Maria Pantazi
Department of History of the European University Institute (Florence, Italy)
While commenting on his chances to escape the Nazi anti-Jewish measures in Salonica, Albert Marcos, a 22-year-old man in 1943, comments:
It was a period of transitioning; our mothers didn’t speak Greek. […] And whoever had some Christian friends, they helped them, they got saved, they trusted them. But even if you found a way to escape, your mother would look at you and ask you, how can you leave me now that I need you?[1]
Albert frames his chances of escaping in terms of two interrelated conditions: i) the need for highly trusted interpersonal connections with non-Jews, and ii) family dynamics. While the Holocaust in Salonica has been explored through the social dynamics that resulted to the extermination of the 96% of its total pre-WWII Jewish population, little attention has been drawn on the interpersonal connections between the persecuted Jews and their helpers.
Departing from Albert’s point and drawing from sets of archived videotaped testimonies of interconnected survivors from Thessaloniki, this paper seeks to trace the interpersonal relationships they narrate as having contributed to their survival. By shedding light on the dynamics of interpersonal bonds as narrated in survivors’ life stories, I explore their practices of connecting, interacting, and forming relationships, including kinship, friendship, acquaintances, and bonding to strangers. I argue that, under the extremes of the Axis Occupation and persecution, previously known practices of connecting, and pre-existing interpersonal ties intersected with emerging clandestine networks that enabled movement across occupied Greece, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. I suggest that an in-depth focus on the complexities of narrating and interpreting the dynamics of interpersonal interaction can contribute to reexamining survival and support of the persecuted Jews in Greece.
Maria Pantazi is a PhD researcher at Department of History of the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). In her thesis titled “The city of extremes: Social networks, social distance, and survival in Thessaloniki during Jewish deportations” she explores the survival of Salonican Jews who escaped deportations.
[1] [1] Marcos, Albert. Interview 453. Interview by Yitzchak Kerem. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, December 22, 1994.