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[Part Three of Twelve]

Bodies Visible and Invisible: The Erasure of the Jewish Cemetery in the Life of Modern Thessaloniki

LAQUEUR and HESSE

The cemetery on which the Aristotle University now stands was by far the largest and most ancient of the city’s extant places for the dead. It sat directly in the path of the main city artery, the via Egnatia, and just beyond the grand arch of the Roman emperor Valerius which marked the traveler’s passage in and out of the city before the destruction of its walls in 1875. The Jewish cemetery dominated the east and stood in the way of urban expansion in that direction.

In a very modest way, its demise began first under the Ottomans, who in 1890 appropriated a small swath of the oldest section, along the border where the old city wall had stood, to build a road of National Defense and what became the Old Philosophy Building. After the great fire of 1917 that destroyed much of the old, oriental Salonika, municipal officials, under the direction of the French architect and urban planner Ernest Hébrard (1875-1933), decided to expand the burgeoning city beyond its historical boundaries. The expropriation of the entire Jewish cemetery became a critical component of their plan, space for a new university and for a vast municipal park. Burials were to cease after some, agreed upon, decent interval; some of the land was to be given over to the University; and the remaining space where now there were to be no new burials would be planted with pine trees. In 1937, after years of official and unofficial resistance and extensive negotiations at the local and national levels the Jewish Community ceded 12,399 square meters to the University; in the following year it began to remove the gravestones and exhume the bones from this section and move them to a new cemetery. At this point it was not clear whether the old plan of turning what remained into a park was still considered as an option by the city fathers—there were other demands for space from a burgeoning Greek population– but this is what the Jewish community believed would happen. The published law of 1937 did provide for a grove that would envelop the graves that remained after the University took what it needed. In fact, except for the few steps we have just mentioned, little changed: neither “the Community, nor the municipality of Salonika, and not even the state took serious steps toward implementing the law,” writes Yomtov Yacoel. The University built nothing and the Jews continued burying as they had always done.

The arrival of the Wehermacht in Thessaloniki on April 9, 1941 definitively tipped the balance between the living and the dead. Less than a year later, on December 6, 1942, representatives and experts of the Jewish Community met at the cemetery site with city architects and the civilian representative of the German occupation forces. An agreement was forged that gave the City and the University more land than they had gained in 1937 but that retained the safeguards of the earlier arrangement: there was to be an orderly removal of tombs of historical significance; graves of those buried in the past thirty years whose immediate relations were still among the living were to be left alone; what remained was to be planted as a forest. It was not to be.

Within hours of the departure of the German and other officials, five hundred workers in the pay of the municipality began to lay waste to the entire site. Precious stones were removed to be recycled. Some went into the service of the occupation forces, including, as Molho chillingly documents, the construction of a Wehrmacht swimming pool. Some went for repairs of the Saint Demetrius church, just to the west. The narrator of Inannou’s short story on Jewish tombs claims that, in fact, most of the tombstones were grabbed by churches that either scratched out the symbols of the various trades that were inscribed in the marble tombstones or simply turned them over and incorporated them into the fabric of their buildings. Jewish tombs to kneel upon he says. Many must have gone for more mundane purposes.

In any case, it took two weeks for Greek workmen to turn one of Europe’s largest Jewish cemeteries with its ancient memorial and epigraphic record into a field of rubble. And so it remained until after the war. The parents of a colleague remember plaques and stones among the pine trees of the still largely un-built upon site of the Aristotle University in the 1950s. A professor of architecture there says that many were still visible in the early 1970s. Now nothing remains.

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