Invisible Revisited 5

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[Part Five of Twelve]

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

LAQUEUR and HESSE

The Nazis wanted the Jews dead; they had no compunction about desecrating graves. But in day-to-day reality they had only a peripheral interest in the burial places of the ancestors of those they murdered. There was, of course, occasional destruction or mutilation of Jewish graves by Germans and by local anti-Semites who helped themselves to building material from the unguarded walls and tombs of a people who were longer among them. This was, however, far more often the case in small, isolated rural settings and in cemeteries where burials had ceased well before the Holocaust than it was in large urban areas or in working cemeteries. There are exceptions: two thirds of tombstones in the old cemetery in Frankfurt that had been used from the thirteenth to the early nineteenth century were demolished by the Nazis. But the far larger cemeteries in use from then until 1929 and from 1929 until now were left unscathed and the area of destruction, with its remaining stones, is now a memorial. There was also what we might call instrumental destruction as, for example, when the authorities in Berlin dug a trench through the unused Jewish cemetery in Grosse Hamburger Strasse. A whole swath of graves was destroyed—bombs destroyed others here and there in other cemeteries in Berlin’s center– but many of the oldest along the walls survived unscathed and were removed only in 1989 for preservation purposes. A new memorial was erected then for Moses Mendelssohn the cemetery’s most famous inhabitant—it was his third—and the whole area is now a memorial park with a few graves to suggest the land’s earlier functions.

In general, the Nazis did not systematically direct their fury against bones and monuments. All of Europe’s major Jewish cemeteries– except for that of Thessaloniki– survived the Holocaust more or less intact. This includes those in the very heart of National Socialism (the magnificent Weissensee with rows upon rows of graves of Jewish soldiers of the Great War and verdant avenues of neo-classical tombs and the more modest and overgrown, but still grand, Prenzlauer Allee in Berlin) as well as those in other major German cities and towns— Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg, Breslau. The Jewish cemeteries in the capitals of occupied or annexed western and central Europe also still stand: Amsterdam; Budapest; the Jewish sections in all of Paris major cemeteries and the far more impressive Jewish section of the great Vienna cemetery; Prague’s famous and much visited old cemetery—a major tourist site—and the new cemetery where Kafka is buried. More remarkable and ironic is the survival of the Jewish cemeteries of Warsaw and Lodz. The Warsaw Ghetto was annihilated, bombed and burned to the ground; the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery– “The Gesia”–in its midst, with one hundred and fifty thousand graves was spared. In Lodz, the enormous Jewish cemetery at the edge of what became the infamous ghetto was used as a killing ground for Jews and others. The Community that owned it was largely annihilated; the cemetery was not.

In fact, genocide and systematic grave desecration do not seem to go together. Few Armenian cemeteries survive in eastern Anatolia; valuable stones were taken; there has been sporadic desecration of surviving Armenian burial sites in the 1950’s and 1960’s but there was no systematic destruction in 1915-1916. The major Armenian cemetery in Istanbul from before the genocide is still well maintained.

To repeat: while the Nazi presence may have tipped the balance in a local struggle over the Jewish cemetery, the explanation for its destruction and subsequent erasure from memory has deeper and more complex roots. There were plenty of monuments still on the site in 1945– or, more to the point, after the killing of the civil war had stopped– to create a memorial park through which Greeks could imagine a vanished community
amongst whom they had for so long lived.

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