Tel Aviv, 2016
Spain, the Spanish ambiance, seemed to us like coming home […]. It seemed like we were coming home, and it is there that we felt human again.
I returned to Greece many times. I travelled for the first time in 1961; I met the Greek friends that I had in Thessaloniki, a very good friend who was a neighbour, Alexandra Drakou, and a very good friend of mine, Yiannakis. I met them in Greece for the first time [after the war].
After that, we went to Greece almost ten times with my wife, my children, to Thessaloniki, to Athens, to Corfu, to Peloponnese, to all the places where you can spend an enjoyable summer with the children. […] Recently, we went to Thessaloniki in August last year with all my children. We travelled so they could see all the places, where I was born, where I grew up, where they took us to Baron Hirsch and to Bergen-Belsen by train, to the train station… The children remember this last trip that we made to Greece very well.
Israel is in our heart, Greece of course, but mostly Spain. Spain for us is the place that saved us, because we had Spanish passport, and I do not know how this passport came about. All the family had Spanish nationality and all the family reached Spain during the world war and we were saved from the bear’s mouth. When all the Jews went to Auschwitz and died, we were living in Bergen-Belsen and from there they took us on a real train, not a cattle train, on a real train to Portbou, then to Barcelona and when we reached Barcelona it seemed like we were coming home. We were home because they spoke Spanish, the food was food that we cooked at home, the same food that we ate at home, the same language, almost the same, and everyone understood us and we understood what they wanted to say. Spain, the Spanish ambiance, seemed to us like coming home, like we never passed from Thessaloniki to Spain. It seemed like we were coming home and it is there that we felt human again.
This is why my father told me before he died: “You should keep the Spanish nationality. Keep the Spanish nationality for as long as you can”. So I keep it, and so does my wife and almost all of my children keep the Spanish nationality along with the Israeli one, because of course all of them were born here.