A view of Corfu. By Yannick Pasquet
CORFU, Greece — The door of the Scuola Greca synagogue on the island of Corfu is painted emerald green with two Stars of David in the middle. When opened, the hallway leads to a low-ceilinged space where painful memories rest between the bricks: portraits of the island’s Jewish Holocaust survivors adorn the walls.
The interior of the Scuola Greca synagogue in Corfu. By Yannick Pasquet
One photograph shows Rebecca Aaron, seated in a large armchair with a patched armrest, in a blue dress whose sleeve does not quite cover the faded ink on her arm from her time at Auschwitz. Aaron was the last of around fifty Holocaust survivors who returned to Corfu after the war; The island’s daily newspaper, “Enimerosi” – Greek for “information” – said his death in 2018 concluded “the most tragic chapter in Corfu’s modern history”.
“Two thousand Jews lived here before the Holocaust – today there are only 60 of us,” Zinos Vellelis, a former clothing store owner and former president of the small community, told me at the start of our visit. long interview. “I got married here in 1993,” he said, referring to the Scuola Greca synagogue. “Since then, only three marriages have taken place. »
I am a French journalist who has worked for 20 years in Germany and Greece. I have spent many summers in Corfu, a jewel of the Ionian Sea with green olive trees, cobbled streets and around 100,000 inhabitants that serves as the setting for the British television series, “The Durrells in Corfu.” After passing the synagogue several times, I wandered inside one day in 2015, shortly after the terrorist attack that killed four people at a kosher supermarket in Paris.
Inside, I found an old man who shared his fear of starting again. He told me how almost all the Jews on the island had been exterminated during the Holocaust. When you live in Berlin like me, you are obsessed with the history of the Holocaust, so I set out to understand the history of this small community.
It turns out that Jews have lived here among Greek Orthodox Christians for over 800 years. During the Venetian period, between 1386 and 1797, Romaniote Jews – those who spoke Greek – lived in a ghetto alongside Jews expelled from Spain or Italy. Even today, the inhabitants of Corfu call the district “Evraïki” or “Ovraïki”, which means Jewish, respectively in traditional Greek and in the dialect spoken on the island.
The Scoula Greca, built in the 17th century, is yellow stucco and Venetian in style, with the sanctuary on the second floor. It is the only one of the four synagogues in the ghetto that has survived time. Next door are the overgrown ruins of the Talmud Torah, damaged by bombs during World War II.
There are no more rabbis on the island. The one from Athens comes for the major holidays and Passover, or to officiate at any major event. “We cannot have a service at the synagogue on Saturday,” Vellelis said.
Vellelis, 68, leafed through a book detailing the history of the Jews of Thessaloniki, a port city on the other side of the country that was sometimes called the Jerusalem of the Balkans. There were 56,000 Jews there before World War II; 1950 after. Here in Corfu, the book says, 2,000 people were deported to concentration camps, 187 survived.
Vellelis, himself the son of two of these survivors, recited these miserable figures in a sad tone. “On my mother’s side, nine people were deported and only two survived,” he told me. “On my father’s side, nine people were also expelled and three returned. »
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington estimates that Greece lost at least 81 percent of its 60,000 to 70,000 Jews during the Holocaust, most of them exterminated at Auschwitz. Birkenau.
The Germans occupied Corfu in September 1943. On June 9, 1944, just four months before the Nazi withdrawal from Greece, all Jewish inhabitants of the island were systematically ordered to meet on the “Kato Platia”, the main square of the old town, before being taken to the nearby ancient Venetian fortress.
German historian Diana Siebert, in a book on the history of Corfu, recounts that around 1,800 Jewish men, women and children were transported on three boats to Athens between June 11 and 15. From Athens they were taken by train to Auschwitz.
An unknown number of Corfu Jews escaped this fate by being hidden by non-Jewish villagers on the island.
French director Claude Lanzmann devoted part of his 1985 documentary “Shoah” to the tragedy of the Jews of Corfu. Among those interviewed was Rebecca Aaron’s husband, Armando, who was also a longtime community leader before his death in 1988.
“We arrived at Auschwitz on June 29,” Armando Aaron testifies in the film. “Most of us were gassed during the night. » According to Auschwitz records, 446 men and 175 women, just over a third of the total, were sent to forced labor camps.
At the end of the war, Vellelis told me, most of Corfu’s survivors moved to Israel. Among them was his own father, he said, but British soldiers at Haifa port turned the boat back and about 50 survivors from Corfu returned home.
“My father was married to my mother’s sister, but she died in Auschwitz,” Vellelis noted. “He remarried my mother after that.”
The main person responsible for the deportation of Jews from Corfu was Anton Burger, who managed to escape justice after the war. He was sentenced to death in 1947 by the People’s Court of what is now the Czech Republic, but escaped from custody before the scheduled execution. He was arrested again – and escaped again – and survived under false identities until his death in 1991.
“Today, many Jews in Corfu are children of survivors,” said Lino Sousi, 73, a retired civil engineer and another former president of the Jewish community. “My mother was sent to Auschwitz with 35 members of her family.” Only she and her three sisters survived.
Sousi said his mother never spoke about her Holocaust experience. “My aunt told us about her ordeal, but we didn’t ask many questions,” he said. “Children and all these innocent people were murdered. For what? I’m still looking for answers to this day, without any luck.
For the thousands of tourists who visit each summer, the history of Corfu’s Jews remains largely unknown.
To keep alive the memory of those who survived the Nazi occupation, for decades Vellelis kept the striped prisoner’s shirt that his father wore in Auschwitz hanging on the wall of his clothing store in the former ghetto, a few meters away of the synagogue of Corfu.
“The striped shirt has become a topic of conversation with tourists around the world,” said Vellelis, who retired in 2019 after 50 years running the store. “It was one of those things that allowed me to share a common story with Jewish tourists from Brazil, Australia and everywhere else. »
Not far from the store and synagogue is a small memorial in a sunny square in the old town, where Corfu’s Jews were deported to their deaths. The bronze statue was placed in 2001 and shows a frightened couple with their son and a baby in his mother’s arms, all naked.
“Never again for any nation”, we can read.
A memorial to the Jews of Corfu killed during the Holocaust. By Yannick Pasquet
There are a few other subtle reminders of the island’s Jewish history for those who wish to observe them while strolling through the alleys decorated with large flower pots on the windowsills and colorful clothes hanging outside to dry. Rue Albert Cohen pays homage to the Swiss writer born on the island in 1895. There is also the “street of Jewish victims of Nazism”, a narrow alley away from the city’s main pedestrian route which connects the old ghetto.
The island’s 60 current Jewish residents remain close to each other and try to keep the Jewish spirit alive at the heart of this intimate island, even as the younger generation leaves Corfu to study abroad.
And it’s not just the island’s relative handful of Jews who cling to the community’s history.
In another small clothing store, a few steps from the synagogue, Giorgos Agiotatos stores boxes of old photographs behind the cash register of his store.
These photos represent moments from childhood, adolescence, celebrations, house parties and memories of a time when the Jewish community was much larger. One of the faded images shows Vellelis’ parents in the 1960s, at a summer party.
“I grew up with Holocaust survivors and their children,” Agiotatos told me during my visit. “They are my friends and family and their agony is mine too. »
He also keeps two Israeli flags in the store, one near the photo box, the other behind it on a shelf. They remind us daily that Corfu is part of Jewish history.
Yannick Pasquet is a journalist at Agence France-Presse (AFP) who lives mainly in Berlin and has spent many summers on the island of Corfu.
