Inside the Gas Chambers

by Shlomo Venezia

  The day the German troops entered Salonika we were in a shelter situated under some big buildings, near the port and the warehouse. The house was right next to the railway station and the area was likely to be bombed, so we moved over to where my uncles lived. As usual, I was always on the lookout for something to eat. I saw there were people coming back from the port carrying supplies. They were helping themselves so as to leave nothing for the Germans. So I went down there and took a barrel of oil that I rolled back to where my family had taken shelter. On my way there, a restaurant owner came up and asked me if I was selling. I thought I could easily sell it and go back and get another one pretty quickly. We haggled a bit and he immediately gave me a nice bunch of banknotes. I left the oil with him and went back to the port, but there was nothing left. I returned to my mother and told her what had happened. “What have you gone and done?” she shouted. “We could have done something with that oil, but the money’s no use at all.” I went back to the restaurant owner with her. She begged him, and he finally agreed to give back half the oil I’d sold him.

  On another occasion, I was luckier. I found a pancake-griddle and I managed to come away with a few of the cakes, since I knew my way round the warehouse. Everybody wanted to buy them from me, so I started to sell them, then I went back to the place I’d found them. In the meantime, people had closed it all up, but I spotted a little hole through which I managed to slip. I took everything I could get my hands on, and went back home with the pancakes and the money.

  Once the Germans arrived, things got worse, and it was more and more difficult to find things to eat. As we were Italians, we received more help than the other Jews. There weren’t many Italian soldiers, since the city was occupied by the Germans, but I struck up a friendship with some of the Italian troops. This made it easier for me to find food. In addition to this, the Italian consulate continued to help us by handing out, once a week, canned food, pasta and parmesan. There were six of us at home and this meant a lot of stuff to bring back. I’d take a trolley and head to the place where the food was distributed. On the way back, instead of coming down the normal road that was in good repair, I opted to take a short cut, down a rougher but quicker track. Once I was stopped by a Greek policeman who said:

  “Hey, you there! Where’d you get those things?”

  “I was given them. I’m Italian. It’s my right.”

  “I don’t believe you. You’re coming with me to the station.”

  “Why? I haven’t stolen anything. I’m entitled to it! Let me go home, please!”

  I realized that all he wanted was a share of the booty. So I told him to come with me, and in exchange I’d give him some parmesan. He accepted and escorted me home. This misadventure meant that I didn’t bump into another policeman who’d inevitably have asked the same thing. I met this policeman every week, and the same scene happened each time. In any case, if I’d had to take the high road I’d have been stopped by others. At least he protected me.

  But since these supplies weren’t enough, I started to barter, swapping things on the black market. Generally speaking, I’d spend my day with the others, waiting at the station for the military trains passing through. The Italian and German soldiers would get off for a while at the Salonika station, and we’d buy or sell what we could – cigarettes, for instance, or malaria drugs that one could take to the countryside to exchange for potatoes or for flour to make bread. You had to take the train and travel quite some distance to find things to exchange. To avoid paying for a train ticket, I used to hang on to the back of one of the train coaches, even when the weather was cold. It was hard, but I was young and healthy.

  Once, when we were all leaning against a wall, waiting, a Greek policeman arrived and carted all of us off to the police station. All of us were Jews. He made us come into his office, one by one, to question us. I was the last, and I soon realized that the policeman was forcing each boy to open his hand, which would be beaten with an iron baton until the flesh bled. When it was my turn to go into the office, I told him:

  “You can’t touch me – I’m Italian!”

  “I couldn’t care less whether you’re Italian or not, open your hand!” he ordered.

  But my brother, who hadn’t been with me when I was arrested, had learned that I was at the station, and he’d told an Italian soldier, someone we knew well. This soldier stormed into the office, and grabbed the policeman by his collar, yelling:

  “He’s Italian – you’d better watch yourself if you touch a single hair on his head!”

  So being Jewish was of less importance than having Italian nationality?

  Yes, we were protected for as long as the Italians were in Greece. And however much I was a Jew, at that period, I was still, above all, Italian. And this protected me, even from the Germans, who immediately started to persecute the Jews. When they needed people to work for them, they’d seal off the district and capture anyone trying to escape. Then they’d carry out a selection and keep the Jews. Sometimes I was present. On the square they’d assemble about forty Jews between eighteen and forty-five years old. To humiliate them, they’d make them do what they ironically called “gymnastics.” The local Greeks would stand and watch – it was fun for them to see the Jews forced to carry out these ridiculous movements. Often, after this humiliation, the men were sent off to do forced labor in sites infested by malaria. They’d work there for a month or two and come back, ill and thin, more dead than alive.

  I happened to be in the area once when they were rounding up people. It was before the Baron Hirsch district was closed. I knew the back streets well enough to be able to escape. Even though I was Italian and theoretically protected, it was better not to fall into their hands.

  And then, one day, after someone high up in the SS had been visiting Salonika, orders were given to close the Baron Hirsch district and put barbed wire all round it. The area was definitively sealed off towards the end of 1942, or early 1943. The first deportations started three months later.

  I also remember that a German who was working in the office of the Gestapo tried to warn the Jews. He had made friends with some of the community leaders and passed information on to them. This German vanished overnight. I imagine he was denounced by counter-espionage agents….

  What was the situation in the ghetto?

  We didn’t use the word “ghetto,” we just said “Baron Hirsch.” But it was like a ghetto, with an exit gate opposite the railway station and an entrance gate, under constant surveillance, on the other side of the district. The area soon became a place of passage before deportations.

  They rounded up and imprisoned the elderly. As I’ve said, I lived just outside the area and I was still protected by my Italian nationality. I didn’t wear the yellow star that they’d imposed on the Jews before sealing the district. And on the document from the consulate, stating that I was an Italian citizen, the fact that I was Jewish wasn’t mentioned. My first name was given as “Salomone” and not “Shlomo.” So I was able to stay on the Greek side and help my friends who were forced to stay in the district. They had nothing to eat, so they’d arrange to meet me in an out-of-the-way spot and throw me money over the fence so I could go and buy the food they needed. But I did this only with the people I knew. This procedure lasted barely a week, since they were soon deported and replaced by other Jews whom I didn’t know.

  I had no opportunity to see my uncles or my cousins before they were deported. I didn’t even find out when they left. My grandmother on my father’s side, Doudoun Levi Venezia, who was sixty-three, was deported too, even though, like my father, she had Italian nationality. But she lived inside the district, and in spite of all our efforts and Maurice’s attempts to get her out, it wasn’t possible to save her. Baron Hirsch had become a transit camp; no sooner was everything ready for the next deportation than the trains were already being filled. But the suffering began there, in the district.

  Within ten days, the people living in Baron Hirsch had been deported; t
hen they widened the circle of round-ups, arresting Jews from other districts and putting them into Baron Hirsch to replace the ones who’d gone. People slept barely one or two nights there before being deported, very early in the morning. In recent years, I’ve read in the Auschwitz Museum that during these first ten days, over ten thousand people were deported from Greece to Auschwitz.3

  Did the Greeks witness these round-ups?

  No, as the deportations were organized very early in the morning. There still wasn’t anybody out and about. The schedule was chosen deliberately so that everything would go off without too many witnesses, discreetly. Even I never saw a thing.

  Once the Germans had finished deporting all the Greek Jews, they wanted to start on the Italian Jewish families. The Consul, Guelfo Zamboni, intervened yet again to help us. I know that, after the war, he was awarded Yad Vashem’s “Righteous Among the Nations” medal for saving many Jews, not only Italian Jews;4 he also procured fake papers for Greek Jews so that they would be protected in the same way as the Italians. This time, he summoned the leaders of the Italian Jewish families. Instead of my father, my brother went to see him. The Consul told them that the Germans intended to deport us, but Italy was not going to let them. He gave us a choice between being transferred to Athens, which was still under Italian administration, or of being sent by boat to Sicily. Since some of the Italian Jews there had businesses, offices or factories in Greece, they preferred to stay in the vicinity to keep an eye on those enterprises. So they decided, in the name of all of us, to go to Athens. Unfortunately, this choice meant death, for virtually all of us.

  How was the transfer to Athens organized?

  It was in July. We left the house, carrying mattresses and everything that my sister had prepared for her wedding. Her fiancé wasn’t Italian, and so he’d been deported in 1943 with his whole family.

  The Italians had arranged for us to leave for Athens by train, under the protection of Italian soldiers who had been ordered not to let the Germans on board. Apparently, this transport was the cause of conflict between the two allies, but the Italians considered it an Italian matter. It took us two days to arrive, since the Germans tried in various ways to slow down our journey from Salonika to Athens. They used various stratagems, such as forcing the train to keep stopping so as to let more important convoys pass first, or leaving us for hours at a time on sidings. There were already tensions between the Germans and Italians. The Germans thought they could control everything, especially when it came to the Jews. The Italian soldiers gave my brother a weapon so that he could defend us if there was a problem. On our route, the train crossed zones infested with malaria, where the last Jews who had been rounded up for forced labor were working. The train driver, with the agreement of the Italian soldiers, slowed down to enable some of them to cling to the train and escape with us. One young boy climbed into our coach this way, and stayed in Athens under Italian protection.

  When we finally reached Athens, they put us up in a school. People who had the means to rent an apartment did so. We were about twenty families staying in this school. The problem of food soon reappeared. Since we weren’t working, we had to find some means of finding something to eat. The Italian Consulate gave us only one meal a day, and their aid obviously stopped on September 8, 1943, with the ending of their alliance with Germany.

  Since there wasn’t a black market in Athens, we had to find some other way. The elderly people with us in the school couldn’t sell their things themselves, so they handed them over to me so that I could go and sell them at the flea market. In general, they had very fine traditional clothes, sewn with gold thread, and worn on festive occasions and holidays. They were very expensive outfits, but they had to be sold, even if they fetched just a few coins. Everyone needed food so badly…. I took what these people gave me, they told me how much they hoped to get for them, we came to an agreement, and if I managed to get a higher price for them, I kept the difference to feed my family. I very quickly understood that, when it came to selling these sorts of clothes, the best thing was to go to the brothels. They were rolling in money, since the women were never short of work. And they weren’t concerned about how much the clothes cost, so long as they liked them; if you said “twenty,” they paid twenty, without any argument. But for other things, you had to go to the market. It was there that I sold most of the objects that my sister had prepared for her dowry.

  What happened after September 8, 1943?

  The rumor immediately started going around that Italy had asked for an armistice. In Athens, as far as I knew, there were several thousand Italian soldiers, in the barracks and elsewhere. I’d had a chance to get to know quite a few of them. But the Germans completely took over and several soldiers refused to return to their barracks to sleep, in case they were taken prisoner by the Germans. At that time, I already was in contact with members of the Greek Resistance and I knew several families in the city. So I tried to place soldiers with families so that they wouldn’t have to return to the barracks. I helped seven or eight in this way. I later learned that one of them had even married the daughter of the family in which I’d helped him to hide. In the meantime, I, too, tried to find shelter for my family. Since we had lost the protection of the Italians, there was no doubt that we in turn were going to be deported sooner or later.

  The Germans started by sorting out the problem of the Italian soldiers. They told them that, if they wanted to continue the war on the side of the German forces, they’d have to register at an office. If, on the other hand, they wanted to go home, they’d have to present themselves at another office. The majority of them refused to continue fighting on the German side and so they did indeed go to register at the other office indicated. After a few days, they were informed that, to go home, they had to turn up at such-and-such a place at a particular time. This was a trap; they were loaded into train boxcars almost the same as those used to deport the Jews. I found out subsequently that they had been sent to do forced labor in German factories.

  What did you do, in those circumstances, to make contact with the Resistance?

  My brother and I had ended up getting to know and socialize with quite a few people in the district. When we realized that things weren’t going to turn out well for us and that we’d soon be deported, we thought of joining the Resistance. We wanted to get our mother and sisters into the mountains, where they’d be safe. The problem was the Greek resistance fighters knew that we were Italian and they didn’t really trust us. They told us they didn’t need anyone else to join the Resistance out in the countryside, and if we wanted to be useful, we needed to stay in the city so as to help organize sabotage and pass on secret information.

  So we started to carry out small acts of sabotage. This generally took place in the evenings, since we couldn’t do anything in the daytime. There were too many people who might denounce us, too many spies, too many Greek soldiers collaborating with the Germans. So we’d go about it at night-time, in small groups. We’d split up, and each group took a district. We slipped leaflets under the doors, saying we’d come back the following day, and asking people to give us something, anything that would help. In general, people did help us, even if it was dangerous for them too. That’s how we became andartis.5

  Eventually, the resistance fighters found a place in the mountains where they could hide my mother and my sisters. My brother and I were to stay in town with a family. But the woman who was supposed to hide us was denounced before we arrived. My mother hid out for a while with my sisters in the village, but since she didn’t speak Greek, she preferred to return to the school so as to be near us.

  Didn’t the Germans try to round up the Jews immediately after their entry into Athens?

  No, in the first months, we didn’t sense anything particular was going on. We had heard about Germany’s military defeats and people were convinced that, in a situation where the Germans had other urgent things to attend to, they wouldn’t bother to deport the Jews from Athens. In January
or February 1944, they forced all the Jewish men to come and sign a register every Friday, in an office of the synagogue. I used to go with my brother, carrying a little suitcase, ready to flee at the slightest alert. But one Friday, it was around the end of March 1944, we made the mistake of going there early in the morning. On that particular day, instead of allowing us to leave, they made us go into the big synagogue hall, and the men who ran the synagogue asked us to remain there, with the other people who had come to sign. In theory we were supposed to be waiting for a German officer who was on his way. In fact, this was a pretext, made up by the Germans to get us in without any fuss. All the people who came along to sign were told to go into the synagogue. Around midday, on seeing that other people were still turning up, we realized that we’d been caught in a trap. The windows were very high and, to see what was happening outside, I climbed onto the shoulders of other boys. Outside, I could see several SS trucks and German soldiers carrying sub-machine guns and accompanied by dogs. I warned everyone that we were encircled and that if we didn’t find a way of getting out of there as fast as possible they’d take us away. Most of the people there were Jews from Athens and the surrounding area. Unlike us Jews from Salonika, they hadn’t witnessed any deportations and didn’t know what the Germans were capable of. So they preferred to do nothing, certain that they would be killed if they tried to get out before the officer arrived. At around two in the afternoon the officer still hadn’t come. But outside, everything was all ready. They ordered us to go out. We found ourselves facing trucks and armed soldiers encircling us. They yelled at us, “Los! Los!” “Move it! Move it!” and we had to climb into the trucks. I don’t remember if there were any people standing around watching, but there must have been a few, even though they couldn’t have managed to get very close.