Invisible Revisited 8

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[Part Eight of Twelve]

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

LAQUEUR and HESSE
Matters stand differently in Thessaloniki. The physical destruction and more importantly the cultural erasure of the enormous Jewish cemetery is only in part the result of Nazi aggression and the Holocaust; it is only partially one chapter in a longer story, stretching back to the Enlightenment, of moving the dead away from the living. Had there been no Germans in the city on that grim Saturday in early December 1942 the fate of these thirty five hectares in the heart of the city might well have been different. Had the devastation of the resting places of the Jewish dead been but another facet of the murder of the more than 49,000 Jews from Thessaloniki at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other Nazi death camps between March and August 1943 it too, like these murders, would have left its traces on the public memory of the city. There is a Holocaust Memorial at the entrance of the new, post War, Jewish cemetery in the Stavrouplis district; in fact—as we noted above– a few of the tombstones on the destroyed cemetery are there as relics of a lost world whose origins are left unexplained; the destruction of the Jewish population is noted on the Aristotle University website and in other popular histories of the city; there are lists, in Greek, of many if not all of the victims; a fine museum in Thessaloniki that documents both the history of the Jewish community and its demise. But there is still no sign of the hundreds of thousands of dead that lie under the feet of students and professors. And finally, had the cemetery been relocated in the interests of urban development, modernization, and hygiene—the reasons usually given by historians for why the dead were moved from their original resting places near the living— its destruction would not have been so complete. It might well have been treated like the Orthodox Christian cemetery to its north-northwest —and like so many other European urban burial grounds— reduced but not eradicated.

This brings us to the third of the accounts through which to understand our problem. If, as we suggested earlier, places of the dead represent the social imaginary of the living then 26 October/8 November 1912 (the liberation of Salonika during the first Balkan War) and 28 July/10 August 1913 (the incorporation of the city and region into the Greek State under the Treaty of Bucharest that ended the Second Balkan War) are a third important starting point for what ultimately happened in 1942 and, more significantly, for the erasure of that day—and the weeks following—from national and local memory. Thessaloniki, we need to remember, was a predominantly Jewish city during the years when the Jewish dead occupied so much land for the dead. Reliable statistics are not available: too much depended on who was counting and for what purpose in addition to the usual problem with censuses especially before the twentieth century. Proportions of various national groups also shifted constantly in the late nineteenth century as Jews from Russia but also Greeks from the Macedonia hinterland moved to the city. But the basic outlines are clear enough. In the early eighteenth century there were roughly 10,000 Greeks, 25,000 Turks, and 30,000 Jews in the city. On the eve of its incorporation into Greece, in 1910 Jews still outnumbered Greeks and Turks combined—65,000 Jews, 35,000 Greeks, 30,000 Turks. That is, barely a third of the population was described as ethnically Greek (Another source gives 30,000 Greeks and other Christians, 60,000 Muslims, and 80,000 Jews in a population of 173,000 in 1900.).

By 1913 a radical demographic change was already under way. While the Jewish population remained more less the same, the number of Greeks had risen to 67,000 and the number of Turks dropped to 24,000. As a result of the final collapse of the Ottoman empire after the First World War and the massive expulsion of Greeks from Asia Minor—and to a lesser extent of Muslims from Greece—this trend accelerated. The population of Thessaloniki both grew dramatically, mostly from immigrant refugees, and became overwhelmingly Greek. In 1928 the Turks were almost gone as were the Donme. There were now almost 180,000 Greeks; the number of Jews declined by perhaps as much as twenty percent through emigration. In less than thirty years, from around 1900 to the mid-1920s, Greeks went from being the numerically third ranking minority in the city to constituting 70%-80% of its population.

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