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[Part Four of Twelve]

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

LAQUEUR and HESSE

The story of the Thessaloniki Jewish Cemetery’s destruction in 1942 and its subsequent erasure from both memory and from the landscape after the Second World War emerges out of three broader narratives of Greek, and more generally, European history: the history of the Holocaust; the history of the dead within the story of European modernization; and the story of the political and cultural incorporation of Ottoman Salonika into the Modern Greek nation as Thessaloniki. It is not one of these stories, but only the unhappy conjuncture of all three that can account for the disappearance of so vast, culturally rich, a site from the city and its history as well as and from Greek national memory more generally.

The most obvious explanation of the destruction of the cemetery was that is was a consequence of the Nazi occupation of Thessaloniki in 1941 and the Holocaust more generally. This is the account offered by the most authoritative voice on these matters in the Jewish community, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Their webpage on Salonika opens with a picture of the destroyed cemetery with the following citation: “View of the destroyed Jewish cemetery in German-occupied Salonika. The tombstones would be used as building materials.” It is also the view of the leading Anglophone historian of the period: “in December the Germans began to demolish the great Jewish cemetery which lay on the Eastern side of the city,” writes Mark Mazower.
Of course, the Nazi presence and the subsequent extermination of over 96% of the 49,000 Jews remaining in Thessaloniki on 3 April 1943 when the first ten thousand of them were rounded up and put behind barbed wire before being shipped in cattle cars to Auschwitz plays a crucial part in our story.

To begin with, the bargaining position of the Jewish community had changed dramatically. The chief Rabbi, who became interim President of the Community, was even willing to include parts of the cemetery as partial, in kind payment, of 3.5 billion drachma demanded by the Germans for releasing Jewish men from humiliating, soul and body destroying, forced labor. This trade of cemetery land was rejected by his community: one did not traffic in the dead. And when the destruction actually began the Community had few resources. It was under the increasingly intense and unbearable psychological, economic, and cultural pressures of Nazi anti-Semitic legislation. It confronted not by a municipal and National government with which it could negotiate in good faith as it had after earlier, smaller, attacks on the cemetery but by a hostile collaborationist administration backed by a German military occupation. The final blow fell so fast that the community was nearly helpless: “the work of destroying the cemetery was done in such haste that very few Jews succeeded in finding the remains of their families and relatives,” writes the United States Consul in Istanbul. “Recently buried dead were thrown to the dogs.” Finally, the Holocaust once and for all settled the question of ownership: by order of the Finance Ministry on October 14, 1943, the entire Jewish Cemetery was seized on the grounds that it had been deserted by its owners.

But it should be made clear that the leveling of the Jewish cemetery was not a Nazi project. The wholesale devastation of the entire site by five hundred workmen in the employ of the city, the harassment of Jews trying desperately to save and move bodies and tombstones to a new cemetery site that the community had been offered, and, finally, the desecration of those few graves that were successfully transferred to the new site was entirely the work of Greeks without any German supervision or apparent interest. Dr. Max Merten, the chief Nazi civilian administrator in Salonika, was present on the morning of December 6, 1942, but only to oversee what was understood as an agreement for the orderly removal of human remains from a portion of the old cemetery grounds. In a sense, he was there to broker the implementation of the earlier transfer of land from the Jewish community to the municipality. There is no evidence that he or any group under his jurisdiction knew of, had any interest in, or instigated the final solution to the Jewish cemetery question.

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