TWENTY-FOUR
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“I’m not a Jew but I was born in Salonika and lived there as a boy and had many Jewish school friends until I was thirteen years old, when my father got a job with the Commercial Credit Bank here in Athens. To some extent, I’ve always regarded Salonika as my real home. Whenever I go back, it’s almost as if I once had another life, that I’ve been two people: that I had a Salonikan childhood and an Athenian manhood, and the two seem entirely without connection. Now, whenever I’m back there, I can’t help thinking that life isn’t just about working out who we are and what makes us tick, it’s also about understanding why we aren’t where we ever expected to be. That things might have been very different. It’s the best antidote to nostalgia I know.”
I nodded silently. This was the Greek lieutenant’s story but, in this particular respect at least, it was mine as well, and for a fleeting second I felt a strong, almost metaphysical connection with this man I hardly knew.
He looked distant for a moment—as if his mind was back in Salonika—and rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. The hair on his head was dark and shiny, with just a hint of silver, and, in the light from the tall office window, it resembled the skin of a mackerel. I guessed he was about forty-five. His speaking voice, which sounded like dark honey, relied a great deal on his hairy hands, as if he’d been trying to negotiate the price of a rug. The tunic of his uniform was tailored and it was a while before I perceived the size of the shoulders it was concealing. They were strong shoulders and probably capable of delivering great violence—a true copper’s shoulders.
“As a boy I wanted to play basketball for Aris Thessaloniki—to be like my hero, Faidon Matthaiou. Not to become a policeman in Athens.”
“A great player,” agreed Garlopis. “The patriarch of Greek basketball.”
“But here I am. A long way from home.”
“I know what you mean, Lieutenant,” I said, hoping to push us all back onto the path of his story.
“Salonika was established by Alexander the Great’s brother-in-law, Ptolemy of Aloros, to be the main port for Macedonia; it’s also been of central importance to Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, even the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But most lastingly, for five centuries it was the Ottoman Turks who controlled the city and gave it a near autonomous status that allowed the Jews to become its most dominant group, with the result that, at the turn of the century, of the hundred and twenty thousand people who lived in Salonika, between sixty and eighty thousand were Jews. This was perhaps one of the largest numbers of European Jews to be found outside Poland; certainly it was the oldest community of Jews in Europe. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that Salonika was the Jerusalem of the Balkans, perhaps even the Mother of Israel, since so many who once lived there are now in Palestine.
“I won’t detain you, Commissar, by trying to explain how, over the many centuries, so many Jews in the diaspora, fleeing one persecution after another, ended up in Salonika; nor will I take up your time to explain what happened between the two wars and how Salonika became Thessaloniki and Greek, but in this most ancient city where change was a way of life, everything changed when the German army arrived and, I’m sorry to say, that change became a way of death. The alacrity with which the Nazis began to take action against Salonika’s Jews was astonishing even to the Greeks who, thanks to the Turks, know a bit about persecution, but for the Jews it was devastating. The Nuremberg Laws were immediately implemented. Prominent Jewish citizens, including some friends of my own father, were arrested, Jewish property was subject to confiscation, a ghetto was built, and all Jews were subjected to violent abuse and sometimes summary execution. But of course much worse was to come.
“Following a series of military disasters for the Axis powers, Hitler reorganized his Balkan front and, as part of this process, it was decided to ‘pacify’ Salonika and its hinterland. Pacify: you Germans have always had a peculiar talent for euphemism. Like ‘resettlement.’ The Jews of Salonika soon found out that these words meant something very different in the mouth of a German. A decision was made at the highest level that the Jews of Salonika should be removed and deported to Riga and Minsk, for eventual resettlement in the Polish death camps. The city’s Jewish community now came under the direct control of the SS and the SD in the person of an officer called Adolf Eichmann. He and several other SD and German army officers set themselves up in some style in a confiscated Jewish villa on Velissariou Street. The villa had a cellar they used as a torture chamber. There, wealthier Jews were interrogated as to where they’d hidden their wealth. Among these was a banker by the name of Jaco Kapantzi in whom the local SD took a special interest since he was also one of the richest men in Salonika. It infuriated these sadists that Kapantzi steadfastly refused to reveal where he’d hidden his money, so they decided to have him transferred by train to Block 15 at the Haidari Barracks in Athens. There, a notorious SS torturer by the name of Paul Radomski could go to work on Kapantzi night and day.
“But something must have happened on the Athens train to infuriate the SD and, in front of several other rail passengers, Kapantzi, still wearing his pajamas and dressing gown, was shot. Perhaps he tried to escape, perhaps he said something, I’m not entirely sure what, but I think perhaps Kapantzi had probably realized that his
