"Unknown," "unknown," "unknown"
>> When I was in high school my great uncle submitted
a page of testimony to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial.
It was in memory of his oldest brother, another one of my great uncles, Salomon and his wife,
Esther and their two children, Benny and Rachel, excuse me,
Benny and Shelly, Rachel, Shelly for short.
And they remained in the family's native city of Salonica in Northern Greece
and perished during the Holocaust.
What's most striking to me in looking at this document was the extent
to which the seemingly most key pieces of information we see right here, date of death:
unknown, country: unknown, place of death: unknown, circumstances in death, quite vaguely:
killed in concentration camp Holocaust, unsure of even where.
And I thought, how could this be?
How could these seemingly most crucial components that one would want to submit
in a page of testimony not be known?
When I went to college a few years later I realized not only did I not really understand
the story of the experiences of this part of my family that remained in Greece
and disappeared during the war but that the general story of the Jews of Greece
and of Sephardic Jews was not really known.
Friends, colleagues, people I would ask, they would say, ooh, Sephardic Jew, how exotic.
There were Jews in Greece?
I didn't know.
They were affected by the Holocaust?
I had no idea.
Ladino, what is that?
I realized that not everybody had a picture like this hanging up in their living room at home.
[laughter] Picture of someone's great grandfather who's dressed in an Ottoman fez,
a great grandfather like mine who was also a rabbi and a Kabbalist.
A rabbi and a Kabbalist who was born in the city of Salonica in
at that time, what was the Ottoman Empire, and has since become part of Greece.
Yet at home the family spoke neither Greek nor Turkish but rather a language
that was described and identified as Spanish.
How could it be?
I had a very intimate sense, a very strong sense of intimacy from the world
from which my family came but at the same time I had a very strong sense of estrangement.
I had heard a few words of Ladino growing up but it was not a language that I learned.
I was not a language I could understand.
I had heard about stories about Salonica.
I had eaten foods that had come from Salonica but I had never been there.
It was just as foreign and strange as any other place.
But I wondered, could I bridge that gap, could I bridge the gap between that sense
of intimacy and that sense of estrangement.
In search of Uncle Salomon I opened up a window into a lost world,
into the world of the Sephardic Jews, a world we don't often and always hear about in connection
to the Holocaust, one that we don't necessarily all the time hear about in connection
to Jewish history more generally.
And in particular the community of Salonica was something that struck me as quite remarkable
when I began to read about it, that this was a city in which Jews constituted 50%
of the population, that they were so influential that the entire city closed on Shabbat,
in observance of the observance of the Jewish Sabbath.
This was a Jerusalem of the Balkans that was off the map.
I began my quest by asking my relatives, do you have any documents?
Do you have any, anything?
Has anything survived that can tell us something about what happened to this part
of my family that remained in Greece?
The answer was invariably no, no, no, we don't have anything.
Except finally one time a great uncle of mine went into his closet and he took out a box
and he dusted it off and he opened it up.
And out came, he revealed to me a cache of letters, a few books and even a few photographs,
including this one of my great Uncle Salomon and his wife, Esther.
But my uncle told me about these documents.
He said you know this is all we have but you can't read them.
It's our Spanish.
It's forgotten.
There's nobody left who can read them.
And you know, I looked at this letters and quite frankly
like, I had high school Spanish at the time.
I had Bar Mitzvah-level Hebrew and I looked at these documents and he's calling this Spanish
and I'm thinking what is going on here?
This can't be.
And since there was nobody I could ask to help read these letters,
I decided I'd have to figure it out on my own.
So where did I go?
I went to the books.
I went to the library.
And I found an old book of Hebrew scripts.
And in that book of Hebrew scripts I found a chart
that said this is Sephardic Hebrew cursive called Soletreo.
And it had there a little diagram and it said this little squiggly mark is an alef
and this little squiggly mark is a bet, etcetera, etcetera.
So I took these letters and I sat down and I began decoding them,
letter by letter, character by character.
And after say many, many hours, many Saturday nights, this was my recreation remember,
this was extracurricular.
[laughter] Eventually I was able to decode my first word which was Almanes, Germans.
I thought if I can figure out what these letters say, maybe I'll be able
to determine what happened to this part of my family during the war.
And the other telling sign was the dates themselves, 1938, 1939,
1940 nothing, 1945, 1946, etcetera.
The first letter from 1938, which is pictured here, was written by my great aunt, by Esther,
and she writes, to the family in the United States, she says,
please you have to do whatever you can to help us get a visa.
We've tried, we've expended all of the options that are available to us here in Greece.
Our fate is in your hands.
For reasons that actually still remain unknown to me,
the family was unable to secure a visa out of Greece.
Another letter reveals some other details, not only details about the anxieties
that the family had but also aspirations.
My cousin, the daughter, Shelly here, age 12 at this time.
She had begun piano lessons and she communicates through her mother
in the letter how she desires nothing more than to spend some time with her family in America
so she can show them what she's learned latest on the piano.
Her younger brother, Benny, this is the only picture we have of him when he's an infant,
probably even, maybe at his Brit Milah.
He's now getting ready for his Bar Mitzvah.
And it's communicated in these letters that he's begun studying Hebrew.
And wouldn't that be great, he says, if I could be with my grandfather and my grandmother
and my cousins in the United States so that we could celebrate my Bar Mitzvah
with allegria complida, with complete happiness, make the celebration complete.
Unfortunately Benny will not live to see the day of his Bar Mitzvah.
Salomon writes a letter in 1940.
It's the last letter that comes from the family in Greece to Salonica.
And he says that if peace is not restored immediately,
Europe will experience a mass carnage, humanity will be completely demoralized
and it will take generations to rebuild.
That was the last news that came from Salonica for five years.
And it was in those five years that Salomon, he was actually correct in a certain sense.
There was mass carnage in Europe.
Humanity was completely devastated.
Half of Europe's Jews were exterminated.
The Jews of Salonica did not escape that fate.
Here's Salomon on the eve of the war with some of his colleagues.
And it's from one of these colleagues who survived the war, one of the few,
who wrote a series of letters to the family back in the United States, after the war.
The first news arriving in late 1945.
You can really feel the pain with which this family friend writes.
He says
[ Foreign language ]
And as you can see here he says, Dear Rabbi Benjamin,
you may be surprised to receive news from me.
I intended to write you for a long time but I did not have the desire to look at even myself
and I did not want to endure you as well.
Truly I do not know what to tell you in this letter.
I am so beaten and sad that it brings me much pain to recount
to you this very harsh tragedy that befell us.
And indeed he recounts in these letters in detail the destruction of the Jewish community
of Salonica, the arrival of the Nazis, the destruction of Salonica's 60 synagogues,
the destruction of the Jewish cemetery, once one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in all
of Europe, which covered the terrain of 80 football fields and housed 400,000 graves.
He described the confiscation of Jewish properties
and ultimately the deportation of 50,000 of Salonica's Jews.
At the time of his writing he noted, in 1945, he says, only 1,200 of us have survived.
He also describes the fate of Salomon and his family and describes
that Salomon was given a position on the Jewish soup kitchen, the Matanot le-Evyonim.
And he was in charge of distributing milk and yoghurt to the poor and elderly
as they were prepared for deportation.
And it's for this reason, the letters explain, that Salomon was among the last,
and his family were among the last, to remain in Salonica.
They experienced, they observed with their own eyes, the virtual elimination
of the entire Jewish community of Salonica.
Within a few short months, 20% of entire city disappeared virtually without a trace.
He does not fail in these letters to indicate what happened to Salomon and to his family.
On June 1, 1943, Salomon, Esther, Shelly and Benny were deported on the 17th
of 19th transports that took Jews from Salonica straight up through the Balkans
into Poland directly to Auschwitz.
He describes that on the day of their arrival, June 8, 1943, Esther, who was a little too old
at age 40, and Benny who was supposed to be Bar Mitzvah right about that time,
were immediately sent to the gas chambers where they perished.
Salomon and his daughter, Shelly, were admitted to the work camp.
The letters described that a very dramatic meeting, a final meeting between father
and daughter was arranged for them to exchange a few last words before Shelly herself was
selected and perished in the gas chambers and it was not for a few more months
that Salomon too was selected and he met the same fate
as his wife and two children did before him.
There were a million victims of Auschwitz.
There were six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
There were 11 million victims of Nazi persecution.
These numbers are so, they're unfathomable really.
We hear this but when you realize that among those nameless victims,
among those people you can say there was my great uncle, my great aunt, my cousins,
their story, my families story became my story.
I accomplished what I set out to do.
I had made known that which was unknown.
I discovered, in a certain sense, the fate of this part of my family that remained behind
in Greece and disappeared during the war.
But I realized that my work was not done.
That I had to know more.
I had to keep going.
Knowing about the processes of destruction was not enough, ya basta, enough!
But what about the life?
What about the world that once was?
A world of Sephardic Jews, a world of the Jews of Greece
for which there are very few memories that remain for us today.
Perhaps some elderly people perhaps recorded,
hidden in documents, in archives or in dusty closets.
They tell their own stories, stories that would otherwise not be told.
Do I, do we, do we have an obligation, a duty to speak for those who have been unable to speak,
to tell the stories for those whose voices have been suppressed
and have been obliterated or otherwise forgotten?
The seeds for my career as a historian were planted.
I was very lucky and fortunate to receive a position here at the University of Washington
in Seattle for Seattle is one of the few places
where we actually have a dynamic and large Sephardic community.
It's one of the few places in which families trace their origins to what used
to be the Ottoman Empire to Greece and Turkey, to Salonica and Rhodes.
It's one of the few places in which members of the community continue to hang
on in a tenacious manner to some of their traditions and customs.
It's also here in Seattle where there are stories still to be told,
where there are documents still to be uncovered, where there are experiences still waiting,
they're waiting to be uncovered, recovered and reclaimed.
Thank you.
[applause]
[ Silence ]