The Admirable and Terrible Jews of Salonica

Survival in Auschwitz (1947) by Primo Levi

Today the sun rose bright and clear from the first time from the horizon of mud. It is a Polish sun, cold, white and distant, and only warms the skin, but when it dissolved the last mists a murmur ran through our colorless numbers, and when even I felt its lukewarmth through my clothes I understood how men can worship the sun.

‘Das Schlimmste ist vorüber,’ said Ziegler, turning his pointed shoulders to the sun: the worst is over. Next to us there is a group of Greeks, those admirable and terrible Jews of Salonica, tenacious, thieving, wise, ferocious and united, so determined to live, such pitiless opponents in the struggle for life; those Greeks who have conquered the kitchens and in the yards, and whom even the Germans respect and the Poles fear. They are in their third year of camp, and nobody knows better than them what the camp means. They now stand closely in a circle, shoulder to shoulder, and sing one of their interminable chants. 

Felicio the Greek knows me. ‘L’anée prochaine a la maison!’ He shouts at me, and adds: ‘a la maison par la Cheminée!’ Felicio has been at Birkenau. And they continue to sing and beat their feet in time and grow drunk on songs. (Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 71-72)

If This Is a Man

Every couple of years, I find it necessary to consume literature about the Holocaust. I’m not sure exactly what it is about me that causes me to seek this out. Am I a spiritual masochist, deriving some kind of sick satisfaction from engaging with the worst crimes humanity has ever inflicted on itself? Or a dutiful Jew, taking seriously the exhortation of Never Forget, Never Again? Or an outsider, a half-Jew, desperate for victimhood, despite the fact that I am partially descended from lucky Jews who left Europe in the 19th century? (In a sense, all Jews are descended from lucky Jews, of one sort or another.) Or even a bloodthirsty Zionist, hungry for an excuse to inflict further atrocities on a different people? There is a whiff of the sordid about an overly enthusiastic obsession with the Shoah, isn’t there? 

One or more of these reasons led me to Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz last month.

Yes, I did feel ashamed for eating a pistachio croissant while reading this book.

It’s not what I was expecting. I’d never heard of Primo Levi, who was both a chemist and a novelist, perhaps best known for his novels The Periodic Table and The Monkey’s Wrench. The title, “Survival in Auschwitz,” was not promising. It seemed to connote an artless but necessary account of a survivor; perhaps it would be a less elegant companion to Night by Elie Wiesel or Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. (I learned in the afterword that the original Italian title translates to If This Is a Man, a more fitting title, and ‘Survival in Auschwitz’ was the invention of Levi’s American publishers.) But in spite of these snap judgments, I bought it at a library sale, intrigued by the inclusion of an interview between Philip Roth and Levi, and the cover blurb from Italo Calvino, whom I’ve not read yet but recognized as one of those postmodern literary stylists one is supposed to read. I figured I would read the conversation with Philip Roth and skim the rest of the book for context.

My deepest apologies to Mr. Levi. I was unfamiliar with your game. It’s powerful, beautifully written, absolutely gutting. It’s a stunning aesthetic achievement in translation, so I can only imagine how impressive it is in the original Italian. His evocations of life in the Lager (camp) are beautiful, horrible, clinical, and all-consuming. I couldn’t put the book down, though it was almost physically painful to read. Each chapter is a gut punch. I was rapt. I even brought it to a spa day at the jimjilbang (Korean spa) with some girlfriends, even though it is one of the least relaxing books one could imagine, and it felt disrespectful to read it in such a luxurious setting. When it was done, I wept.

But how could one imagine not being hungry? The Lager is hunger: we ourselves are hunger, living hunger. (74)

There’s no way to really grasp the scope and horror of the Shoah, not for someone who was born, lived, and will likely die in comfort (knock wood). What can I know of hunger? The only hunger I’ve known is from deliberate intermittent fasting. What do I know of deprivation and threat? I’m a coddled American.

But the artistry of Primo Levi’s memoir brings me one step closer to grokking one corner of the vast horror of the Shoah. And one piece of his account hit me close to home— or at least close to my family’s ancestral home: Salonica.

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The Selonick Family Saga

I have an unusual surname—Selonick. As far as I know, there is only one Selonick family. I’m related to every Selonick in the world. (If you or someone you know is a Selonick and you don’t think you’re related to me, I’d love to hear from you!¹) It isn’t an overtly Jewy name. There are Selznicks and Selnicks, which may be derived from the Russian Jewish name Zeleznick, most famously in the case of David O. Selznick, who produced Gone With the Wind (1939). But we are the only Selonicks.

Probably unverifiable family lore goes like this: after the initial Diaspora, our ancestors settled in the Iberian Peninsula for centuries. We were Sephardic Jews. In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, Ferdinand and Isabella expelled every Jew. Leave, convert, or die. We left.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Our ancestors made their way to the city of Salonica in what is now Greece, which hosted a vibrant Jewish community. For an unknown period of time, we stayed. Then, for an unknown reason, we left again. We made our way to Eastern Europe, perhaps Prussia, where we became known as the Jews from Salonica, which became the surname ‘Selonick.’ We gradually became Ashkenazi. Then we moved west, to another area known for its large and sometimes thriving, sometimes persecuted Jewish population: Alsace-Lorraine, a region passed back and forth between Germany and France for centuries. Then, in the late 19th century, we arrived in the United States, bound for the Midwestern Mecca of Jewish life: Cincinnati.²

Although my family is culturally French-German Jewish, I’ve retained an affinity to those Greek Jews of Salonica, where we picked up our name. When I studied Classics in college, I felt some measure of pride in my Greek name—although my ancestors were likely still in the Levant in the time of Pericles and Plato.

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Salonica: Jerusalem of the Balkans

Thessaloniki, also known as Salonica, is the second largest Greek city. It’s located in central Macedonia and is named after Alexander the Great’s sister, Thessalonike. Some Jews were probably present in the city since the 2nd Century BCE, but the mass migration of Sephardic Jews following the expulsions from Spain and Portugal in the late 15th century turned Salonica into “the Jerusalem of the Balkans.” From the 16th to the 19th centuries, Salonica was the only Jewish-majority city in Europe. As the city absorbed waves of migration of Sephardic Jews, the community and its economic power grew. They primarily spoke Ladino, a Jewish derivative of Old Spanish. 

In the early 20th century, the community suffered from the defeats of the Ottoman Empire and growing hostility from its Greek Orthodox neighbors, especially after Greek annexation in 1913. By World War One, the Jewish community was diminished and no longer constituted an ethnic majority. Still, at the dawn of the Second World War, the Jewish population was significant. Estimates vary, but according to Yad Vashem, about 56,000 Jews still lived in Salonica at the time of German occupation in 1941. All but 2,000 were murdered by the Nazis, most of them deported in 1943 and gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka. The Salonican Jews had one of the highest death rates of any group, matched only by the Polish Jews—over 95% were murdered by the Nazis. Within a matter of months, two thousand years of the community’s history, culture, and memory were all but annihilated. 

Beyond the terrible human toll, the Nazis also desecrated the physical evidence of the community’s existence. A 500-year-old Jewish cemetery, containing 350,000 graves, was appropriated by the local Greek authorities under the aegis of German occupation forces, razed, its tombstones repurposed as building materials, and eventually Aristotle University of Thessaloniki was built on top of the ruined remains. Fragments of these tombstones can still be found in the city today. (For an overview of the Salonican Jews and the shameful history of the cemetery and the university, see this article.) The few Salonican Jews who survived the Holocaust returned to find non-Jewish Greeks in their homes, unwilling to return their property and possessions. Today, there are only around 1,000 Jews living in Salonica. 

The destroyed Jewish cemetery in Salonica, courtesy of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

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“The Most Civilized” Jews in Auschwitz

I was surprised to find multiple mentions of the Jews of Salonica in Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz. They aren’t the central figures in his memoir—he naturally focuses on himself, his fellow Italian Jews, and a few other people he interacted with during his ten hellish months at Auschwitz—but they pop up throughout the book, defiant, vital. It felt jarring to encounter proof that my family story was rooted in real history. There’s a place called Salonica, and there were Jews there.

I had accepted the myth of my family’s migratory history unquestioningly, incuriously. It seemed to exist somewhere outside of the spectrum of fact or fiction, an uncorroborable tale that was imbued with truth but could never be fact-checked. I didn’t discover (or look for) the Jews of Salonica Wikipedia page until a couple of years ago. In the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, there’s a Greek diner named Salonica on 57th Street. I ate there often as a college student,³ wondering about my connection to the place, but never, apparently, bothering to do a cursory Google search. Family stories are funny that way.

Now, I was confronted not with dry facts and figures from Wikipedia, but a deeply felt tribute to the Jews of Salonica from Levi, a lyrical and precise scientist/writer from Italy. Levi was sent to Auschwitz on February 22, 1944, along with around 600 other Italian Jews. He first introduces the Jews of Salonica in a taxonomy of the tattooed numbers each prisoner receives:

Everyone will treat with respect the numbers from 30,000 to 80,000: there are only a few hundred left and they represented the few survivals from the Polish ghettos. It is as well to watch out in commercial dealings with a 116,000 or a 117,000: they now number only about forty, but they represent the Greeks of Salonica, so take care they do not pull the wool over your eyes (28).

I blinked at this. Were the descendants of my forebears particularly sheisty? Apparently so. Despite being so few in number, and their linguistic alienation from the rest of the camp—the Salonicans spoke Greek and Ladino/Judeo-Spanish but not Polish or Yiddish, the main languages of the other inmates, or German, the language of the Nazi guards—the Greeks managed to pull together and advance to positions of relative safety and prosperity in the Lager.

Levi elaborates on the contributions of the Greek Jews later, in a chapter detailing the complex economics of the Lager:

The professional merchants stand in the market, each one in his normal corner; first among them come the Greeks, as immobile and silent as sphinxes, squatting on the ground behind their bowls of thick soup, the fruits of their labor, of their cooperation and of their national solidarity. The Greeks have been reduced to very few by now, but they have made a contribution of the first importance to the physiognomy of the camp and to the international slang in circulation. Everyone knows that ‘caravana’ is the bowl, and that ‘la comedera es buena’ means that the soup is good; the word that expresses the generic idea of theft is ‘klepsiklepsi,’ of obvious Greek origin. These few survivors from the Jewish colony of Salonica, with their two languages, Spanish and Greek, and their numerous activities, are the repositories of a concrete, mundane, conscious wisdom, in which the traditions of all the Mediterranean civilizations blend together. That this wisdom was transformed in the camp into the systematic and scientific practice of theft and seizure of positions and the monopoly of the bargaining Market, should not let one forget that their aversion to gratuitous brutality, their amazing consciousness of the survival of at least a potential human dignity made of the Greeks the most coherent national nucleus in Lager, and in this respect, the most civilized. (79)

Normal human morality was consciously, deliberately abolished in the camps. The Nazis created a laboratory for suffering founded on an irrational set of rules that required theft and grift and cruelty for survival. In the face of this, the Greek Jews excelled through dishonest dealings while retaining some core decency. They looked out for each other, and to some extent, Levi and the Italians, out of a sense of Mediterranean solidarity.

In Auschwitz, there are no heroes or saints. Heroes and saints are quickly killed. But some men remain men.

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Apocalyptic Revelation

I’ve written previously about my obsession with post-apocalyptic science fiction. Now having read Survival in Auschwitz, I wonder if my chronic compulsion to read Holocaust literature is related to that. The Holocaust was a kind of apocalypse; it wasn’t just the mechanized murder of 12 million people, half of them Jewish. It was the destruction of European Jewry, the end of a civilization within a civilization, as final as an asteroid impact or a zombie plague.

A Cozy Floridian Apocalypse

The word ‘apocalypse’ comes from the Greek ἀποκαλύπτω, meaning to uncover or reveal. In English, it has come to connote the end of the world, an eschaton, I believe through its use in the New Testament in the Book of Revelations (Apocalypse). Levi, influenced by his training as a chemist, saw Auschwitz as a vast laboratory experiment by means of which human nature could be studied—could be revealed.

Once you’ve received a revelation, an apocalypse, you can’t unsee it. I’m reminded here of the Holocaust survivor Artur Sammler’s musings from Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet:

Like many people who had seen the world collapse once, Mr. Sammler entertained the possibility it might collapse twice. He did not agree with refugee friends that this doom was inevitable, but liberal beliefs did not seem capable of self-defense, and you could smell decay. You could see the suicidal impulses of civilization pushing strongly. (26)

Sammler witnessed this collapse first-hand as a Polish Jew who crawled out of a mass grave, but this uncovering of the true nature of the world is not only evident to those who saw it up close. Through the transmission of survivor accounts, memoirs, and diaries, the revelation of Shoah is available to us all, and we have a duty to receive it.

Levi’s book is gripping and necessary, and I’m glad to have read it. This time, though, I find myself increasingly curious about the pre-apocalypse. How many under-explored Jewish worlds ended in gas and bullets? What was their character? I want to witness the rich tapestries of Jewish life, not just their gruesome destruction. I want to know what it felt, smelled, sounded like to walk along the thriving docks in Salonica in the 17th century. To appreciate the enormity of the crime, we have to understand what was taken from us.

Survival in Auschwitz (1947) by Primo Levi: 9.5 / 10

Further Reading

News article about the planned Holocaust Memorial Museum in Thessaloniki

Memory and Desecration in Salonica by Devin E. Naar

Primo Levi, Salonika and “other great Greek matters” by Stefania Zezza

—Books I want to read:

Fleming K. E. (2008). Greece: a Jewish history.

Mazower Mark (2004). Salonica, City of ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950

Naar Devin E. (2016). Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece

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1. I mean, I’d also love to hear from my known Selonick relatives, too—love you all.

2. Cincinnati is one of those overlooked second-tier American cities that is actually a place of great natural beauty and cultural engagement. It sits on the Ohio River, overlooking Kentucky. It’s sometimes described as the ‘Gateway to the South,’ but it’s also a firmly Midwestern city. The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Cincinnati Opera punch above their weight—my grandmother remained a member of both organizations for her entire adult life.

The city has a rich Jewish history. It’s the birthplace of American Reform Judaism and attracted droves of German Jews beginning in the mid-late 19th century. The longest-running Jewish American newspaper, The American Israelite, was founded there in 1854 (as The Israelite). Manischewitz, the kosher foods company, was founded there in 1888.

3. Gyro omelette and crispy hash browns with an extra side of tzatziki was my typical order. Sometimes moussaka to take home and eat later.