Remember Salonica
Clare Mulley is deeply moved by a rare collection of personal reflections on the Holocaust in Jewish Salonica
Isaac Matarasso, Talking Until Nightfall: Remembering Jewish Salonica 1941-44. Translated by Pauline Matarasso. London: Bloomsbury Continuum 2020. Pp. 272. £16.99. ISBN 9781472975881
(© Bloomsbury Continuum)
‘For whom…’ Isaac Matarasso anguished, ‘should we weep first?’ 46,000 members of the Jewish community of Salonica, now Thessaloniki in northern Greece, were deported to Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. Only 2,000 would return. A Jewish doctor whose wife was Catholic and whose skills were much needed, Matarasso survived the Nazi occupation through the help of a prostitute, a priest, and the fighters of the Communist resistance in the mountains above the city. Although determined to bear witness for his devastated community after the liberation of Greece, initially Matarasso found the weight of this duty almost unendurable. ‘There are too many of you,’ he sighed onto his opening page as he turned to face the dead. Only when he found inner peace did figures step forward to greet him from the crowd: his father, the children from Salonica’s orphanages, a group of friends.
Talking Until Nightfall is not a memoir, nor even a single narrative, but a powerful collection of testimony and reflection, here translated, assembled and introduced by Pauline Matarasso, the widow of Isaac’s son Robert, and published in English for the first time. Isaac wrote most of the essays in 1946, in the shadow of the Second World War but before the fresh traumas of the Greek Civil War. These include documentation of the different phases of the Nazi occupation, from the first restrictions on the Jewish community through to the deportations; accounts of the few survivors who returned from Auschwitz or had managed to hide in remote villages; and a presentation of the deprivations and injustices faced in the first years after liberation. There are also more personal essays capturing poignant snapshots of life in the ghetto, from where few such accounts survive, as well as the experience of brutal interrogation, written while Isaac’s body was still bruised and aching in 1943.
Parts of the unfinished memoir of Isaac’s son, Robert, who was just fourteen at the start of the occupation, are also included. A young man’s memories recalled by his older self, these have been filtered through forty years, but are equally honest and evocative. The thought-provoking final essay, by Robert’s son, François, reflects on the intergenerational impact and wider significance of such devastating history.
Isaac Matarasso was Jewish by birth and tradition but not markedly observant. As a young man he married the French Catholic Andrée. He was also, we quickly learn, a thoroughly decent man. Having developed a treatment for freckles involving somewhat alarming-sounding ‘pencils of carbon dioxide’ in the form of dry ice, he was offered lucrative work by Elizabeth Arden in Paris, but chose to remain as a community doctor in Salonica.
We first meet him in an essay that serves as a preamble to the book, written in 1946 or 47. Here Isaac finds an old table he had owned before the war, its drawer still holding forgotten detritus from the 1920s. Postcards, five-centime stamps, and a ‘cosmetic crayon’ still smelling of roses evoke the carefree days of his youth when he would wax his ‘aspiring moustache’ into shape. This was a time when life was well ordered, before the insanity of the war. Although ‘voiceless’, Isaac writes, these objects speak to him. The voices of the murdered soon convey much more.
One person who steps forward to speak through Isaac’s pen is Mordoh Pitchon. A former orphan ‘rescued by a good fairy,’ given care, shelter and an education, Mordoh learned to love the French classics. He repaid his community by teaching literature at the city’s Jewish school. In July 1942, during the first phase of the occupation, he was selected for slave labour and sent to repair mountain roads. Months later he returned, burning with malaria, covered in sores, his head shaved and his eyes sunken. Isaac feeds and cares for Mordoh until he is strong enough for the two of them to walk out one evening. Sitting on a hill above their beloved city, they contemplate the times, the plundered Jewish cemetery below, and ‘the marshes flamed like molten gold.’
It is a brief moment of calm, a pause at the heart of the book and the mid-point of the occupation, before the ghettoes are created and the deportations start. Such poignant pen-portraits make clear the depth as well as the width of the human loss. Elsewhere Isaac gives plenty of statistics to present the wider picture, but in essays such as this he has taken a different tack. Knowing the facts so personally, he has also sought to convey their meaning. Mordoh’s story is not, after all, a fairy tale. ‘My dear Mordoh Pitchon,’ Isaac concludes his tribute, ‘vanished now in the smoke from an Auschwitz chimneystack.’
The essays that compose Talking Until Nightfall speak powerfully not only of the loss of individuals, or even of a whole community. They also explore the tyranny and traditions, faith and fear, love and language that helped enable the Holocaust.
Isaac is generous in his criticism of the Jewish leaders who failed to introduce any grit into the mechanisms of persecution, or even became ‘obedient servants’ of the Nazis. In his eyes they were acting not from malice, but cowardice, and a lack of moral awareness. ‘I see them still,’ he writes, ‘those men, intelligent, honest but credulous and fainthearted, acting with the meek eagerness of the servile...’ But his interest lies less with these individuals and more with the broader issues, such as the community’s inability to process the possibility of planned genocide.
Above all, the persecution was progressive. Initially the Nazis gave receipts for confiscated possessions and reassurances to Chief Rabbis. By the time deportations were threatened, few in the community had the resources to arrange escape from the ghetto or to survive in hiding. Doubts grew when orphans, the elderly, sick and disabled were rounded up. What work could they do? But the large Jewish families of Salonica were deeply bound by love and affection across generations. The most vulnerable among them could not be abandoned.
Nazi euphemisms poisoned the well of language, and as the vocabulary for the greatest horrors did not yet exist, the worst fears were the hardest to articulate. In any case, even the most clear-sighted could not believe that deportation led to certain death; it was incredible, impossible. Non-Jewish friends watching their former neighbours being rounded up sometimes called out, ‘Keep your spirits up! You’ll be back!’ while the Rabbis among them encouraged them to take heart, that they would rebuild their community in Krakow. ‘Today it is plain to us that what was really unbelievable was our own gullibility,’ one survivor of Auschwitz told Isaac in 1945.
Comparatively little has been published on the Greek Holocaust experience. The successive voices that speak through Talking Until Nightfall collectively build up both a moving tribute to the dead, and a powerful interrogation of this history. Above all, however, the book testifies to the importance of bearing witness. Many Greek Jews took refuge, Pauline Matarasso writes, in ‘the nearest place of safety, the one called Silence.’ Isaac’s determination to bear witness ensures that the voices of the dead not only ‘cry out with pain’ and ‘howl with rage’, they will also be heard.
