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LIFE IN GREECE BEFORE THE DEPORTATION

My name is Shlomo Venezia, and I was born in Salonika, Greece, on December 29, 1923. My family had been forced to leave Spain when the Jews were expelled in 1492, but before settling in Greece, they spent time in Italy. That’s why my name is Venezia. The Jews who came from Spain did not, at that time, have family names; they were called (for example) Isaac son of Solomon. On arriving in Italy, they chose for themselves family names corresponding to the name of the city to which they had moved, in this instance Venice. That’s why many Jewish families bear the names of cities. In our case, this was what enabled us to keep Italian citizenship.

There were five children in our family, two boys and three girls. My older brother, Maurice, was two and a half years older than I; next came Rachel, who was one year and two months older than I. Then the last two daughters, Marica, born in 1930, and, after her, Marta, born in 1933. For the first years, my family lived in a house. It wasn’t very big, but it was better than the wooden shacks in which most of the poorer Jews of Salonika lived. As the family grew, the house became too small. I must have been five when we sold it and built a bigger, two-story house next door, on a piece of land belonging to my grandfather. My father was a bit egocentric, and he had his name written in red bricks on the path leading to the front door. The upper floor was rented out to Greek families. The money from their rent helped my father to pay his taxes. Unfortunately, things changed with his death, which happened very early. It must have been 1934 or 1935, and he left five fatherless children behind.

So you were very young. How did you react to his death?

I was eleven, I was at school when one of my father’s female cousins came to take me to see him in the hospital. He’d had an operation for a kidney problem, but nothing further could be done. In any case, I didn’t even have time to see him; he died before I arrived. All at once, we found ourselves almost alone, without material support. My father had run a small barbershop that his father had built for him. I obviously couldn’t step into his shoes on his death, since I was still too young. So his assistant took it over in exchange for a small percentage that he paid my family every week. But it wasn’t enough to feed a family of five children. It was only thanks to the help of my mother’s four brothers that we managed to have enough to eat every day. I went to their place every Thursday to pick up a bag of vegetables – eggplants, onions, and other things that they grew and put aside for their sister. This help was indispensable but not enough; as a result, one year after my father’s death I had to leave school to find a job and to help support my family financially. I was barely twelve years old.

And what did your older brother do?

He was sent by the Italian consulate to study in Milan. My father had fought in the First World War, and he was an Italian citizen, so he’d had the right to certain privileges. And that also meant we had one fewer mouth to feed. When the racial laws were passed in Italy in 1938, my brother was excluded from the Marchioni Technical Institute in Milan and sent back to Greece. So he never finished his studies either.

My father never lived to see the years in which the Fascist regime showed its true face. He felt so proud to be an Italian in Greece that he didn’t hesitate to wear the black shirt of the new regime and to march proudly along in the processions whenever the occasion presented itself. In his view, Mussolini was a socialist, and he never understood the real nature of Fascism. We were too distant to see which way this regime was drifting. As an ex-soldier, he took part in all the demonstrations and parades organized by the Italians. It was his only break from everyday life. It gave him a feeling of prestige vis-à-vis the other Jews of Salonika. Not very many of the Jews who’d come from Italy had kept their Italian nationality. Most of them adopted the same attitude as my father: they saw the realities from a distance, without really understanding what was happening in the Italian cities.

Did you sense any difference in Salonika between Italian Jews and Greek Jews?

Of the sixty thousand Jews in the city, there must have been not many more than three hundred of us Jews of Italian origin. But we were the only ones who were authorized to send our children to the Italian school. In comparison with the others, who in general went to the Jewish school, this gave us certain advantages: we got everything free, we didn’t have to pay for our books, we could eat in the canteen, we were given cod liver oil…. We wore really smart uniforms, with airplanes for the boys and swallows for the girls.

During this period, the Fascists were trying to promote Italian prosperity over all else. This was propaganda meant for the eyes of other countries, but we reaped the benefits. So, on Saturdays at school, there was the “Fascist Saturday,” which all the pupils were supposed to attend. I felt proud to join in these processions; I felt different from the others, and I enjoyed this feeling. I even went twice to a holiday camp in Italy, with the Balilla,1 whereas at that time hardly anyone ever traveled. And then we had several other advantages, since the Italian Embassy gave us a great deal of help. For example, on certain holidays, the consulate would hand out shoes and books to Italians who weren’t so well off. For us, these things made quite a difference. Actually, the Jewish community in Salonika was divided into three categories: a tiny number were very rich, a marginal group managed to scrape by, but the vast majority of people would head off to work each morning not knowing whether they’d manage to bring back enough money to feed their families in the evening. It’s difficult to admit, but at home I couldn’t just say “I’m hungry, I’m going to have something to eat,” since we had nothing. It was completely different from these days when you need to force children to finish up what’s on their plates. Back then, everything was in short supply, and everyone had to do whatever they could to find something to eat. I remember that we had some neighbors who were even poorer than us. My mother always tried to help them, even though we were going short ourselves. This gives you an idea of the extreme poverty in which we found ourselves. All of this forged my character. I’m convinced that, when you have to go without all the time, it makes you a stronger person.

What was Jewish life in Salonika like?

There must have been five or six Jewish districts in the city, all very poor. They were generally designated by the number of the tramline that went there. But the main one was called Baron Hirsch, after a rich donor who’d helped the Jewish community of Salonika. Over ninety percent of the population who lived in this district were Jewish. Actually, we lived just outside this part of town, but I spent pretty much all my time with Jews. At home, everything was kosher. Not because my family was religious or really strict, but because all the shops in the area were kosher. Meat in particular, which we bought on the few occasions when we could afford it. We ate it on Fridays, with beans; that was how the poor feasted. If you wanted to eat non-kosher, you really had to be determined and look for it a long way outside your district. On the other hand, the food at school wasn’t kosher, but this wasn’t a problem as far as I was concerned. The main thing for us was just to eat so we wouldn’t starve to death.

A lot of the Jews we lived amongst were religious. But probably not like in the little villages of Poland, where everyone really was very strict. When I had my bar mitzvah ceremony, I couldn’t read Hebrew, so I learned my portion by heart. My father had already passed away, so it was my grandfather who took me to the synagogue. From then on, every time I went to sleep over at his house, he would wake me up at the crack of dawn to go and recite the morning prayer with him. Like all thirteen-year-old boys, who prefer to stay in bed, I’d roll over, grumbling, trying to get out of prayers.

What were the relations between Jews and non-Jews?

There weren’t any particular problems. Even if most of my friends were Jewish, I also hung around with Christians. There could be the occasional scrap, though, when certain youths from other neighborhoods came into the Jewish district to provoke us and pick a fight with the Jews. But these were mainly just tussles between kids. I don’t know if the word “anti-Semitism” was relevant here. I remember one episode that almost turned out really badly for me; I must have been twelve or thirteen. In those days we’d often go out on a Saturday evening to take a look at the girls from the other districts and maybe meet them. But the boys soon started to get jealous and tried to send us packing – it was their territory. Once, I found myself with four or five friends confronting a gang from another part of town. My friends turned and fled, but I was unaware of the danger and continued walking. When I saw how angry they were, I started to pretend I had a limp. As they went by they said, “We’ll let you off since you’ve got a limp – otherwise...