Hidden Children In Occupied Greece
It was in the autumn of 2000, prompted by the first presentation in Greece of the Anne Frank House Museum’s touring exhibition, “Anne Frank: a Story for Today”, that the Jewish Museum of Greece began research into the subject of hidden Jewish children in Occupied Greece, in search of similar stories with a Greek background.
Gradually, accounts were gathered from people who had lived through the harsh years of the Second World War in Greece and had known displacement, loss, humiliation and fear. At the most tender age, they were forced to leave their homes, go into hiding, constantly change their hiding places and use false names or false identities, so much that they lost their own identity sometimes permanently.
The sequence of the events of that time is more or less familiar. The Greek – Italian war of 1940 -1941 was succeeded on April 6th by the German invasion. By April 9th the German had already entered Thessaloniki and by the 27th Athens.
In Thessaloniki, started the first systematic persecution of Greek Jews when all male members of the Community were gathered together and humiliated in Plateia Eleftherias (The Square of Liberty) on 11th July 1942. Forced labor was imposed upon them and they were confined to ghettos. Their property was systematically plundered. The culmination came in 1943, with the deportations by rail under the most appalling conditions. Ninety – seven per cent of the city’s Jews never came back from their extermination camps. Few had foreseen the evil that was in store and managed to hide in time and save themselves.
The Athens area was under Italian administration until September 1943. Anti – Semitic laws did not apply here, so many Jews from German – occupied parts of the country were able to find temporary refuge. However, when Italy capitulated and the Germans took over the former Italian – administered territory, they set about their monstrous task there too. The difference now though was that, the Jews here had advance information about the fate of others of their faith and took steps to hide. They were many cases of Christians who willingly helped their persecuted fellow human beings, especially the children, by hiding them.
Attention should be drawn to the particularly intense emotional expressions in the accounts of the children. The anxiety over survival is one of the most noticeable features in them. The same goes for feelings of loneliness and separation from loved ones, of loss, and in some cases rejection, which even in unfounded, gripped the children’s innocent souls. The constant need to play a role, which was necessary for their survival, coupled with sudden separation from their real parents and long periods of time spent with strangers, towards whom they had to behave as they would to their parents, frequently led to confusion, which in many cases went on after the Occupation was over.
However, the overriding emotion running through almost every single account is fear of everything and everybody that could betray the children themselves or their families. It was the fear of even pronouncing their own names, which was not overcome for a long time after the Liberation, and which in many cases left indelible marks on their personalities and even on their whole adult lives.
BENIAMIN ALBALAS
Beniamin Albalas was born on 1 September 1937 in the central Athens neighbourhood of Kato Petralona to parents from the western Greek city of Preveza. For him, it is a happy coincidence that it was his father’s sister, Aunt Matilda, who was the midwife at his birth. The Second World War broke out on his second birthday, a war that for a small child meant the sound of the air-raid sirens and the rank smell of the underground shelter on Pallineon Street.
A chain of random events enabled the Albalas family to be saved. As a travelling textile salesman who did the rounds in the centre of the city, his father Iakovos harboured no illusions about the bleak future. One of his friendly contacts was Panos Machairas, a neighbour and doctor to many Jewish families. Machairas was not only a humanitarian, but a resistance operative – he was a member of the National Republican Greek League (EDES) – and responsible for the underground network in the Athens Municipal Police that provided forged identity papers. In late May 1943, with the rubber stamp of the 9th Police Precinct, Iakovos, Karolina and Beniamin Albalas were renamed Orestis, Maria and Kostas Donos, respectively. The next step was transfer to a safe house, namely to the home of a cousin of Machairas in Katsipodi (as the Athens suburb of Dafni was once known). For 14 whole months, the family lived indoors and were provided with food by Machairas’ resistance network. The mother and children – Beniamin and his two-year-old sister Victoria – and the octogenarian grandmother hid, while the father left the house early every morning to give the impression that he was working so as not to cause suspicion in the neighbourhood. The daily danger of being accidentally found out or being betrayed terrified them, particularly when the Germans and collaborationist Security Battalions unleashed indiscriminate raids against the resistance in the districts of Athens. A victim of these mass arrests made during one of these raids was his mother’s brother, Leon Sabas, who was deported to Germany as a Christian detainee.
Those dark days ended with the flight of the occupiers in October 1944. Over the following 70 years, the small hidden child would subsequently become a military officer, academic, president of the Athens Jewish Community and the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece, and a member of many other Greek Jewish organizations and associations.
SIFIS (IOSSIF) VENTURAS
Sifis (Iossif) Venturas was born in 1938 Chanea, Crete. His particularly wealthy family originally came from medieval Venice and had kept their Italian citizenship. In 1942 the local Gestapo began considering the issue of the island’s Jews. The Jewish Community had to hand in a register, listing the names of its members. The Venturas family with their two children, Sifis and her older sister Yvette were included in this register.
A friend of their father’s who had access to Gestapo information, warned them to leave as soon as possible, “…for things are not going to go well for the Jews”.
The family escaped Crete in 1942 in a boat, for the comparative safety of Athens.
At first they stayed at their grandfather’s home, in Sepolia. But with Stroop’s order for the registration of the Jews, they had to hide. After a few days wandering on Mt. Hymettus, when his father carried Sifis on his shoulders, and they slept in schools and churches, a house was found in Zografou. Their refuge could not stay secret for long though: Greek collaborators of the Germans discovered it and started blackmailing them for money. The family decided to split up.
Sifis, together with their servant, Athina, settled in the house of a friend, Petrochilos, in Ekali. The young boy was presented as the illegitimate son of Athina. Playing with Petrochilos’ two children and going for walks in the countryside of Kokkinaras, were their diversions. During a walk to Nea Erithrea the sole surviving Occupation-time photograph with Sifis and Athina was taken.
As he was still so young, he quickly forgot his natural parents and became attached to Athina. She, for her part, loved him as if he were her own son.
The children’s favourite recreation during the summer was diving and playing in the fountain in the middle of the garden. While the Petrochilos children were allowed to swim naked, Athina forbade Sifis to do so. Since the garden was separated from the adjacent German prisoner’s camp only by a wire fence, there was a great danger they would see the little boy was circumcised.
The separation of the family lasted for months. They were not reunited until the Liberation.
When Sifis, after all that time, first met his parents again, he did not remember them! “I do not recognize my parents as my natural parents. I stay close to Athina, it’s her I love, she is my mother. For many years after the Occupation this troubles me. Those events are traumatic, they have followed me in all my life. They have left indelible marks” he confesses. Even today he attributes some traits of his character, like easily feeling panicky and insecure, to the experiences of that time.
FOTINI KAMPA
Thirteen years had passed since the end of the war. Sixteen-year-old Fotini Kamba lived with her parents in Athens. They were a quiet, loving family.
Then her father happened to be taken ill with Asian flu. There was an epidemic of it at that time and he was taken to hospital. His condition was serious.
During one of her visits to the hospital, her father started to tell Fotini a story. It seems he did not want to die without having told her the truth.
So he told her that they always loved her very much and that she was the most precious thing her father and mother had. But he also told her that she was not really their child. During the Occupation, around 1943-1944, a Jewish acquaintance of theirs had entrusted his three-year-old daughter, Rachel, to him and his wife. He knew how much they loved children and wanted to protect her that way from the persecution unleashed by the Germans against the Jews. Upon his return from exile, he would take her back.
The years went by, the Germans left Athens and the war ended. The couple’s Jewish acquaintance never returned to claim his daughter and it was obvious why. They continued raising her as their own child. The bond between them had taken root and they loved her very much. Her adoptive mother was particularly fond of her.
This revelation took Fotini-Rachel by surprise and shattered her quiet and orderly world. She became very upset and started trying to discover who she really was. When her father recovered, together they tried to trace her original family. They went to her old neighbourhood and inquired about her parents. So complete had been the deportation of the Jews though, that none of those who might have known them remained.
Her adoptive mother became anxious that she would lose her. Her anxiety brought their attempts to find Fotini-Rachel’s natural parents to an end. Fotini-Rachel did not even manage to learn their names.
A few years later, she married a Christian and had children. But no matter how many years went by, the questions about her real identity still troubled her, always remaining unanswered. Fortunately, her husband supported her. Her efforts to obtain more information through the Jewish Community of Athens and also through international organisations in Israel failed, as her natural parents’ names were not known. A relative, who might have known them, died before he could tell.
Even so, Fotini-Rachel decided to accept her identity: she studied and prepared to become Jewish again. The Jewish Community took her to its bosom and embraced her. She now is a member of various Jewish women’s organisations. She has many Jewish friends, who invite her to Jewish celebrations and Community festivals. Her close family approve of the choices she has made and fully support her. She has thus managed, after years of anxiety, to become again what she believed she should be and regain her inner peace and tranquillity.
SHELLY COHEN
Shelly Cohen was one of the few children of Thessaloniki who, from the balcony of their home, saw the Germans arrive as occupiers in her native city on 9 April 1941. Soon, the little girl would leave her carefree childhood of playing games on the street and learn that her name was now “Kaiti Konstantinou”. One Wednesday afternoon in March 1943 she would say goodbye to her parents and, for the last time, to her grandfather and aunts – whom she would never see again – and board a train by herself, to travel to her Uncle Manolis in Athens. If, in her own words, the train was the road to death for most Jews, for her it was the road to life. After two days and nights of anguish and panic that she might reveal her real name, she arrived in the capital. Fifteen days later, her parents joined her there.
Ultimately, Solomon, Regina and Shelly Cohen survived thanks to Konstantinos Kefalas, a paper merchant, who offered to pay whatever was needed to hide them, and the president of the Pharmaceutical Association of Athens, Lambros Karamertzanis, who had contacts in the resistance. The two men were not random cases of Christians offering solidarity, as they were also helping other Jews, the Siakki and Antzel families. Until the Liberation, the Cohens changed shelter 17 times to escape the myriad of dangers, including blackmail by Greek agents of the Gestapo. One of those safe homes was owned by Lela Karagianni, a resistance heroine who was executed in September 1944. Forced to go out for shopping and burdened by the daily risks, Shelly realised how quickly she had grown up. The liberation, which was announced by the members of the resistance shouting through paper cones, left her ecstatic. The return to Thessaloniki was a challenge to make a new start. It also left her with bittersweet memories of playing games in the street with her cousins, which were now firmly in the past.
MOISSIS KONSTANTINIS
The family of Moissis Konstantinis lived in Athens. His father, Kanaris Konstantinis was an inspector General with the PTT. The children, Moissis and David, his elder brother by three years, were at school when the war broke out. Until 1943, while Athens was still under Italian occupation, little changed for the family.
Difficulties started in September 1943. Italy capitulated and the Germans took over from the Italians in Athens. When Stroop’s order for the registration of all the city’s Jews was issued, the family went immediately into hiding. The first house they hid in, was in Nea Smyrni. An incident with a German soldier during Christmas, made them change several hideouts. At the various homes they hid in, they passed themselves off as relatives of the landlords, who had come from one of the provinces. In many places they were refused admission or were told to go when it was discovered that they were Jews. They always went on foot. A young man with a cart helped them carry their meager belongings. They ended up in a house in Promitheos street.
His father had already procured false IDs with Christian names. Moissis was now called Dimitrios Arikas and his brother Vassilis. He felt that it was very important to use his false name, that it was not a game.
They avoided going out of the house. They missed the sun. The endless hours of their confinement passed with toys of their own making. They also learned to play the piano. Ôhe ‘’Piano School Certificate’’ of Dimitrios Arikas does still exist.
The only dangerous outings of Moissis were shopping errands with his mother.
They first went by the stock market, where they changed the gold sovereigns they had into drachmas. After that they went to Evripidou Street, where they bought bread. As they had no ration coupons, they had to pay for it. The also bought olives, lentils and anything else they could find to cook. Moissis remembers witnessing battles between the Germans and the ELAS resistance fighters near Veikou Street towards the end of the Occupation. Then went running from door to door along the side streets, dodging the bullets that whizzed by. His father and elder brother almost never went out.
SAMUEL (MAKIS) MATSAS
Samuel Matsas, the son of Minos and Margarita (née Sarfati), saw the light of day in 1937 in Athens. His earliest childhood memories were bound to have a strong musical colour, given the Hoffman piano in the house and the songs his parents sang in the evenings to the family, shaping his childhood dreams. One day, however, the music stopped and what should have been a happy childhood was disrupted by air strikes in Piraeus and strict voices on the radio announcing the beginning of the Nazi occupation. Unaware of what was happening, little Samuel lived through a dream-like adventure that started one night in 1943, when the family left its home at 225 Michail Voda St and sought refuge in the house of Pipitsa Ikonomou, a close friend and partner of his father’s, at 10 Chios St. Again, thanks to Pipitsa, they soon escaped from Athens and settled in the mountain village of Dikastro, in Fthiotida prefecture, along with his grandfather Azaria Sarfati. There, thanks to the hospitality of the family of Yiorgos and Athina Vlachos and the support of the entire village, life went back to normal. Minos participated in the people’s court due to his legal knowledge, barter secured the necessary food while little Samuel – now called Makis by everyone – rediscovered the joys of carefree play thanks to the young daughter of the Vlachos family, Rinio. Indeed, the guerrillas of the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), who passed through Dikastro frequently, made him their “mascot”. During wide-scale sweep operations conducted by the Germans in summer 1944, the village was evacuated, which was the beginning of a period of anxious wandering that lasted several weeks. But the Matsas family managed to avoid the trap of Nazi persecution. The Liberation found them in Lamia and, with a British military truck, they made their way back to Athens. Returning to normal life was as strewn with difficulties and deprivations. But most importantly for the seven-year Makis, the music resumed. And it has never stopped since.
YVET BEZA
When Thessaloniki was bombed in 1941, the family of Yvette Beza decided to move to the village of Vyzitsa, on Mt. Pelion, where they would be safer.
They lived quietly there for a time, while their father, Mois, traveled back and forth from Thessaloniki on business. One day though, he did not return: he was taken hostage by the Germans and incarcerated in the Eptapyrghion prison.
The family immediately returned to Thessaloniki. The intervention of their mother, Sarina, at the Kommandatur, back up by letters from German industrialists, attesting that Mois Beza was one of their good customers, brought results. After ninety-three days of incarceration their father was released. Back from his “journey”, he brought some small presents; For Sabetai, Yvette’s brother, whom they called Mimis, he brought “a handmade snake, made by the long-term convicts with his name “Mimis Bezas 1941” inscribed on it”; For Yvette, he brought “a purse of the same origin, inscribed “Vivi Beza, 1941”they used to call her Vivi when she was young.
Little Yvette was at the time in the second year of Elementary school. She still remembers the first day she went to school wearing the yellow Star of David on her clothes, in compliance with the German order. “I think I wore it without being impressed. But I had a schoolmate and friend, Mario Karasso, who was ashamed to enter the classroom and his big black eyes were filled with tears […] “Don’t be ashamed, my child, it’s not a shame to be Jewish their good teacher told him as she sat him at his desk. Then she went on with the lesson as if nothing had happened”.
During the carnival, a neighbor took her secretly out of the ghetto and dressed her up to play with other children. A passing German soldier took a photograph and gave one copy to each child.
A first attempt to escape to the Italian-occupied city of Lamia failed. A few days later, friend knocked on their door: “Come quickly with me”, he told them, “In the morning they’ll take you”.
“We went into the night, all fearful […] I can still feel the beating of my heart. “For fifteen days they stayed hidden in Thessaloniki with false IDs and Christian names.
But they had to leave town. From this moment started their Odyssey that would last for two years: they went to Kozani, Larissa, Athens, Ioannina, Dorres in Albania, and then, by ship, to Italy. From there, a big steamer carried them, together with thousands of soldiers, to Egypt. “We arrived in Alexandria and from there they took us to a refuge camp in the desert, at the “Sources of Moses” […] We stayed in tents. Since there was no danger of Germans now, we used our real names again”.
They lived in the desert for eight months before they were able to return to liberated Greece.
LILIAN BENRUBI
At the outbreak of the Greek-Italian war in 1940, ten-year-old Lilian Benrubi lived with her parents, Isaak and Dora, in Tsimiski Street in Thessaloniki. Lilian’s father, Isaac, a realist and a foreseeing native of Thessaloniki, decided back in 1941 to protect his family by moving to Athens, then under Italian occupation. Two rooms in the centre of the city became their new home. Lilian had already registered in the nearby school, so that she would not lag behind. The lessons, the company of her girlfriends and their youthfull frolicks, helped maintain a semblance of normality in her daily life. As the Germans had already started taking initiatives that forebode nothing good, young Lilian had to stop school so that she would not have to go out so much. Isaak procured false ID cards with Christian names so that it would be hard to trace them. He himself became ´´Fotis Bouzouris´´ and his wife became ´´Theodora´´, while Lilian took the name of ´´Loukia Papadopoulou´´. At the same time, they started looking for a new house in another area, where nobody would know them. A family friend, Aristidis Kestekidis, offered them refuge in his home. A very difficult period followed for Lilian. Confined in the house, she almost never went out. She missed a year at school. But since Kestekidis’ home was always full of people, she at least had some company to help her pass the endless days. Çours of agony came for the family, when some Germans moved into a room of the house. This however proved to be a blessing in disguise, for no one could ever suspect that Jews were hiding in a house where Germans stayed. Their hideout became known though. They had to move once again. Doctor Christos Papageorgiou hid them in his house. The situation there was even more difficult: the family had to stay absolutely silent and quiet, so that the patiens visiting the doctor would not notice them. Lilian had become used to pretending to be a relative from Trikala. But this compulsory role-playing was stifling for her. The pregnancy of the doctor’s wife, Katina, gave them all hope. On October 12th, 1944 this hope was realised: the Germans left town, a boy was born to Katina and the Benrubi family were at last free.
EFTYCHIA NAHMIA
In the vortex of war, the family of Eftychia Nahmia found themselves in Athens, far away from their native city of Ioannina, where they normally lived. The anonymoys crowd of the city would help them pass unnoticed. When Stroop ordered the city’s Jews to be registered the family went into hiding instead.
They obtained new, false ID cards with Christian names. Chitsa and her brother, Tzekos (Iakovos), changed their names to Eftychia and Nikos. They found refuse in the house of Mimis and Maria Angelopoulou. They passed themselves of as a nephew and a niece of “uncle Mimis” and “aunt Maria” from some provincial town.
No one in their new neighbourhood knew that they were Jewish. They played with other children, while their “aunt” gave them lessons, so that they would not lag behind other children of their age. Craving for their family and memories of their happier days of the past, may them cried at night but they did not dare express their longing, lest they upset the people that were hiding them.
Months went by and all sense of time was lost. The children had no way of knowing when Pessach time came. For cover, they celebrated all Christian festivals, including Greek Orthodox Easter. Like everyone else, they went to church on Good Friday. This made them feel confused. Was it not a sin to pretend to be Christians, when in fact they were not?
In order for the whole family to be together, they moved into the house of Dimitris and Argyro Spiliotopoulou. Walks in the nearby park during dark and extremely cautious visits to the Vox open-air cinema were their only diversions. A chance encounter, an inappropriate glance, could spell disaster.
Thus, at an age when other children discover life and the world, “when their first thought is play and second the school”, Eftychia had to change her name, in order to hide from those that regarded her as “subhuman” and persecuted her. For her “it’s not a joke, not a game, but a matter of life and death . . . “.
ROSINA PARDO
In the centre of prewar Thessaloniki , at 35 Tsimiski street, lived the family of Haim and Evgenia Pardo lived with their three daughters, Lilly, Rosina and Denise. Haim was a merchant and his shop was just across the street. Until the declaration of the war in 1940, they had led a quiet life. Even then, only a few things changed. Fear of the Italian bombing raids made the family temporarily move to a detached house in Edmondou Rostan Street, a little further away from the city centre.
Their first worries started when the Germans entered the city on April 9th, 1941. They were quickly appeased though by the conquerors skilful propaganda and the ambivalent attitude of the Jewish Community’s leadership towards them.
Later, the compulsory concentration of all the Jews of Thessaloniki into ghettos and the yellow stars bode no good. Their worst fears came true, when the first missions to Poland started. At this critical point, the family of Rosina Pardo decided to flee the ghettos.
The couple of Yiorgos and Faedra Karakotsou became their saviours. They undertook to hide the whole family in their house, at Tsimiski street, in the centre of Thessaloniki. Rosina and her sister, Denise, changed names and became Roula and Nitsa. From that moment on, they would not venture outdoors.
They found refuge in the worlds of fantasy, in keeping a diary and playing: “We used to climb on the terrace, at 113 Tsimiski street and play “ship”. Seated on a parapet, we imagined it to be a ship and set off for faraway places, seas and free lands, without conquerors” remembers Rosina – Roula.
She also kept a diary, where the prevailing sense of fear of being exposed and arrested has been recorded. Fearing that her diary might fall into German hands and compromise them all, she never mentioned her real name in it.
Their confinement lasted for 548 days. The big day was October 26th, 1944, when the Germans retreated from Thessaloniki. But even then, when Rosina came out of her hideout and was recognised by an old neighbour who called her by her real name, she was scared and run back into hiding again. Fear had become her second nature. . .
REINA SIAKKI
The German occupation of Thessaloniki in 1941 was to fundamentally change the life of the Jews of the city. Reina was born during the German occupation of Thessaloniki, in 1942. Her father, Albertos Siakki, managed to escape persecution by joining the resistance in the mountains. Her mother, Eda de Botton, had no time to use her Spanish citizenship in order to escape and was confined in the ghetto. Left alone with her daughter and with her whole world in sudden and violent disarray, Eda was now in no state to take any initiatives. Little Reina was to be saved by a good friend of her mother’s, Liliane Fernandes. She proposed the only feasible solution. Having herself used her Italian citizenship just in time to be exempted from confinement to the ghetto, Liliane delivered Reina to the Calamari, French Catholic convert, where the nuns, would look after her. A horn, cut into pieces, would serve as a recognition mark for the eventual reunion of mother and daughter. The prioress did not feel safe though if the Germans raided the convent, how would she explain the presence of Reina, Lila and Mario Citterich, Italians, who lived just outside the convent, already had a thirteen-year-old son Vittorio. The agreed to take the little girl into their family, under the name of Gilberte. With false papers, she was now safe. The memory of her real mother had already started to fade.
At the end of the war they were all alive. Eda, the mother, was in a hospital, convalescing from the experiences of the Bergen-Belsen camp. Alvertos, the father, was in Palestine.
The reunion of mother and daughter, that finally took place in Paris, after a prolonged search, was very difficult. Eda never really managed to overcome the trauma of the camp. Reina-Gilberta, on the other hand, having been separated from her mother at a very early age, had no recollection of her and took a long time to accept her. Even though their relation improved in time, the rift created between them by the war, was never fully repaired.
ISAAK HATZIS
The eldest son of cloth merchant Leon Hatzis, from the northwestern city of Ioannina, and Sarina (Nina) Samuel, from the central city of Trikala, Isaak Hatzis was born in Ioannina on 27 September 1931. On the eve of the war, he lived with his parents and two younger siblings, Chrysoula and Moris, at 3 Aixoneon St in the Athens neighbourhood of Petralona. The family got through the famine of 1941–42 thanks to food sent by his mother’s parents and siblings from Trikala. When the Germans sought to register the Jews of Athens in September 1943, the road to Thessaly was one again the path to salvation for the family. It was only years later that Zakis, Isaak’s diminutive, would learn that all other passengers on the wood gas-fuelled bus, which departed for the town of Karditsa around Yom Kippur, were Jews like himself, who escaped from the German-occupied capital with false papers. When the bus arrived at Sofades, it was in liberated Greece, the only part of Greek territory where the word “Jew” was not a source of shame or a passport to certain death. The fighting between the ELAS partisans and Germans in the region brought more adventure. After staying for a month in Loutra Smokovou, they were put up in Karditsa and finally settled in Volos, where a cousin of his mother’s, Ilias Kapetas, lived. Even though Volos was under German occupation, the strong presence of EAM in the city was a further guarantee of safety. The struggle to survive, however, was daily and Zakis accompanied his mother, under the nose of the Germans and collaborationist Security Battalions, to the villages of Mt. Pelio in order to find food. He travelled as far as Trikala to give his grandfather, Isaak Samuel, enough fabric with which to restart the family business. The then 13-year-old Jewish boy experienced the Liberation – the most beautiful days of his life – in Almyros, in Magnisia prefecture, with his mind full of partisan marching songs, the hope for a better tomorrow and a burning desire to tell his story some day.
ALEXANDROS SIMHA
A black taxi brought in 1940 the family of Alexandros Simha from Kavala to Athens. They were safer here, since no one knew them. Alexandros and his brothers could still, at the beginning of the Occupation, go out, make friends and play with other children, albeit under false names. They even had, for better cover, learned the “Pater noster” and “Credo” Christian prayers. It was then that Alexandros started feeling the first shadows of the difficult period that lay ahead. “My parents kept telling me not to tell anyone we were Jews, so that the Germans would not know” he remembers. “I thus started having feelings of guilt. I felt that I belonged to an inferior category of people…”
The German Occupation got ever harder. The family decided to split up. The Aeginitis family undertook to hide Alexandros. Living with people he did not know was difficult for him. For safety reasons, meetings with his family had been forbidden. His adoptive family did their best to make him feel comfortable. Their daughter, Keti, took him for walks.
Obtaining food was difficult. Guitar playing and singing were the only escape from daily anxiety. His adoptive father started teaching him to read and write, so that he would not lag behind other children of his age.
The family was reunited after the Liberation, starting a new life without having to hide from anyone.
DONA -LILIAN KAPON
Born in 1943, Dona – Lilian Kapon remembers little from the time of the German Occupation, except for a “fleeting picture of hunted people, slipping like shadows into the night”.
She know her family’s story from what her parents have told her. Her family was very wealthy. She had a brother, Isaak – Rovertos. They were in Athens in 1943, when the first German antisemitic measures were implemented.
A couple of family friends, Andona Panayiotou and her husband, Nikos, offered, of their own initiative, to hide them. They even took it upon themselves to adopt little Dona-Lilian, should she lose her parents. They hid in Zografou, together with Dona-Lilian’s uncle and his wife.
They obtained false ID cards with Christian names on them. The parents appeared as Dimitrios and Lela Georghiadi. Isaak took the name Kostakis while Dona-Lilian, still an infant, was called Boula.
They passed themselves off as bombed out refugees from Crete. The stock of the gold sovereigns prudently saved up by her father, helped them provide for themselves without burdening the good people who were hiding them.
But they were not able to stay in their hideout unperturbed for long. An anonymous blackmail letter, asking for gold sovereigns in return for not handing them over made them hastily abandon the house. Dona-Lilian’s fleeting memory goes back to that night. Nikos, who owned a truck, put them on it, covered them with a tarpaulin and hid them in his garage till daybreak.
In order to be safer, Isaak – Rovertos had to be separated from the rest of them and went to stay at the house of the Sinanis family, in Filothei.
A little later, they rent a house in Plaka. They came out only during the night so that nobody would see them, going for a short walk to the nearby archaelogical site. For lack of sun and proper nutrition, the children had developed a vitamin deficiency. Thanks to a good family friend, Aristea Lioudaki, who provided them with vitamin pills, they managed not to get seriously ill until the Liberation.
After the war, Dona – Lilian made sure that these people were awarded the “Righteous of the Nations” title by Yad – Vashem.
ANNA GANI
Anna Gani was born in 1930 in Athens. Her father, Iacovos Mossios, was an itinerant textile merchant.
The first period under the Italians passed without any significant problems for the family. Their difficulties started after the Germans took over and Stroop ordered the registration of all the Jews in Athens. Her father and mother, Stamatoula, decided not to show up. This saved at least the children from arrest.
An acquaintance offered them his house in Egaleo, where nobody had ever seen them before.
But another Jewish family, whom everyone there knew, happened to live next door. If anyone denounced the neighbours, Anna’s family could also easily get caught. They decided to move again. They rented a room in the neighborhood of Aghia Varvara.
Kyra Lemonia, the owner, took them in, despite the fact that Anna’s father had told her they were Jews in hiding, and her own full knowledge of the dangers in store for her should they be caught.
The family made a difficult but comparatively safe living. The textile stock of her father helped them buy their food.
Since no one suspected they were Jews, they managed to stay at Kyra Lemonia’s in safety until July 1944.
But someone gave them away. Greek Security Battalion members started blackmailing them for money, threatening to turn them in to the Germans. The jewellery of the mother temporarily bought their silence. The father’s decision though, to report the extortionists to the Police, led to the arrest of parents.
As soon as the neighbours got word of what had happened, they undertook to hide the children. Kyra Lemonia arranged for one of the two sisters to stay at the home of her close friend, Ioulia, while she herself, the daughter of a priest at the First Cemetery of Athens, offered to take Anna. To explain her sudden appearance, they said they had brought her from some village or other, to help the very old priest, who was almost blind, to get to and from the cemetery.
Her elder sister, Eftychia, hid at the house of Ioulia’s sister, in Chalandri. Her brother, Sam, stayed with a family friend, Rebecca Soussi, at the house of a retired General, in the centre of Athens.
The children remained hidden like this for four months. During this time they never came to any harm. “Anyone who got away, owes it to the [Christian] Greeks”, Anna says.
Fate would have it that Eftychia was to be tragically killed on the very day of Liberation. In the heat of the celebrations, a stray bullet from the skirmishes between the fascist Security Battalions and the leftist ELAS resistance fighters entering the city, struck her in the head, at the corner of Aghion Assomaton Street and Pireos Street, very near the Synagogue . . .
MAURICE GATTEGNO
Maurice Gattegno was born in 1933 to a wealthy family from Thessaloniki. His father, Alvertos, was one of the best-known jewellers in the city. Difficulties started from the very first days of the city’s occupation: their shop’s merchandise was looted, their mansion commandeered. They briefly stayed at the house of a friend.
A family friend of theirs, Mr. Voridis, manager of the Bank of Greece branch in Thessaloniki, warned them that by all accounts things would get pretty tough for the Jews. He advised them to hide. So that they would not lose the few things they still had, he arranged for them to be ´´confiscated´´ for alleged debts to the bank. The ´´confiscation´´ took place in the presence of policemen and a German lieutenant, whom Max Merten himself had put at their disposal!
At first, the family stayed in the laundry room of a house near the old tram Depot. ´´We found ourselves in a wash-house, with three or four people, who came every night and blackmailed my father´´ they were asking for money threatening to turn them in.
Another friend, Vassilis Bouzanis, helped them obtain false ID cards. Their attempt to escape to Athens in an Italian military train, failed. They were arrested and imprisoned in the concentration camp of Pavlos Melas. Forced labour, threats and punishments were part of daily life. A blanket to cover himself, was the only thing young Maurice had during that time.
As they were Spanish citizens, they were set free by intervention of the Spanish Embassy and managed to reach Athens. They stayed at the house of an aunt, in Metz. A little later, they rented a house on Charilaou Trikoupi Street in the centre. The winter of 1943-1944 found them in this same house. ´´It snowed in Athens and the only place we could go to was the nearby park, where they served sweets made from carob beans!´´Maurice remembers after all those years.
Their father’s secret preparations for them to escape to the Middle East, were betrayed by the captain of the boat that was supposed to take them to Turkey. They were once more arrested and brought into the horrible concentration camp of Chaidari. From there, one month later, on April 2nd, 1944, the ´´Second Group´´ of Spanish Jews was loaded onto a train, destined for Bergen-Belsen . . .
MARCEL BATIS
Μarcel Batis was born in 1941 in Athens. A photograph with him at the kitchen window was taken at his grandmother’s house, in Petralona.
While Athens was still under Italian occupation, the Jews enjoyed relative safety and “freedom” of movement. But on September 8th 1943, when the Italian capitulation was announced, the Germans took over from the Italians. From that moment on, things got tougher for the city’s Jews. “Everything was deserted, everything went back to zero”, remembers Marcel’s aunt, Simha.
At Stroop’s order for the registration of all the city’s Jews, the family decided to hide. Marcel found himself with his parents and grandparents in a house in Kastella. But the Allied bombing of the port of Piraeus, made them search for refuge elsewhere.
Together with the rest of the extended family, they squeezed into an empty shop in Nea Elvetia. The floor there was of earth, there were no doors or windows, except for the rolling shutters on the front. The family passed themselves off as bombed-out refugees from Piraeus. Τhey lacked everything. They had managed to take very few things from their home. Among them, two copper cooking pots and some cutlery. With these they fed little Marcel.
With the shutters always down, they tried to pass unnoticed. When German bootsteps were heard from outside, everyone kept silent. “Don’t breath”, their grandfather told them. Their grandmother was praying all day long for them to be saved.
Obtaining provisions was their biggest problem. Marcel already suffered from a vitamin deficiency. They had to sustain themselves with clandestinely procured provisions. Neighbours helped them as much as they could. Marcel’s mother, Rachel, did their washing in exchange for eggs.
The months passed slowly and agonizingly. The whole neighbourhood was aware that they were Jews in hiding, yet no one betrayed them.
On October 12th 1944 the longed for day of Liberation finally came. Participating in the celebrations, the family could at last leave their hideout. They had been saved, but their property had been destroyed, their homes looted.
They now had to start again from scratch . . .
NESTORAS MATSAS
Before the war, the family of Pinchas and Victoria Matsas lived with their three children, Judith, Artemis and little Nestoras in a mansion in Tzitzifies. They led a very convenient life. When their mother died though, they had to move into a much smaller house in Plaka, at 16 Vyronos street.
During the German Occupation things became very difficult. In the winter of 1941 – ’42, their father had to sell one by one the objects they had kept to remind them of their mother: first her fur, then her piano, later the phonograph. With the tiny amounts they obtained from the black-marketers, they barely managed to buy a little food. Sometimes they lacked even this, as they lacked coal for their stove.
On March 24th, 1944 their father did not come back home. A friend of his, Mr. Vlassis came instead, and told them to pack a few things and leave immediately, for the Germans had arrested their father. At first they split up: Nestoras went to the house of Mr.Kiriakakis, a friend, Artemis went to his godmother, Eleni, while Judith stayed at friend of hers, Dionissis. They stayed apart for about ten days. A little later, Dionissis rent a room for them in Exarchia. They settled thus in Londou street. They went back to school and signed up to the Red Cross soup kitchen, in order to have at least one meal per day, especially Artemis, who by now was very thin. In order to earn their living, they decided to start selling cigarettes on the street. Little Nestoras was ashamed at first doing this job, but in time he got used to it. He also got used to hearing people swearing and learned what the “house” of Mrs Glykeria was, on Gambetta street, where the girls bought most of his cigarettes. He witnessed the Resistance youths writing paroles on the walls, as well as the “ruffians” and Quislings and heard about the tortures and executions of Resistance fighters. This way he grew up before actually tasting childhood.
At the same time Artemis fell ill from malnutrition. They tried to heal him by giving him more than his fair share from their meagre rations. Living daily through those difficulties, under the constant fear of being exposed and arrested, the months of the Occupation seemed an eternity to them. The pain of their father’s absence, as well as the uncertainty about his fate, added to their agony. Little Nestoras, by now grown up before his time, kept a diary, where he put in writing their travails and his own thoughts.
The day they longed for came at last, when the last Germans abandoned Athens. The joy of their participation in the celebration was overshadowed by their anxiety for their father’s return. They waited in vain until 1948, when no more hope remained. The fate of the camps’ inmates was by then known beyond doubt. The siblings’ life went on. The memory though of the years of happy family life and the sweet reminiscences from their parents never went away.
PAVLOS SIMHA
When his family split up, Pavlos and his brother, Yerassimos, stayed with their mother. They had already been baptized as Christians, taking false IDs with the surname “Dimitriou”. Pavlos had a additional problem; he sleep walked. For this reason he could not be separated from his mother, as she looked after him during his nightly crises. Together with his father, they temporarily hid in Vyronas, in the house of a distant cousin of one of their former neighbours.
A little later, they had to move to Ilissia, to a secluded old house, where two women lived: old Mrs Andonia with her daughter. The four months they stayed there were the most difficult time for Pavlos. Confined to the house, he lost all contact with children of his age and their games, which were so necessary to him. “A deadly silence reigned most of the time in that enormous mansion” remembers Pavlos. Since every outing could be potentially dangerous, his only outdoor option was the secluded garden of the house: “Lizzards and frogs abounded in that overgrown garden and were my only company” he adds. Their hosts though, terrorized by the ever intensifying persecution by the Germans, asked them to leave the house.
They then found refuge in the home of Stavros Voyiatzakis, in Aghia Paraskevi. Their father managed to escape to the Middle East. After only three months, their landlord, who was the Commanding Officer of the local Police Station, one evening warned them that there would be a raid to find and arrest Jews the next morning. Their mother’s decision to leave immediately saved them as the Germans had been informed of their presence by a traitor.
Their next refuge was the house of Yiannis and Tatiana Bakouli, in Thesseion. Pavlos started selling cigarettes to complement the family’s meagre income.
The adjacent archaelogical site became a field of endless exploration for the children, where their repressed energy and imagination could find an outlet. The violence and horror of the Occupation though, had already marked their souls. They run ever wilder, indulging in merciless pranks, with neighbours and passers-by as their victims.
SABIS AND NELLY KAMHI
A good-hearted Austrian warned the father of Sabis and Nelly Kamhi to hide his family. A family friend, Petros Katsoulakos, suggested they hide in the secluded village of Kotronas, in Mani.
On a truck they set off for Gytheion. False IDs, with Christian names, and some bottles of wine helped them pass through the German blockades on the way.
From Gytheion, they reached the village in a boat. “We arrived at Kotronas as the “Papadopoulos” family” Nelly remembers. “My father as Panayiotis, my mother as Maria, Sabis as Takis and me as Elenitsa”. Time passed by quietly. But in February 1944, a German raid made them flee into the wintry mountains. Sabis’ childish obstinence in refusing to enter a nearby village, saved them, since the Germans were there also. Τhis incident has so strongly been impressed in his memory, that years later he wrote about it in one of his copybooks.
After several days, they returned to Kotronas in another house. It was a very difficult period for the family: they lacked almost everything. The near drowning of Sabis in a capsized boat “was a marked adventure for the village and this scene was captured in a painting by a villager, who sent it to us after the war”.
They lived in Kotronas untill October 1944. As soon as they learned that the English had landed in Gytheion, they set out on their way back home. Sarah, their mother, had taken with her a black stone, which she threw behind her as they left on a boat, never to return.
KETTY SAMUEL
Mois Altchech and Lucha Azaria from Thessaloniki had three children: Reina, Baruch and Ketty. Two Christian girls, Elisso and Marika, lived together with the family as house helpers. Everyone in their neighbourhood knew and loved them.
At the beginning of the German Occupation, Ketty’s family did not go hungry, since their father, a textile merchant, was able to trade his stock for food. “In 1942 my mother becomes pregnant”, recounts Ketty, “for they had told her, if you have another child, your husband will not be called to arms any more. I still very vividly recall the day all that drama happened in Liberty Square, when my father came back, he said ‘Lucha, it’s over, we’re in danger. We must find a way out’.”
They started looking for a way to leave for Athens. Marika and Elissavet tried to help them in any way possible. They even went to the point of wishing to wear a yellow star themselves, so as to share the family’s destiny.
For a short time they moved into another house at the outskirts of the city, but did not stay there for long, as the deportation of the Jews had already begun. “We split up: My mother, pregnant, me and my brother, Lakis, went to a house near the church of Ayia Sofia. There, a lady made me write Ketty Angelidou or repeat it many times, to remember my name was now Ketty Angelidou and that I am her niece. Two or three days later, we boarded a train.” This way they reached Athens. They lived in a house in Akadimia Platonos. They again changed their names and she was now called Ketty Sofianou. But someone who knew them saw them and they had to find new hiding place. “We went away, but it was time for my mother to give birth and we went to some relatives and she gave birth in their house, on June 17th, 1943. Thus was born my sister, Flora.”
When Italy capitulated and the Germans occupied Athens, the family moved to the small provincial city of Eretria. “We had the baby, there was nothing for her to eat, my mother’s milk had stopped, we, the children, gathered small crabs to eat. And having prepared to flee to Syria, we were forced to return to Athens instead.” They stayed at the home of the Kambouropoulos family, in the suburb of Peristeri. They once more changed their surname and were now called Altinoglou. Their father worked together with other merchants from Thessaloniki and they managed to get by.
But someone betrayed them. The Germans came and instructed them to go and register with the Jewish Community. Their father now remembered having heard that a friend of theirs, Yiannis Kosmidis, had helped Jews to escape. He went to see him. Kosmidis also advised him to register. Mois made the mistake of following this advice and he was arrested and jailed in the concentration camp of Chaidari, at the outskirts of Athens. Ketty would never see him again. Lucha was now alone to take care of the whole family. She went to the Red Cross soup kitchen and brought back milk for the children and food for Mois, which she took to the camp. One day she came back from the camp with money: Father “had sold his ring inside the camp.” Together, he sent them a note: “Kosmidis traitor…”
The last time their mother went to present herself to the Community, she saw all Jewish men being loaded onto trucks. A friend took her and the family to the house of Lola Feggos. She in turn, took them to the house of her own family, somewhere in the suburb of Kipoupolis. “A tiny house. We hid there, we ate rocket from the side of the road, we had nothing else to eat, our baby ate corn from the chicken-coop. My mother was such a dynamic woman, with four children, the eldest eleven years old and the youngest an infant, she was a hero this woman.”
Liberation found them there. “When the war ended, they came looking for us, and they ask Lakis, my brother, ‘do you know the Altchech family?’ Lakis thought they were Germans, ‘no’, he says, ‘I don’t know them’ and then [they asked him] ‘why did you lie to us?’ ‘I thought you were Germans’. Such was our fear…”
MARIOS SOUSSIS
Marios Soussis and his three siblings lived with their parents in Athens. At the beginning of the war, their father obtained false ID cards with Christian names. Their shop’s merchandise was distributed to friends for safekeeping.
In 1943 the Germans took over the occupation of Athens. Commander Stroop’s order for all the city’s Jews to be registered, bode no good and made the family decide to hide. Mr. Vigos, the Mayor of Chalandri, a suburb of Athens, offered them refuge on his estate. When this house was commandeered by the Germans, they had to move to Frangoklissia into the house of Ms. Kleopatra, as Marios remembers her.
On March 24th, 1944, their father was arrested at the blockade of the Synagogue and interned at the Chaidari concentration camp. From there, he sent them notes on small pieces of paper or cloth. His watch and golden ring, are the last things they have from him. A few days later, all prisoners were herded onto trains bound for the extermination camps…
Together with their mother, the children found refuge in the estate of Mr. Kortessis, in Chalandri. ´´From that day on, housewife Louisa was transformed into a furious lioness, who would do anything in order to save her children from the rapacious birds of prey of the Third Reich […] the Germans never managed to find us´´, Marios recounts. ´´Like a new Moses, my mother led her small tribe of Israelites to the Promised Land…´´ They settled in one room of the small house of Belbas, one of the peasant workers of the estate. The daily rituals of rural life, like wheat threshing with horses, distillation of alcohol from pomaces and feeding and mating of the cows, were new experiences to them. Ôhe children of the farmers became their playmates.
They were deprived of many things. Obtaining food was difficult. A friend of theirs, who was a grocer, sent them provisions from Athens.
Upon Liberation, they returned home in Athens. But it had been ransacked and their shop’s merchandise appropriated by others. Now their mother had to support the whole family by herself, during the difficult time of the Civil War, that had just begun. . .
STERINA PINTO - TABOCH
Sterina Pinto was born in Thessaloniki in 1932, the youngest of the seven children of Zacharias and Estrea Pinto. The family lived in the centre of the city. Relations with their Christian neighbours were excellent. “We all loved each other, all the people in the neighbourhood”, she says.
The death of their father at the very beginning of the German Occupation prevented them from escaping the German’s closing trap: “Had my father still been alive, we might have been able to flee. When he died, my siblings were all young, they had no experience, they were all taken to Auschwitz, and not one of them came back”.
Just before the Germans started arresting the city’s Jews, a friend of Sterina’s mother took the little girl to the city of Verroia. There she would try to find pack animals and organize the family’s escape to the mountains. Her provisional one-week stay at the house of Yiannis and Maria Grigoriadis, became permanent, since Jews were in the meantime forbidden to travel. Their friends made it to the mountains, but Sterina’s family was trapped in Thessaloniki. She would never see them again.
In order to let no-one suspect she was Jewish, during the time she stayed in Verroia she used the false name Maria Grigoriadou and lived as a Christian.
Upon the Liberation, Sterina’s “step father” took her to Thessaloniki, to appear as a survivor at the Jewish Community and thus facilitate eventual search by her relatives. She also asked him to take her to her old neighbourhood, to see if someone was back and what had happened to their home. “And when we were there”, she recounts, “all the neighbourhood gathered around me and everyone pretended they did not know me…” Sterina was thirteen by then, and this was her biggest disappointment. She could not retrieve anything belonging to he now lost family. Only her memories remained. “I was asking the neighbours, when the Germans carried our things away, did by chance any photographs drop, I do not want anything more, just a photograph of my parents, if you found something. I have neither a photograph, nor anything else from them. I did not ask for anything else, I did not ask for furniture, just a photograph, that’s all I ever asked for. But they, all of them together: We do not know you… This was an enormous disappointment.”
As noone of her relatives was coming back, Sterina returned to Verroia, now her permanent home. She went on living as a Christian and using the false name from the time of the Occupation. “I went to the church, visited Sunday School, I lived as a Christian, only that I wasn’t baptized!” Everyone around her had almost forgotten she was Jewish and when she was betrothed to Isaac Taboch, a Jew, they were all astonished! But she had never forgotten her origin and identity. “I often went to the Synagogue in Verria, I went and lighted the oil-lamp…
In 1954 she married Isaac in Verroia and had three children. In 1960 she once more returned to Thessaloniki, which nevertheless was already very different from the city of her reminiscences. But she always remembers her family. “I often have hopes, that someone of them is living somewhere else, in another country…”
She retained close contact with her saviours until their death, and still keeps in touch with their children and grandchildren in Canada.
ALLEGRA MATALON
For Allegra Matalon, the beautiful memories of Thessaloniki did not stop with the outbreak of the Greek–Italian War, but a little earlier, when she followed her parents, Solomon and Eleonora Matalon, to Athens, because of her father’s transfer. The occupation affected, but did not undermine the rhythm of life. The 12-year-old Allegra attended the First Gymnasium in Plaka, her older brother Raoul, the Varvakeio School. During the terrible famine in the winter of 1941–42, her father’s salary as an employee with the Greek State Railways (SEK) kept hunger at bay, as did the food sent from Thessaloniki by dentist Mois Molho, her maternal uncle.
It was clear that the situation was changing when the parcels from the uncle stopped. The danger became visible in the spring of 1943, along with the first signs of solidarity. During Raoul’s final year in the Varvakeio, the headmaster encouraged the students to support their Jewish classmate. After Athens rabbi Ilias Barzilai paid an unexpected visit to their home in Metaxourgio to encourage them to abandon the city, the Matalon family decided to take the risk to leave, as he did himself. The first welcoming refuge they found was on Michail Voda St, in the home of the Kouloutpanis family. Later, the children in the family, Zoi and Giorgos, who knew Raoul as a candidate student for Athens Polytechnic, secured a small house for the persecuted family in Agios Georgios in Ano Liosia, in December 1943. With the tacit support of the peasants and bakers of the wider Menidi (Acharnes) area, the archbishop of Athens and the forgery networks that provided fake identify papers that guaranteed their anonymity, the Matalons lived a simple life in Ano Liosia until the Liberation. Bitter memories remain of the raids of the Germans and Greek collaborators in Menidi and the figure of the young Giorgos Kouloutpanis, who had become a senior member of the United Panhellenic Youth Organisation (EPON), when he was arrested by the Special Security division and handed over to the Germans in February 1944. “A lad young and handsome … They tortured him to death … He had come one evening to Agios Georgios and asked us to hide him because he was being hunted by the Germans … And we hid him. We reciprocated for what he had done for us…”
Exhibition Contibutors
Exhibition Curator:
Zanet Battinou
Archaelogist – Director J.M.G.
Museological – Museographical Study:
Dr. Evridiki Antzoulatou – Retsila
Ethnologist – Folklorist – Museologist
Associate Professor of the Ionian University
Research – Texts – English Translations:
Alexios – Nikolaos Menexiadis
Cand. PhD History
Proofreading:
Ilia Iatrou
Additional Translations:
Kay – Elvina Sutton
Graphic Design and Catalogue Cover Artistic Processing:
Hayia Cohen
Graphic Designer
Constructions:
Tassos Abatzis
Sculptor – Painter
Panel Printing:
Stavros Belessakos
Plexiglass Constructions:
Kostas Theodorou
Inscriptions:
Vassilios Katritsis
Electronic Processing and Printing of I.D. Cards:
George D. Georgiadis
Printing of Catalogue and Other Material:
Athanassios Ioannidis
Sound Production and Processing:
Studio GDG
Photographic Archive – Photography:
Leonidas Papadopoulos
Exhibit Conservation:
Mary Kapotsi
Conservator of Antiquities and Works of Art
Exhibition Educational Programs:
Orietta Treveza – Soussi
Museum Educator
