Jewish
Frontier

The tragedy of European Jewry during the 1940's knew no boundaries. East and West, North and South, all were efficiently trapped and either massacred on the spot, like the Jews in the Ukraine by the Einsatzgruppen or sent long distances to Auschwitz, like the Jews of Greece. Indeed, very little has been written about this centuries' old community of Jews in southern Europe, where 65,000 Jews were killed by the Germans, or 85% of the population, among the highest percentages of losses of any country during the Holocaust.

In this first comprehensive and moving account in English about the fate of Greek Jewry during WWII, Dr. Michael Matsas provides us with a magnificent history enriched with many personal memoirs, including his own one year in hiding in a mountain village during his early teens.

Illusion of Safety is actually four books in one, and therein lies its unique achievement, for it fuses objective history with an impassioned testament as to what happened to recognizable, palpable human beings.

The first book depicts the Greek Jews under the three zones of occupation: German, Bulgarian and Italian. Although the Bulgarians in Bulgaria protected their Jews, in the Greek zone they cast aside their benevolence: they deported 11,000 Jews; only 2200 survived. In the Italian zone, which included Athens, Jews were not persecuted; racial laws were ignored. Only when the Italians surrendered and the Germans entered did the horrors begin. General Stroop, who a year later was assigned to liquidate the rebellious Warsaw Ghetto, led the assault against Jews of Athens. But the church and the general populace (not as anti-Semitic as the Greeks in Salonika) made great efforts to save Jews. Archbishop Damaskinos, for example, instructed all monasteries and convents in Athens and in the outlying areas to hide any Jew who sought assistance. The Greek Resistance was always helpful and average citizens, at great risk, sheltered Jews.

The second book gives the personal memoirs of Jews in the three areas of occupation; the third presents the memoirs of resistance fighters, and the last focuses on the Ioannina-born author's own recollections of survival.

We live in a world supersaturated with instant information. Hence, it is hard to conceive that an entire population, a decade after the rise of Hitler, was ignorant of the Germans' intentions. But in 1943, when more than half of Poland's three million Jews had already been murdered, the Jews of the thousand-year-old community of Greek-speaking Jews in loannina; the Sephardic, Ladinospeaking community of Jews in Salonika (the only port beside Haifa that shut down on Shabbat); and dozens of smaller towns and villages, had no idea what was going to happen to them. Like Jews at an earlier time in Eastern Europe, they believed the Germans — masters at deception and manipulation — that they would be resettled near Cracow, Poland. After all, in the internment camp in Greece, they were able to change their Greek drachmas for Polish zlotys!

All this Dr. Matsas dramatizes with empathy and erudition. He is the first to make use of hitherto closed archives of the WWII Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the State Department files pertaining to Greece. He got access to telegrams that US diplomats from Greece had sent back to Washington, describing the arrests, humiliations and violence against the Jews. The author also shows how the British, ostensibly the allies of free Greece, knew of German actions and plans but did not make them available to Greek Jews.

Matsas does not spare his fellow Jews either, especially the feckless Jewish leadership in loannina and the semi-collaborationist Chief Rabbi Zvi Koretz of Salonika who, on the one hand, helped the Germans by giving them lists of Jews and, on the other, instilled in Jews a false sense of hope. (Nearly 95% of Salonika Jews were killed.) (A survivor from Salonika told me some years back that he remembered seeing Waldheim with other SS officials in Salonika.) Matsas also lists Jewish traitors. A name that keeps reappearing in various memoirs is that of two Recanati brothers, who, fluent in Ladino and in the employ of the Germans, lured Jews into the Gestapo net. (The good news is that one of them was caught after the war, tried and sentenced to life imprisonment.)

Matsas is particularly severe against Jewish leaders who did not urge their fellow Jews to flee to the mountains, as did the Matsas family. On the contrary, they counselled that if the Jews obey the laws all will go well for them. The author repeatedly contends that given the freedom of the mountains, always under resistance control, many more Jews could have been saved. Matsas particularly praises the ELAS resistance units for welcoming, protecting and saving Jews — the only such helpful organization in Greece.

One of the most memorable vignettes in Illusion of Safety — a book filled with many memorable, touching and exciting personal accounts — is the one that depicts the fate of the 275-member Jewish community on the small island of Takinthos. When the German commander asked Mayor Karrer for a list of the Jews, the mayor gave the German an old gold ring and told him that Jews are listed in the city register along with other citizens and that there was no way of separating them. The next day, Bishop Chrysostomos who had studied in Munich and had met Hitler many years ago and earned the German's respect for this, and the mayor handed the commander an envelope. When he opened it he saw there were only two names in it — the Bishop's and the mayor's.

Combining the narrative skill of a novelist in the personal memoir section, the objective scholarly stance of a historian in the historical part, and the moral outrage of an engaged Jew from an ancient and noble community of Jews, The Illusion of Safety is a gripping and brilliant work which will hold the reader in thrall in more ways than one.