THE GREEK JEWS AND THE HOLOCAUST - Part 4

At this point, as a Greek Jew, I want to express my gratitude to the people of the United States. I appreciate those who fought as members of the Armed Forces, those 400,000 who fell in action and their families, and those who contributed to the war effort with their labor in the farms, the factories, and the merchant marine. I am also grateful to those who risked their lives in their noble attempt to save Jews, like the German businessman who went to Switzerland, the interpreter Wolfson in Patras, the thousands of righteous Gentiles all over Europe, the 11 partisans in Karalaka, the Greek police chiefs Angelos Evert, Michael Glykas, Dimitris Vranopoulos, and Stavridis. I am grateful to EDES and especially ELAS-EAM, ELAN, and PEAN, Archbishop Damaskinos, and the presidents of 42 Greek organizations who protested the deportation of the Greek Jews. The poet Angelos Sikelianos, who wrote the protest, the editor George Karantzas, and the actor Theodoros Moridis, all three risked everything when they undertook the dangerous mission of delivering the protest. Compare this to what the Vichy French and other sub-human collaborators of the Germans did to the Jews.

I believe that all those who love this country have to face the truth, no matter how painful it is. Here is an example of this truth: On April 16, 1944, the American Consul in Istanbul, Burton Berry, criticized his superiors for their inaction. “...as was suggested in dispatch No. 2680 (R-2404)... resulted in the seizure of all those who obeyed the order to report.” In dispatch No. 2917 (R-2706), Consul Berry reported “...on March 24, 1944, an order was published stating that all Jews living in the provinces were to be arrested and brought to Athens."[15]

Consul Berry sent another report: “Michael Boyiadjoglou, a Greek tobacco merchant, recently arrived in Turkey. On April 30, while on a train from Athens to Salonika, Mr. Boyiadjoglou talked with three German SS officers who said that they were on their way to Corfu, where they were to deport all Jews. These officers left the train at Larissa.[16] The unsuspecting Jews of Corfu were arrested on June 9, 1944.

It would have been extremely easy and free of any personal risk for the Secretary of State to send a warning to the Jews of Corfu, via the British military mission in Greece and the resistance. He did not have to send bombers or the marines. He would even have contributed to the war effort by frustrating the German plans. He preferred to let some 2000 men, women, and children go to a death camp. The German commander of Corfu, Colonel Emil Jaeger, when he was told that the Jews of his island were about to be deported, sent a lengthy report to his superiors explaining why the Jews should not be deported. He insisted that “they should first transfer the Italians of Badoglio, who as former soldiers are much more dangerous than the Jews, against whom, by the way, we never expressed any complaint.”[17]

On June 11, 1944, 300 women, many of them pregnant, accompanied by midwives, formed a transport, which eventually arrived in Auschwitz. Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, a Polish Jew became the eyewitness to a mass murder. He wrote, “Last night they burned the Greek Jews from the Mediterranean island of Corfu, one of the oldest communities of Europe. The victims were kept for twenty-seven days without food or water, first in launches, then in sealed cars. When they arrived at Auschwitz’s loading platform, the doors were unlocked, but no one got out to line up for selection. Half of them were already dead and half in a coma. The entire transport, without exception, was sent to crematorium No. 2.”[18]

Saving the Jews of Europe should have been a moral obligation for the US and not simply a humanitarian act. Five hundred fifty thousand American Jews served with distinction in the Armed Forces of the United States. Eleven thousand were killed, 40,000 were wounded, and almost all of them had relatives in Europe who were abandoned to the hands of the Germans. Those in power in the American government rejected thousands of applications for immigration to this enormous country. Among these applications was that of Anne Frank’s family in Amsterdam. While 6 million Jews were dying in Europe, the United States was becoming a nuclear superpower, thanks to Jewish scientists like Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer, Zillard, Teller, Rabbi, and Admiral Hyman Rickover (inventor of the nuclear submarine), while the relatives of these Jews were left to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka.

The abandonment of the European Jews by President Franklin D. Roosevelt became obvious when he refused entry to this immense country to the 900 German Jews of the “St. Louis.” Six hundred of them eventually were killed by the Germans. Why is there so much Christian hate toward the Jews? I discussed this subject with a professor of theology at Cornell University who did not know that I am a Jew. He concluded, “Killing the Jews is not enough.” “What can be worse than killing them?” I asked with obvious surprise and shock. “Eternal damnation,” was his reply. I wonder what Jesus would say, if he knew in what kind of degradation fell his noble teachings like “Love your neighbor as you would yourself’ or “Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you.”

As if the hate of many Christians was not enough, now we also have the hate of many Moslems. Anti-Semitism is called now “Anti-Zionism. Everyone is talking about the 800,000 Arab refugees of 1948, but nobody even mentions the 800,000 Jewish refugees who were forced to leave the Arab countries. Of course, all refugees deserve our sympathy. However, the Jewish refugees were absorbed, while the Arab refugees remain as a weapon in the hands of the Arab states whose aim is the destruction of Israel.

In 1948, while five Arab States attacked the 600,000 Jews of Israel, the United States refused to sell weapons to Israel. If the Israelis were not able to buy weapons and airplanes from Czechoslovakia, there would have been one more small Holocaust in Israel and it is possible that those who hate us now would have felt sympathy for us. The slaughter of the Jews of Israel did not take place in 1948 or 1967, or 1973, and it will never take place. Israel is extremely strong and our enemies know this. They also know and ignore the fact that if Israel did not have great moral superiority, it could expel the Palestinians the same way as millions of Germans were expelled in 1945.

If, in spite of everything, the majority of the nations prefer to hate us, I personally prefer their hate, rather than their pity. [At this point, the highly educated audience interrupted the speaker with thunderous applause.] Everyone, including me, is in favor of a Palestinian State. But I want a peaceful State. If a Palestinian State was the aim of the Arab countries, they would have established it between 1949 and 1967, but they did not. They also refused the magnanimous offer of Ehud Barak who gave them 97% of the land, including the Temple Mount. They try other means like “the right of return,” which will flood Israel out of existence with millions of Arabs, or suicide bombers, which will force the Jews to abandon the State of Israel to avoid a life of Hell. But nothing will work for the Arabs. The Israeli Jews have no place to go and they don’t plan to commit suicide!

The anti-Semitic and Arab propaganda is so strong, that they were able to reverse the truth and even deceive the good people who should have been our friends. The Israeli victims are condemned as if they are the murderers.

Even the people I especially love in Greece, the former partisans of ELAS, see the Israeli soldiers as if they are Germans of the SS, and they admire the Palestinian murderers as if they are the partisans of EDES and ELAS, who blew up the bridge of Gorgopotamos, rather than the cold killers who blow up Israeli buses filled with workers who go to their jobs.

Even a corporal of any army, if he looks at the map of Israel cannot possibly allow enemy troops with tanks and artillery to be positioned 1000 meters from the Knesset (Parliament) or 10 kilometers from Netanya by the sea. The “humanitarians” of the world, who don’t care what the Arabs are doing in Sudan, accuse Israel for imaginary “massacres” and hope that Israel will agree to commit suicide by allowing the establishment of an independent and, therefore, armed Palestinian State, which would have the right to allow other Arab armies to enter its territory. What a shameless display of hypocrisy. In the meantime the Jews of the world are “demonized” and the latest I heard from Greece is that the Jewish cemetery of loannina, where my earlier ancestors are buried, was desecrated in spite of a new fence recently installed.

I conclude with a poem by Yitzhak Katznelson, which was written a few days before the Germans killed him, and it seems to be appropriate even today.

Sure enough, the nations did not interfere, nor did they protest,
Nor shake their heads, nor did they warn the murderers.
Never a murmur. It was as if the leaders of the nations
Were afraid that the killings might stop.