THE GREEK JEWS AND THE HOLOCAUST - Part 3I believe, however, that anti-Semitism also played its role. The Jews, with rare exceptions, thanks to anti-Semitism, did not have close Christian friends who could send them to trustworthy relatives in the mountain villages. They did not have as we did, the Bokoros family in Agrinion, who took us into their home and arranged for the taxi to take us to the mountains. Many heroic people in Athens offered asylum to Jewish families. However, out of more than 10,000 Jewish families outside of Athens, only one family of five people was offered asylum by their physician “friend” in Salonica. A few days before the Germans left, the Jewish parents were “persuaded” to officially transfer all their real estate holdings to their “saviors.” They remained alive, but desperately poor. Even after the Jews were forced to wear their yellow badge, it was easy to go to the mountains. In Veria, the Chief of Police Stavridis persuaded the President of the Jewish community, Menachem Stroumsa, to go to the mountains. He took his family, including his elderly mother. When they forded the Aliakmon River with a raft, the old lady, on top of a mule, believed that a miracle was taking place. Until the end of her life she kept talking about “...the waters that parted, as in the time of Moses.” Approximately 60 other Jews of Veria followed Stroumsa and saved themselves.[7] Only 8,000 Greek Jews decided not to obey the Germans. With the help, mainly of the naval branch of the Greek resistance, ELAN, 1500 Jews crossed the Aegean and eventually went to Palestine. There was collaboration between the resistance movement of Hagana in Israel and EAM-ELAN.[8] The British also operated similar boats, but they did not accept Jews unless there were vacancies.[9] Most of the Jews who saved themselves in Greece found safety in the free mountains, while more than 650 became partisans. The BBC could have helped us, but it did not. In Agrinion every day my father was bringing home, hidden in his shoe, the daily BBC news, which the resistance was distributing. We never read anything about the murder of the Jews of Europe or any warning for the Greek Jews. I have a personal letter from Mr. Nathanael of the BBC who certified that, “All broadcasts in Greek during World War II were examined, and nothing was mentioned related to Jews.” American diplomats stationed in Istanbul and Cairo sent advice to Washington, as to how the Greek Jews could be saved. The documents with such advice were ignored and were filed in the National Archives, where I was the first one to discover them in 1975. I found over 500 pages of such documents, thanks to the “Freedom of Information Act.” The Allies with their silence helped the Germans in the slaughter of the Jews. The Allies with their silence eliminated even our instinct of survival, which in case of danger, orders you to hide, flee, or fight. They preferred to damage even their own military interests The Germans needed few soldiers to capture Jews who did not offer any resistance. The morale of the German soldiers did not suffer, since they did not have to kill Jewish families fighting for their lives in German or Greek cities. The Germans, instead of facing only 650 Greek Jewish partisans, could have faced possibly 25,000 veterans of the heroic Greek Army and other young fighters. In the battle of Karalaka, First Lieutenant Marko Carasso, Joseph Matsas, other Jews, and 150 partisans of ELAS, under the brilliant leadership of A. Aggeloussi, killed 242 Germans and liberated some Jews.[10] If there were more Jewish partisans to help the Greek resistance, many more German soldiers could have been vanquished. Thanks to the abandonment of the Jews by our British and American allies, thousands of able Jewish men and women were led like lambs to the slaughter houses of the death camps. It is abundantly clear now that the United States knew about the mass killing of the Jews as early as July 1941. In October 1941 the American Military Attache in Berlin reported, “The normal procedure for the Nazis upon taking over a city in the East, was to establish local commandos, to separate the Jews, and to shoot them.” A logical conclusion, writes Richard Breitman, was that the deportees would also be killed if sent to the East. [11] On August 1, 1942, a German businessman transmitted to the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland the information that Hitler had ordered the liquidation of all Jews throughout the territories occupied by Germany. The information was transmitted to England and the United States.[12] John Pehle, the Executive Director of the War Refugee Board, made the following comments in a recent TV documentary: “The State Department was actively suppressing information about the Holocaust, while Undersecretary of State Breckinridge Long tried to cover it up. By suppressing information, the Government becomes an accomplice in what the Germans were doing, by hiding information from the American public. Officials of the Treasury Department who discovered the State Department’s deliberate obstruction of rescue efforts, revealed the “nasty scandal” in a report entitled, “Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews of Europe.” A rabbi from Baltimore, Maryland, in a bitter sermon, suggested that, “If we had any Jewish dignity, we would picket the White House and demand that the President use his influence to stop the killing of the Jews.” Within an hour, the Board of his Congregation fired him, for his disrespect of President Roosevelt, who was beloved by the American Jews and who received 90% of their votes. In November 1942 Rabbi Stephen Wise publicly announced the murder of over two million Jews. In a meeting with the President, Roosevelt declared, “The Government of the United States is very well acquainted with most of the facts that you are now bringing to our attention.”[13] In December of that year, Sidney Silverman asked British Foreign Affairs Secretary Anthony Eden in the House of Commons, "...whether it was true that the Germans planned to deport all Jews to Eastern Europe and put them to death.” “Yes, sir,” Eden replied. A non-Jewish member asked whether the House might rise to express its grief. For two minutes the members stood with heads bowed. It was a gesture unprecedented in the history of Parliament."[14] Professor Richard Breitman, in his book, “Official Secrets, What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew,” proves that the German government was successful in deceiving the Jews of Europe, but not the outside world or the German people. Professor Daniel Goldhagen, in his book, “Willing Executioners,” asks the question, “How could the Holocaust happen?” The answer can be found “in the widespread, profound, and virulent anti-Semitism based on the traditional religious enmity to Jews, which to a large extent was replaced by racist anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. The German Protestant and Catholic churches, their bishops and most of their theologians watched the suffering that the Germans inflicted on the Jews in silence.” Professor Breitman discovered that the coding system of the German Order Police that dealt with the Jews was broken by British Intelligence in 1939. The British were able to follow transports of Jews all the way to the killing grounds by intercepting radio messages. They knew the names of the units involved and the names of the officers who were in charge, the number of the transported Jews, and the location of the executions. Winston Churchill was given such reports daily and he circled with a red pencil the numbers of the Jews who were killed. Professor David Wyman said in his book, “The Abandonment of the Jews,” that “anti-Semitism was widespread and the State Department was actively blocking information about the genocide and deliberately obstructed rescue efforts. The press had little to say and this was in the inner pages. The President refused to focus on the issue. The United States and Great Britain were deeply committed to a policy of not rescuing the Jews, while, if the US accepted a policy of rescue, hundreds of thousands would have been saved and in the process it would have rescued the conscience of the nation.” Professor Wyman concluded with this statement, “A fact that particularly pains me as a Christian is that the American churches were largely silent.” Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau wrote, “We knew in Washington from August 1942 on that the Nazis were planning the extermination of all the Jews of Europe. Yet for nearly 18 months, the State Department did practically nothing. Officials procrastinated or suppressed information about atrocities.” Why did the Government of the United States demonstrate such hostility toward the European Jews? In the TV documentary “America and the Holocaust – Deceit and Indifference,” I believe there is the answer to this question. “Pervasive anti-Semitism dominated the US in 1940. Jews were unacceptable to many employers and they were unwelcome in resorts and country clubs.”
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