studied in cheder. Of course, they had bar mitzvah as Jewish traditions required. As for my father’s younger sister Etelka, I think her parents may have taught her at home. She knew Hebrew, could pray and knew Jewish history and traditions. My grandmother followed kashrut strictly and taught Etelka to know it. There was a Jewish housemaid in the house.  My grandmother was not very fond of doing work about the house and in due time Etelka took over housekeeping. My father and I think all other children studied in a Czech school and later - in a grammar school. 

My grandmother was hoping that her sons would grow up religious Jews, but her expectations were not to come true. They got fond of communist ideas. Only three of them – the oldest Izidor, Jeno  and the youngest Armin, who was single and lived with his parents, were religious. My father and his brothers became atheists.

Grandfather Adolf died of his heart failure at the age of 52. This happened in 1920. My father was 15. My grandfather was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Kosice in accordance with the Jewish rituals. When I visit Kosice, I always visit my grandfather’s grave and drop a little stone there according to Jewish rules. 

My grandmother’s older son Jeno helped my grandmother with her store. My father also began to help his mother, when his father died. My grandmother bought green coffee beans, and my father was responsible for roasting it. There was a notable difference in price of green and roast coffee. My father started roasting after he came home from school and kept reading doing his work. Reading was his lifelong passion. He also had to watch the beans to not overdo them. After my grandfather died my father had to give up school and help the family. Still, my father studied by correspondence and obtained a certificate upon finishing the grammar school. My father was very handsome: tall and slender with big dark eyes and handsome features. He was also a decent, honest and noble man of principles. He hated lies. He felt very uncomfortable having to conceal from grandmother that he didn’t always go to the synagogue or follow Jewish traditions. At the age of 18 my father went to work for a confectionery company owned by two Jews. The owners valued my father well and employed him back after his service in the army.  He got promotions and was paid well.

My father’s brothers got married and had children. Izidor, a sales agent, married Gizi Katz, a Jewish girl from Vinogradovo. His wife was a seamstress. They had three children. Their daughters Lilia and Judita were older than me and their son Adolf, named after the grandfather, born in 1930, was the same age with me. My father’s brother Elemer married Terez, a Jewish girl from Kosice. I don’t remember what Elemer was doing for a living. Elemer and Terez had two children: Tomas, an older son, and daughter Julia. After my grandfather died, my grandmother left the store to Jeno. His wife’s name was Adel, but I don’t remember her maiden name. They had three children: sons Ervin and Karl and daughters Lilia and Stella. My father and his brother Mor had much in common. They were both very handsome. Uncle Mor was very cheerful, smart and kind. He owned a small store in the center of the town selling imported fruit, sweets and delicacies. He always treated his nieces and nephews to all kinds of delicious things. Mor married aunt Gizi’s sister Eva Kaz from Vinogradovo. They had two daughters: Vera and Livia. My father’s sister Etelka didn’t get married for a long time. Finally Armin Rosner, a Jew from Uzhgorod, proposed to her. She married him and moved to Uzhgorod. After getting married she became a housewife, like her brother’s wives.  Etelka had two daughters: Livia and Edit. My father’s younger brother Armin was single.

My father was recruited to the Czech army at 19. He served near Prague and had good memories about his service in the army. It was democratic and orderly. For example, officers and soldiers had same meals. Why I mention this, because I remember my father telling me how he was surprised, when he saw that in the Soviet army officers had different meals at a different place from soldiers. 

My father met my mother before he went to the army. My father’s cousin sister Ilona, Relly’s daughter, was my mother’s best friend. She introduced them to one another. . My mother was 15. She was a pretty blonde with wavy hair, gray-greenish eyes, snow-white teeth and was lovely built. Her name was Szerena Klein. Since her childhood everybody called her ‘Szöszi’ [blondy in Hungarian] My parents fell in love once and for all.

My mother’s parents came from Kosice; they were born in the early 1870s. They were a very beautiful couple. My grandfather Herman Klein was a raven-head ma with tick moustache and my grandmother was a slim blonde with green eyes. Her name was Berta Klein, nee Liebermann. They were very much in love. They had two daughters. My mother’s older sister Izabella, born in 1907, was very much like her father, and my mother Szerena, born in 1909, took after my grandmother. She was quiet and reserved.  

My mother’s parents were neologs. They went to the synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. My mother’s father Herman Klein worked in a state-owned printing house. He went to work on Saturday and had a day off on Sunday. My grandmother was a housewife. My grandfather and grandmother wore casual clothes in fashion at the time. They didn’t follow kashrut or paid much attention to their daughters’ religious education. They were a common family, living in a small apartment. There wasn’t even a bathroom. Both daughters finished a Czech general school.  Izabella graduated from the Department of Economics of the University and became an accountant. As for my mother, her parents sent her to study dressmaking. She learned to make garments, but she was too vivid to like this job.

My father began to write before he went to the army. At first he wrote poems inspired by his love of my mother. I read these poems, when I was a child, and admired their lyrical nature and beauty. The first letters in lines composed my mother’s name or deklaration of his love of her. My father wrote my mother poems of letters from the army. Regretfully, they got lost during the war. My father became chief editor of the communist weekly ‘Mai Nap’ (‘Today’) published in Hungarian where his writer’s talent was fully realized. My father had to work a lot to support the family. Besides, the newspaper was also funded by its employees. My father continued writing after the war. My brother Adolf keeps his stories and memoirs written in Hungarian in his archives. 

My mother received the first awards at beauty contests in her town several times. She had many admirers, but my father became number one. My parents got married on 14 July 1929. He was 24 and my mother was 20 years old. They had a real Jewish wedding with a rabbi and a chuppah.  My father was working for the company. He rented a two-room apartment and furnished it.  My mother told me that her grandmother Amalia came to their apartment on the first day after the wedding and fixed a mezuzah on the front door. Before the wedding her grandmother gave my mother a lovely wig of fair wavy hair, but my mother never wore it. Her mother Berta didn’t wear any, either. Grandmother Amalia never forgave my mother.  

Growing up

I was born on 3 June 1930. In my birth certificate my Hungarian name Judit was indicated, and my Jewish name is Sima. My parents called a ‘love child’. In April 1933 my sister was born. Father wanted to name her Katalin but I insisted on Klara, even though I was only 3 years old. I liked the name and they agreed to a compromise. My sister was named Klara in the documents, but nobody called her thus. Everybody called her Katalin, Kati in short. My sister’s Jewish name was Laya. Our apartment became too small for the four of us, and we moved into half a mansion. The tenants of another half were the Rothman family, nice and wealthy Jews. They had no children. We had a three-bedroom apartment, spacious and cozy, with all comforts. There was a small garden where my sister and I liked playing. We had a happy and cloudless childhood before 1940. Even with our father having to go on business frequently. He even bought a small sporty car. My father spent Saturday and Sunday with the family. My sister and I always looked forward to weekends. On Saturday morning we jumped into our parents’ bed. My mother went to make breakfast and our father told us everything that had happened to him through the week. He often told us about beautiful life in the Soviet Union. He told us there was no exploitation of workers in the USSR, that the power belonged to people and the people ruled their own country. My father said there were no poor or suppressed people in the USSR, that all people were equal and free. Soviet newspapers and radio programs stated the same. My father and all communists believed that the USSR was a country of equal opportunities for all people, the country of equality and brotherhood for all. Now I understand that even when people in the USSR believed this, it is no surprise that those who only heard about it from the Soviet propaganda believed the USSR to be an ideal. My father was a convinced communist, and it had nothing to do with his material situation.

Every Saturday my father and his brothers living in Kosice and their families went to visit grandmother. They got together after the morning prayer at the synagogue. Each time my father reminded me and my sister of replying positively if our grandmother asked us if he had been at the synagogue.  Our father taught us to tell the truth and my sister and I were surprised at this request of his, but my father said that this was a holy lie since grandmother would be very upset if told the truth. My grandmother’s numerous children and grandchildren got together in her small apartment.  There was a Saturday meal: challah, chicken liver paste and cholnt made from beans, pearl barley, meat, fat and spices. On Friday a pot with cholnt was left in the oven to keep it hot for a Saturday meal. Adults discussed their subjects and children played and had fun. Since the family was big, everybody got just little food, and then all went to their homes for dinner. On Sunday my father took us and his nephews and nieces for a nice drive out of town. The Edelmann family was very close and we, children, always looked forward to these outing. We still keep in touch with those who survived in the war, though many of our kin are scattered across the world.

My mother’s older sister Izabella was a very pretty girl. When she was in university, she fell in love with a senior student from the Radio Engineering Faculty. His name was Andras Tamm. He was tall and slender and very handsome. He returned my aunt’s feelings. The only obstacle was that he was Hungarian. Even though Izabella’s parents were not so religious this marriage still seemed a disgrace to them. They could only get married six years later in 1933. They could not live without one another and my grandparents gave up. They just registered their marriage in the town hall and had a wedding dinner in a restaurant in the evening. Andras rented a small facility in the central street in Kosice and open a radio store with a radio shop in it. Andras worked in the shop, and my aunt ran his store. Izabella and Andras were well-to-do and rented a nice apartment. In 1936 their son Gabor, my favorite cousin brother, was born.

My father and his brother Mor joined the Czechoslovakian communist party. They were convinced communists. The Czechoslovakian communist party was legal, though police had lists of its members, but this was a mere formality. My father began to work for ‘Mai Nap’. Besides, my father worked for ‘Munkas Ujsag’ [Workers Paper] too, both of them are published in Kosice. Before 1938 these newspapers were issued legally and regularly. In 1938 when [Southern] Slovakia became Hungarian, both ‘Mai Nap” and ‘Munkas Ujsag’ became underground newspapers, because the communist party became illegal in Hungary. In 1940 the newspapers were closed and most of their employees were arrested. My father made monthly contribution to the newspaper ‘Mai Nap”  from his earnings and so did other employees. The newspaper was distributed among communists for free and its editing office had no profits. 

1938 brought changes into our life. Hungary received a major part of Czechoslovakia, a part of Romania (Transylvania) and Subcarpathia. [Editor’s note: According to the First Vienna Decision the southern part of Slovakia was attached to Hungary in 1938, including Kosice/Kassa. In 1939 Hungary annexed Subcarpathia and in 1940, according to the Second Vienna Decision, Northern Transylvania was attached to Hungary.] Hungary actually [partly] restored its borders that existed before 1918. [Trianon Peace Treaty] 6 From the middle 1930s there were visitors in our houses staying for few days.  They were emigrants from Germany: communists and Jews escaping from Hitler. They stayed openly during the Czech regime, but had to be quiet during the Hungarian rule. The communist party had to take up the status of underground. Since the police had lists of its members, they knew that arrests were inevitable. It was just the matter of time. Hungarian authorities began to gradually introduce anti-Jewish laws 7 significantly suppressing their rights in all spheres of life.

During the war

In September 1939 WW2 began. Hitler was taking efforts to involve Hungary in the war, but it had no intention to get involved. Then Hitler undertook provocation: in June 1940 bombers without any identification signs dropped few bombs onto the central part of Kosice. The central post office and few building across the street from it were destroyed. This bombing was so unexpected that an air-raid alarm only raised a howl after the bombers were gone. They announced that those were Russian bombers attacking Kosice. The Hungarian authorities had to join Hitler in the war against the USSR. Few weeks later my father and all other members of the communist party, who were on the lists, were arrested and take to prison in Kosice. The trial against them began. They were charged in actions against the state. They were tortured and interrogated. The Hungarians wanted to know the names of those who joined the communist party during the Hungarian rule and whose names were not on the list. My mother was one of them. She joined the party under my father’s influence in late 1938. My father was brutally beaten and taken to Budapest for interrogation where one policeman injured my father’s kidney. My father suffered from pyelonephritis for the rest of his life and finally died of kidney failure. Of course, my father didn’t tell them any names. The investigation lasted five and a half months and then there was a trial where my father spoke.  He acknowledged his membership in the party. The trial sentenced him to 7 months in jail, but since by the time of trial he had already served the sentence, he only had to stay in jail 40 days.  During this period my grandfather Herman Klein fell ill with cancer and died. My mother requested the police management to let my father go to the funeral, but they refused. My grandfather Herman was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Kosice. After his death my grandmother Berta began to attend the synagogue every Saturday with other Orthodox Jews and began to pray at home. She moved in with us. Her older daughter Izabella wanted her to live with them, but grandmother Berta refused point-blank to live in the house with Izabella’s non-Jewish husband.  My grandmother loved my father dearly.

Before my father’s arrest many of his comrades moved to the USSR. The Soviet government gave them this opportunity. At first they could move with their families, but when it was my father’s turn, this opportunity was closed. Communists and their families were leaving Hungary illegally, by forged documents. My father refused to go without us. Perhaps, it was for the better since many of those who went to the USSR were sent to the GULAG 8 where most of them perished.

I remember the day, when my father’s sentence was over. There was a crowd of those who sympathized with him meeting him at the gate, though this was early morning. They carried him along the street. My mother and sister also came to meet him, but we could hardly fight through the crowd to come closer. Those people followed us as far as our house. We were infinitely happy to reunite. Papa told us a lot about his imprisonment, but avoided the subject of tortures to save us from pain for him. My mother told me about it, when I grew up. She said father was continuously beat during interrogations till he fainted. They beat him on his head and vitally important parts of body where it was the most painful. They threatened him of arresting and torturing his family, if he didn’t answer their questions and this was the harder for him than not answering their questions. 

I was always a quiet and obedient child while my sister was very lively and my parents used to say she was supposed to have been born a boy.  Mama and grandma often slapped her, but my father after what he had to go through at interrogations gave a vow that he would never raise his hand to hit one person and he never did.  When my sister did something wrong, he made her sit beside him and said: ‘You deserve a good flogging, so imagine you’ve had one from me’. My sister used to sob a while after this. My father had to make his appearance in the police office three times a week for them to make sure that he had not escaped. In 1939 my father got a job in a company in Budapest. I don’t know what kind of company this was or what he was doing at work. Before his arrest he worked in Budapest on weekdays and returned home on weekends, but afterward he was to come to the police office on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. My father kept his job in Budapest, but he could not stay there a whole week and returned home on Friday. Of course, my sister and I were very happy about it.

Since 1939 grandma Amalia began to spend less time in Kosice. My father insisted that grandma lived with us, but my grandmother had solid principles. When she visited us, she never had anything to eat or even a cup of tea or coffee. Grandma knew that my mother did not follow kashrut and for this reason she did not eat anything. She spent more and more time with her daughter Etelka in Uzhgorod. Etelka and her husband were very religious and followed kashrut and Jewish traditions. My grandmother prayed few times a day. Religion was the most important part of her life. I still remember something that struck me once. When my father was released from prison, my grandmother was in Uzhgorod. 2-3 days after he returned home my father said he hadn’t seen his mother for a long time and would go to visit her. He rushed in his car to Uzhgorod.  Then my father told my mother that when he came there he rushed into the room where my grandmother was praying, but she put her finger to her lips showing him to stop distracting her. And she only came to hug her son whom she hadn’t seen for over 7 months after she finished praying. My father was so hurt that he had tears in his eyes. In 1941my grandmother went to live with her daughter in Uzhgorod. Her son Armin to avoid service in the army, or it would be more correct to say – work battalion since Jews were not taken to regular army troops, also lived with grandmother in Uzhgorod since 1943. Jews, gypsy and communists were recruited to work battalions. They did not have weapons or wear military uniforms. They wore their own clothes and had yellow armbands. Work battalions were digging trenches for the frontlines troops. They were actually easy targets at the front line. However, the Soviets somehow got to know who they were and did not fire at them. [Editor’s note: Most of the time the Soviets did not distinguished between regular Hungarian soldiers and members of the work battalion. Oftentimes they were treated as Hungarian POWs when falling captive.]

When the war with the Soviet Union began 9, my father was arrested again in July 1941 and taken to the Hungarian prison in the mountains near Garany town, in the former mansion of an Austrian lord. This area belonged to Slovakia before 1938. When Hungarians came to power, the owner of this mansion moved to Austria and his castle was converted into a prison. All prisoners were kept for political charges. My father became the leader of all prisoners. He prisoners had to cook and do all maintenance duties in the jail.  My father organized courses and hobby clubs for prisoners.  My father generated lists of attendants and also, made cleaning and cooking plans.  He learned to cook in this camp. There was also a good library in the mansion and prisoners could use it. Relatives were allowed to visit twice a month. Two relatives could visit 2-3 days. My mother went there to visit my father and took either my sister or me with her. We rented a room from local farmers. My father made arrangements with the management of the camp for prisoners to be allowed to take some time off the camp to meet with their relatives. There were strict rules about the exact time for all of them to return to the camp. My father asked my mother to bring grandmother Amalia to see him, but my grandmother never came to see him. For her it was out of the question to stay in a goy’s house and eat non-kosher food. My father was kept in the Garany prison for a year. In late 1942 it was closed and Jews were taken to work battalions while Jewish communists were sent to penal battalions to go to the frontline. They were to wear yellow armbands with a 10 cm in diameter black circle on it. The work battalion where my father was taken was following the frontline with Hungarian and German troops in the eastern direction. After defeat of Germans near Stalingrad they turned to go in the opposite direction, from east to west. My father kept thinking about how to cross the frontline and surrender to the Red Army. He organized a group of 50 people and managed to accomplish their well-considered plan near Zhytomyr. It’s scaring to think what might have happened to them since the USSR did not trust deserters believing they were spies, but my father and his comrades were lucky. There was a Jewish communist, who lived in Hungary and emigrated to the USSR in the end of 1930th in the Red Army troop where they happened to get. He knew about my father’s underground work in the communist organization in Kosice. He guaranteed for my father’s trustworthiness.  This group formed a group of prisoners-of-war following the Red Army troops liberating Ukraine.  My father proved to be good at having a brigade under his command.  The brigade consisted of Hungarians and Hungarian Jews. One of the commanders of a military division where they happened to come knew my father, and also considering that my father was a communist, this man appointed my father to command over this unit of the newcomers. This man also helped my father to improve his Russian, but at the very start this man translated my father’s commanders’ orders from Russian into Hungarian for my father to understand and follow them. My father was promoted to the rank of an officer and moved with the troops as far as the Carpathians. When they were near Uzhgorod, the military were inoculated and they must have injected some infection in my father. He fell gravely ill. He developed abscess. My father was taken to a hospital in Uzhgorod. My father’s comrades were working in the communist department in Uzhgorod and my father began to assist them even when he was in hospital. At their request my father was demobilized to establish the soviet power in Subcarpathia. He became 2nd secretary of the town party committee in 1945. We reunited with my father after the war.

One of anti-Jewish laws did not allow Jews to own stores, factories or anything that generated profit.  They were supposed to give away their property or the state confiscated it. Many Jews fictitiously sold their property to non-Jewish owners, but actually things did not change. Or they entered into agreement of common ownership and became ‘partners’. By late 1944 many Hungarians took advantage of such agreements and took over the new property. There were also honest Hungarians, who returned Jews their property after the war. My father’s brothers lost their property. My father’s brother Jeno was working for the new owner of his former store. My father’s brother Mor, when suppression of Jews began in Hungary, sold his store and moved to Presov in Slovakia where our relatives lived. One of my grandfather sister Relka’s sons Albert was a talented artist. In the late 1930s he moved to USA with his family. Relka’s other son Alexander was a communist. In 1939 he was recruited to the Hungarian army, but escaped to the USSR.  Unfortunately, he became victim like many other young people who believed the USSR to be their ideal. He was sent to the GULAG where he perished. After the war his fiancé Bozena searched for him. She found our family and my father began to look for Alexander. Of course, it was dangerous to search for a turncoat that was surely believed to have been a spy, but these considerations did not stop my father. He kept writing letters and requests, but never got a clear answer from them. Official authorities notified my father that Alexander Bergman was not on the lists of prisoners in the camps. So, we never got any information about him.

In 1936 I went to the first form of a Czech primary school. During Hungarian rule this school became a Hungarian one and I studied 2 of 4 years in the Hungarian school. I had all excellent marks at school and was allowed to go to a grammar school after the 4th form. For the rest of pupils could go to grammar school after the 5th form. I finished primary school in 1940. My father was in prison at that time. My mother sister’s husband Andras took me for an interview to the Hungarian grammar school for girls. There were restrictions already: only 2 Jewish girls were allowed for a class. My interview was successful and I was admitted to the first form. Few teachers were members of the Hungarian fascist party. They got to know that my father was a communist and was in prison. They kept finding faults with me and it caused me much distress. However, I did well at school. We had exams in summer. I remember the one in geography in early June 1941. There was an examination panel and its chairman was a teacher of mathematic, the most ardent fascist at school. As soon as I started answering she interrupted me with the question: ‘Tell me where do our and the heroic German troops fight at the front’. I knew how fast Germans were moving in the direction of Moscow and this was bitter for those who sympathized with the USSR. I pretended to be naïve and said that I didn’t know and could not be interested. The teacher shamed me for not knowing about the glorious victories of our and the German troops. My class tutor, a German teacher, who liked me came to my rescue. She asked me to goon answering my examination question. I sighed with relief, but I could never forget about this exam.  I also remember how unfair this teacher of mathematic was to me. Though I knew mathematics the best she never gave me an ‘excellent’ mark. I had the only ‘good’ mark in her subject. I remember dreaming about how I would take my revenge when the war was over. We were all sure that the USSR would win. There was one more Jewish girl in my class. We faced no anti-Semitism. My life would have been cloudless in the grammar school if it hadn’t been for me being the daughter of a communist.

After my father was arrested again, there were four of us living together: my mother, my sister, grandmother Berta and I. My mother never went to work. My father’s earnings were sufficient, though he gave away a significant portion of it for the party needs: for the newspaper, assistance to unemployed members of the party, immigrants, etc. I don’t know how we managed through four years that my father was away. I only remember that the owner of my father’s company in Budapest paid my father’s salary to uncle Izidor, who probably did my father’s job. He brought my mother this money. We had everything we needed. My mother regularly sent food parcels to my father every week.

In February-March 1943 Slovakian fascists began to persecute Jews. My father’s brother Mor decided to leave Presov for Kosice. Many Jewish families were leaving Slovakia for Hungary. Somebody reported to the police that Mor was coming back. They told Izidor, the oldest of the brothers, that if one member of the Edelmann family crossed the border, they would arrest the whole family in Kosice. Mor only got to know this after he moved to Kosice with his wife and two daughters and they settled down at my grandmother’s. Mor went to the police office the following day and told them he came on his own will and asked them to leave his family alone. They never let him go from there. On the same day they arrested his wife and children. They were taken out of town and killed.

The situation with Jews in Kosice grew worse in the middle of 1943, when Germans were losing their positions in Stalingrad. Hungarian introduced many restrictions for Jews. [Editor’s note: Mass persecutions started as late as after March 19th 1944, when Germany invaded Hungary.] Since 1944 all Jews had to wear 10-cm hexagonal yellow star on their chests. I went to school with this star, though it didn’t last long. The academic year was reduced due to the wartime. In the middle of April the school closed for vacations. Jews were not allowed to come to public places or leave their homes after dusk.

In April [19th] 1944 10 German troops occupied Hungary, though Hungarian fascists started outraging even before. I shall never forget the first evening on Pesach 1944. There was a synagogue across the street from our house where Jews got together for a prayer. All of a sudden we heard screams from the synagogue, curses and anti-Semitic shouts. This was a pogrom in the synagogue made by Hungarian fascists. During the war there were back-outs on the windows in all houses. My mother lost her temper, turned off the lights, open the window and began to shame the young people telling them to stop this disgrace. She didn’t look like a Jewish woman and they were just laughing in her face, but did her no harm. My sister, grandmother and I sat in the corner of our children’s room trembling of fear. The rascals pulled some older Jews by their payes and went away. In the morning we saw that all windows in the synagogue were broken and heard the rabbi’s wife and children crying. Then German officers and soldiers came to Kosice. They ordered wealthy Jews to come to the central square and told them to give their money and valuables to the German army voluntarily, and if they did not obey they would force them to do so and arrest them. Later Germans gathered Jews in the ghetto at the brick factory in Kosice. So the old couples, the owners of our house were arrested. There were air raids. Or house was near the railway station that was bombed most frequently. Germans also began to arrest communists and their families. We were scared. My mother was told that we had to stay elsewhere, but not at home. We separated: grandmother Berta and I stayed with my grandfather’s sister Relka, and as for my mother and sister, only Liza, my father’s cousin brother Nandor’s wife, knew. Nandor died after an unsuccessful surgery in 1942. Liza and her two sons lived on the 3rd floor in the house in the end of our street.  Liza was watching our house, when we were not at home and in case of danger was to notify us to stay away from coming home.

On 16 April 1944, on Friday, my grandmother decided to go home to clean the apartment before my mother and sister came home. We always cleaned the house on Friday. I stayed with aunt Relka. At that moment aunt Liza saw a car stop by our house. Few German officers went into the house.  Liza went to tell my mother about what was going on. My grandmother came into the house. The Germans were searching the house. They showed grandma my parents’ photograph called them ‘Kommunisten’, and asked where my mother was. My grandmother got very scared. Since she didn’t know where my mother was they let her go and she returned to aunt Relka’s home. A photographer, my father’s acquaintance, gave us shelter in his laboratory. We didn’t have any clothes. Liza found out that Germans left the house before night. My mother’s sister Izabella was in her 7th month of pregnancy. She took two big bags and went to our house. She grabbed few photographs, some clothes and left the house.

At that time my father’s cousin Ondrej Edelmann, whom everybody called Erno [Ondrej is the Czech name, this is how he was registered in his documents, Erno is the Hungarian name, the language they used in the family.], grandpa’s brother Sandor’s brother, came from Czechoslovakia. He was a last-year student of the Medical College in Prague. He had secretly crossed the border. Erno lived through a tragedy. He had a fiancé, a daughter of poor Jews, who already worked as a teacher at the age of 19.  They were going to get married after Erno finished his college, but this was not to be. In 1941 Hitler ordered to take all Jewish girls to work in Germany.  Young girls were getting married in emergency to avoid this disaster. Erno and Anna also got married, but the order for Anna to go to Germany was signed before they registered their marriage. Anna was sent to Germany. Poor Erno almost lost his mind, when this happened. He wrote Hitler asking to send back his young wife, but surely he got no reply. Later he got to know that Anna was pregnant. She died at birth and so did the baby. When Erno got to know that all Jews were to be taken to concentration camps from Hungary, he decided to spend his money to save his relatives taking them to Czechoslovakia. [Czechoslovakia was dismembered in 1938. The interviewee is here refereeing to Slovakia.] It was decided that Erno and I would be the first to go to Slovakia. We had to decide about grandmother Berta. We had to cover 20 km in the mountains to get to Slovakia and my grandma could not do this with her unhealthy legs. My grandmother firmly said she was not going to hideaway and would be with other Jews. Very soon all Jews, and my grandmother too, were taken to the ghetto at the brick factory on the outskirts of Kosice. In late April they began to be taken to concentration camps where they were sorted out. The younger and stronger ones were taken to work. They lived in barracks with inhuman conditions. Old people and children were burnt in crematoria. My grandmothers and many relatives perished there. My mother, my sister and Erno on the evening of 22 April 1944 removed yellow stars from our clothing and went to a village near Kosice where a guide was waiting for us to take us across the border. This was the night of 22 April, full of danger. The first risk was when we went across the town. At first everything was all right, but then we saw my sister’s former teacher and his wife. He was wearing the uniform of a lieutenant of the Hungarian army. Of course, he recognized us. My mother was sure he would call the police, but there are decent people in this world. He greeted my mother politely, gave my sister and me a wink and moved on. When we came to the guide, Erno gave us some Slovakian money and went back to  Kosice to take another group next night. 

We stayed till dark in the guide’s house without turning on the lights. The guide, his two brothers and sister, who spoke fluent Slovakian, came at midnight. We went a long way across the woods in the mountains. 3 hours later we stopped in a nice valley.  The guide told us to stay there till morning, when we had to get to the railway station nearby. It was cold and the men made a fire. We had sandwiches. We tried to get a nap, but it was cold and we were worried, so we stayed wide awake.  At dawn we saw a nice river in the valley, and got to the station along the rail tracks. My mother gave our companions money to buy tickets. When we were alone, a tall man in the hunter’s outfit, with a rifle over his shoulder approached us. He said he knew my mother from Kosice and advised us to get in another carriage than our companions. He said they had typical Jewish appearance and this might attract the gendarmes’ attention, but speaking good Slovakian, they would manage while for us it might be worse since Slovakian gendarmes were capturing those who crossed the border illegally. We did as he told us. It happened to be true. Gendarmes approached our companions demanding their documents and left them alone afterward. We were close to Presov, when the tall hunter told us to get off the train and walk to the town since there were many gendarmes at the station. We agreed with our companions to meet near the railway station square. They were to take us to the house where my father’s cousin Terez, daughter of Anna Hertz, and her husband lived. They were aware that we were coming and were to give us forged documents.  Everything went all right. Our relatives welcomed us and we could take a rest. On the following day our documents were ready. According to the legend, my mother was a widow of landlord Vitalishov from near Presov, and we were going to the Tatra Mountains since I had tuberculosis and had to breathe fresh air in the mountains. My sister and I had chains with crosses on our necks to prove our Christian origin. A week later, on 1 May 1944, Erno joined us. We didn’t recognize him. He colored his hair to become fair and grew a beard and moustache. Erno told us he only managed to take one more group relatives across the border before Hungarian gendarmes started looking for him. Probably someone reported on him and why he was in the town. We took a train to a resort on a mountain in the Tatras. There were posh hotels for wealthiest people on the bank of a lake. At the bottom of the hill there was a small village where railroad people lived. There were also few inexpensive and cozy recreation centers. There was a cable way from the station to the lake. It didn’t function since there were no tourists. We chose this place to be our escape. Erno rented a room on the 2nd floor in one recreation center. Downstairs the manager, his wife and their four children lived.  In the morning and evening my mother boiled some milk in their kitchen and in the afternoon we had lunch at the restaurant on the station. They served good meals. My mother and I spoke German to the owner, and my sister, who didn’t know a word in German or Slovakian, was ordered to keep silent pretending she was mute and deaf. Before 1938, when Hungarians came to power in the country, my sister didn’t go to school, stayed at home and spent time with us and our parents friends’ children. We spoke Hungarian at home and so did our friends, and my sister could only speak even a few words in Slovakian. Once a gendarme from a nearby village visited the area. He came to see us. My mother explained to him in poor Slovakian that she was German, but her husband was Slovakian, that I was ill and she took my sister and me there to improve our health.   The gendarme was satisfied with this story. There were few other Jewish families staying in the village and we met them. They were from Slovakia and this was good. In case we had to escape they knew where we might go. Erno visited us twice bringing us some money. We played with the children of the manager and picked Slovakian rather fast. Every other day we went to take milk at a farm in 2 km from the recreation center. These were lovely strolls. Days, weeks and months went by... In July a group of Hitler jugend boys, 10 Germans, came to stay in the neighboring recreation center for recreation and military training. Hitlerjugend boys were sent to Slovakia where they could have military training and rest. They marched in the morning and in the evening singing fascists songs. They also shouted patriotic slogans and trained shooting on the training ground. They were not allowed to have any contacts with the locals, but we were still of them anyway. 

In early September we got to know that Germans started occupation of Slovakia. Our acquaintances decided to leave the place. We decided to join them. There were 3 other families, but only two men, with us. Hey found a place in the mountains and took a train carriage there. It arrived at the dead end where there was a small village. There was a windmill right by the station. We were starved and my mother went to the mill to buy a little flour. Our chains with crosses helped us there. The miller’s wife felt sorry for us. She gave us food and sold some flour and bread. She thought we were Catholics and said she hated Jews and would never help one.

We stayed in a poor house whose owner was at the front. His wife had few children and was pregnant.  They had a cow and the landlady gave us some milk every day. A short time later she started labor and my mother acted as a midwife. I remember how stunned my mother was that the woman got up on the same day to milk the cow and work in the garden. It was getting colder and we didn’t have warm clothes. My mother went to the village store to buy some clothes. She bought us nice gray and black boots and some clothes. The men from other Jewish families were thinking where we could escape, if Germans came to this distant village. They discovered a path that led them to two houses where foresters with their families lived. They told the men that there was a partisan unit nearby and that partisans would mobilize men to their unit. There was one Jewish families staying in one of these houses: a husband, a wife and two adult sons. The foresters promised to give us shelter for a certain fee. They mentioned that the men would still have to hide from partisans unless they wanted to join them. The men didn’t want this to happen. Nobody knew, which was worse: to be captured by Germans or partisans.

In early October we heard that Germans were coming to the village. We went to the foresters’ houses. My sister and I liked staying there. It was still warm and there were many berries and mushrooms, particularly blackberries. We picked them and ate as much as we could. Our mother cooked mushrooms. The men were hiding in a shed in the daytime. Our mother and we had nobody to fear. One forester had a radio and we listened to news.  When we heard that a part of Slovakia was liberated, we rushed to Brezno by train. From there we went to Banska Bystrica. The town celebrated liberation and there were crowds of people in the streets. We went to our relatives. Erno, his sister Magda and many relatives, whom Erno rescued, got together in his house. We met with Adolf, uncle Izodor’s son, my cousin. We, children went to see the Soviet movie ‘6 am after the war’. It was in Russian and there was no translation, but we understood what it was about. It was a very touching movie. Next day we heard that one of the communist leaders of liberation of Czechoslovakia came to Banska Bystrica. I don’t remember his name, but my mother knew him well. He used to work with my father and often visited us at home in Kosice. He told my mother that Germans were bellicose about coming back to Slovakia and that my mother had to take a train to the town where this officer’s unit was deployed. He wrote a letter for him to give us shelter in case Germans came back. He also comforted my mother by saying that the war was to be over soon and we would survive. I remember that we waited for my mother standing in an entrance of a building while she had this meeting. My mother came back in tears: we had to get wandering again.  Erno was thinking how to help the family. He divided all relatives in groups. All of us had to go to the mountains and stay in earth huts or with partisans till the end of the war.  Erno read the letter m mother had and approved it. He also gave us the address of one of former customers of his father. He lived in a village half way from the place we were heading to. We took a train and moved on. When we were in about 5 km from the place of departure we heard that there were Germans in the place we were heading to. We went to the man Erno told us to go to. When he heard who we were he offered his help. His son had contacts with partisans. He had just got married and was hiding with his wife in the woods. My mother and other women of this family were baking bread for the road all night through. Early in the morning our group – there were about 10 people – started on our way.  My mother was carrying a heavy bag with our food stocks and clothes. She had tears of exhaustion and despair in her eyes, but to comfort us she tried to smile to us. We made short stops to rest before we continued climbing higher in the mountains. In the evening we reached two earth huts that were carefully camouflaged for outsiders not to discover them. There were 10-12 tenants in each hut located at 100 m from one another. There was a plank bed about 1 m above the floor with straw on it that made our ‘bedroom’. There was a small stove with a smoke stack with its exhaust end outside. There was a toilet – a plank over a pit in the snow – between two pine trees near the hut. We also melted snow for water. We used a helmet as a wash basin. It was late October 1944, and we could never believe that we would have to stay there as long as March 1945, i.e., five months. 

There was Mark, a Czech man, his young Jewish wife Sonia, their 6-month old son and Sonia’s mother living with us in the hut. My mother happened to know Sonia’s mother. Her husband Grunwald, a communist often visited Kosice on party business during the rule of Czechoslovakia before 1938, and knew my mother and father. Before 1939 Grunwald left his wife and daughter, crossed the border to the USSR, was kept in a camp two years, and then was sent to Moscow to take the responsibility for a radio program in Slovakian. Then he was mobilized to the Red Army, became an officer and married a Russian doctor. After the war Grunwald and his wife came to his homeland looking for his first family. My mother felt sorry for Sonia’s mother. In 1941, when Jewish girls were forced to go to Germany, she arranged for her 15-year old daughter Sonia to marry a Czech engineer, who worked in a mine. He was about 15 years older than Sonia. At first there was no love between them, but when they got to know each other better living in one apartment, they consummated their marriage. They had a lovely boy, whom we all loved. Sonia didn’t have breast milk, and Mark and other men went to buy milk and other food products in the village twice a week. They froze milk for the baby in the snow. We cooked peas, beans and sometimes baked potatoes, if we managed to get some from farmers. There was Kellerman, a 19-year old guy with us in the hut. He had a long nose and black bulging eyes. He was always hungry like my sister, and mad at the rest of the world. I remember the day, when my mother had to cut my wonderful long hair since we could not keep them clean considering our living conditions.  In another hut there were Jews and the newly married couple of farmers, who had brought us there.  There was a house nearby. It was probably a former forester’s house, but now there were partisans accommodating in it. They never left it to fight against Germans. They enjoyed themselves eating and drinking, listening to the radio and waiting for the war to come to an end. They didn’t take one effort to expedite this end.  Our men found a shelter in a rock nearby in case Germans discovered us. We used it several times, when Hungarian soldiers came close to our huts. They spoke Hungarian and we understood them and could talk to them. By the end of 1944 mainly Hungarian troops, faithful allies of Hitler, fought in Slovakia. They were even more formidable than German fascists. [editor’s note: The Hungarian army did not enter the Slovak state in World War II. The soldiers were either not Hungarian or it took place in Hungarian territory, possibly in Southern Slovakia attached to Hungary as early as 1938.] We established security guards to watch the locality and inform us of danger, if there was any, but Hungarians never came up to the mountains this far.

One day in January we got terribly scared. When we went to bed, we heard shooting above us. We froze of fear, but then it turned out those were our neighbors shooting to salute the liberation of  Kosice. They knew we came from Kosice and wanted to greet us. We invited them to the hut, they brought some wine with them, and we celebrated this wonderful event with tears in our eyes. It was more and more difficult for our men to descend from the mountains looking for food. The Hungarian troops were in rage executing partisans and the locals, who, they suspected, had contacts thereof. By end of February we ran out of food stocks and had no food whatsoever for our baby boy, who was 10 months old. His father and grandmother had to take a desperate step. Madam Grunwald spoke fluent Hungarian. She wanted to ask Hungarian troopers to give some food for her grandson or allow her to take him down to the village. Her son-in-law accompanied her. Since he didn’t speak one word in Hungarian, he hid away to watch her. He saw her talking to a Hungarian officer, saw how soldiers tied her and took her to a house.  He kept watching the house at night. In the morning the unfortunate woman was taken to the center of the village, she had a plank with “This is what will happen to all those who help partisans!’ in Slovakian and Hungarian. There were signs of beating on her skin. The Hungarians made all residents of the village watch her execution. Her son-in-law watch it. She was on the gibbet for a whole week and nobody was allowed to take her down. Poor Mark returned to our hut half-dead. He had to tell Sonia everything. We bitterly mourned the poor grandma, who sacrificed her life to rescue her grandson. 

In early March we saw that the house where the partisans used to be was deserted. They left  without warning us or leaving any food or the radio. By that time there were three polish Jewish refugees with us. They said that this part of Slovakia was liberated by the Romanian troops that were on the side of the USSR. These Polish Jews decided to move towards their liberators and save their lives by crossing the front line. They were sorry for Mark’s family and agreed to take Mark and Sonia with them. Many years later we got to know that they had survived. Sonia met with her father, divorced Mark and left with her father and son.

We had to make a decision as well. We didn’t have any food and didn’t want to starve to death at the very end of the war. There was a group of 13 of us led by the young newly wed farmer, who had a compass and some food left. In early March 1945 we moved in the eastern direction across the mountains. We were hoping to cross the front line. We walked 6 days. There were two women with us: our ‘commander’s’ mother and his young wife, the rest were men in our group. It was still cold in the mountains. There was waist-deep snow. We walked at night since we were afraid of being noticed in the daytime. We could see the road with German and Hungarian armies retreating. We managed to cross it on the third night. During the day we tried to rest a little digging pits in the snow to sleep in them. Once we bumped into a tent on four posts. There was a little straw inside.  We even dared to make a small fire and boil some water. On the first night my mother, sister and I lost the group. My sister got tired and we stopped. E were scared to be on our own, but the men noticed that we got lost and came back looking for us. The fourth day was the most difficult and scary. We crossed the road and started climbing the mountains on the opposite side of the road. We had to cross a mountainous river, wide and quick, but shallow. We had to cross it before the dawn. The men decided to carry the women and children across the river. My sister was the youngest in the group. She was 10 years old. The oldest man had to carry her across the river. I think he must have been about 45, but then he seemed an old man to me. I was the first one to be taken across the river. Then came a man with my mother on his back and beside him was this old man with my sister on his back. In the middle of the river he stumbled and my sister fell into the ice-cold water. When my mother saw it, she dropped her bag with our documents and money into the water. The bag was gone. My sister crawled out of the water onto the opposite bank. Her hands covered with ice crust instantly. Her feet in the boots were wet knee-high. She sat by a tree and said she had to sleep a while before she could move on. The rest of the group was climbing the mountain. They had to come onto another side of it before full dawn. My sister began to freeze. She closed her eyes and was falling asleep. My mother and I were shaking her by her shoulders begging her to hold on. At this time we saw two figures dressed in white climbing down the hill. My mother said this was the end, they were Germans and since we had lost our documents we would not be able to prove that we were not Jews or partisans. However, they were two men from our group. One of them poured a little alcohol and put a slice of pork fat into Kati’s mouth, and another man began to hit Kati with a stick making her walk. My sister obeyed and went on. When we climbed the top of this hill, we saw that the others from our group made a fire. They took my sister closer to the fire, pulled off her boots and stockings and began to rub her hands and feet with snow. When they got warmer, they wrapped my sister in some cloth. A woman gave my sister her valenki boots [winter boots made from sheep felt wool] and borrowed somebody else’s extra boots for herself. These valenki boots saved my sister’s life, and we shall never forget this young woman’s kindness. We fell asleep. I can hardly remember the next day. My sister’s legs were aching, and my mother or one of the men had to carry her. She also had to walk at times. The men gave her a stick to walk with us. By the evening of the sixth day we saw a wonderful house in the forest. It was empty. There was wood in the yard. We got into the house, cooked whatever beans we had and were happy to have a roof over our heads.  We went to sleep. Our leader ordered few men to investigate the situation in nearby settlements. The rest of the men took turns to guard our sleep. Early in the morning our guard saw a man and a woman nearby. They said that there was a village in about 4 km from our place. Romanian and German troops were fighting for it. There was a village in 8 km from there that was already liberated. We decided to go to this village. There was a road nearby and we saw German and Romanian troops moving along it.  My mother saw an older Russian soldier following his wagon and smoking. She suffered from lack of cigarettes and approached him. By her greedy look he knew what she wanted and offered her a self-made cigarette. My mother almost got suffocated from strong tobacco particularly that she hadn’t smoked for so long. The old soldier saw my sister limping and put her on his wagon and we took to our journey. We arrived at a village. There were mainly Romanian soldiers and officers in it. The Russian soldier took us to the military commandant, who accommodated us in a house.  The owners of the house gave us some food, then we washed ourselves and went to sleep on the floor.  In the morning my mother went to see the commandant again. She told him about us and he arranged for us to go to the Soviet military hospital in Miskolc on one of his trucks. The driver dropped us in the town. We felt more at ease there. It was a Hungarian town where we could understand the language and explain what we needed. We went to the nearest snack bar. My mother said we had no money, but we were starved and needed a place to stay. The owner said there was a Jewish community functioning in the town. We went to its office. It was overcrowded, but one man offered us a place to stay and promised to help us. His family perished in a concentration camp. His  housemaid stayed in his apartment during the war. There was a Soviet captain, a Jew, in this office. He was director of the macaroni factory. He told my mother to wait for him and brought us a big bag of macaroni. Our new landlord took us to his apartment. There were few girls, who had returned from a concentration camp, staying in his apartment. He let us his bedroom with two nice beds. We heated a big barrel of water to wash ourselves. We had veal stew with macaroni for dinner, but we were told to eat slowly and just a little. For the first time in a long time we fell asleep in a real bed. In the morning my mother carried my sister to the hospital where they amputated my sister’s toe. The doctors told my mother to bring her to the hospital to change a bandage every day.  One day my mother met our family dentist and his daughter. He told us that they survived in the basement of a house, whose owner supported them. He was eager to go to Kosice to find out about the rest of the family. He offered my mother to come with him and my mother was infinitely happy with his company. We finally got to our house. The windows were broken and it was empty inside. There was light in the neighboring apartment coming from behind the blackouts. My mother rang the bell to this apartment. We recognized the janitor from a neighboring house in the woman who opened the door. Her family lived in the basement of the house. She recognized my mother and let her in. Through the open door my mother saw few pieces of our furniture, our blankets and pillows, bed sheets with my mother’s monograms on them embroidered by a craftswoman for my mother’s wedding. The janitor was rather confused. She said she saved some of our belongings from Germans and would return them. However, this did not make us happy. The janitor said that our father had come by the night before. She told him she hadn’t seen us and he went to Izabella without even coming into the house. We went to Izabella’s house, when it got dark. My mother knocked on a window. A minute later we were hugging our dearest Izabella. Izabella was struck with how we looked. We had all possible clothes on since it was cold. My mother was wrapped in some blanket shreds. Our clothes were dirty, torn and smelly. Izabella heated some water and put my sister and me in the bathtub with hot water. Izabella burnt everything we had on in the oven. After we got washed we put on our aunts’ pajamas, big, but homey and clean. When the bathtub was being filled for mama, the doorbell rang. What happened was that my father had really returned to Kosice the night before. The town party committee organized a banquet in his honor and now he returned from it. Izabella went to open the door to prepare my father to the surprise waiting for him, but my sister and I couldn’t wait and threw ourselves on this tall lean man in a military uniform. While kissing us his eyes were searching for his beloved wife whom he hadn’t seen in three years.  When this strong and brave man, who had come through so many ordeals in recent years saw our mother, he couldn’t stand the test of joy and fainted. My sister looked at him with horror and screamed: “Papa died!’ He recovered his senses from her screaming. Izabella took us to the bedroom where her children were sleeping: my 8-year old cousin Gabor and his 8-months old  sister Marina. My aunt put us to sleep in one bed and went to sleep on another and we fell asleep. One hours later I got high fever and began to talk deliriously. My screams woke Izabella and she gave me pills and applied compresses all night through. In the morning a doctor came and said this was a nervous breakdown. He prescribed me a sedative. Our father told us how he came to Kosice from Uzhgorod. He was secretary of the regional party committee in Uzhgorod. He got a letter from his niece Judit, Izodor’s daughter, who returned to Kosice from a concentration camp and met with her fiancé. Her parents perished in the concentration camp and since she hadn’t reached the age of 18, her marriage could only be registered at her parents’ consent. Judit asked my father to give his consent to her marriage and this was how my father came to Kosice. He got a 3-week leave and had a car to take him to Kosice. My father adopted Judit, and young people got married soon.  We moved to Uzhgorod.           

There was a surprise waiting for us there. My father’s cousin Terez, grandfather brother Pal Edelmann’ daughter and her two friends, our distant relatives. They had all returned from a concentration camp. Some time later my father’s nephew Adolf joined us. His sisters Livia and Judit lived in Prague. It was hard for them to raise their younger brother and they sent him to us. Adolf was like one of us in the family.

We also got information about other members of the family. Grandfather Pal’s widow Betti, her daughter Terez, and sons Emil and Jozsef were taken to Auschwitz in April 1944. Betti perished in a gas chamber, and the children were sent to a work camp. After liberation Terez returned to Kosice, got married and was manager of a canteen at school. She is 86 now. Emil also worked in a camp. After returning home he moved to Israel. He lived his life and died there. . His family lives in Israel. Jozsef returned to Kosice after the war. He died in the 1980s. Jozsef’s family was also taken to a concentration camp. Jozsef and his wife perished in the crematorium. Their children survived.  Laszlo moved to Australia in 1946, got married and owned a men’s garments’ factory. In late 1940s he helped his sisters Kato, Magda, Judit and Eva and their families to move to Australia. Laszlo has died, but his family and his sisters’ families live in Sydney. My grandfather’s sister Regina Berger, her husband and their son Simon also moved to Australia after returning from a concentration camp. Regina and her husband lived their life in Australia, died and were buried there. Their son Simon moved to Canada where he lives with his family. My father’s cousin brothers, my grandfather sister Pepka’s children, who were raised in my grandfather’s family, were in a concentration camp. Only the middle daughter Regina (her family name was Muller) returned to  Kosice. Aranka and Jeno perished in the camp. Vilmos, the son of Nandor, who died in 1942, survived. He told me that when his mother Liza, Vilmos and 7-year old Tamas arrived at Auschwitz, the sorting began. The younger son was taken to the group of inmates that were sent to a gas chamber. A German officer approached Liza and whispered into her ear, - Vilmos heard this discussion, - ‘Gnädige Frau! – that was how he addressed Liza, - I advise you to follow your older son. Liza replied that her son could take care of himself while her younger son couldn’t. The officer was convincing her telling her that the younger son would be taken care of and she would be able to see him, but Liza was inexorable. She took her younger son by his hand and went into the gas chamber with him. 14-year old Vilmos worked at a German plant. After the war he left for Israel, studied and became a lawyer. He changed his name to Zeev Singer. Since Israel was at war, Vilmos decided his place was in the army. He was promoted to the rank of colonel of the Israel army. He served in landing units and participated in all wars with Arabs. Vilmos was severely wounded, demobilized and worked as a lawyer in Tel Aviv. Zeev Singer is a national hero of Israel. He is a pensioner. He has two children and six grandchildren in Israel. My grandfather’s sister Betka Gerstl and her husband and children were also taken to a concentration camp. Betka and her husband Moric Gerstl were exterminated immediately. Betka’s daughter Ilona Zimmermann with her children and Betka’s sons Jeno and David perished in the concentration camp. Only her son Armin Gerstl survived and moved to Israel shortly after he returned. He has passed away. Mor Bergman, son of my father’s favorite aunt Relka, married a girl from Zvolen before Hungarians came to power and moved to his wife’s town. After 1938 Zvolen belonged to Slovakia and Kosice was Hungarian. When Jews began to be sent to Germany, Mor and his wife tried to cross the border and return to Kosice, but were captured and killed right there. Relka’s daughter Ilona stayed with her mother. They both perished in a concentration camp. My father sister Anna’s family, the Hertz family, was also taken to Auschwitz. Anna and her husband Moric were exterminated immediately. Of their 10 children only two survived: son Aladar; he lives in Frankfurt in Germany, and daughter Terez – she emigrated to Israel after the war. Terez has passed away. Her children live in Israel. Anna’s younger daughter Eszter also moved to Israel. She lives and works in a kibbutz. Sons Tibor, Marcel, Erno, Pal and Sandor and daughters Sarolta, Ilona and Edit and their families perished in the concentration camp. Grandfather’s youngest sister Etelka and her husband Jakab Blumenfeld and their younger children – son Erno and daughter Marta also perished in the concentration camp. Older daughters Edit (Gerstl in marriage) and Izabella (Kovartovski in marriage) were in a work camp and survived. After the war they moved to Israel. They’ve both passed away.  

My father’s brothers and sisters also suffered. The Hungarian police arrested Izodor and his wife Gizi in 1944 and charged them with concealment of Mor and his wife who had illegally crossed the border from Slovakia to Hungary escaping from the deportation. Izodor and his wife were put to prison.  In April 1944 Izodor and his wife Gizi  were taken to Buchenwald. According to eye witnesses Izodor behaved heroically in the camp. He went on hunger strikes and called other prisoners to disobey the oppressors. Izodor was executing with an electric wire and his wife was exterminated in a gas chamber. Their three children survived. Their older daughter Livia was a serious and smart girl. She wanted to become a doctor. She finished a grammar school in 1943. This was at the time of fascist Hungary and Livia could not get a higher education.  She finished a course of medical nurses in Budapest and went to work. She managed to avoid deportation to a concentration camp. Under a different name she went to work as a housemaid in a Czech village.   After the war Livia moved to Prague where her dream came true. She finished a Medical College and became a children’s doctor. She married a Czech man and had two daughters. Livia’s husband has passed away. She is a pensioner. Her daughters are married. Izodor’s second daughter Judit and her brother Adolf lived in the Tatras during German occupation where they stayed with other members of the Edelmann’s family. They were in the 2nd group that Erno managed to take out of Kosice after us. After the war Judit returned to Kosice. After my father adopted her and gave his consent to her marriage she got married at the age of 17 and had a daughter. Shortly afterward Judit divorced her husband, left for Prague with her daughter and remarried. She became a widow recently. Her daughter Julia moved to Australia in 1968 where she lives with her family. Adolf finished a secondary school and we both went to Leningrad where he graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of Leningrad University. He returned to Uzhgorod, finished a post-graduate institute. He was senior lecturer of the Faculty of Philosophy of Uzhgorod University. He got married and had two sons, Ilia and Andrey. When they grew up, they decided to move to Hungary. Adolf and his wife followed them there. They live in Szolnok. Adolf and his wife are pensioners. I believe Adolf to be my brother. We keep in touch writing letters, calling each other and visiting each other every now and then.

Jeno and his family was taken to Buchenwald. German executioners killed Jeno, and his wife Adel, sons Erno and Karoly and twin daughters Livia and Stella were burnt in the crematorium. 

My father sister Etelka’s family, grandmother Amalia and the youngest brother Armin were taken to Mauthausen. Only aunt Etelka survived. Grandmother and her two granddaughters Livia and Edit were burnt in the crematorium. Etelka’s husband and brother perished in the camp. According to eye-witnesses they died of typhoid. Etelka worked at a factory. In May 1945 Americans liberated her and she returned to Uzhgorod. It was hard to look at her: a young woman turned into an old one. She weighed 37 kg.  She lived with us in Uzhgood. My parents took every effort to bring her to recovery.

After the war

Only two of 7 families survived in the war: our family and my father brother Elemer’s family. Erno managed to take him, his wife, son Tamas and daughter Julia out of Kosice. They also took hiding in the woods living in an earth hut. After the war Terez divorced him and moved with their children to USA where her brother lived. Terez has passed away and Tamas and Julia and their families live in the States.  Elemer moved to Israel where he died at the age of 70.

My mother’s sister Izabella and her family stayed in Kosice. Her children and their families still live there. My cousin Gabor Tamm became a metallurgical engineer there. His younger sister Marina was an economist.  They are pensioners. We visit each other and talk on the phone.
When I went to Israel in 1989, I filled the forms and submitted the lists of the members of our family who perished during the war to the Yad Vashem 11 in Jerusalem.

My father received a wonderful 3-bedroom apartment. There were 6 of us living in it: our family, my cousin Adolf and aunt Etelka. My father became a secretary of the regional party committee.  In 1945 my father’s comrade Vinkler visited us. He was a member of the party like my father and was put in prison in 1940. When communists began to cross the border to the USSR, Vinkler went with them. He was arrested at the border and sent to thee GULAG where he spent two years. Then he was taken to Moscow where he was made responsible for a radio program in Hungarian. He worked there during the war, and in 1945 he decided to return to Kosice. On his way home he visited Uzhgorod to see my father. My father and mother were on vacation in a recreation center. Vinkler asked me to send them a message to come back home. Vinkler understood that life in the USSR was hard and it wasn’t worth staying here, but he couldn’t talk about it with me. When I told my father, he said: ‘I’ve fought for the Soviet power and want to live where the Soviet power is. I’ve had enough of fighting’. My mother, though she was a communist, understood very soon what was going on and often spoke very emotionally about it. I think, in his heart, my father agreed with her, but he always told mother that this was the fault of some people, but not the regime. My father rarely criticized some officials, but if somebody in his presence expressed his concerns about the Soviet power, my father always spoke in its favor. Some people did it from fear: many people were afraid of speaking their mind in fear of arrests 12 that went on in the USSR. However, my father was a very brave man. When the Soviet power was established in Subcarpathia, they began to arrest the Hungarian officials for the charges of their service for fascists. They were innocent, but they were to go to prison anyway. In 1945 my father saved many of these people. He saved Laszlo Sandor, a free lance employee of the ‘Mai Nap’ newspaper, from the camp where he was taken just for being a Hungarian, which meant fascist for them. My father witnessed that Sandor had always sympathized with communists. There were other similar cases. Of course, later I realized that my father could not have kept his belief in communist ideas living in the USSR. He got disappointed and acknowledged it and suffered from it very much.

My father didn’t work as secretary of the regional party committee for long. I understood later that they could not allow a Jew to hold this kind of position. My father was appointed logistics manager of the regional executive committee [Ispolkom] 13. He supported construction of two bridges in Uzhgorod: pedestrian and automobile. He was a born administrator and manager. However, in the opinion of authorities, a Jew was no good even for this position. There were two big plants in Uzhgorod: woodworking plant and plywood and furniture plant. Their directors were not very competent and the plants were in decay. Town authorities united these plants and appointed my father director. He was dedicated to his job, and soon the enterprise began to prosper. After the campaign against cosmopolites 14 during the postwar years, anti-Semitism in the USSR was growing stronger, and again danger hanged over my father.

In 1946 my aunt Etelka living with us after she returned from the concentration camp, married Ignac Bergida, who had also lost his family to the war. He lived in Uzhgorod before the war. He liked Etelka even then. His first marriage was prearranged. He was a decent, kind and honest man. He was an accountant. When my father became director of the plant, he employed Bergida. In 1947 Bergida and Etelka’s daughter Vera was born. In 1945 the soviet regime began to struggle against religion 15. Most Jews in Subcarpathia were religious. All synagogue were closed in Uzhgorod. The biggest – the Hasidic – synagogue was given to the town Philharmonic. The Jewish community decided to send their representative to the Jewish Antifascist Committee 16 in Moscow for help. Bergida was not an activist in the community, but he was the only one who could speak Russian.  Ukrainian Ivan Turianitza, the first secretary of the regional party committee, my father’s close friend, issued a letter to Fefer, a member of the Committee, requesting him to support the community. Bergida went to Moscow. Shortly after he returned, the Antifascist Committee was liquidated and its members executed. The KGB 17 was aware of Bergida’s trip to Moscow. He was arrested and sentenced to 25 years in the GULAG. The charges against him were treason and support of international Zionism and capitalism. This was nonsense and was not true, but at the beginning even my father believed he was guilty, so strong the Soviet propaganda was. However, my father was Bergida’s relative.  Somebody reported that my father went to the synagogue and for this reason refused to work on Saturday. This was wrong, of course: my father was an atheist even when religion was the way of life. KGB officers followed my father looking for a ground to arrest him. Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953 saved my father from arrest. Bergida’s sentence was reduced to 10 years. He had cancer at that time, and they released him from the GULAG. He died in 1956 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Uzhgorod. My parents supported Etelka and her daughter. Etelka has passed away. My cousin Vera Brown lives in the USA.

My sister and I went to the school for girls. When Subcarpathia became Soviet, the Russian language was introduced in all spheres of life. There were Russian schools, and only my father could speak the language.  We still spoke Hungarian at home. However, children pick languages easily, and a year later my sister and I had no problems with speaking Russian. I had all excellent marks at school in all years. My sister had different marks. Our father was a patriot and raised us to love our Soviet Motherland. We became pioneers and then joined Komsomol 18. I didn’t face any anti-Semitism at school, but I cannot say it did not exist in Uzhgorod. After the process against cosmopolites began to encourage anti-Semitic moods, as I understand now, but our father protected us from this information. He didn’t want us to get disappointed in the Soviet power.

I finished school in 1949. I got to know that there was a faculty of eastern languages, and the Finnish-Hungarian department in it in Leningrad University. I wrote them and they replied they would be happy to admit me, particularly that Hungarian was my native language. Professor Bubrik, chief of this chair, wrote that I could work for him at the department. However, there were only 2 applications submitted to this Faculty while they needed at least 8, so they cancelled this admission.  So, they suggested that I entered another department, passed academic exams during my first year and enter the 3rd year of the university. My father wanted me to return home, but I decided to stay in Leningrad. I passed exams to the French department of the College of Foreign languages. I was accommodated in a hostel and started my study on 1 September. I never went to study in the university, though: professor Bubrik died and they closed the Finnish-Hungarian department. I finished the College of Foreign languages successfully. I studied French and English, and also, passed exams in German, that I knew since childhood to obtain a certificate for teaching it. 

I got to know what anti-Semitism is like in college. We had wonderful lecturers. During the process against cosmopolites wonderful lecturers and scientists were fired from the university and Academy. Rector of the College of Foreign languages employed them. Yefim Etkind, a brilliant scientist and a charming person, taught us stylistics and translation.  Etkind brought me to understanding that not everything in the USSR was so great as we were used to thinking. I didn’t face any anti-Semitism till early 1953, the disgraceful ‘doctors’ plot’ 19. There were Jews in college and in our group. My closest friend was Rosa Fradkina, a Jewish girl from Leningrad, whose family perished during the blockade 20. She was taken out of the city by the ‘Road of Life’ 21, and was sent to a children’s home. Rosa grew up there and returned to her home city. Rosa spent vacations at my home and became one of us in the family. Our friendship became a lifelong relation. We correspond and phone each other and sometimes Rosa visits me.

The ‘doctors’ plot’ brought open anti-Semitism to life. People with typical Semitic appearance were abused publicly and there was nobody to stand for them.  In polyclinics patients asked about doctors’ nationality and refused to go to Jewish doctors. [Jewish was considered a nationally among many others in the Soviet Union and it was registered in peoples’ passports.] This was hard and scary. When I heard that Stalin dead on 5 March 1953, I couldn’t hold back my tears. There was a mourning meeting and we were all crying. There was one question: how do we go on living and what will happen to the country now that Stalin is dead. I can still remember this feeling of fear. 

I met my future husband in Uzhgorod, when Rosa and I came home on vacation. There was an open-air swimming pool near the railway station. We spend much time there swimming and lying in the sun: Rosa, my sister and I. . Kati finished 8 forms and entered the Electric Engineering technical college in Vinogradovo, despite our parents’ protests. She fell in love with a senior student of this college. My sister’s friend was a sportsman. Once he injured his spine and the bruise developed into tumor. He was taken to a hospital in Uzhgorod. My sister gave up her studies and returned to Uzhgorod. She entered an evening school and spent days in the hospital. He died and it was very hard on my sister. We tried to support her and I always took my sister with us wherever we went. We met our future husbands by this swimming pool. My husband Adolf Haikis was a doctor in the Uzhgorod military hospital. He was born in Kiev in 1921. His father Solomon Haikis was an endocrinologist in the clinic for scientists in Kiev. He had finished the Medical Faculty of Berlin University before the revolution of 1917 22. He had good memories about the years of his studies and he gave his son the German name of Adolf.  Back in 1921it was not associated with Hitler. His mother Vera Haikis, nee Kozlova, came from the Jewish family of the Kozlovs, attorneys in Kiev.  Adolf wanted to become a literarian, but there was no literature college in Kiev and he decided to become a doctor to follow into his father’s steps. He entered Kiev Medical College. In 1944 Adolf finished college and went to the front. He was doctor in hospital. In 1947 he requested to demobilize from the army. He entered the residency department and specialized in neuropathology.  After finishing the residency he returned to the army and became a military doctor, neuropathologist in the Uzhgorod hospital.  Returned to Uzhgorod in 1956 after finishing my college and we got married. Of course, we didn’t have a traditional Jewish wedding. We registered our marriage in a registry office and had a wedding dinner for our relatives and friends.  We lived with my parents. I went to work as a French schoolteacher. In 1955 our only daughter Ludmila was born. My father loved her dearly. He called her ‘the last love of his life’. At that time my parents lived in Velikaya Dobron [30 km from Uzhgorod, 680 km from Kiev] village, but they often came to Uzhgorod: my mother visited us more often than my father. My sister married Leopold Lowenberg, a Jew from Mukachevo [40 km from Uzhgorod, 650 km from Kiev] She moved to Mukachevo with her husband. She finished higher accounting courses and worked as an accountant and then chief accountant in a big store. Her husband was a shop superintendent at a factory. In 1953 their only daughter Julia was born. We didn’t celebrate any Jewish holidays in our family even in my childhood. Since 1945 our family always celebrated Soviet holidays: 1 May, 7 November 23, Soviet army day 24, Victory Day 25 and the New Year, of course. We always had guests and lots of fun.

It was more and more difficult for my father to work as director of the plant. Workers liked him very much, but the pressure of party authorities was hard for him.  When in 1954 General Secretary of the CC CPSU Nikita Khrushchev 26 appealed to communists to go to villages to improve the kolkhoses 27, my father was among the first ones to respond to this appeal. He went to Velikaya Dobron village in Uzhgorod district and became chairman of the kolkhoz. My mother followed him, of course.  This was remote village, with no polyclinic or public baths. In one year my father turned this kolkhoz into a successful enterprises. Velikaya Dobron residents adored him for becoming wealthy. A school, a polyclinic, a public bath were built and villagers had new houses with all comforts.  The villagers called my father ‘our father’. However, not everything was well with his work. At that time local authorities demanded to show higher quantities in documents to pretend there were more successes than in reality and there was much pressure on my father in this regard. My father was an honest man and convinced communist and refused to do any falsifications. One day in June 1963 he was invited to another bureau of the district party committee. When he came home, he had an infarction. He survived, but he could work no longer. My parents returned to Uzhgorod. My father became a free lance correspondent for the ‘Karpati Igaz Szo’ newspaper. [Carpathian True Word, Hungarian language Soviet newspaper, issued in Uzhgorod.] My father suffered much than neither his daughters nor their husbands were members of the party. Though my husband was a military, he never joined the party and this had an impact on his career.  Through 14 years of his work in Uzhgorod hospital he was in the rank of captain, though it was time for him to be promoted to the rank of major. They wouldn’t have promoted a Jew, particularly that he was not a member of the party. My husband knew what the party policy was worth.  After the 20th Congress of CPSU 28 we heard about Stalin and his regime’s crimes from the speech of Nikita Khrushchev. My husband and I believed this to be true. The 20th Congress was followed by the so-called ‘thaw’. We were hoping for improvements, but some time later we realized that these expectations were not to become true. The CPSU and KGB guided the life in the country.

In late October 1956 my husband received an emergency call ordering him to come to his unit immediately. This was all he knew any relocation at that time was confidential. In the morning my husband called me to inform that he was leaving. The only point of contact was captain Ostapenko in his hospital. I put my 11-month old daughter into her pram and ran to the hospital. I got to know that they were sent to Hungary by train. I read about the events in Hungary [23rd October 1956] 29 in newspapers. It was scaring. I feared for my husband, was sorry for the actions of the Soviet government and sympathized with Hungary. My husband called me from Budapest: they deployed a hospital in the basement of the Parliament building. My husband met a telephone operator. Her name was Judit like mine. My husband didn’t speak Hungarian, but he spoke German. He told Judit about me and our daughter and she allowed him to call me every evening. My husband’s best friend Samuel Frek, a Jew, an endocrinologist from the Uzhgorod hospital was sent in his ambulance vehicle to Hungary. On their way they were halted by a group of Hungarian rebels, about 40 of them. They disarmed them and ordered our doctors to stand with their backs to trees, but they did not shoot them and let them go few minutes later. In these few minutes, Samuel Frek, a dark-haired handsome man of the same age as my husband, turned gray. Upon their return to Uzhgorod they began to have problems. The political department demanded that they explained why they gave away their weapons. Hey didn’t want to understand that 3 doctors could not resist 40 armed men, even though the rebels returned their guns to the military commandant of Uzhgorod.

Few months later the military in Hungary were allowed to bring their families there. My daughter and I joined my husband in Hungary. I was happy to speak Hungarian and hear my native language around me. I served as interpreter for other militaries. In 1957 my husband’s father died in Kiev. There were restrictions about traveling from Hungary and my husband was not allowed to go to his father’s funeral. We received the notification about his death on Friday, but my husband had to wait for a permit for departure till Monday. My father went to the funeral from Uzhgorod. My husband went to Kiev later to support his mother after the funeral. My father-in-law was buried in the Baykovoye town cemetery in Kiev.

From Hungary we returned to Uzhgorod with my husband’s division. In the early 1960s armed conflicts with the Chinese started on the Far Eastern border. Khrushchev began to send divisions from all over the USSR to the Far East. 1963 was a very hard year for our family. My father’s health condition was very severe after the infarction, and he had to stay in Dobron. We had to look after my father. My husband’s mother spent spring and summer with us, leaving for Kiev in early November. That year my husband was planning to take her to Kiev before 7 November. On 13 October she died suddenly of infarction. She was an atheist and we arranged a secular funeral. On 23 October my husband’s hospital was given an order to send 4 people to the Far East. There were only 3 Jewish employees in the hospital: Haikis, Flek and Wasserman, and all of them were sent to the Far East. The 4th man was a Russian doctor. They went to the gathering point in Vladimir-Volynskiy. My husband asked the general to allow him 10 days to make arrangements for his mother’s apartment in Kiev to be returned in the ownership of the state. The general gave him the leave. Then my husband in November 1963 moved on to my husband’s point of destination. He got a job in a big hospital in the Primorskiy Kray, Kraskino village, on the very border with China, a district town of the Khasan district in 50 km from the Khasan Lake. I only managed to obtain a permit in February 1964, I and our daughter came to Kraskino. We could see Chinese houses from our hut. I went to work in the only village school. My daughter also went to this school.   We spent vacations with my parents in Uzhgorod every year. In 1968 we also planned to go there, but my husband fell ill and we had to stay home. When he got better, we went to the recreation house for high-rank officers near Vladivostok. This was August 1968 , and we heard about the events in Czechoslovakia [Prague Spring] 30. I remember how shocked my husband and I were, when we heard about the invasion of Soviet armies of Czechoslovakia, the country that I believe to be my Motherland. I’ve always loved it.  In this recreation house we met a lecturer from the Academy in Leningrad, a Jewish man. When we met after we heard about the events in Czechoslovakia, I remember how this Jewish colonel and my husband cursed the Soviet power for this invasion: ‘How could we bring tanks to Prague? How could they allow it to happen?’ When I returned to Uzhgorod later, I got to know that Erno, my father’s cousin, when Soviet tanks invaded Prague in 1968, decided to leave the USSR for Israel. Erno was professor of Medicine lecturing in the Prague Medical University. He became a doctor in Israel. Erno has passed away, but his widow, son Karoly, a cardiologist, the father of four children, and his daughter Eva, an archeologist, live in Israel. She had two daughters.

The Far East promoted my husband’s military career. This was a different world with no anti-Semitism where people were valued for their human merits rather than their nationality.  My husband was appointed chief of department and promoted to the rank of major. 4 years later he became chief of the hospital and promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. During military actions my husband worked in a field hospital. The term of service in the Far East was 5 years and we lived there 7 years. Upon completion of this term my husband was sent to the Сarpathian military regiment.  We moved to Uzhgorod, and settled down with m parents. My daughter went to the 8th form a school. My husband went to the regiment commander, a general, to report of his arrival. The general stared at him: lieutenant colonel, a Jew and chief of the medical department of hospital – how could this be true? It just could not happen in Ukraine. Commander of the regiment advised my husband to visit with the family in Uzhgorod since he was not ready yet to talk with him and hopefully, when Adolf came back, he would have a job to offer him. 10 days later my husband came back to Lvov. The general offered him the position of chief of the medical department of the hospital in Korosten, a small town in Zhytomyr region [85 km from Zhytomyr, 165 km from Kiev]. Before the revolution of 1917 Korosten was within the Jewish Pale of Settlement 31. There were many Jewish residents in the town. 80% of medical employees of the hospital were Jews. We were welcomed nicely. My daughter went to school and I went to work as a French teacher at school. After finishing school my daughter went to my parents in Uzhgorod and entered the English department of the Faculty of foreign languages of Uzhgorod University. My husband wanted to demobilize from the army and move to Kiev, his hometown. We did it in 1974. We received a 2-bedroom apartment in a new house near a lake in the Sviatoshino district in Kiev. My husband had a confirmation of his transfer of the parents’ apartment to the state and this helped a lot. My husband worked a neuropathologist in the polyclinic for scientists of the Academy of Scientists. I worked as a German and French teacher at school till I retired. I got along with my colleagues and my pupils liked me. My former pupils visit and call me. I am very glad that they do not forget me.

In the 1970s Jews began to move to Israel. My husband did not appreciate this process. He did not understand how they could leave their Motherland and their kin’s graves. My father had the same attitude to emigration. Our close friend Tsypkin, a traumatologist from Uzhgorod, and his family left the country. My husband was trying to convince them against doing it.  I met with the Tsypkins in Berlin last year. They are doing very well. Their children are well. They have a decent living in their old age, which cannot be said about Ukrainian the Commonwealth of Independent States pensioners. Now I receive my husband’s pension as his dependent, as I hadn’t worked in my life. My own teacher’s pension wouldn’t even be enough to pay my monthly fees. 

In 1975 my father died few months before he was to turn 70. We buried him in the town cemetery in Uzhgorod. He was an atheists and we arranged for a secular funeral. My daughter still lived with my mother, and my mother didn’t feel complete loneliness. Upon graduation from the University Ludmila married Miloslav Goshovskiy and moved in with her husband. Their apartment faced the central synagogue that housed the Philharmonic during the Soviet power. Miloslav is a physicist. He graduated from the Lvov Polytechnic University and worked in the Uzhgorod affiliate of the institute of nuclear research. Since the head institute was in Kiev we were hoping that they would move to Kiev. Ludmila worked as an English teacher in the children’s center at the gymnasium. My granddaughter Yekaterina was born in 1978. Two years later my grandson Mikhail was born. Ludmila and her husband decided to stay in Uzhgorod. My mother often visited us in Kiev staying with us for a long time. After our grandchildren were born, she began to spend more time in Uzhgorod helping Ludmila to take care of the children. My mother died in 1985 at the age of 76. She was buried beside my father.

My sister and her family lived in Mukachevo. Her daughter Julia finished school with a golden medal and entered the University. She got an offer to go to study at the Faculty of Hungarian Language and Literature of the Budapest University under a students’ exchange program. Julia went to Budapest, and my sister and her husband wanted to live close to their daughter. They decided to move to Hungary, but they could not obtain the visa. After they had 3 refusals Klara and her husband decided to move to Israel for Julia to join them later. Of course, had my father been alive, he would have never allowed my sister to emigrate. They obtained a permit and left. They settled down in Netanya. My sister went to work as a cashier in a supermarket, and Leopold worked as a goods expert in a store. After finishing her study Julia worked in Budapest as an editor of Hebrew-Hungarian dictionaries in a dictionary publishing office. Julia had no chance to join her parents: Hungary did not allow emigration to Israel in 1970s. Julia undertook few efforts and then decided to trick the authorities: in 1978 she bought a tour to France and from there she left for Israel illegally. In Israel Julia married Boris Penson, an artist. He had come to Israel from the USSR. Julia and Boris have two wonderful sons. Max, the older one, born in 1981, served in the army and works for an army organization. Roy, the younger son, born in 1989, studied in high school and later at a higher education institution in Natanya. Now she owns a publishing house. They have a house in Netaniya. Klara and Leo are pensioners now.

In 1982 my husband died. On 30 April he was at work receiving patients and on 1 May he had an infarction. He died on 4 May 1982. We buried Adolf near his father in the Baykovoye cemetery in Kiev. Since then I’ve lived alone. I often visit my daughter’s family in Uzhgorod and my grandchildren visit me. In 2002 a terrible tragedy happened in our family. My daughter fell severely ill. She had a malicious tumor in her brain. She had a surgery, but to no avail. Nobody told me my daughter’s diagnosis, and when I heard about it, she was already dying. Despite a surgery and our efforts she died in 2002, so young that she was. There will be always pain of this loss with me.

After finishing school Yekaterina entered the Historical Faculty of Uzhgorod University. Mikhail studied at the Medical Faculty in the university. My granddaughter also taught history in the Jewish Sunday school and my grandson worked as a medical brother during studies. When she was a senior student in the university, my granddaughter. After finishing the 4th year of the university my granddaughter took an academic leave and went to work in Germany for a year, to Stuttgart. She met her future husband Michael Hertzog, a German man, there. They got married. A year later Yekaterina returned to Uzhgorod, finished her studies in the university and moved in with her husband in Germany. Now she studies at the Faculty of Economics in Osnabruck. My grandson Mikhail also moved to Germany after finishing his studies.    

In the late 1980s General Secretary of the CPSY Mikhail Gorbachev 32 initiated perestroika 33 in the USSR. I was enthusiastic about it. Finally freedom came to the USSR that I believed to be y second Motherland. There were articles on various subjects that had been forbidden formerly, published. There were books by for example, those of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn 34 published that would have been judged as anti-Soviet propaganda in the past. The ‘iron curtain’ 35 that separated us from the rest of the world for many years, collapsed. Citizens of the USSR were allowed to communicate with people living abroad without fearing the KGB, correspond with relatives 36 and invite them home. There was no longer ban on religion that had been in place since the start of the soviet power. People were allowed to go to temples and celebrate religious holidays. Religious and everyday anti-Semitism was reducing. We, citizens of the USSR, were happy and full of hopes for a different life. I could finally travel to Israel to visit my sister and see my friends. I was happy about it. It’s hard to say how much Israel impressed me. It’s an amazingly beautiful country where the antiquity and modern life are in complete conformity. Unfortunately, this little country living in the encirclement of hostile neighbors, knows no peace. I wish Israel peace, quiet life and prosperity from the bottom of my heart.   

When after the breakup of the USSR [1991] Ukraine gained independence, we were building up hopes  for a better life, but many of us still live in the humiliating poverty. Ukraine is rich in natural resources, fruitful soils and hardworking people. I believe, we have such poor life due to our leaders who guided the country in the Soviet times. However, there has been some improvement. The Jewish life is reviving. There are many Jewish organizations and associations, and the most popular with old people is the Hesed 37, of course. The Hesed in Kiev provides food packages to us, delivers meals to elderly people and bring medications. This is significant assistance. We are in a better position than non-Jewish residents. Hesed is just great! It conducts a great job to recover Jewry in Ukraine, from nursery schools to old people helping them to study the Jewish history, history of religion, and learn more about Jewish traditions. There are various studios and clubs. I like our Sunday daytime center where we talk with other people – this is very important. Sometimes talking to others is more important than food. I have new friends in the daytime center and we enjoy spending time together. I read Hesed-delivered Jewish newspapers and magazines regularly. Soon I am moving to my grandchildren in Germany, my family. It’s hard to live alone in my age. Of course, it’s hard to leave everything here, it’s been a big part of my life, hard to leave the graves of my dear ones and get adjusted to a different way of life, but I hope to able to visit Uzhgorod and Kiev, my two hometowns.

GLOSSARY:

1 First Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938): The First Czechoslovak Republic was created after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy following World War I. The union of the Czech lands and Slovakia was officially proclaimed in Prague in 1918, and formally recognized by the Treaty of St. Germain in 1919. Ruthenia was added by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. Czechoslovakia inherited the greater part of the industries of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the new government carried out an extensive land reform, as a result of which the living conditions of the peasantry increasingly improved. However, the constitution of 1920 set up a highly centralized state and failed to take into account the issue of national minorities, and thus internal political life was dominated by the struggle of national minorities (especially the Hungarians and the Germans) against Czech rule. In foreign policy Czechoslovakia kept close contacts with France and initiated the foundation of the Little Entente in 1921.

Yvonne Capuano-Molho
Athens
Greece
Interviewer: Vivian Karagouni
Date of interview: May 2006

Mrs. Yvonne Capuano is a particularly intelligent and active woman. She is a microbiologist and her private practice is located on the same floor as the apartment she is living in.

It is located in the center of Athens, at the “Pedio tou Areos” and there she lived for many years with her husband, who passed away in 2003, and her son, who now is married. Today she is living in this apartment with a lady-companion - a house manager.

Mrs. Yvonne Capuano is a tall, impressive and chic lady who obviously is taking good care of herself. She is a modern lady with many abilities.

On top of being a successful professional, she possesses a wider education and high intellect. Her home is decorated by herself with an impressive classic taste.

Among other things in her home one can find framed embroidery, knitted by Mrs. Capuano herself, and even chairs the upholstery of which has also been knitted by her in complex and particularly difficult designs.

She is very polite and attentive and kept on asking me if I was feeling alright or if I needed anything. When we were looking at old photographs I was very impressed with the difficulty and effort she was putting in because as she said, “These are not photographs but cemeteries.”

• My family background
• Growing up
• During the war
• After the war and later years
• Glossary

• My family background

I am descended from the Spanish Jewish families that came to Thessaloniki in 1492 following their expulsion by Isabella and Ferdinand 1. This was Isabella the Catholic, who was full of hatred and this is why the expulsion started in Spain and continued in Portugal and other countries.

Our Jewish race has always been persecuted. I believe that in every period there is a thorn, every time there is a different excuse, they will always find something. It does not matter, we fly away and we are always back, we are here and we will always be.

I don’t know any stories of myths about my ancestors, what I know is that when they arrived in Greece, which was part of the Ottoman Empire at that period, they adapted to the Turkish way of life.

When the Jews went to Kastoria, which was a big fur center, they learned all about furs; it is said that the treatment of furs first came to Thessaloniki with the Jews. Many of them established their shops in the Copper place, and learned from the local craftsmen the processing of copper-braze.

They also say that when the Jews went to Istanbul to serve the sultan, as accountants, lawyers, doctors etc., the sultan said, ‘I considered Ferdinand and Isabella intelligent and couldn’t imagine that they would expel such an element from their country.’

My fathers’ father, Joseph Molho, worked for the Turks. He was responsible of a big agricultural exploitation [tsiflikas]. The same applied to my father, Raphael Molho. When my grandfather was working for the Turks he was buying a lot of jewelry for my grandmother Esther, nee Ergas.

They even told me that when Grandfather Molho died, my grandmother, who had six sons said, ‘Whichever bride will give birth to the young Joseph will have all my jewelry.’ Well my mother had two daughters, my aunt four daughters, the next aunt two daughters, the other aunt one – only daughters. It was the youngest of all, Uncle Alberto, when he returned from the concentration camps, who got married and had a son, and young Joseph was born. But Joseph came too late.

I remember my grandfather being dressed in beautiful European clothes. He was wearing a frock-coat. Grandmother Esther was also wearing European clothes, I remember she had the lob of her ear torn because once, as she was wearing earrings a young Turk grabbed it and ran away, and thus her ear was torn.

I don’t know to which school my grandfather Molho went but he spoke French, I don’t know whether he also knew how to write it.

One of my grandfather’s brothers was a very educated man. He had attended the rabbinical school [yeshivah] in Istanbul and, I think, also in Vienna. Later he became the rabbi of Kavala.

When the first racist legislation against the Jews was ordered by the Nazis, as there were also Bulgarians and Germans 2 there, they shouted for the Jews to come out and sweep the city. This uncle, the rabbi, was the first that took a broom and started sweeping.

My grandfather had many brothers, but I was very young at the time. I knew some of them but I don’t remember anything else about them.

My grandparents of the Molho side of the family, since my grandfather worked for the Turks, were always living in Turkish houses. The house I remember was located close to ‘Kamara,’ the Arch of Galerius, where many Turkish houses were situated. It had running water and a fountain in the yard, exactly as the Turks used to have.

Within the yard was a heart-shaped pond and water was coming out of it. It also had the Turkish balcony which is a covered balcony extending out of the house. That is where the women were sitting. They were not going out of the house but sitting around on this balcony where they could see what was going on in the street without being seen.

The house had two stories and I remember a big iron door at the entrance. Inside the floor was made of big marble slabs and the furniture was heavy and massive. It had also many square tables with heavy legs and many sideboards. That was what the furniture looked liked in that period. I found the same kind of furniture in the house of my mother-in-law too.

These Turkish houses had the hall and the dining room in one piece and all around were the bedrooms. When a son got married, he didn’t leave the house. He was given a bedroom of his own, and this is how the brides were living in the same house with their mothers-in-law.

My mother was living with her parents, but I remember one aunt that was living with my Molho grandparents. The other aunt was not living with her mother because her parents had left for Israel, then still Palestine.

I don’t remember if the Molho grandparents ever left Thessaloniki to go on vacation or to travel. I remember them already old. All of their children were married and had their own families.

When my grandfather Molho died in 1930, my grandmother with her daughter, Gracia, and her son-in-law went to live in an apartment in the center of the city, on Pavlou Mela Street. They were staying on the third floor; next to the place the Moskov family 3 was living.

My mother’s parents were Leon Moshe and Bienvenida, nee Florentin. My grandmother’s name means ‘welcome’ in Spanish. There were many names like that at that time.

These grandparents were also living in Thessaloniki, but they were traveling a lot. It was due to my grandfather’s job. I heard that in the beginning he had a factory producing wooden door frames, but later, because he got tired, he got a big shop selling wood and stopped producing it. It wasn’t construction wood but a specialist shop selling wood for furniture, and part of his job was to travel and visit exhibitions.

Despite the fact that he had no formal education he was very avant-garde. He was telling us that when he was young he went to school at the synagogue where they were taught to read and write not Hebrew but Ladino 4, or Judeo-Espanol, and writing in Rashi 5. I call this type of writing ‘little pieces of wood.’ At that period all the people in Thessaloniki were speaking Judeo-Espanol, it was our mother tongue.

My grandmother also knew how to write in Rashi, not with the European alphabet. When her daughter, Sylvia, went to live with her husband in Spain – they got married in 1927 and left in 1930 – my grandmother forced herself to learn also the Latin alphabet in order to be able to write letters to her daughter, who was of course speaking Judeo-Espanol, but didn’t know the Rashi writing.

My grandfather, Leon Moshe, didn’t come from a rich family, but he was a hard working man. He was telling me that when he was a boy he did many jobs and he also worked at the railways 6. I don’t know what exactly he was doing there, I never understood.

Anyhow, his supervisor was an Italian and Grandfather learned very well the Italian language. After that, and knowing Italian, he worked in a wooden frames factory belonging to an Italian and this is how he learned this business. At that period Thessaloniki was an ‘open port,’ a free trading zone, and many different nationalities were gathered there with many Italian and French businessmen.

This grandfather was fat when he was young but later this changed. I remember his eyes…  When he looked at you, you were finished…

He was always dressed elegantly. He wore European clothes and so did my grandmother. She was very coquette and fatty as was in fashion at the time. Her dresses were all embroidered and her hats had feathers. My grandfather was wearing a bow-tie and later he walked with a walking-stick. All my family wore European clothes as they were rather progressive. The only person I remember wearing traditional clothes when she left the house was the mother-in-law of the brother of my grandmother, who was visiting wearing a Kofya, a traditional headgear for Jewish women, which was all knitted with pearls.

What my mother told me is that when she was young every Passover, Pesach, and every New Year’s Eve, Rosh Hashanah, my grandfather bought for each of the kids a fez 7. Thessaloniki was the last city to be liberated from the Turks in 1913. When I see on television the recent Turkish series’ and when I visit Turkey I hear many Turkish words that I am familiar with. Words I heard from my grandfather and my father because they lived in the Ottoman Empire. For example, the word ‘kavgas’ which means fight, I thought it was a Hebrew word and recently I realized it is Turkish.

My grandfather Leon Moshe was very hard working and extremely strict. Jews were men dedicated to their family. My grandfather was the leader of his, a real ‘pater familias.’ I was watching this Turkish series on television and saying to myself, ‘This is Memik? That’s the name of the strict traditional grandfather in the series. Well, that’s my grandfather.’ Oh, he was really strict.

My grandmother Bienvenida was very good and open-hearted but also collected in front of the strict grandfather, yet it is impressive how she always managed to do what she herself wanted. My mother would say, ‘Grandmother asked to go to Spain to see Aunt Sylvia. Grandfather will never say yes.’ But of course they went to visit Sylvia in Spain.

Also, every year they went to France. You know, Thessaloniki was a cosmopolitan city, a small Paris, and it was also the Jews that were offering a particular flair to it. All Jews were civilized people; they had not lived in villages. Since they had no country of their own, as Israel didn’t exist then, they always lived in big cities. They had the particular radiation of the big cities.

• Growing up

I always happen to hear from friends, co-students etc., ‘I will go to my village.’ My village! Thessaloniki and later Athens were the only places I knew. And the Jews in Thessaloniki were more numerous compared to the Christian Greeks, a balance, which, of course, later changed. Thessaloniki was a city that shone. For example my grandfather and my grandmother would never go to Athens; they would go to Paris or to Vienna.

My aunt Sylvia, my mother’s sister, suffered from poliomyelitis and was handicapped. My grandfather would do whatever the doctors would tell him. One of them said, ‘Go, early in the morning, to the slaughter house and get the gall-bladder of a cow that’s just been slaughtered.

Bring it home and put the foot of the girl in it.’ They thought that this would make the nerves to operate again. And so Grandfather would take his carriage with the horses, bring the gall-bladder and put it, as a compress, on his daughter’s foot. Later, in 1914, he took her to Vienna to be treated, imagine, to Vienna in that period!

Even grandmother would go for her gynecological problems to Paris every year. Also, Grandfather would always be the first to go to the wood fairs, to Paris, to Germany etc.; he would also take my mother with him since she spoke French.

In our house, all the tapestry had been ordered by grandfather in Vienna. First came the fabric and then the walls were painted in the same color with golden leaves in blue enamel paint.

None of my grandfathers had gone to the army. It was the Turkish army and neither the Jews nor the Christians would go to the Turkish army. They would even tell the following anecdote: When children were born they would say to the local priest, ‘Father, the child is born; shall I declare it younger or older?

If I declare it older it will be too old and will not be taken to the army, if I declare it to young it will be too young to be taken to the army.’ ‘And why don’t declare the exact birth?’ ‘Is that true, can I do that?’

Or, if necessary, they would let the boys attend, for a couple of months, a priest school so that they wouldn’t be called to the army. This, of course, was valid for the Christians only, not for us. Anyhow, neither my grandfathers nor my father went to the army.

The number of Jews in Thessaloniki was quite high, sixty thousands. Jewish people were quite closely connected among themselves. During the very old days, the ones when I didn’t exist yet, the Jews were quite isolated and kept all the religious traditions, despite the fact that they were in the Diaspora. When they left Spain they locked their houses and took the key with them, as they thought they would return.

When Juan Carlos 8 came to Thessaloniki, the president of the Jewish community welcomed him in Spanish and said, ‘We speak your language, which we carried from that time and we still have our keys of those houses of ours in Spain.’

[‘Hablamos vuestra lingua que trajimos con mosotros cuanto mos huimos de España, i dainda tenemos las llaves de muestras cazas ay.’] Even today in Spain there are many names like our Jewish names as we also brought them with us from there.

Before the war, it was a world somehow secluded. Not that we didn’t have contacts with the Christians. On the contrary. You could see partnerships with one Jewish and on Christian name, and at school we were all together. In conclusion, it was a perfect adaptation.

They would even tell me, ‘Yvonne, you know our festivities better than us, and they would add, ‘Dominique, who knows when her name day may be?’ And I would answer, ‘On the 8th of January.’

Schools were closed during the Christian festivities and not ours. In conclusion, the assimilation was exceptionally high. Not that I forgot our own religion, not at all. Even if I wanted to there were my father, my mother, my grandmother etc.

• During the war

In that period there were many synagogues 9 in Thessaloniki. I remember our synagogue, the Beit Saoul 10. It was located one bus stop away from home. It was a very beautiful synagogue on the main street, but to enter it you had to walk a long narrow yard with trees and flowers on the left and on the right side of it, and when you reached the end of this yard you entered the synagogue.

All these synagogues were destroyed during the war and now there is only one synagogue left, the ‘big synagogue’ as we call it, the ‘Monastirioton’ 11. It is the only one that wasn’t destroyed as it became a Red Cross depot. Today, this synagogue, the ‘big synagogue’ opens only for special events, however in the Modiano market there is the ‘small synagogue’ [the ‘Yad Lezicaron’] which operates normally every day.

Before the war there were many Jewish organizations. I remember the Mizrachi Club 12, which was opposite our house on Cyprus Street. They even had a football team. In its localities they organized marriages, bar mitzvahs and it operated during the big festivities.

I remember the brides, the poor ones, coming, and upon the arrival of the bride by car, and while the people were waiting, one would say, ‘Aide take the bride for another ride with the car, for who knows when will be her next use of a car.’ You see, they were poor girls, servants etc.

Marriages were also held at the Matanot Laevionim 13, which means ‘presents for the poor.’ This was a charitable center that had been erected by my uncle Jacques, my mother’s brother. In the basement they were offering, every day, free meals to the poor children, on the first floor marriages were held.

At this place the engagement ceremony as well as the marriage of my uncle Jacques took place. A very nice marriage with live music, an orchestra and all kind of things…

I don’t know what this place is used for today. However, I remember that even during the occupation, they were offering free meals to the poor people. It was close to the Mizrachi Club. During that time there also existed a mikveh but I cannot recall where it was.

There were also many Jewish schools. There was the Alliance 14, the Talmud Torah for the less wealthy, I think, and also there were the ‘Lycée’ and the private Jewish schools of Altzeh, Gatenio, and Madame Yehode. The Jews were also going to the American College 15, the German school and the Greek private schools of Schina and Valagianni. I don’t remember any other schools.

There was the ‘Association des Anciens Elèves de l’ Alliance Francaise Universelle.’

Also there were many Jewish women welfare organizations because we had a lot of poverty. There were big areas of the city occupied by poor, very poor families. Usually our servants, who were sleeping in our house, came from those areas.

We were very many Jews living in the city, spread all over it. There were no exclusive Jewish quarters. Only the very poor neighborhoods were exclusively Jewish like the ‘151’ 16, the ‘7’… The ‘151’ was located higher than Harilaou, the other was close to the First Army Camps that is higher than Vasilissis Olgas, which was a central avenue.

On top of it was the Army Avenue and higher was an area called ‘koulibas,’ which means huts. Then there was another area next to the railway station [the Baron Hirsch], which during the occupation became the transport center for the trains that took the Jews to Auschwitz. In conclusion, there were many poor Jewish neighborhoods.

One poor Jewish neighborhood called ‘Campbell’ [where approximately 220 poor Jewish families lived] had been attacked by the ‘EEE’ or ‘3E’ 17. I remember that all were scared and it was the only subject of discussion. It was a wave of anti-Semitism.

When Venizelos 18 came, he brought with him anti-Semitism to Thessaloniki. The organization ‘EEE,’ which stands for National Union Hellas, had set the neighborhood on fire 19. They all said that Venizelos was behind it.

I don’t know, but I think that in a country and city where Jews live, giving them an element of civilization, they normally should be well taken care of. Hate is not good. Hate creates hate and violence brings violence. Being soft and good with people brings positive results.

If you behave well towards someone, he will certainly behave well towards you too. We are all together in it. When people are shouting, and someone wants to say something, if he speaks in low tone, immediately the others get silent in order to listen to him. What I mean to say is that people are copying and mimicking what the majority is doing.

The Jews of Thessaloniki covered all possible professions. Many were merchants, others tanners. They were so honest among themselves that it was said they were not asking for receipts. Their word was the receipt. This was said to me by an acquaintance, Mr. Noah, who was a merchant of cotton and wool.

Until once arrived someone who cheated him a big sum, and following this negative experience, he started asking for receipts. He said, ‘I didn’t want to take receipts, it was the others that forced me to.’

Also the Jews were the ones operating the port of Thessaloniki. They worked as porters, loaders, unloaders, etc. and these are the same people that set up the operation of the Haifa port. They had a particular pack-saddle on which they loaded what they transported. They were divided in different specializations. Specialists for carrying strong boxes, others for lighter loads, and specialists for weights over a hundred and fifty kilograms

I have seen pictures of these porters in the book of Yiannis Megas, ‘Memories of the life of Jewish community of Thessaloniki 1897-1917, editions Capon, Athens 1993.’ There you can see this particular saddle they were wearing, as also the traditional dress they used [antari]. I also remember house removals executed by using a long thin cart, very big. All the house furniture was loaded on this cart and it was pulled by one or two work-horses.

I remember that there were a number of cars in the city, not many private cars as compared to the taxis. Many taxis. And tram also, for public transport. And many cobbled streets. The big avenue, Vassilisis Olgas, was cobbled. And as the tram was passing on it, it made a huge noise. There were many other cobbled streets as well as many with earth and mud.

My father, Raphael Molho, was the first of ten siblings. Second was Saoul, who was very intelligent and had a lot of humor. When there was an engagement or marriage they would all gather at the grandparents’ house. Saoul was the clown of the family.

He survived Auschwitz because he behaved the same way with the Germans. He might have said to them, “Count on me on whatever you want,’ etc. He was very funny. He would say to his mother, ‘Mama sew me a button, please.’ ‘Amen, I will sew it, go and get married.’ ‘Mother, should I get married for a single button?’ Saoul got married but left his wife and child in Auschwitz. When he returned to Thessaloniki he remarried.

Then there was Gracia who died in Auschwitz, and so did her husband. They had no children.

The fourth child was Jacques. Jacques got married before the war, to a very beautiful girl called Daisy, and went to live in France. He worked in Grenoble, and they had a daughter.

Then there was Charles who lived in Belgium before World War II. He survived Auschwitz and returned to Belgium. He had no children.

The sixth child was Dario who stayed in Thessaloniki, and was deported and murdered in Auschwitz.

Then came the twins, Lisa and Bella. Lisa died in Auschwitz with her two children, while Bella had left earlier for Israel, then Palestine. She died there in 1980.

The youngest brother, Alberto, survived Auschwitz but left there his wife and two daughters. When he returned he remarried and had a son called Joseph.

There was also Mois, who had committed suicide for romantic reasons, but I know nothing more about him.

Both my father and his brothers and sisters graduated from the German School of Thessaloniki, which was a private school. Out of my uncles four came back from the concentration camps in Germany, because they knew the German language.

Before the war, the Jews of Thessaloniki were very fond of Germany. Most families would get a ‘Schwester,’ that is, a sister/governess, in their houses from Germany. Of course this changed later….

My mother is Erietta, nee Moshe. In her family there were two sisters and two brothers, Jacques, Mario, Erietta and Sylvia. One of my uncles, Jacques Moshe, was very well known as he was the best engineer in Greece. My grandfather had brought to his home a ‘Schwester’ – Gelda was her name I believe – whose husband had died in World War I in 1914, and she was the teacher of the children at my mother’s house.

If there is a reason that my mother got out of the Haidari camp, a prison in Athens – because she was caught – as well as my grandfather, my grandmother and Uncle Jacques, it was because of the knowledge of the German language.

My mother had gone to school at the Alliance. I think that schooling lasted three years at the time. They were taught sewing, housekeeping, and then they arranged to get them married.

My mother was friends with the twin sisters of my father, Lisa and Bella. This is how she got to know my father. My father was working with his own father, and he also had his own big land, ‘tsiflic,’ from the Turks.

My grandfather constructed for my mother’s marriage in 1917 a set of very good furniture. And then came the big fire of Thessaloniki in 1917 20 and all was burned. Of course the marriage wasn’t postponed. So after the marriage my grandfather made new furniture for his daughter.

When they got married they first bought an apartment overlooking the sea like in Venice. Right in front of it, the waters were deep, so my mother used to put us in a rowboat and we were going opposite to Alexander the Great, where the waters were shallow and people were swimming, and we would also swim with our mother.

I was born in the month of June and when I was two months old, Mother must have taken me into the sea to swim. Later both my sister and myself, when we had whooping cough, and as they said that the sea would be good for us, my mother kept on taking us swimming with the boat. At this particular house there was a common yard that we shared with the apartment next door. Jews, very good people. They do not exist any more.

Also, on the other side lived Sonia Petridou, whose origins were from Russia, divorced with two children, who wasn’t on speaking terms with us. I’m not sure whether she was divorced or not, but we never saw a husband. One evening she was very sick, so her daughter Milia, who was the same age as my sister, came to us and called in the night, ‘Mrs. Errieti, Mrs. Errieti, please come.’

And my mother called the doctor and stayed next to her continuously for two days until she got well. After that Sonia told her, ‘I never thought that you Jews were like that.’ She came from Russia and it seems they had anti-Semitism there. Anyhow, after that incident they became good friends.

We left this house when I was six years old because it was very cold and my mother suffered from rheumatism. I remember we didn’t have parquet, that is wooden flooring but tarpaulin, and as the wind, the northern wind of Thessaloniki called Vardaris, was blowing, we could see the tarpaulin pieces moving. So we left that place and went to live at my grandmother’s.

Their house was also close to the sea. First there was the sea, then Queen Olga Avenue, and right after it was Cyprus Street and the Archaeological Museum Street perpendicular to Cyprus Street and Queen Olga Avenue.

The street where we lived started at Archaeological Museum Street and ended at Karaiskaki Street. The area was called ‘Pate – Phaliro’ and where it was situated, I could get out of the house, on the balcony, and see the sea right in front of me.

Cyprus Street was not a big street. It was a residential street. It had nine or ten houses, and in every house on each floor lived one family. In the house next door, which had three floors, lived three families. Only in our house, on two floors, it was just us, while normally it could have accommodated two families. We stayed in this house quite a long time, almost all our life.

The house was facing Cyprus Street, but its back part, the garage where Uncle Jacques was parking his car, was facing the street in the back, Broufa Street. In the front was the good big door, which was the door we used to enter.

However, there was another door, a smaller one, with a corridor that led to the kitchen. This is the door that the grocer used when he was bringing us our shopping.

A characteristic of this house was the quantity of honeysuckle. Honeysuckle covered the two pillars on which the door was hanging, and there was so much that sometimes we had difficulties to fully open this door. The house was dubbed ‘the house with the honeysuckle.’ In the morning, when I was leaving for school, it smelled so intensely and from such a distance that I kept its smell in my nostrils all day long.

Upon entering there was a straight surface, on the left a small garden and the marble escalator with its handrail covered with honeysuckle. The house was full of its smell. One bedroom was facing this small garden and the other two bedrooms were looking at the back port. The kitchen was facing the yard where there was also honeysuckle.

Next to the garage there was a house where some friends of ours lived. They were Jews that lived in the city of Kavala. The father was a tobacco merchant and they would come for a few days and stay at his mother’s house in Thessaloniki. I met these people later in Athens and we became good friends.

With the older brother of this family – he does not live anymore – we were playing together. He died in a car accident. Back then we were playing ball. It was not usual at all, playing ball from balcony to balcony, we could have broken window-panes, of course, so the parents would shout at us, but it was fun.

Also, this home of ours shared a common wall with the home of my grandmother’s brother, which was also a two-story house. Inside our house on the wall, next to the escalator, we had opened a big hole in the wall, like a door, and we could come and go from our home to the home of my mother’s uncle and aunt.

The uncle was called Jacob Florentin, but we called him ‘Pasha,’ which is a Turkish word, because he was very handsome. His wife was Aunt Esterina and they had five children, two boys and three girls. The oldest one, Sylvia got married at the age of 14 in Paris. She only died three years ago.

I loved her very much. The oldest son, Mevo, went to the army and the other son, Leon, was sent to Israel [then Palestine] when he was very young, to the first farm school, during the British Mandate, that was around 1933.

The second daughter, Jeanne, was the same age as my older sister. They were also sharing the same milk as both mothers took turns in breast feeding the two girls. The youngest one, Dolly, was two or three years younger than me, so we were growing up all together.

Each Sunday we were playing ‘tombola.’ I still remember the pieces an when it was piece 22 my uncle would shout, ‘Ducklings, suckling,’ and when it was the 11, ‘Wood nails, wood nails.’ Wood nails were those small thin wooden nails used to repair high quality shoes.

I remember my mother and Mrs. Soli and Mrs. Regina playing cards in the afternoons. Mother had many friends, who she knew through Grandmother, as Grandmother also liked to play cards and they were gathering at her place to play. Father didn’t know and never played cards. Neither did Grandfather. But Grandmother did, she liked it. She was a gambler.

Our house was a family home. Of course, with the many brothers my father had, we organized big dinners on the holidays. It was a custom at those dinners to have ‘uevos enchaminados,’ eggs cooked in the oven. We put them in the oven all night, as today we do with a casserole.

We cover the bottom of the casserole with dry onion leaves, tea, coffee, pepper and salt and then we put a layer of eggs and then again onions etc. and again add some olive oil and we let them boil for six or seven hours.

These eggs come out brown on the outside, and brownish like marble inside and have a special taste. These eggs were normally prepared on the high holidays such as Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, but even on ordinary days, as to some they are irresistible.

Another custom we had on Pesach and Rosh Hashanah was to exchange visits. My father would visit all the family and all the relatives would visit us with their children and we exchanged eggs. We would visit the other homes and return with eggs in our pockets. This was the custom.

I also remember that on Yom Kippur we were supposed to fast. My mother would bring us chestnuts, as it was their season, and would say, ‘Children, if you get hungry eat the chestnuts but do it in secret.’ So my friends Mendi Hassid, myself and Dolly from the next house would sit secretly together, clean the chestnuts, powder them with sugar and eat them. We would call them ‘the grandfather.’ I can’t remember why.

At home the language we were speaking was Spanish, or Judeo-Espanol, but also French and Greek. My parents, however, when they wanted to share a secret would use German, which we didn’t understand.

We also had a servant at home, to help with the housework. The only thing she never did was to cook, as this was the job of my mother and my grandmother. The ladies would cook as they didn’t do much more. They didn’t go out either; they would cook in big stoves like fireplaces with the ash falling down.

In the bathroom we had a water-heater operating with wood and in the winter we would heat the rooms with beautiful wood burning porcelain stoves, which were manufactured in Vienna. We had two such stoves, one of them was very big and you could lift the cover to heat cheese pies and other things.

At that time we would eat mostly pies. The traditional meal, even on Friday evening, was a pie. Cheese pie, eggplant pie, etc. One of these two stoves is now at my niece’s house.

When I was young I was taken care of by my grandmother and my mother. My father was very good but rather strict. As for me, I was very energetic, a monster!

The Jews of Thessaloniki were good husbands and family men. Even now I hear Christians saying, ‘I would very much like a Jew as husband for my daughter.’ The importance of family was highly appreciated by the Jews of Thessaloniki. The men would become good husbands and the women good mothers.

Now, of course, things have changed, as there has been a lot more elastic attitudes, but in that period we were living all together; my grandmother Molho, for example, would certainly pay a visit to our place at least twice a week.

In that period there was no telephone. It is worth mentioning that when Grandmother wanted to pay a visit to a relative, we would have to send a person, usually the grocer who was carrying our shopping, to pass the news for the forthcoming visit. There was no other way.

We installed our telephone at home in 1934. I remember once we called from Thessaloniki to Athens, as my uncle, Jacques, the engineer, also had an office in Athens and was traveling a lot. He had many construction sites in Thessaloniki like the Macedonian Studies building, the Mediterranean Hotel and others, many, many. So once we called Athens – via a telephone center and an operator, of course.

I was eight years old at the time and I remember that all the adults were very impressed. My mother and grandmother would say to everyone, ‘We did it, we talked with Athens.’ The also wrote about this news to Aunt Sylvia in Spain.

What a celebration! At that time, the most someone could do was to send a telegram, and the telegram was mostly used in order to inform people unexpected – of sudden news, like a death, an engagement, etc.

My father, I remember, would read French books. My mother didn’t read very much. They would both go to the Mizrachi club which was opposite our house and would be open for example on Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah. As for myself I wouldn’t go with them to the synagogue, we didn’t go very often. I remember going many times to the Beit Saoul synagogue for marriages though.

My parents were not involved with political parties as politics didn’t enter our house. Of course they always were conservatives, never leftists. I believe the only club my father would go is Alliance and this is, by itself, impressive as he had graduated from the German school.

When I was a kid I played a lot. Always with boys. We used to play ‘thieves and policemen’ for example, in our second home on Cyprus Street. I was always playing the policeman and of course my knees were continuously wounded. At the Hirsch Hospital 21, now it’s called the Hippocratio Hospital, they knew me very well as  I was a frequent visitor, once to have the one leg stitched, next time the other etc.

In that period we were frequently going to Aidipsos for baths, since the hot springs there were considered very healthy. We would first go by boat to Volos. The boat would stop at the Volos port for loading and we would go for a walk, using a small train, and then we would return to the boat, when it was loaded, and it would then take us to Aidipsos. There was no other way of going there at that time. Upon arrival there, the porter would come to carry our belongings and we would walk to the hotel.

In Thessaloniki we didn’t go to restaurants, we would normally stay at home, while my parents would rarely go the movies or to an evening party organized by an uncle. It was a rather conservative family life and there were almost no restaurants. I remember one restaurant called ‘Olympus-Naoussa.’

To the movies we were going quite frequently in Thessaloniki. Many cinemas, after the film, would also have theatrical performances. There  was the Apollo [at the eastern port of the city], the Alexander the Great [a music hall – night club by the sea at 62, Queen Olga Avenue]. I only remember these two.

I remember my mother saying to everyone that she would go to the theater to see ‘Dybbuk’ by An-ski 22, and she went to see it twice with my father.

Alexander the Great was by the sea, where we were going to swim. As there was no mixed swimming then, boys were swimming with boys and girls with girls. During the summer, Alexander the Great had also a stage.

Many famous actors and actresses, all the big names, would come to perform, like Hero Hatza and others whose names I don’t remember. When I grew up and came to live in Athens, when I saw them, in local theater performances, I recognized them, as I had seen them before in Thessaloniki, but had not kept their names in mind. Hero Hatzas, [Kyriacos] Mavreas, and many others.

They played ‘Les deux orphelines,’ [by A. Ph. Dennery, 1897]. I was insistent, asking my mother continuously, to take me to see it but she refused. Finally she gave in and took me to see it, and I was crying throughout the duration of the play, as I remember.

In Thessaloniki at that time there were no theatrical groups or actors, but theatrical companies would visit the city as part of their tour. This is happening today too, theatrical tours to Thessaloniki. Mesologgitis would come to play and he would make us laugh very much. I don’t remember other theaters, only these two.

I also remember, Palace 23, at the old quay, which was a cinema, and so was Ilysia. There was also the Pathé, which was very close to where we lived in Phaliron and Constantinidi Street. The street has this name as earlier the Constantinides School was located there. Today the School of the Blind and a baby nursery are in its place.

Very close was also the French nursery school called ‘The children of the Lycée.’ I went there for a year because it was very close to our house at the Constantinidis bus station.

For elementary school I went to the Jewish school in order to acquire the principles. We had various lessons, religion too. We learned about Ruth, the sacrifice of Abraham, the fat and the thin cows. Everything was taught in the Greek language, but two hours a week we also had Hebrew. We also had French every day as this language was spoken as frequently as Greek.

Out of my teachers I remember Miss Paula who was teaching us Greek. Later, when I was in the third or fourth grade, she was appointed by the state and left. We also had house keeping, needlecraft, drawing, painting, things like that. We also had history of the Greek Revolution, Composition and all the other lessons.

Only in the morning we would say our own prayer, ‘Shema Israel.’ I remember our Hebrew teacher, who had a wooden ruler, and when he asked something we didn’t know he hit us with the ruler straight on the nail.

After the elementary school I took exams to go to the gymnasium, the secondary school.

I went to the 2nd Girls’ Gymnasium which was a public school. It was a very good school, not only in terms of teaching. There were many girls from good families, but also poor girls like the daughters of the launderers and others... We had classmates from all sort of origins.

I was a good student and never had problems with my professors. After Rika Coulandrou, I was the second of my class with regards to my academic excellence. Rika is also a microbiologist and now lives in Psychiko. Her marital name is now Constandinidou.

After many years she told me that while at school she had felt anxiety that I would surpass her, because we were almost equal in performance.

I had another classmate, Kate Palaisti, who was a niece of the great singer Marica Palaisti; I remember her very well as she always had a runny nose. This Kate I met many, many years later in New York through my nephew Laki Reccanati, who lives there. It is a long story… And I met some other classmates again too, like Danai, whom I found quite recently, and it was a happy occasion as I remembered the past.

I also remember best friend Vouli, who got married to Bassias, a radiologist in Thessaloniki. Another friend of mine is the daughter of the doorkeeper, not a close friend but a friend. She also got married to a very good doctor in Heracleio Athens, or South Patissia.

We talk on the phone from time to time. This is the right thing to do, that is, to keep in touch and be on ridded neither in your thinking nor on your judgment.

I have to admit that as a trained doctor I never took notice getting into a poor or rich house. I never made a distinction. I always looked at the person, what he or she was never mattered and was left out, and this is how things should be. I did the same thing with my son, exactly as I had been taught by my grandfather.

I remember in first and second grade of the gymnasium we went to the parade. We went next to the beach, where there’s a street for cars now, while at that time it was only for walking – 25th March Street.

We had a pass for the bus, paying half the fare, we would pay for a semester or a whole year, so that we didn’t have to carry money for transport but just had to show our pass to the bus-driver.

Opposite our school was the 5th Gymnasium for Boys and there were many handsome boys there. As for me, I was rather young, but we had the intelligent ones, the ‘vivid’ as we called them. What vivid, it is crap. They were only looking in the eyes, this was the vividness. So as we were passing in front of the boys’ gymnasium and going towards the waterfront the boys would call us, ‘One two, one two. Chest out, the first one, chest out.’

Except for school I was also attending the music school and the English institute. The institute was at Aristotelous Place, where we were going by tram and when we finished we were together going to Flocaki, a patisserie which started in Thessaloniki and today is a chain all over Greece, to eat a pastry. Back then there was the Flocas and the little Floca, the Flocaki as we called it, which was located in a small street, Agiou Minas Street, in the center of Thessaloniki.

remember some particular pastries called ‘Plaisir des Dames’ which were round. Actually it was a roll with chocolate outside and cream chocolate filling. The sweets at Flocas were rather small as compared to other more popular sweet-makers whose sweets were huge.

I was very impressed when I went to the United States, to Astoria, the Greek center, where I got into a pastry shop called ‘The White Tower.’ It reminded me very much those neighborhood pastry shops with pastries as big as a plate, while at Flocas pastries were small and elegant.

The music school was at the grounds of the International Fair of Thessaloniki 24. It was easy to go there on foot. I recall that when I started going there, my mother knew every detail of what I was doing there and I kept wondering how my mother managed to learn everything in detail.

Once, while visiting my Molho grandmother, I saw Aunt Gracia talking to Mr. Karantsis, who was the director of the music school. He was living next to my grandmother and aunt, and then I knew how my mother was so well informed. I was about nine years old at that time. Those years were very good, I also had friends from the music school and my teacher there was Mrs. Emily, who was a Jew.

And later I was a member of the mixed chorus of Mr. Floros and once we sang at the Palace theater house that song which says ‘Alleluia.’ Kaufman sang solo the ‘Ave Maria’ and we accompanied her. At that time there were two piano schools; one was Margarite’s and the other Kaufman’s, who was a German Jew. The Kaufman that sang solo was his daughter. The performance was very beautiful, and I still have vivid memories of it.

We even got an award. Where is this award? Well, we left [during the Holocaust] and what did we find afterwards? Nothing! We had given things to people to hide for us, and when we returned my mother would see the same things at their houses but they would say, ‘There is nothing left, they took everything from us.’ What to say.

The best of all was that we were girl scouts. Every Saturday we gathered at the YMCA. The place where recently, in September 2005, there was a big fire. I was a girl scout and we were all divided in four groups, the leader and the deputy leader. The group I was in was called ‘Amarantos.’ We were six girl scouts and our chief was Lena Zanna, the mother of Samaras, a Greek politician and granddaughter of Delta 25.

How much did I wish for Saturday to arrive. We did a lot of things. We played detection games; we did our good deed every month, carrying flour and sugar to a poor family. Small things, but they wanted to teach to us how to help, to offer help to our fellow humans.

My clover-leaf had the number 124. 124, I was on the second team that Mrs. Zanna, the daughter of Mrs. Delta, was the trustee of and so was Mrs. Syndika. I was always carrying this clover-leaf with me, for it to bring me good luck, in all my examinations at university. The clover-leaf and a teddy bear.

As I mentioned before, my father was strict. My parents didn’t permit me to go to parties. Right opposite our house was ‘Radio Tsiggiridi.’ This was the first radio station in Thessaloniki, once I was invited to a party there by the son of the Tsiggiridi family.

My father refused to give me permission. This same son, Tsiggiridi, I met a few years ago in Athens, at a tea party he had at his place. That’s when I remembered this little episode.

My father also didn’t give me permission to go for an excursion with the girl scouts. They had planned to go to Lake Doirani. I went to bed early and left the blinds open so that the morning sun would wake me up.

However, my father came in at night and shut the blinds. That’s how I woke up late and missed the excursion. You see, we were not going on big excursion at school, so I had been looking forward to this one with very high expectations.

At school we were going for walks, to Aretsou. Once with the girl scouts we even went to Perea. I spent long hours in the sun and got sunburned, I returned home red from the sunburn. I was a very energetic child, a monster; if I had been in my father’s place, I would have been as strict as him.

However, I was permitted to go to the movies. Uncle Dario, who later died in Auschwitz, had a cinema of his own. So he gave me a permit, a ‘passe partout,’ to get in the cinema free of charge.

This way I would take with me a friend and we would get in without paying. At 2 o’clock the screening started. When I could, I would go at 4 o’clock, that is from 4 to 6, but my mother always knew. I had her permission as at that time I was only 14 years old.

I didn’t graduate from the gymnasium in Thessaloniki, as it closed during the war and I came here, to Athens. After the schools opened we covered three school years in three months so that we wouldn’t lose out on time. I really was ‘illiterate,’ all those lessons I read later on my own, and following those three months of schooling I got into the medical school in 1943.

At the declaration of the war with the Italians 26 we were in Thessaloniki. I remember that despite the fact that I was a young girl, I went to the hospital and asked to work there as a volunteer. As I had won the first award of the girl scouts in first aid I had the impression to have won the entire world.

When the doctor saw me, a girl that young, well, what could he tell me? He said, ‘We want volunteers, but for the time being we are not that desperate and when we will really need you we will inform you.’ And I was left in deep sorrow to return home.

I said to myself, now with the schools closed, unemployment etc. what can I do? So I learned how to knit and started going to the rabbi’s wife with another 15 ladies to knit pullovers for the army. In the beginning I knitted straight but later I also learned to knit with five needles for gloves and seamless socks, so that they would be smooth to the skin.

When the Italians declared the war, bombings started. Our houses, which were made of stone, were not that strongly built and couldn’t survive a bombing. So we decided to build an air raid shelter. This shelter was on the lower floor.

It was a corridor that led from the servant’s room to the kitchen, and this door we closed, my uncle put reinforced concrete cement and I don’t know what else. The people living next door were also coming to this shelter. In order to deal with our fear my parents would say, ‘We have no fear because if the bomb falls at the front side of the shelter we will come out from the back side.’ I really think that had a bomb fell upon us everything would have come down. My aunt would not come, as she had moved to a house in front of the sea.

With the bombings we decided to come to Athens in 1941. My grandfather, my mother and myself. Especially since during the summer, while we were at Aidipsos, happened the incident with the navy ship ‘Elli,’ which was bombed and sunk.

My grandmother was already in Athens, at my uncle Mario’s, as she had decided not to go to Paris for her yearly gynecological treatment, but chose Athens instead. She had even taken my sister with her. This way we all met here, in Athens.

When we left for Athens from Thessaloniki, it was during the Albanian war, and the trains were carrying the army, so we took a bus. It was grandfather, my mother and myself. It was an old bus with 16 seats, and we got into it, twenty persons, Jews as well as Christians.

The Germans had not arrived yet. We left early one Tuesday morning in March, and we arrived in Athens on Friday in the afternoon. It took us over three days for such a short trip.

It was then that a small earthquake shook Larissa and our driver almost fell asleep on the steering wheel. They would wake him up and shout at him, so that he wouldn’t fall asleep, but they insisted that he wouldn’t stop at Larissa due to the tremor. Thursday night we slept in Thiva, in a hotel full of bugs and fleas.

Early on Friday morning we heard the sirens as the city was bombarded, and we left and it took us five hours to reach Athens. Can you imagine it, five hours to Athens from Thiva? At the end of our trip we saw the Acropolis and couldn’t believe it in our joy.

And another thing: we had paid four or five golden sovereigns per person for the whole trip, and all during this trip I was traveling on my mother’s knees. I don’t remember how many ‘kokorakia, small roosters’ I swallowed during this trip – this was the word we used for aspirins.

When we arrived in Athens, we were accommodated at my Uncle Mario’s place, who lived on Ploutarchou Street in Kolonaki, from March to September. Uncle Jacques was staying on the top floor, the penthouse, on Kriezotou Street, but it was a very small place. In April the Germans entered and occupied Athens, and they set up camp on Ploutarchou Street.

At that point in time the racist legislation had not been passed yet, so we had no problem. We even talked on the phone with my father in Thessaloniki. He wouldn’t come to Athens. He would say, ‘I have my job to take care of, my brothers too, we will see, I will come later.’

We stayed here, in Athens, and made two big efforts to arrange for my father to come here: once with a boat owner and once with the help of a policeman. Unfortunately he was arrested in a roadblock two hours before departing for Athens. He was taken to Auschwitz and never came back.

In April we rented a furnished apartment at Ypsilantou 41 and Marasli Street, which was very close to my uncle Mario’s on Ploutarchou and Ypsilandou Street. It was a small apartment with an entrance, a bathroom to the right and the sitting room and a dining room.

The kitchen could be shut out and didn’t look like kitchen. It was the first time that I saw such a thing, like a sliding cupboard that would shut the kitchen out. The bedroom that my grandparents were using had a balcony looking out on Ypsilantou Street.

We were the only ones that also had a stove and when it was very cold the neighbors would come to warm up. On the floors there were carpets. In front of my grandparents’ room was a storage space under the floor, where we would put our suitcases etc. In this storage space I was saved later.

My sister had been hiding with the Karounidis family, who were ship-owners, while I went to a house in Pangrati to baby-sit a child. However, I didn’t stay as the man of the family behaved with what we describe today as sexual harassment, and this is why I left within a week and returned home. After I left, I stayed at my aunt’s so that I could be with my cousin May.

This is when my uncle learned about the new racist legislation, so we left and hid in Agia Paraskevi. There, there was a farm, but as we were afraid that the local people had understood that we were hiding, we left and went to stay at Tavros. The house was owned by the aunt of Koula, the Christina fiancée of the son of Nissim, who lived in Paris.

But even there, my uncle recognized somebody working at a neighboring farm, who used to work at a grocery shop in Kolonaki, and so we were forced to move from there too. I went back to our apartment, my uncle hid close to the Acropolis and my aunt with her daughter May, who had finished German studies in Dresden, Germany, found a job as an in-house teacher of German for the child of some lady. As for myself, I once again had to find a place to hide.

My uncle Mario had a friend called Aristotelis Stamatiadis, who was working at the Ionian Popular Bank. He sent me to a friend of his in Ekali, I remember I went in the morning to the bank wearing a scarf and looking down so that nobody would recognize me.

Mr. Stamatiadis took me to Mr. Telemachos Apostolpoulos, the bank manager. He died recently, at the age of 104, and he was included on the list of the Righteous Among the Nations 27 by Yad Vashem 28.

His sister, Toula, was the secretary of the National Bank manager, but she had been transferred to the office of Archbishop Damaskinos 29. Damaskinos was a ‘shelter,’ protecting whatever you could imagine: communists, New Zealanders, who had fought with Australians and Greeks against the Germans, when Germany invaded Greece, Jews etc.

My G-d how much he helped us [the interviewee starts crying]. I put myself in his position and ask myself would I risk as much as Archbishop Damaskinos did or Toula, or Memis, Telemachos. It happened because we were facing the same enemy, or maybe it is because we Greeks are great souls.

This is how I went to live in Ekali and I had with me the Physics books, as this was the only subject left from my first year’s exams. The professors was Mr. Hondros, he was a special man with great courage.

On 25th March, the national holiday, when we were not in hiding yet, he had gathered a group of us, students, and we went to the Hero’s Tomb to crown it, with a garland made of grass and herbs. We also sang the national anthem, and when the Italians realized what was going on they came after us and hit us in order to force us to scatter.

This house in Ekali was a three-story villa belonging to Mrs. Apostolopolou’s daughter who, in order to keep away the Germans, who could have requisitioned it, somehow managed to get a medical diagnosis, saying that she was suffering from psychological neurological problems and that it was me who would be occupied as governess there. There was also a gardener and a young girl for doing small jobs. It was good there.

Opposite there were some houses, where another Jewish family was hiding, with two children, but they weren’t very smart, as every Sunday they had a party. Once I had heard the lady talking in the street to her children and saying, ‘This is not possible, these kids, I am unable to get used to your new names!’ That’s how I knew they were Jews.

However the gardener, who at the same time was like a porter, going from one house to the other, he knew all the details and spilled them out, and he informed us about the party and what sort of meatballs the people next door cooked.

Mrs. Apostolopoulou would always say to him, ‘And what do we care about all these details Kostas?’ And then he informed us that the Antoniadou family were Jews in reality and their last name was Levi and this was a piece of information given to him very confidentially.

Throughout the occupation I very rarely went to see my mother. On 27th January I went to see them. When I visited I would normally sleep at Mrs. Maria Papadimouli’s place, next door.

My family lived at 41 Ypsilandtou Street, while they stayed at No. 39. Mr. Papadimoulis was a pharmacist at the Evagelismos hospital, while Mrs. Maria was making orthopedic corsets. They were good people and neighbors and, as I said, when I was visiting my family I stayed for the night at their place.

On that particular night of 27th January, my mother told me, ‘Yvonne, there is a party in the neighborhood tonight, there will be people coming and going and you will certainly be seen. And of course they will ask why you are here, so why go? You will stay here.’

I went to make my bed and Mother told me, ‘Leave it, we will share the same bed, we will talk and hold each other.’ I agreed. That was the night that the diplomatic relations between Argentina and Germany broke down. My family were Argentinean subjects but with faulty papers. At midnight the bell rang.

The sixth sense of my mother saved us. Had I been on a bed by myself, when the Germans came looking into our house, even if I had had the time to hide, a used, lukewarm bed would have given me away. This way we rushed, opened the storage space under the floor, I hid in it and my mother put the carpet on top.

My family didn’t open the door immediately in order to give me time to hide my belongings. And so, when the Germans came in, who in the meantime had rung many other doorbells, they didn’t find me. I stayed in this hiding place for two and a half hours, and throughout this time I was praying silently.

That night, the Germans had gone to other apartments too. First they went to Admiral Petroheilos, who was new to the block of apartments and didn’t know us. Then they went to Mr. Litsos as Mr. Petroheilos sent them to him. After him they came to us: ‘Are you the Moshe family? You are under arrest as the diplomatic relations between Argentina and Germany have broken down.’

They went into my grandparents’ room, stepping on the top cover of the hiding place I was in, and I could hear their steps: ‘Bam boom, bam boom, made their boots!’ At some moment I heard my grandmother asking, ‘Where will you take us?’ and he replied, ‘Tonight to a palace and tomorrow to Germany.’

This ‘tomorrow to Germany’ was actually the Haidari concentration camp where they stayed for seven months. I also remember the Germans telling them, ‘Whatever you have with you, furs, jewelry etc. take it with you as it is cold out there.’

My mother pretended to wear some gloves and as she was wearing some rings, she threw them into the gloves and saved them, and as she had also her jewelry, she was informing me, and so did my grandfather, in Spanish of what exactly they were doing. ‘Yvonne, here I place some papers’…and this and that… and mother said, ‘All the jewelry is in the little beige bag of mine, and I put it behind the bathtub.’

Anyhow, they took grandfather and grandmother. ‘Ai, Ai,’ I thought to myself, ‘they are going to hit my mother.’ But it was not like that. They had come with a small car, a Fiat 500, so they couldn’t fit in all of them. So they left my mother with the interpreter. This Greek ruffian, the traitor who was speaking Greek!

As my mother got into the room she saw him opening the drawers of a commode. ‘What are you doing there,’ shouted my mother, ‘you didn’t come to search our place, you came to arrest us, so shut it immediately.’

Mother had her own ways, you see. And then I heard mother calling out to the neighbor, ‘Mrs. Maria, the three of us are leaving, so please keep an eye on the apartment.’ Mrs. Maria, of course, knew very well that I was in there. Anyhow, I waited for an hour and I heard steps on the escalator.

It was Mr. Litsos, the landlord, who was coming down … the staircase was wooden. He was fond of Germans as he had studied in Germany and worked for the Germans. He went out to see the German stamp outside the house. Earlier I had heard my mother saying that after stamping the house, they would also cut the power.

I waited, and waited for Litsos to go and came out of my hiding place with great difficulty, as it had been stuck from the Germans walking on it. I came out like a snake and was still scared that they would see me. I got dressed in the dark, because I was afraid there might be a German guard outside the house.

Opposite our place lived a girl whose father was English and her mother was German. This way they had very good relations with both the English and the Germans. So I went to her and told her, “could I please bring you some stuff for hiding”?

My mother had a suitcase, this suitcase had been brought from Thessaloniki and it was full of things, my sister’s dowry, and what not. So I took the suitcase and without opening the door, it was the basement, I got out the window with the suitcase.

Earlier the Germans had insisted to lock the door leading to the balcony as it looked onto Ypsilandou Street and my grandfather had said, ‘I will do it,’ and he locked it and then quickly unlocked it again and said to them, ‘Now the house is properly locked and here is the key, which I give to you.’ And in Spanish he added, for me to hear, ‘The door is open, so you will jump from the balcony.’

So I came out of the kitchen window and went to the girl next door, who had already agreed to accept the things. I left the suitcase and went to bring more stuff and when I returned I found all my things outside, and the girl informing me that her mother was afraid that ‘if the Germans would come to search they will think we are dealers of stolen goods.’,

In short that they cannot accept them. So I responded OK, and took all these thing and gave them to Mrs. Maria. Well, at some point we moved from that place, Mrs. Maria never gave them back to us, what to do.

I stayed at Mrs. Maria’s up to six in the morning and left. I took Ypsilandu Street, then Ploutarchou and wanted to inform my sister that the family had been caught. At Ploutarchou Street, to the right, were the ‘Goblet’ is now, was a bakery that had a telephone. At that period all bakers were very severe. Anyhow I informed my sister and went back to Ekali where I was usually hiding.

My sister was issued with a Christian identity card as [Angelos] Evert 30, the [Athens] police chief, had given to everyone false papers. I don’t know how many golden sovereigns the false papers cost.

Later, when I went to the Fix family I learned details about the location of my mother and my grandparents. All these details we learned from Soeur Hélène, a nun who frequently came to the Fix family as they were helping us. They would send food to the people in hiding etc. and she had been allowed to enter the Haidari camp and this is how she learned that my mother was there.

My mother had learned about me from a friend of my sister. She arranged to escape and leave for the Middle East. Many went to the Middle East at that time. However, the guy who was paid the golden sovereigns to let them go betrayed them so they were caught, taken back to the Haidari camp and finally were sent to Auschwitz where she was killed.

Her name was Daisy Saltiel, and she was married to Carasso. When they first caught them they were taken to Haidari camp. Since Daisy was in touch with my sister, she learned what happened to me and this is how my mother learned it too.

For long months my mother would wait every midnight, when the police van would arrive and she would climb up to look out from the small window high up in her cell to see if they were unloading my sister or me. It also was from Daisy that she learned that I had come out of the hiding place under the floor and was safe.

In the neighborhood where I was staying, there was a guy called Spanopoulos, who had rented a house there and was occupied with gardening and who, during the winter, was occupied with delivering heating carbon. It seems that in February the people next door didn’t have the money to pay for the carbon and he betrayed them to the Germans.

Some day in February, maybe a month after they had caught my mother, they came to knock at my door: a German, a Greek ruffian and a translator. When I opened, the Greek asked me where Spanopoulos stayed. I told him.

Normally I should have recognized the fat guy, as he was the same that had come to arrest my family at our place in Ploutarchou. However, at that moment I didn’t think anything bad, I must have had some sort of peculiar reaction, hit by the February sun, and I thought of nothing bad. I said to myself, they may want to confiscate something.

Five minutes later comes the gardener and tells me, ‘Ioanna, the Germans are at the Levi’s place, they are hitting them and telling them that if they betray the other Jews hiding here they will leave their children alone.’ I cut him short and ask him, ‘And what do I care about it, Kostas?’ The Levi family didn’t betray me; it was the Christian servant who had been taking care of the kids all their lives, who betrayed me.

So I leave the house and go on foot to the other side of Ekali, phoned my sister and asked her to find Apostolopoulos and inform them on what had happened. She didn’t find them and upon returning I found Mrs. Maria out of control: ‘Oh what did my son do to me.’ And things like that and that the Germans are looking for me. I went into the room and when I tried to get out I realized she had locked me in, so I got out through the balcony.

I returned to the same grocery shop with the telephone and called again my sister who had managed to get in touch with Apostolopoulos. She informed me that I should leave immediately. I don’t know where I found the courage, but I returned to the house, collected my belongings and left.

As the night was approaching and the buses were not that frequent, I went through the meadow, after that to the public road and there I asked a passing van to give me a lift to Athens where, supposedly, my sister was giving birth.

So I returned back home and once again they found me another job, not as a servant but as a slave. The husband had lost a big fortune, he was suffering from neurasthenia and he was sleeping with a bayonet in his hand. The house was also rather big, and the work there was very hard. I stayed until May. Then they found me another job as a chambermaid, cook and child minder of two kids.

On 18th May I presented myself to the Fix family, opposite Zapeio, but we immediately left to go to their farm in Magoufana [today Pefki]. I had a very nice time with them and we are still friends. They even gave me a false identity card, from the ones that Evert was issuing. My false name was Ioanna Marinopoulou.

My mother, while she was in Haidari, was a needlewoman. As she knew how to make clothes, all the girls of the Athens high society who were with the resistance, would come to my mother and say, ‘Mrs. Molho, give us something to sew.’ And she would give them a button here, a fastener there.

You see, in the morning, the Germans would empty the Jewish houses from clothing and in the evening they would bring these clothes to Haidari, to be repaired and then sent to Germany to be used by them.

Even my uncle Jacques Moshe was taken to Haidari and immediately made to work as an engineer. My grandfather in 1940 was 65-70 years old, I don’t remember exactly. Since my uncle was an engineer he took his father to work for him as an office hand, to have him close to him as he was old. He took him as an office hand in jail too. They stayed there for seven months and were liberated on 14th September 1944.

I remember that day very clearly. It was the day of the Holy Cross, 14th September, I had taken the kids, two and four years old, to Zapeion for a walk and when I returned home Mrs. Fix told me, ‘Ioanna, please sit down. Your mother and grandfather telephoned.’ ‘Are they alive?’ ‘Of course they are alive. They came out today.

As soon as the Germans left, the gates were opened and they came out. They were all put in a van and they unloaded them at Omonia Square.’ ‘And where is mother?’

The house at Ypsilantou Street had been rented. However, Uncle Jacques had built a block of apartments at Academias and Amerikis Street. Starting from Omonia he went to his place at Kriezotou Street and he put up my family in an apartment in this block of apartments.

I will never forget my first visit to see them there. My mother was wearing some shoes which were not shoes, tied all over with ropes. It was very peculiar, some things here, some small pigtails. My uncle, who suffered from diabetes and while in jail couldn’t keep his diet, his legs were very, very thin like straws. And they all wore short pants. My grandfather wearing short pants! I was shocked. I looked at them and did not recognize them.

The city of Athens was liberated from the Germans in October [Editor’s note: Athens was liberated on 12th October 1944]. I don’t know why they abandoned the Haidari camp in September; thank G-d they didn’t shoot them.

After the liberation, I stayed with the Fix family for quite some time. I wanted to see where I stood. I wanted and liked to stay there, I felt as if I were at home. Later when I restarted the university I left. All my family, except for my grandmother, returned to Thessaloniki. We learned about my father, my uncles, my aunts, their children, two hundred and twenty members of my family had been murdered.

My father had stayed in Thessaloniki because he was saying, ‘I have to collect things, do my job.’ And uncle Jacques, a well known figure in town, arranged for a boat to go and take him. They had a meeting place, there at Phaliro, where the boat would take my father and bring him to Athens.

However, in that period Phaliro was within the limits of the ghetto and a brother of my father, Alberto Molho, with his wife and two children came to stay at our house. So my father said, ‘How can I leave my brother and go?’ The boat owner came to the house and my uncle would tell him that he was afraid: ‘If the baby starts crying in the middle of the night what will I do with the Germans?’ ‘I will give him Luminal,’ said my father but didn’t convince him.

Another ten to fifteen days passed and we found someone else to help him escape. At that time my uncle was very close friends with the police chief and he told him, ‘At six o’clock in the morning I will send a soldier to take your father, dress him like a policeman. At four o’clock in the morning there was a roadblock, the Germans caught my father and that was it.

Later I heard from my uncle that returned from Auschwitz that my father, because he was 50 years old, too old that is, was taken directly to the crematorium.

Out of the big family of my father there was left only a sister, Bella, who lived in Israel, a brother, Charles, who lived in Brussels and survived Auschwitz, another brother, Jacques who lived in Grenoble, France, and two brothers living in Thessaloniki, Saoul and Alberto, who also survived. That is four brothers in all.

This Uncle Jacques Molho, who was married in Grenoble, went to the concentration camp while his wife Daisy and his daughter stayed in Paris. When the command to empty Paris was issued, it applied particularly for the children who were caught. A certain Mr. and Mrs. Simon, at night, brought I don’t know how many children to Spain through the Pyrenees. Now, it seems that among these children was Uncle Jacques’s child.

When my uncle Jacques returned from the camp his wife had died, from a heart attack, and they said that the child had been brought to Spain. So he took a bicycle and went all over Spain looking for his child in all the monasteries, because it is more than certain that the kids were brought to a monastery. He never managed to find his daughter; he returned and got married again, to a very good lady. They both aren’t alive anymore.

Uncle Alberto was the brother of my father who didn’t want to go with the boat owner. He left for the concentration camp with his wife and two children. He was the only one of his family to survive.

Uncle Saoul lost his wife and daughter. She was like a doll, while his daughter was an angel. Aunt Gracia and Aunt Lisa with her two children also died in Auschwitz.

That is where another uncle of mine, Dario, died of typhus at the very end, and next to him was his brother, Saoul, who returned and wrote about his time there. I have here the manuscripts he wrote, he said many things and among others about Uncle Dario. He said that Dario was an electrician in the concentration camp.

You see, the members of my father’s family were very resourceful. They would ask them, ‘Do you know how to play the piano.’ ‘We know,’ they responded. ‘Violin, do you know?’ ‘We know.’ You see they knew everything in order to pass a bad moment!

Well, and there came a German and told him, ‘I want …’ Something, I don’t know what it was. And my uncle responded, ‘In a moment, please wait a little and I will bring it to you.’ Now, how can you say ‘wait’ to a German?

So they hit him hard and left him full of bruises, half dead, and his brothers took care of him, and as they didn’t have compresses they put snow on his face. Uncle Saoul wrote many other things about his time there. He was so good this uncle of mine, Saoul!

Slowly we left from Academias Street and went to Kolonaki. They were hard years. It wasn’t easy at all, my father hadn’t returned, we didn’t have facilities or conveniences but it was OK, it passed.

From 1941 my grandfather Moshe was like a father to me, and he was very, very, very strict. For example, when my sister and myself got engaged and we were going out in the evenings, he wouldn’t permit the groom to enter our place upon bringing us back.

Never, ever. When as a student I was late on returning home, not engaged yet, he would ask my mother, ‘Has Yannakis, little John, come home yet?’ Little John was me; my grandfather was very humorous too.

When I decided to go to medical school to become a doctor, as I had this passion since my childhood, I told him, ‘You know, Grandfather, I will go to medical school.’ ‘You will go with the boys to university? I don’t believe it. Why go to university? To learn? Tell me what books you need and I will buy them for you.’ ‘OK, Grandpa, I will tell you.’

And I went out and took part in the examinations and passed, so I went to the medical school. But it wasn’t easy, at all. Grandfather was very strict and acted accordingly, in order to reinforce his position as the head of the family. But he was also just. I learned very many things from my grandfather, how to respect myself, not to tell lies, to be honest, etc. He taught me all that and most important of all, how to stand in my life.

He made all sort of difficult remarks in order to show me that he was there. For example: ‘Where will you go? When will you return?’ And I was rather old, eighteen or nineteen years old, but who could talk back to Grandfather?

My grandfather Memik, from the TV series, Memik. He was my teacher, he would tell me, ‘You can forgive anything but never forgive the person that wants to accuse you falsely and put intrigues within your family. This person you should throw out. Out, for he/she will never change.’

My grandfather did many things. When I was studying for upcoming exams until up to four in the morning, he would get up and come to check on me, he would open the door slowly and say, ‘Are you still studying? You consume a lot of electricity.

Tomorrow is a new day.’ He would shut the door and I would laugh. You see we ask the children to study more today, while my grandfather advised me not to study that much. But he just wanted to irritate me, really, to tell me, ‘Here I am.’

I also remember my poor Molho grandmother. Whenever I had exams at university she would say, ‘You go calmly and I will be sitting here reading prayers.’ When I returned in the afternoon she would ask me, ‘How did it go?’ ‘Fine, Grandmother.’ ‘Didn’t I tell you? I was reading the prayers and you passed your exams!’

So because of my grandmother I was passing my exams! I still see her, she didn’t have much hair, which we also inherited, and she was wearing a small hat to keep her head warm, and she was sitting there with a book in her hands, reading prayers.

I think about anti-Semitism and have the impression that from my early years there was something in the atmosphere, something anti-Semitic that I wasn’t experienced enough to detect. However, in Athens, after I had attended medical school, as we were coming from a lesson, a classmate of mine, a girl called me ‘dirty Jew.’

She shouldn’t have said it, and I never spoke to her again. I don’t even recall her name. I thought to myself that if for no real reason she said that, she is dangerous, and I cut any contact with her. This is a behavior coming directly from my grandfather.

• After the war and later years

My family returned to Thessaloniki and Mother went to collect our belongings at our house. There my sister got engaged to the man she was in love with before the war, Raoul Frances, who had survived because he joined the National Resistance in the mountains. This is why I went to Thessaloniki, for my sister’s marriage in 1945.

People from the northern suburbs of the city, Menemeni, from the city of Veroia and some villagers had come to our house and lived there. Everything was in very bad condition, almost destroyed, beds, things etc. all destroyed.

The funniest thing happened to the house of my brother-in-law, Frances, which was also a two-story Turkish house with a fountain and garden. Well, the owner of a chained bear and monkey had come from Menemeni to live there!

And in the basement lived a poor woman, who had lost her husband in Yugoslavia, with her son and daughter, Vouli was her name. This Vouli stayed there for the rest of her life. My sister lived on the top floor.

The brother of my brother-in-law hadn’t gone to the mountain, but stayed in Thessaloniki and got married to an Italian girl called Vetta, who was pregnant. He would go somewhere and secretly, with his friends, would listen to the radio, from London, as the Germans had officially confiscated all the radios. Somebody betrayed them and they came in and arrested them all.

As the woman was Italian she tried to save him and get him out of prison. She would send him food daily; she couldn’t go herself, as she was very close to giving birth. Exactly on the day she was giving birth, the Germans had returned the food and the lady next door decided not to tell her, as she would think that her husband was taken to be executed.

However, right upon giving birth another neighbor said, ‘Vetta, why is your husband’s food still here?’ She gave birth and immediately, maybe from the shock, died. The baby was also called Vetta.

However, her father returned from jail, and since there was no active marriage anymore with a dead wife, he was sent to the concentration camp. He died either in the train or in the camp.

After the occupation this little girl, little Vetta was taken by my sister Nina and her husband and as the Italians had been expelled from Greece, Vetta’s aunt kept on sending letters, particularly when Nina had her first son, Mimis.

The Italian woman wrote, ‘Now that the son has been born, things are different.’ So we responded to her, ‘Dear Anita, the only person to remind us that Vetta is not our daughter is you.’ And that’s when she stopped bothering us, and indeed we all love Vetta very much. Now she has three daughters and six grandchildren.

So my sister had Vetta, then gave birth to Mimi and this Vouli took care of her kids. She had a son of her own, from her late husband. At some stage, Vouli immigrated to Germany, but she didn’t have any luck there and returned.

She also gave birth to a daughter, fathered in Germany by a Greek from Kavala, who was already married, but fortunately he recognized the child. We were the ones to take care of the marriage of this child. Vouli died 15 days after the death of my sister; she was as a member of our family.

Going back to our story: the first thing my sister did was to send away the bear, the monkey and the tambourine; she fixed the house as best as she could and set up the wooden frames factory they used to have. She had to do very many things as everything was destroyed.

The wooden frame factory had been the business of her husband before the war. It is worth noting that in the past my grandfather was a partner of his father. Later, following a conflict, they separated their activities.

Our family house wasn’t easy to get back. My grandmother didn’t want to return there, she would always say, ‘I won’t set foot in Thessaloniki. I will neither find my sister there, nor my family, nor anybody, so why go there? I will stay here, in Athens.’ My grandmother was very insistent and so we stayed in Athens. Of course, I couldn’t go either since I was already studying here.

When I visited Thessaloniki, I saw in our neighborhood that the houses where Jews used to live before the war now had been taken by Christians. However, the Mizrachi club, which was opposite our home, had stayed as it was.

The grandfather who was the guard didn’t live any more but the son returned. I don’t know if he’s still alive, Solomon was his name. There were very few Jewish people left. A minimum, maybe a thousand souls all together. So I went and didn’t find anyone, no friend, no cousins, no one.

Many of the ones that returned from the concentration camps, of the very few that did return, went to Israel. There was an orphanage or something like that, where they were offered free housing and this organization was helping them to go to Israel.

In reality what they did was to help them get away, transport them and leave them at a shore in Israel because they were not permitted to enter the country legally, as it was under British occupation. Of course, this wave of immigrants wasn’t the first aliyah. The pioneers were the ones that had come from Russia on foot and set up the kibbutzim.

There were quite a number, that is, the survivors that left. Some distant relatives of mine went. The place where they kept them was called ‘Hassara’ and we went there every weekend to sing for them and entertain them as they had lost their families and were very lonely.

Do you know what they did in Thessaloniki at that time? The Greek state did something good. Whenever there were no immediate heirs, the state could acquire the buildings. So, due to the condition of the people returning from the concentration camps, which in reality was indescribable, the state decided to give to the Jewish community all the real estates, so that the community could nurse and attend to the needs of the survivors.

So what did our community do? As the first survivors arrived, they started looking for their houses, their relatives, their mothers, their brothers and sisters but did not find anyone, absolutely none. So the community immediately arranged for group marriages. This is terrifying. In order to set up their homes and their families again.

My sister got married at the Monastirioton synagogue. After the marriage we went to Phaliro for an evening dinner but the picture of Thessaloniki was already different. You see, the Jews had always offered an element of civilization, of sociability.

It was an altogether different picture because all the people from the villages around had come to the city. They had come, the bear, the monkey, Menemeni, Chortiatis and had acquired the houses. They had even come from Veroia, Naousa. Who knew them? What did they care?

Of course, the Jews were a different society altogether, they were ‘people of the city.’ You see, Thessaloniki was also rather ‘posh,’ that is, they were somehow ‘stuck up’ as they knew they were good. Even here in Athens they were good, but in Thessaloniki the history was also there, they were descendants for centuries, 500 years. There were many good Jews in Thessaloniki, very good families, different, more civilized.

I finished medical school and in 1954 I got married, but I had not sat my exams for my medical specialization. I became a microbiologist and I studied it at the Evagelismos Hospital. I was a Greek subject while my husband, Richard Capuano, was a Spanish subject. He belonged to one of the approximately two hundred families that were expelled from Spain by Queen Isabella, and the Greek state refused to make them Greeks.

I don’t know the reason. We asked for the Greek citizenship many times. We even had a client at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and another client at the Department of the Interior and their response was: ‘We cannot do anything and we don’t know why.’

We applied and reapplied as my husband wanted very much to become Greek and he wanted our son to go to the army. The final result was negative and my son didn’t go to the army as he is Spanish subject. There are still a number of Spanish subjects in Greece.

Of course I couldn’t have a free profession, and then comes a law that says that a Greek woman can be married to a foreigner but retain her citizenship and therefore can be employed in a free profession. That made us decide to get married.

The family of my husband was known to my family from Thessaloniki. At the Jewish school there was someone who worked there whose son was married to a first cousin of my father in Israel. She was called Saltiel and her husband was Cohen.

He was the one who got me in touch with my husband-to-be. My husband was very open minded so he decided to call me on the phone and asked me to go out with him. We went out for a walk, we started to get acquainted and got to know each other, and we went out a few times and then got married.

I intended for my husband to be a Jew. Do you not see what is happening now’ This has become a ‘mayonnaise’ these days, and with the civil marriage we don’t observe these things. My daughter-in-law is Christian Orthodox; I had no objection.

However, at the time when I got married it was very difficult for someone to change religion. It wasn’t only because of the parents’ reaction, but also because to convert took a lot of time. Of course, you had to study, the women that converted and became Jews know about our religion much more than I do. I don’t know much about religion.

My husband had many commercial representations, medicals and other things too, but most importantly, he was the first importer of cellophane in Greece. He would tell me that when he first brought cellophane to Greece he went to Flocas and asked for the owner.

He knew the family, as they also came from Thessaloniki. ‘Let us have a coffee,’ he proposed to Flocas. ‘Yes, certainly.’ ‘Could you please bring some chocolates.’ And he brought some, wrapped in a golden piece of paper.

My husband had a piece of cellophane in his pocket, took the chocolate and wrapped it in cellophane. ‘What is this that shines?’ ‘Cellophane.’ This is how my husband got his first order before the war.

My husband was born in Thessaloniki. His mother was from Monastir, she was born at the end of the 19th century and her name was Tzogia Beraha. His father, Moses Capuano, was of Italian origins. He was very aristocratic, came from an old family. They say that last names ending in ‘–no’ like Capuano, Modiano, Massarano, etc. were selected families of Spanish origins.

My husband had finished the French Lycée and was very fluent in French. His father had died in 1934 and his mother in 1977. My husband, his brother Jacques and his mother, as Spanish subjects, were arrested and taken to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp 31. However, life in this camp was a different world compared to Auschwitz. In Auschwitz they would have roll-call in the morning, and you didn’t know if you would still be alive by the end of the day.

Lina, who was the oldest child and the third boy, Rene, were collected by the Spanish Embassy here, and were transported to Spain, then sent to Egypt and then to Israel. Finally they asked to be taken to Cairo, where they stayed at the house of the other brother, the second child; the older boy called Joseph was already living there permanently. However Lina’s husband was caught and never came back, while she and her two children survived and went to America. Rene was not married at that time.

My husband received compensation from the Claims Conference of Adenauer but nothing of importance. This organization paid the German compensation, that is 450 million German Marks, distributed to survivors. My husband received money twice but I cannot recall the exact sum. The last time was in 2001, but the previous one was much earlier. I don’t remember. I don’t know and I don’t wish to know. It didn’t interest me.

My husband received his pension approximately in 1980. His mother tongue was Judeo-Spanish and French but also Greek. He could speak English too.

My personal business went very well. I was a very conscious doctor. I was employed as a freelance professional. In the beginning I would work as a replacement at the hospitals Helena and Marika Heliadi in Athens. The manager, Mrs. Pangali was a close friend of mine; she is dead now. This is why I was going there from time to time but that was at the beginning of my career, later I didn’t go any more.

Then I inscribed myself for a PhD, which I started in 1960 and finished in March 1962. I was then pregnant with Maick. The mark I received was ‘excellent.’ The subject was new then, very avant-garde. The two transaminases that have already become routine by now. They are the microbiological examinations of the liver. They control the circulation of the liver and of the heart.

The work was done at the pharmacologists’ with Professor Mr. Nicolas Kleisiouni, a deputy professor, Mr. Constatinos Moiras, and teaching assistant, the next professor of pharmacology, Mr. Dionysios Veronos, who recently passed away. He was a remarkable men, I don’t think there was another professor like him. We became very close friends; I would go there every day to see my rabbits!

I have an allergy to mice; I cannot even pronounce the word mouse. Despite that the professor would tell me, ‘No, you must also do it with mice. We have so many mice and you spend your money on rabbits. They are white little mice, beautiful mice.’ ‘Professor, I can’t, it is impossible for me.’ ‘No, you will also do one mouse.’

Finally, we had a field mouse whose blood was taken by Dionysios Veronas. This is how I managed to run various tests on them too. I have to admit that their blood cells were very strong as compared to the rabbit’s red blood cells which were weaker! I have to admit that looking at the blood specimens was a great experience for me too; I was taking intravenous blood from the rabbit’s ears from their capillary vessels that are extremely thin. I learned, very quickly how to do it without breaking any vessels.

When I did my doctorate thesis I was pregnant and due to a pregnancy anomaly I had to lie in bed. So I sent my assistant, in order for him to phone me and tell me to come there when the time would be approaching; it was planned for seven o’clock.

I had already prepared my black costume so that I would be very formal for the occasion, with all the medicine professors there, and he calls me at five, instead of around seven, telling me that they decided to examine me immediately. I jumped up, like crazy, put an overcoat on top and rushed to the university. Everything was messed up on that day. I had ordered a taxi and the taxi never came, so I arrived there with great agony at the last moment.

In the beginning we stayed in a neoclassic house, which belonged to my husband’s family, on Rethymnon Street. My mother also stayed there, to look after the child, and we also had an in-house baby sitter for the child until the age of four. But later we left that place and came here, where it was more convenient for me and for the child.

The private practice was on the same floor and next door to this apartment. The kid would go to school in the morning and in the afternoon I didn’t work in my private practice, as I wanted to be at home and I wanted the child to see his mother in the house. Whoever wanted me would call and arrange for an appointment up to two thirty or three o’clock at the latest.

My son Mike attended the Jewish school from kindergarten to the third class of elementary school. Every afternoon a French girl, a very nice girl would come to teach him French.

Every summer, after he turned four, I would take Mike to Switzerland. It was to give him the opportunity to speak French, to learn languages. As he was a good pupil, my husband would say, ‘Why worry? He will learn languages. Every language is a different human being.’ And he was right. First he went to Switzerland, twice, the next three summers to France, the next three or four times to England.

He went to Chantilly where there was a chateau, belonging to the Rothschild family that had given it as a donation; it was used as an orphanage for the children that lost their parents in the Holocaust. There I met the manager and the manageress, Mr. and Mrs. Simon, who were the couple that had helped the children escape from Paris to Spain.

Those orphans grew up and the orphanage closed, but for one month every year Jewish children would come from all over the world. It cost 1,000 US Dollars for the month, but the money was not a payment, it was a voluntary donation. For example, the children coming from Canada and whose parents owned factories, gave much more.

Mike went there for three years, and it was very good. One year I went there too. In the first year he was crying. He had not yet finished the first grade of the elementary school. He went together with the oldest daughter of Vetta, my niece Sofie.

One day I called them on the phone. It was very funny. ‘Why are you there at this hour of the day?’ I asked and Mike said, ‘We didn’t go for the walk.’ You see, every afternoon they went for a walk in the woods. ‘And why did you not go?’

‘We cannot, we want to come back home. We are crying and don’t participate in order to save the money, the cost of the walk. If we don’t go they won’t charge us for the walk.’ Charging the cost of the walk, just listen to that!

‘But dear Sofi, what are you saying? You know that the return tickets are at the hands of the teacher there. What are you talking about?’ And so I wrote them a letter, I was just reading it again the day before yesterday: ‘We have sent you there as representatives of Greece, descendants of Kolokotronis, of Manto Mavrogenous and Bouboulina, heroes of the Greek revolution against the Turks in 1821, which eventually resulted in the creation of the first modern Greek state. You cannot humiliate us like that.’

Finally, the children were convinced and Mike also made a good friend there. This boy came from Amversa, and I even went to his bar mitzvah. His father was a jeweler. His mother was from Poland, and had gone to a concentration camp, where she had lost all her family. So they had this son, who was playing the piano exceptionally well.

The two boys got very close, and every summer Mike would go to their place and when the family would go, for example, to London, they would also take Mike with them. One summer Leon came here, to Greece, and gave three concerts: one in the Greek American Union, one at the Jewish camp and one at the ‘Casa d’ Italia.’ At that time he was ten or eleven years old.

For the last grades of elementary school, Mike went to the private school of Andonopoulos. This is contrary to what I did as a kid; I went to public schools and this turned out to be very positive for me, so for high school I decided that my son should do the same. He went to the 5th Gymnasium and all my relatives were against me. However, I still insist that this is what I should have done, as he got in contact with all kind of people and doesn’t make distinctions.

My son received all the lessons necessary for his bar mitzvah. It was held on a Saturday and the rabbi didn’t give his consent to decorate the synagogue with flowers because, as he explained, the magnificence of the day is such that it cannot be beautified more with flowers.

So we introduced a novelty and offered a gardenia flower to every lady in the synagogue, at the place reserved for women only. I will not forget him taking the Sefer Torah. But, how many flower petals did we throw to him!

You see I had gone to the end of Patissia, bought very many flowers and we had pulled out the petals. The petals thrown were like snow. I have his speech recorded on a cassette, it was very good. Afterward, in the evening, what a rain, my G-d what a rain, a true flood! Due to the rain only half of the people we had invited came to the evening cocktail.

After Mike finished high school he went for a year to the Deree College [the private American College of Athens]. Unfortunately at Deree he couldn’t get enough credits to get a degree and so he went to Israel. Despite the fact that he wasn’t a good student he went to Israel in 1980 and didn’t lose any time nor did he fail any subject.

My son studied political sciences and he also speaks seven languages: Spanish, French, English, Portuguese, Italian, Hebrew and Greek. He also worked as a simultaneous interpreter. He sent an application to the European Union and he was employed there. He worked there for four or five months, but in the end he wanted to leave because the Greek cabin, at that time, had very few translators. That was fifteen or sixteen years ago.

So he decided to quit. However, they told him that he cannot leave, as he would have to return all the benefits he had received, plane tickets etc. Mike said, ‘OK.’ They told him to wait, as they were in congress, and told him: ‘We will call you, but we don’t think that you can go.’ He waited outside. After some time they called him: ‘The era of slavery has been over in Europe for many years now. You are free to go.’ And he left.

Before going to Israel, during the period that he was learning Hebrew here, he worked for six months at the Embassy of Uruguay. He does not only speak Spanish, not the Spanish of Spain, the Castilian, he also speaks the South American dialects. He is an impressive child. When he left for Israel I wasn’t worried but I was sorry that he left, as he is my only son.

I remember a particular incident of which I am ashamed. I was at the airport, crying because he was leaving and there comes to me one of the ambassadors of Israel. She tells me, ‘What is it? Why are you crying Mrs. Capuano?’ Because I was a Jew, they knew me as a doctor at the embassy of Israel. ‘I’m crying because my son is leaving and I lose him.’ ‘You won’t lose your son,’ she said, ‘you win him as there he will acquire his personality, you will see.’ And she was right.

There they leave the kids alone, so that their personality can come to the surface. To get control of themselves and become independent. And even after he returned he lived alone of course. He was no ‘child of his mother.’

My son got married in 1999. His wife is called Silia Kapitsimadi. She finished the English Literature department here; she also finished another private American University on Arts and went to finish it up for two and a half years in London. She is a jeweler.

They didn’t have children for a long time. Mike says they were afraid they’d ‘become like him,’, that is, extremely undisciplined. Now, finally, my daughter-in-law is pregnant and we are all very happy about it.

My son now has a representation office; he represents Samos wines and other drinks. He is a very good person; he was always very good with his friends that love him. They try to be with him, he is a very civilized man, open minded. To tell you the truth, when mixed marriages take place, the parents, despite their original reaction, at the end give in. I can assure you I never said a word because he is a very fine person.

They married in a civil ceremony. Silia said that when they will have children she will convert. At their home they don’t celebrate the Jewish holidays, as they come here. A few days ago, on the eve of Yom Kippur, I made an eggplant pie and they ate all of it.

The Christian festivities we celebrate all together at the mother of my daughter-in-law’s: Easter, New Year’s Eve and Christmas. A little later my son has his own birthday and gives a party, as they all do.

Together with my husband we had many friends both from the Jewish community and outside it. We had a group of friends; one of them was an admiral. All of them where people that liked to feast. Giose, Lava, Gionis… we had very nice parties; it was unimaginable to have a party at which there wouldn’t be a piano or a guitar. As I sing correctly I was singing all night. They were very good companions. All this is lost now, nothing is left as most of these people have died.

My husband was also very good at companies. When he first went to America, he went on an ocean liner where they had a dance competition and he won the first prize. And what was the prize? This old lighter, let me show you, so nothing, but he danced well. He liked the entertainment.

Then there was also the Tsatsi family; we were very close with them. Mr. Tsatis was a professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and an academic too, a member of the Greek Academy. We were with them when he was accepted at the academy. We went to prepare the sweets and organize the meal that followed. We were friends, brothers, and of course with them we had a whole group of professors we were frequenting like Alexandropoulos, Kascarellis, Tountas etc. All these people we were close friends with don’t exist any more, they are all dead now.

Our companies were including all sort of different types of people, many friends, and we went on cruises, trips etc.

Today there aren’t even relatives left. Uncle Albert, the one that returned from the concentration camp and remarried and had a son, is now dead, while his wife is in Thessaloniki and the son lives here in Athens. I see him from time to time or call him on the phone, or at the synagogue. When my husband died in 2003, he came to the funeral, the Kaddish too.

I also had a sister-in-law who lived in Cairo. Her name was Rena, she was the wife of Joseph Capuano. She was born in Cairo but her origins are from Ioannina. Her father was a pharmacist in Cairo. I loved her very much, but she also died in 2003. She had cancer, a cystis that had not been noticed, and some day she knelt down to tie her shoes, understood there was something wrong, but is was too late.

Here in Athens, I also have a sister-in-law, the wife of Jacques. She has children etc but they are all very busy, they have their own life. So many people around. Sometimes I say to myself, ‘Which friend of mine should I call on the phone and arrange to see?’ And I don’t know, maybe my mind stops, I don’t know.

My mother has been buried in the third cemetery here. My husband too. The same applies to my father and mother-in-law. We brought the remains from Thessaloniki, as on 5th December 1942, the tombs were unearthed; the burial plaques were taken to the university which was built there, on the site of the Jewish cemetery, while the bones were here and there. Now they are all here.

At the beginning it was the first cemetery, which was relatively small as the site was also small. So it closed down. Now it is the third cemetery which will end anytime shortly, as we don’t unearth the remains. All the tombs are there. I guess they will give us another branch.

My sister is buried in Thessaloniki. There it is quite special as all the tombs look the same. There are no mausoleums, a simple tombstone, the same for everyone. I made a simple tombstone for my mother, a simple tombstone like in Thessaloniki. Here at the third cemetery there are only two tombstones like that. One Carasso from Thessaloniki and my mother’s.

We didn’t discuss Israel or other Jewish subjects with our Christian friends. It just didn’t happen. Not that we refused to talk, but they didn’t share the same interests with us.

Right from the beginning we have been following up the creation of the Israeli state 32, its actions and its evolution. We still are well informed of what is going on there. I receive the informative newsletters of the community; it is part of our life. I am even a member of the summer camp committee at the community.

I hadn’t thought of aliyah since I had my parents. I wasn’t all alone in life as the others that went there to start a new life. I had my mother, my people, so why go there? The ones that left had lost everything.

I had an aunt who stayed there, in Israel, before the creation of the state, I had many relatives that went there, all very satisfied with their decision to go there.

If someone immigrates, say a Greek goes to Germany or Australia or Sweden trying to improve his life, he will always feel a foreigner. When they left from here, they found a shelter there. And of course, it was the land of their forefathers. The State of Israel was at that period in the making as it was bound to be. The ones that immigrated there didn’t go to a foreign place, what they really did was go back to their home,. A home that had been occupied by others, but it was always their home, the land of their great-, great-grandfathers. That is where Israel started from.

Once, when I was in America for a health problem, I met an Israeli-German Jew. Before World War II, the German Jews didn’t want to leave Germany. They would say, ‘Why go?’ I am more German than the Germans; I love my county more than the Germans.’

Anyhow this man told me: “When I’m finished with my treatment I’ll leave.’ ‘Where do you live?’ In Israel, in Natania, where I own the best restaurant the “Henry the 4th”.’ ‘Very good and what do you do in Germany?’‘Oh, I have a very big business, real estate.’ ‘Bravo, how can you?

I cannot go to Germany, cannot even listen to German.’ ‘But Germany provides me with the funds to be able to live in Israel. My restaurant is in Israel but in reality it is my hobby. Germany provides me with the money to live in Israel.’ I was very impressed by what he told me.

What I mean to say is that Greece is a pro-Arab country. All the time you hear, there were killed that many Palestinians, that many Palestinians, that many Palestinians. You must be very naïve to believe that in a war in Israel only Palestinians get killed.

Do you know how many young people get killed in Israel? A very high number but what do they do, mourning is not permitted, the only thing permitted is to close the windows and the shutter and not go out wearing black because in that case all Israel would be colored black.

This is why it is so important that they do not retrograde so that they will keep their morale. And here on the TV and in the newspapers they say: “That many Palestinians were killed.’ For G-d’s sake, no Jew has been killed? Buy ‘The Times’ and you’ll see how many Jews were killed.

Or I call my cousins: ‘What’s the news?’ ‘Do not ask, the son of our friends XXX was killed.’ But here, on TV we only see them throwing stones, they don’t have guns. Or we see the wives of those killed who cry and cry and cry. They don’t say, of course, that they only cry when the cameras are there.

Jewish mothers are more dignified, they do not go out in the streets to cry. Their children are hit, because it is usually the children who are the victims and they get hold of themselves so that their husband can go to work, can look after the other children. A child is hit and the whole family is destroyed. And here they say nothing about all that. They don’t even refer to whole cities with hidden arms buried underneath them.

And what happened with all that money they gave to Arafat. He took all that himself and finally it ended up with his heir, his wife, since he didn’t get a divorce. As politics is dirty, huge amounts of money are involved. All the big nations are sending money because they want to sell arms. This is the truth of the whole story.

I have also to mention that there the young ones are continuously in the army. It is not like, ‘I went to the army and finished it.’ It is not like that. They call them every now and then to do ‘melouim,’ that is, going to the frontiers and serve in the army for some more time.

When my son was studying, they would patrol every night, a military man with a jeep and all the others were guarding and my son, wearing a helmet, was looking for hidden bombs. They were patrolling every night.

As for myself I am Greek. My religion is Jewish but as a citizen I am Greek and very much so. Even in the cemetery here there is a monument for the Jews that died in the Albanian war.

I always respected and considered seriously both religions. Let me just tell you something. I was returning from Paris with my son and getting out of the airplane we entered the bus to take us from the plane to the airport. There was an empty seat and I thought to myself, ‘Bravo, they all went to the other side and left this seat for me.’

Well, it turned out there was machine oil there and that was the reason it was empty. I try to go there and I slip, fall down with a triple crushing break of my shoulder. A whole story, the journalists came, I was taken to hospital etc.

Later we took Olympic Airlines to court. Olympic Airlines had tree lawyers to say that it was raining that day and that this was the reason I slipped! My son had to search meteorological archives in order to prove that it wasn’t the rain but the oil, to prove that it wasn’t raining that day.

Finally the president of the court called me and said, ‘Please take the oath.’ And there was the New Testament, so I took the oath on the New Testament, and that moment a young lawyer jumps out and says: ‘Mrs. President, Mrs. Capuano is bad willed.’ ‘How dare you say something like that?’ said the president.

The lady is a doctor and a very respected person.’ Upon that the young lawyer asked me, ‘What is your religion, my lady?’ ‘Jewish,’ I replied, and he goes, ‘But you took the oath on the New Testament. How is that possible?’ I said, ‘Mrs. President, G-d is one, his representatives differ.’

After that the examination of the case continued as nobody said anything else following that statement of mine. And this is what I really believe by the way.

Yesterday I was reading about Alois Brunner 33 who is in Syria. Here there is a law since 1959 that in reality abolishes the prosecution of Germans in Greece, and he killed so many people! Well this is ridiculous. If someone will steal bread they will arrest him and put him in jail.

He, who killed 56,000 people, has his prosecution finished… I’m sorry, but that I can’t understand. What does it mean that his prosecution is finished? These things happen only in Greece.

This Brunner is in Syria and they know who he is and what he did. But in Latin American countries there are all sort of peculiarities. You will see, for example, a mayor called Mr. Weinberg, many Germans who have been completely assimilated.

They changed their hair from blond to black, and they have had all sort of plastic surgeries to change their looks. And they had a lot of money, a whole lot of money. This is the reason they never invaded Switzerland, as the exchange was: we will give you our gold to guard and we will not invade.

A short while ago we visited Auschwitz, as it was the 60th celebration of the liberation. The visitors were coming from all over the world, but this particular year something new happened. The European ministries of education funded many non-Jewish schools, so that the children would have an opportunity to participate in the manifestation of memory.

There were about 30,000 people present, and as I was walking, I heard a group talking in French amongst themselves. I asked them where they were coming from and they told me Lyon, France, and when I asked them if they were Jews they said, no, that they were Catholics.

Here, the Ministry of Education gave 50.000 Euros and only 15 people were interested in coming! The rest of the money was given to schools, students etc. of our community. This is how the ones who wanted to could go. It was a gigantic manifestation, the ‘March of the Living.’ We walked three kilometers to go there and another three to return. I personally didn’t think I would be able to make it, as I have a problem with my legs. I still cannot quite believe how I managed to complete the march.

As we were going around the camps on foot I was crying and crying because it is a different thing to read about it – at home I have two shelves full of books on the Holocaust – than to see it in reality. To put yourself in their place at that moment that they would put in line one after the other in order to see how many a single bullet could kill, penetrating from one to the other etc. Well, this is a different thing all together.

You should see the ‘pieces of cotton,’ or what I thought were pieces of cotton. I asked myself, ‘why do they show these pieces of cotton? Did they take them out of a mattress? But weren’t mattresses here filled with straw?’ So I asked our group leader what those discolored pieces of cotton were all about and she told me, ‘What discolored pieces of cotton, Mrs. Capuano? Can’t you see that it is peoples’ hair?’

They found five tons of it there that were not sent to Germany. They also told me this hair is the raw material for manufacturing a very strong and light cloth that is used to make parachutes. If you do not see and live it you have seen nothing.

Many speeches were given and there came Sharon and we could see him on the big screens that had been installed. It was all very moving and the music they would play would also shake us. Before we started to walk – it was where the rail tracks were, on the spot where the trains were passing – they were giving us little cardboard badges and written on those was, ‘In the memory of my family, my parents, my uncle.’

They would pin those cardboard badges on us. And when we arrived there was a sort of esplanade because the manifestation took place in Birkenau 34, the march started in Auschwitz and ended in Birkenau. Of course, only Auschwitz exists now because in Birkenau there is nothing left since the Germans had the whole camp blown up before they left.

At this esplanade, we were looking at a giant screen and there spoke the prime minister of Poland, a representative of the organization of the Rights of Women and many others. However, the highlight was Sharon who said, ‘I will not speak to you about the Holocaust as what I see is enough. You must talk about it among yourselves, with your children, with your children’s children, as it must never be forgotten.’

Then came Elie Wiesel 35 and said, ‘I was a young child, fourteen years old.’ And I was wondering how he survived as at that young age they were not taking them in the camp, he must have looked much older. He continued, ‘I was holding hands with my father, my mother, my little brother and suddenly, I had no time, they all disappeared. My mother had no time to give me a kiss, neither my father to give me his blessing. I lost them. Why all that?’

Then came the former chief rabbi of Israel whose name is Lau and said, ‘Why did they choose us? We all see the same flowers, we all smell the same flowers. Why did they choose us?’

I went to the gas chambers and prayed my respects and is seems that he people taken in there they were suffocating and dying, but before dying they were hitting the door with their hands, and they were digging the walls with their nails and on one wall it was written ‘n-k-m’ and the rabbi said, ‘I understand it as the Hebrew word “nekama” which means “revenge.”

Certainly revenge but not with violence. Revenge is what I see today. Revenge is 30,000 people present in this manifestation today. Revenge is that they didn’t manage to achieve what they were after. Revenge is every child that is born.’

Only by visiting that place you can really understand it, live it partly, since only the people who suffered there really lived it.

Recently, in 2005, I honored Mr. Fix. I had everything prepared already some fifteen or twenty years ago, but Mrs. Fix didn’t want me to, as she told me, ‘Mr. Fix is dead. Mr. Fix hid you, I had no involvement in it, whatever we did we did it for the best and I don’t want any thank you. For whatever we did let G-d thank us.’

However, I had my dossier ready and last year was the celebration of the Holocaust in Greece for the first time and little Charles Fix, the son, calls me. ‘Ioanna,’ he says – I was called Ioanna Marinopoulou when I lived with them – and asked me, ‘Why did you forget us?’ I told him that I hadn’t forgotten them and that I would expect him at my place the next day. So he saw that I had everything prepared and I told him, ‘Your mother didn’t want it.’ But he said, ‘I do want it.’

It took me only eight months to arrange for it. I telephoned here, I telephoned there, got in contact with Yad Vashem and with Mr. Saltiel, if I recall correctly, and this year we celebrated the sixty year anniversary.

We went to Thessaloniki, because the celebration was held in Thessaloniki. The son, Charles Fix, came as well as my son and Mr. Prokopiou, the only cousin of Charles Fix. He came especially for this occasion and left again the next day in the morning.

I had also prepared a little speech to give but I didn’t in the end, as I was very moved and was crying. And when it was over I turned my head towards Charles, he turned towards me, and we looked at each other and fell into each other’s arms. I can still hear the applause we received.

Imagine, 2.500 people clapping. And when I saw Aliki Mordohai, I told her, ‘Aliki, my child, I’m sorry I wasn’t able to say a few words.’ And her response was that I did very well not to talk as, ‘the embrace and the kiss said it all and it was more than enough.’

Most recently, I’ve been occupied with my autobiography. Some people told me that there wouldn’t be a high demand for these old stories. However, it will soon be published by the Gavrielides Editions. So I am very busy with it.

I don’t go to the synagogue frequently. I only go for the holidays. It does not influence me, I am what I am, whether I am in a religious place or not. When there is a big holiday I like to go there and pray. I also go to the synagogue for memorial services or when they open the temple.

Every night I say my prayer, ‘Shema Israel.’ This is the only prayer I know, I am sorry to know only this prayer, but then again this prayer says it all. There is only one ‘Shema Israel’ but even if you don’t pray, when you say, ‘oh, my G-d, please…’ it means that for you G-d exists.

Describing my life I could say that I lived a ‘bourgeois life.’

I’ve always believed that the Greek Jews but also the Greek Orthodox Christians do no have an aristocracy, there may have been some aristocrats, on the islands of Corfu, Cefallonia, Zakynthos and that it is all.

For me aristocracy is a right and honest house. People well educated, cultured. These are the people that get distinguished. Is it not so? And we do not have aristocracy like the French with the prefix ‘de’, nor dukes nor counts nor Sirs, nothing of the sort. But even if we have, the titles have in reality been bought because today titles are sold. As for me, I consider equal and fully comparable all the correct, civil families with alleged aristocracy.

• Glossary:

1 Expulsion of the Jews from Spain: In the 13th century, after a period of stimulating spiritual and cultural life, the economic development and wide-range internal autonomy obtained by the Jewish communities in the previous centuries was curtailed by anti-Jewish repression emerging from under the aegis of the Dominican and the Franciscan orders.

There were more and more false blood libels, and the polemics, which were opportunities for interchange of views between the Christian and the Jewish intellectuals before, gradually condemned the Jews more and more, and the middle class in the rising started to be hostile with the competitor.

The Jews were gradually marginalized. Following the pogrom of Seville in 1391, thousands of Jews were massacred throughout Spain, women and children were sold as slaves, and synagogues were transformed into churches. Many Jews were forced to leave their faith.

About 100,000 Jews were forcibly converted between 1391 and 1412. The Spanish Inquisition began to operate in 1481 with the aim of exterminating the supposed heresy of new Christians, who were accused of secretly practicing the Jewish faith.

In 1492 a royal order was issued to expel resisting Jews in the hope that if old co-religionists would be removed new Christians would be strengthened in their faith.

At the end of July 1492 even the last Jews left Spain, who openly professed their faith. The number of the displaced is estimated to lie between 100,000-150,000. (Source: Jean-Christophe Attias - Esther Benbassa: Dictionnaire de civilisation juive, Paris, 1997)

2 German Occupation: in the spring of 1941, Germans defeated the Greek army and occupied Greece until October 1944. The county was divided in three zones of occupation. Thrace and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia were occupied by Bulgaria, Germany occupied Macedonia including Thessaloniki, Piraeus and western Crete and Italy occupied the remaining mainland and the islands.

Now depending of where the Jews lived, defined both their future luck as also the possibilities of escape. Greek resistance groups, communists or not fought against the occupation in an effort to save Greece but also the Jews living in Greece.

Approximately 8,000 to 10,000 Greek Jews survived the Holocaust, due to the refusal, to a great extent, of the Greeks, as also the leadership of the Greek Orthodox Church, to cooperate with the Germans for the application of their plan to deport all of them. Further more, the Italian authorities up to their surrender in 1943 refused to facilitate or to permit the deportation of the Jews from the Italian zone of occupation.

(Source: www.ushmm.org/greece/nonflash/gr/intro.htm)

3 Moskov, Kostis (1939-1998): Mayor of Thessaloniki, advisor to the Ministry of Culture and Representative of the Greek Civilization foundation in the Middle East. A historian, writer, poet and journalist who had many of his works published.

4 Ladino: Also known as Judeo-Spanish, it is the spoken and written Hispanic language of Jews of Spanish and Portuguese origin. Ladino did not become a specifically Jewish language until after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 (and Portugal in 1495) - it was merely the language of their province. It is also known as Judezmo, Dzhudezmo, or Spaniolit.

When the Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal they were cut off from the further development of the language, but they continued to speak it in the communities and countries to which they emigrated. Ladino therefore reflects the grammar and vocabulary of 15th-century Spanish.

In Amsterdam, England and Italy, those Jews who continued to speak 'Ladino' were in constant contact with Spain and therefore they basically continued to speak the Castilian Spanish of the time. Ladino was nowhere near as diverse as the various forms of Yiddish, but there were still two different dialects, which corresponded to the different origins of the speakers:

'Oriental' Ladino was spoken in Turkey and Rhodes and reflected Castilian Spanish, whereas 'Western' Ladino was spoken in Greece, Macedonia, Bosnia, Serbia and Romania, and preserved the characteristics of northern Spanish and Portuguese. The vocabulary of Ladino includes hundreds of archaic Spanish words, and also includes many words from different languages:

mainly from Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, French, and to a lesser extent from Italian. In the Ladino spoken in Israel, several words have been borrowed from Yiddish. For most of its lifetime, Ladino was written in the Hebrew alphabet, in Rashi script, or in Solitreo.

It was only in the late 19th century that Ladino was ever written using the Latin alphabet. At various times Ladino has been spoken in North Africa, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, France, Israel, and, to a lesser extent, in the United States and Latin America.

5 Rashi alphabet: A Hebrew alphabet traditionally used for Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, 1040-1105) commentaries of the Bible and the Talmud, it is also the traditional alphabet of Judeo-Spanish. The Judeo-Spanish alphabet also used certain characters to denote the Spanish sounds that are alien to the Hebrew phonetics.

Judeo-Spanish religious as well as secular texts were written in Rashi letters up until the introduction of the Latin alphabet, first by Alliance Israelite Universelle after 1860.

6 Railway network of Thessaloniki: In 1871 the city of Thessaloniki was connected to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. In 1888 it was connected to Belgrade and the European Railway network.

In 1894 the connection of Thessaloniki with Monastiri was completed, while in 1896 Thessaloniki was also connected with Constantinople, today's Istanbul.

7 Fez: Ottoman headgear. As part of the Imperial Prescript of Gulhane (a westernizing campaign) of Sultan Mahmud II (1839-1876) the traditional Ottoman dressing code was abolished in 1839. The fez, resembling the hat of the Europeans at the time, was introduced and widely used by the Ottoman population, regardless of religious affiliation.

In the Turkish Republic it was considered backward and outlawed in 1925 by the Head Law. In the Balkan countries the fez was regarded an Ottoman (Turkish) symbol and was dropped after gaining independence.

8 Thessaloniki visit of King Juan Carlos: On 27th May 1998 the Spanish Royal couple, King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia visited Thessaloniki. They were received by the Minister of Macedonia and Trace, Philippos Petsalnikos, and he accompanied them to the Holocaust Monument where King Juan Carlos laid a wreath in honor of the memory of the Jewish martyrs.

9 Synagogues in Thessaloniki: Before WWII there were 19 synagogues in Thessaloniki, all of which were blown up by the Germans a short time before the liberation. Already the big fire of 1917 had destroyed most of the synagogues and certainly all the historic synagogues, that is those built before 1680.

Historian Rena Molho accounts that before the big fire there were about a hundred synagogues out of which 32 were recognized by the chief rabbi, 65 private small synagogues belonging to well known families and 17 small public synagogues. [Source: 1. R. Molho, 'The Jews of Thessaloniki. 1856-1919 A special community,' Ed. Themelio, Athens 2001, pp.65, 121. and 2. Helias V. Messinas, 'The Synagogues of Salonica and Veroia,' Ed. Gavrielides, Athens 1997]

10 Beit Saoul Synagogue: It was set up in ca. 1898 on 43 Vassilissis Olgas Street by Fakima Idda Modiano in memory of her husband Saoul Jacob Modiano.

11 Monastir Synagogue (Monastirioton in Greek): Founded in 1923, inaugurated in 1927 by the Aruesti family who during the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), along with other Jewish families of Monastir (today Bitola), sought shelter in the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki and settled in the city. This synagogue survived the destructions during World War II because it was used as the headquarters of the Red Cross.

12 Mizrachi: The word has two meanings: a) East. It designates the Jews who immigrate to Palestine from the Arab countries. Since the 1970s they make up more than half of the Israeli population. b) It is the movement of the Zionists, who firmly hold on to the Torah and the traditions.

The movement was founded in 1902 in Vilnius. The name comes from the abbreviation of the Hebrew term Merchoz Ruchoni (spiritual center). The Mizrachi wanted to build the future Jewish state by enforcing the old Jewish religious, cultural and legal regulations. They recruited followers especially in Eastern Europe and the United States.

In the year after its founding it had 200 organizations in Europe, and in 1908 it opened an office in Palestine too. The first congress of the World Movement was held in 1904 in Pozsony (today Bratislava, Slovakia), where they joined the Basel program of the Zionists, but they emphasized that the Jewish nation had to stand on the grounds of the Torah and the traditions.

The aim of the Mizrach-Mafdal movement is the same in our days too. It supports schools, youth organizations in Israel and in other countries, so that the Jewish people can learn about their religion, and it takes part in the political life of Israel, promoting by this the traditional image of the Jewish state.

(http://www.mizrachi.org/aboutus/default.asp; www.cionista.hu/mizrachi.htm; Magyar Zsidó Lexikon, Budapest, 1929).

13 Matanot Laevionim: Matanot Laevionim was created in February 1901 with the objective of offering free meals to orphans and other poor students of the schools of the Jewish Community. It operated with funds from the community, the help of Alliance Israelite Universelle and other serious legacies left by the founding members or their wives when they became widows.

These funds were used in order to acquire a building in the suburb of Eksohi. In 1912, Matanot Laevionim offered approximately four hundred free meals a day, while after the big fire of Thessaloniki in 1917 it extended its activities and set up one cook house in each neighborhood.

During the occupation it offered great services to the community, as with the assistance of the Greek and the International Red Cross it managed to distribute daily 'popular meals' and half a litter of milk to 5.500 children. [Source: R. Molho, 'The Jews of Thessaloniki 1856-1919. A Unique Community,' Ed. Themelio, Athens 2001, pp.104-106]

14 Alliance Israelite Universelle: An international Jewish organization based in France. It was founded in Paris in 1860 by Adolphe Gremieux, as a response to the Damascus Affair, with the goal to protect human rights of Jews as citizens of the countries where they live.

The organization was created to combine the ideals of self defense and self sufficiency through education and professional development among Jews around the world. In addition, the organization operated a number of Jewish day schools and has done a lot to standardize the Ladino language.

The Alliance schools were organized in network with their Central Committee in Paris. The teaching body was usually the alumni trained in France. The schools emphasized modern sciences and history in their curriculum; nevertheless Hebrew and religion were also taught.

The Alliance Israelite Universelle ideology consisted in teaching the local language to Jews so they could be integrated to their country's culture. This was part of the modernization of the Jews. Most Ottoman Jews, however, did not take up the Turkish language (because it was optional), and as a result a new generation of Ottoman Jews grew up that was more familiar with France and the West than with the surrounding society.

In the Balkans the first school was opened in Greece (Volos) in 1865, then in the Ottoman Empire in Adrianople in 1867, Shumla (Shumen) in 1870 and in Istanbul, Smyrna (Izmir), and Salonika in 1870s. In 1870, Carl Netter of the AIU received a tract of land from the Ottoman Empire as a gift and started an agricultural school, Mikveh Israel, the first modern Jewish agricultural settlement in the Land of Israel.

The modernist Jewish elite and intelligentsia of the late 19th-century Ottoman Empire was known for having graduated from Alliance schools; they were closely attached to the Young Turk circles, and after 1908 three of them (Carasso, Farraggi, and Masliah) were members of the new Ottoman Chamber of Deputies.

15 American College (or Anatolia College): School founded by American missionaries in Merzifon of Asia Minor, in 1886. In 1924, after the invitation of Eleutherios Venizelos, it was transferred to Thessaloniki. During the interwar period it had many Jewish students.

16 ‘151’: After the Fire of 1917, the Jewish Community acquired the large No. 151 hospital, which belonged to the Italian army and was located east of the Thessaloniki. 75 wooden structures and many brick and cement structures were subsequently built to house the fire-stricken Jewish population.

17 3E (Ethniki Enosi Ellados): lit. National Union of Greece, a fascist nationalist organization, founded in 1929 by George Kosmidis. It had about 2000 members, of whom the majority was immigrants. [Source: J. Hondros, 'Occupation and Resistance: the Greek Agony,' New York, 1983]

18 Venizelos, Eleftherios (1864-1936): an eminent Greek revolutionary, a prominent and illustrious statesman as well as a charismatic leader in the early 20th century. Elected several times as Prime Minister of Greece and served from 1910 to 1920 and from 1928 to 1932.

Venizelos had such profound influence on the internal and external affairs of Greece that he is credited with being “the maker of modern Greece.” His impact on modern Greece has been such that he is still widely known as the “Ethnarch.”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleftherios_Venizelos)

19 Campbell Fire (Pogrom on 29th June 1931): Responsible for the arson of the poor neighborhood Campbell was the Ethniki Enosis Ellas - National Union Greece, short: EEE also known as the 3E or the 'Iron Helmets.'

This organization was the backbone of fascism in Greece in the period between the two World Wars. It was established in Thessaloniki in 1927. The most important element of the 3E political voice was anti-Semitism, an expression mostly of the Christian traders of the city in order to displace the Jewish competitors.

President of the organization was a merchant, Mr. G. Cormides, there was also a secretary, a banker, D. Haritopoulos, and chief spokesman Nikos Fardis, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Makedonia. The occasion for the outbreak of anti-Semitism in Thessaloniki was the inauguration of the new Maccabi Hall in June 1931.

In a principal article signed by Nikos Fardis, from Saturday, 20th June 1931, it was said that Maccabi of Thessaloniki had placed itself in favor of an Autonomous Greek Macedonia. The journalist "revealed" the conspiracy of Jews, Bulgarians, Communists and Catholics against Macedonia.

Two days later, the Ministry of the Interior confirmed the newspaper's allegations despite the strict denial of the Maccabi representatives. All the anti-Semitic and fascist organizations were aroused. This marked the beginning of the riots that resulted in the pogrom of Campbell.

Elefterios Venizelos was again involved after the 1917 fire, speaking at the parliament as Prime Minister, and talked with emphasis about the law-abiding stance of the Jewish population, but simultaneously permitted the prosecution of Maccabi for treason against the state. Let alone the fact that the newspaper Makedonia with the inflaming anti-Semitic publications was clearly pro-Venizelian.

At the trial, held in Veroia ten months later, Fardis and the leaders of EEE were found not guilty while three refugees were found guilty, but with mitigating circumstances and therefore were freed on the spot. It is worth noting that at the 1933 general election, the Jews of Thessaloniki, in one block voted against Venizelos. [Source: Bernard Pierron, 'Juifs et chrétiens de la Grèce moderne,' Harmattan, Paris 1996, pp. 179-198]

20 The Fire of Thessaloniki: In the night of 18th August 1917, an enormous fire, fed by the famous Vardar wind, destroyed the city centre where most of the Jews lived. It was a region of 227 hectares, where 15,000 families lived, 10,000 of them were Jewish families which were deprived of their homes.

The Jews were hit the hardest, since more than two thirds of the property destroyed by the fire was Jewish and only a tenth of that immense fortune was insured. Nearly all the schools, 32 synagogues, 50 oratories, all the cultural centers, libraries, clubs, etc. were annihilated.

Despite of the aid of a sum of 40,000 golden pounds collected from all over the world, the community never recovered from that disaster. The Jewish face of the city that had been there for more than five centuries was wiped out in 36 hours.

25,000, out of 53,000 of the stricken Jews that belonged mostly to the lower and middle class, were forced to live in the working-class districts that were hastily built in a rudimentary fashion. (Source: Rena Molho, 'Jewish Working-Class Neighborhoods established in Salonica Following the 1890 and the 1917 Fires,' in Rena Molho, 'Salonica and Istanbul: Social, Political and Cultural Aspects of Jewish Life,' The Isis Press, Istanbul, 2005, pp.107-126.)

21 Hirsch [Clara de] Hospital: It was inaugurated in May 4th, 1908, exactly ten years after the donation of Baroness Clara de Hirsch who had died in the meantime. Her condition for the donation of 200,000 golden francs, once off for the construction of a 100-bed hospital and 30.000 francs per year for its maintenance was that an equal amount of money would be given by the Jewish Community.

In order to cover the second part there were many public fund raising efforts and a special committee was formed in order to supervise the details of the construction. The hospital manager was Doctor Misrahee and it employed the most specialized doctors of the city.

During WWI it became a military hospital which was returned to the community in 1919. After the end of WWII the hospital was sold to the Greek State on the condition that the label with the name of Baroness de Hirsch would remain intact. This was respected only during the first decades.

Today the label cannot be seen, while some of the marble plaques where the names of other Jews donators were written, were taken out and others were covered with many layers of paint. (Source: 1. R.Molho, “The Jews of Thessaloniki 1856-1919 A special community” Ed. Themelio, Athens 2001, pp.96-101)

22 An-ski, Szymon (pen name of Szlojme Zajnwel Rapaport) (1863-1920): Writer, ethnographer, socialist activist. Born in a village near Vitebsk. In his youth he was an advocate of haskalah, but later joined the radical movement Narodnaya Vola. Under threat of arrest he left Russia in 1892 but returned there in 1905.

From 1911-14 he led an ethnographic expedition researching the folklore of the Jews of Podolye and Volhynia. During the war he organized committees bringing aid to Jewish victims of the conflict and pogroms.

In 1918 he became involved in organizing cultural life in Vilnius, as a co-founder of the Union of Jewish Writers and Journalists and the Jewish Ethnographic Society. Two years before his death he moved to Warsaw. He is the author of the Bund party's anthem, 'Di shvue' (Yid. oath).

The participation of the Bund in the Revolution of 1905 influenced An-ski's decision to write in Yiddish. In his later work he used elements of Jewish legends collected during his ethnographic expedition and his experiences from WWI.

His most famous work is The Dybbuk (which to this day remains one of the most popular Yiddish works for the stage). An-ski's entire literary and scientific oeuvre was published in Warsaw in 1920-25 as a 15-volume edition.

23 Cinema Palace: The sign post at the front of the cinema was in three languages: French, Greek and Hebrew. Palace was also a theater. Performances were organized there as early as 1935.  On2nd January 1942 the Germans confiscated it, changed its name to “Soldatenbühne” (Soldiers’ Stage) and it was a theater  for German soldiers only.

(Source: Costas Tomanas, “theaters in old Thessaloniki” Ed. Nisides, Thessaloniki 1994)