Invisible Revisited 7

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[Part Seven of Twelve]

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

LAQUEUR and HESSE

Cemeteries were not to be spared in this march of progress. A Turkish lycée and a new road, as we noted, were built on land from the old Jewish burial ground already in 1890. Midhat Pasha, vali from 1873, had before that managed to relocate several Turkish cemeteries to build what is now St. Demetrius Street. By the late 1920’s and 1930’s even some of the spokesmen of the Jewish community seem to have recognized in private what they could not acknowledge in public: that some of the cemetery should be sold or given to the municipality for a park and the University for a new physics building. (Officially the Community argued that the Jewish dead—unlike those of the Orthodox who practiced secondary burial—could not be moved and that consequently no land could be ceded. Precedents— based on this view of sacred space– from Vienna in 1898 where the Vahrungen Jewish Cemetery was spared from a confiscation in order to build a new tram line and from other European cities were adduced in negotiations with the City.)

That said, there was an animus in the destruction that began Dec 6, 1942 which went beyond the needs of urban planning, well beyond the resolution of a long smoldering dispute over land use. Yomtov Yacoel, critical as he was of much of how the Jewish leadership handled its relations with the city, recognized it in the behavior of the municipal authorities and their workmen: “The hurried manner and the excessive zeal shown by the Greek authorities make it obvious that it wasn’t only out of motives aimed at the city’s beautification that they were moved to dismantle the Jewish monuments so quickly.” A delegation of Christians, he subsequently learned, had “visited the German military commander to thank him on behalf of the Greek population of the city for the final settlement of this matter.” The rapidity and purposefulness with which the vast, 350,000 square meters, Jewish cemetery was destroyed, the fact that its bones were left in the ground, and that all traces of its existence are lost to contemporary memory is as unique in modern European history as it is in the history of the Holocaust and Holocuat commemoration.

The bones from the Cemetery of the Innocents were moved under clerical supervision over a period of years to the vast grottoes that lie beneath Paris between what are now the Metro stations of Alésia and Denfer-Rochereau. The corporeal remains of the displaced dead are still today visible neatly sorted into arms, legs, skulls and ribs; throughout the nineteenth century they constituted a memorial site. The bones from beneath St. Pancras were disinterred, reburied, and a small part of the old burial ground kept as a memorial. Bunhill Fields, the burial ground in London where many of the great “rabbis” of the dissenting tradition are laid to rest—Isaac Watts, and John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe—became a park with its graves in place in 1867 and was rebuilt after war damage in the center of London’s financial heart. Generally speaking, building on the remains of the dead—at least those not dead for millennia– is rare and regarded as dangerous. (It is a trope of modern horror movies like Poltergeist that no good can come of such desecration.)

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