A brief history of tragedy
Rhodes has special significance for several reasons.
In 1912, Italy seized Rhodes from the Ottomans during the Italo-Turkish War. Being under Italian administration, the island’s population was thus spared the “exchange of the minorities” between Greece and Turkey. Turkey ceded them officially to Italy with the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. Thousands of Italian colonists settled in the island, mainly in the capital “Rodi”. In the late 1930s, Mussolini embarked on a program of Italianisation, including his Fascist program, which coincided with improvements to infrastructure, building imposing buildings such as the Hotel Rodon, while obliterating many historical buildings. As a result of its Italian administration, the Leggi razziali (Racial Laws) were passed in 1938, mimicking the Hitlerian antisemitic policies in the rest of Europe. All Jews who served in the government, including the military, were forced to resign, school children were forced to abandon their studies, and all commerce that included any dealings with Jews was forbidden.
This quirk of fate was the impetus for about 1000 Rhodeslís (Rhodian Jews) to leave the island and Europe altogether, who formed their own diaspora spread across the world, with the destinations of choice being Belgian Congo (as it was known from 1908 until 1960; later Zaire (1971–1997) and from 2006, the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), the Americas and Palestine. Vic Alhadeff’s father, Salvatore, was among those 1000 Rhodeslís, but was engaged to be married at the time of his departure from Rhodes, and the play encapsulates the heartbreaking impact of the ensuing events on the young couple.
The 1931 census recorded the Jewish population of Rhodes as 4310 Jews (25 times that of Kos)—easily making it the largest Jewish population in Greece after Salonica (although of course it was part of Italy at that point, and became occupied by Nazi Germany from late 1943, at which time its Jewish population was as low as 1637 (suggesting greater dispersal from Rhodes than the thousand Jews who left on the eve of WWII). A minority of the Rhodeslís were ethnically Greek Romaniote Jews, who had been present in Greece since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The Romaniyotim, who are neither Ashkenazim nor Sephardim, had been living in Greece, the southern tip of the Levant, well before the destruction of the Second Temple, from the time of Alexander the Great—as early as 300 BCE—and were thus a continuous presence there for 2300 years (five times as long as their Sephardic brethren). While the lingua franca of Sephardic Jews was Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), that of the Romaniyotim was Yevanic, or Judeo-Greek.
Unlike the rest of the Jewish people, they had never been anywhere near Babylon.
From September 1943 until July 1944, while the Germans were arresting and displacing Jews all over Greece, no measures were taken against the Jews living in Rhodes. This eased their initial fears and gave to the members of the Jewish Community the false impression of peace and hope that nothing serious was going to occur. Only a few young Jews, risking their lives, dared to escape in shaky boats to the Turkish coasts. The rest waited and hoped. This dilemma not only epitomises the ruptured relationship of Vic’s father with his fiancée, but the hopelessness of the island’s remaining Jews writ large, because on 18 July 1944—a full year after 96 per cent of Salonica’s 50,000 Jews were exterminated at Auchwitz-Birkenau, which accorded Salonica the tragic statistic in suffering the highest rate of loss of Jewish life in all of Europe—an unnamed Nazi turned up at the house of the president of the Jewish community to convey the orders of the recently arrived SS-Hauptsturmführer Anton Burger, an Austrian Nazi in his 30s and a violent thug, who prior to his arrival in Greece had served as Kommandant of the ghetto at Theresienstadt, and whose remit was to do in Rhodes what 32-year-old SS-Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny had done in Salonica: organise and execute the registration, concentration, confinement and deportation of Jews by the use of deception and trickery.
All Jewish men over 16 were effectively required to round themselves up the following morning; women and children the morning after that. They were incarcerated for three days and treated callously before a gruelling eight-day voyage to the mainland port of Piraeus, where they disembarked (if they could) under the burning heat of the sun on 31 July. From Piraeus they were taken to Haidari where they were subjected to physical beatings and humiliation for three more days as they awaited the arrival of another contingent of Jews. On 3 August, after having extracted their gold teeth and glasses, the Germans loaded the Jews onto a 30-carriage freight train, 70 prisoners crammed into each carriage. By the time they reached Auschwitz-Birkenau 13 days later, on 16 August 1944, they had been tortured for 15 days, and at least 40 had died. Among the 2500 or so Jews who arrived on that transport were 1661 from Rhodes and Kos, including 151 Alhadeffs. After selection, 346 men and 254 women were interned in the camp; the men sent to forced labour in quarries, in coal mines and on the railways, the women were raped, sterilised and used in inhuman experiments as inmates. The remainder, including 1202 men, were immediately dispatched to the gas chambers and executed.
Because of the 1000+ Rhodeslís who were not living in Rhodes at the end of the Shoah, they were nevertheless living, and so the loss of the Jews of Rhodes can be considered in two ways, as the tables below illustrate. The one on the left takes this unique situation into account; the one on the right is a more literal version in terms of what actually happened to those who had remained on the island. This is not so much a comparison as much as a tale of different tragedies.
Dr Andrew Lowy is a physician with an interest in the history of the Jews of Rhodes and Thessaloniki.
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