Brussels, 2019
What did we do? How were we to blame?
I did not live in the Ovriaki [Jewish neigbourhood]. I lived in Niohori, where all the Greeks [Christians] were. It is there that we built our house, it is there where we lived, and in the school where I went until the fifth elementaire [5th class of primary school in French]. There were Italians. We learned Italian. Our family, a big family, had stores in Rhodes and in Leros, fabrics. At the time we did not sell ready to wear clothing. It was all about cutting with scissors and sewing, and we had two stores on Leros, one in Lakki and one in Aghia Marina, and the central store was in Rhodes. Our family was well off, the family was big and spread out, in Paris and in Brazil. […] When the war started in Rhodes, my father asked my mother to go there [to Brazil], to abandon everything in Rhodes and leave. [She] did not want to. “How are we to leave our homes, how are we to leave our stores”? “I do not know”. And my father came back [from Paris], he caught pleurisy. At the time there was no penicillin, he died. He died.
So the Germans came to Rhodes, they took us, put us in four boats, brought us to Athens, detained us in Haidari. From Haidari we were taken to Auschwitz, seventeen days, seventeen nights, that was it. Then, when I was there, they did selection for the jobs [forced labor], for this, for the other, and then they took us to Mauthausen, because the Russians were coming, they took us to Mauthausen. Mauthausen is worse than Auschwitz. They put us in the Gedeckte Lager, us the Jews, without bunks, without anything, we slept on the snow. We lived through this. We lived through this and were liberated by the Americans. “Where do you want to go”, they ask. “To Rhodes, where else?’’. “But there are no boats, there are no planes that go to Rhodes for the time being”.
I waited for a month. They said “there is an Italian boat that goes to Egypt”. I say “I will go to Egypt, it is close to Rhodes”. I got on the boat, went there. The community there embraced me with great onore [honour in Italian], the Jewish Community, great onore and they gave me… anything I wanted and clothes to wear. And [then] I went to Rhodes. When I went to Rhodes the Greeks started again ‘’Why shop there?”. My brother opened a fabrics store with an African millionaire. ‘’Don’t go to the Jew to shop, come to us”, this and that, this is what they started… I can’t say it [on camera]. Do you understand me? This jealousy exists… What did we do? How were we to blame?