Tel Aviv, 2014
Each morning we would all gather and say the prayer
Then, the other days, when we were out, we were… it was ten days before Pessah. Each morning we would all gather and say the prayer, but no one knew the whole thing. One would say one part, the other another part and so it was each morning. Two days later, they started to teach us the orders. Attention, at rest, left, right and the first time there was someone who… He was someone from Thessaloniki that was brought with the first transport, because it was a family from Germany and they knew German. I am not sure if you have heard of them, the Kounios. They were there, they told us what to do, they taught us the orders, “right”, “left” and all that, to “take off”-everyone had a beret- “to take off the beret”, to “put on the beret” and then they told us: “I will tell you this once, I will tell you this order and then you have to know it”.
Someone came* and started speaking, I don’t know how we spoke, maybe with gestures; and then he says… he asked me “where are you from?” and I said “from Greece”. He said “from Greece? Do you want to teach me Greek”? “What is this here?” I asked him. “A school?” “Do you want to or not?” I said “I do”. We sat close by at a table and I said “This is a glass, this is bread” and so on… “This is a window”, whatever we saw from there and he wrote it down in Greek. He was Polish, but he wrote with Greek letters. The next day he brought a small book, we looked at the pictures and I would say “This is…” and “That is…” and he would write in Greek. After each lesson he would give me bread to eat, torta [dessert in ladino]. I thought, people have nothing to eat, he has so much so he can also give us some? But I did not know.
With time I learned and found out. For fifty four years I did not know where he was… Aval [but in Hebrew] he said that he was a teacher of Latin and ancient Greek and this is why he knew the alphabet. He wanted to learn modern Greek and so each day I would teach him, while we were in the hospital. In return, he gave me what he had. Do not forget that these Poles who were VIP, so to speak, had the right to write home and receive letters and packages too. He had a lot to eat so he gave to me as well, and when we left the hospital I went where he lived, in block four. I would teach him for an hour, before that I would write a poem, a song, something like that, he learned slowly, step by step. I taught him until April or May of ’44, until they moved him to another camp. For many months I did not go hungry.
Another time I was ill, they put me in the hospital, it was around Rosh Hashanah, New Year of ’43. I had pimples, pimples all over … that was on the New Year, the Jewish New Year. The hospital had wards with triple bunk beds and the head of the ward walked in and said that all Jews must get out of bed, go where they look after the Jews that are holè [ill in Hebrew]. Then an officer came in with soldiers and they said who goes… He comes, there was, there a table with cards, each one had his card and took off his robe, then he would look to see if you are healthy… My turn came, I took off my robe and they took a look here, they took my card, put it on the table, where there were two separate places they put the cards.
We, all knew that one of these places was for those they would exterminate, the others were the ones that they would let live for now, but we did not know which was which. They looked at me, I thought I was healthy. I do not know, they took my card, put it there and then left. We waited; we knew he would come… Meanwhile, I had the bread they were giving and I thought it’s Yom Kippur, so I will not eat, and at night when it was Yom Kippur, an SS officer came in the ward and said “Whoever hears his number must collect his things and come outside”, to go to place where it was… “to receive clothes because we found out he is not that strong so we will take him to the sanatorium”. So they said. We knew they would take them for extermination. And now you must think that I am in this ward, I hear a number, it is not my number, I go like this [breathe] and I do not know which will be the next number and so they called out, they called out again, they called out again. Agony? More than agony. In the end, as you can imagine, I did not hear it. They did not call out my number.
*Refers to Franciszek Czyz (1910-1958), mentioned at length by Moshe Haelion in his book The Straits of Hell. The chronicle of a Salonikan Jew in the Nazi extermination camps Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Melk, Ebensee (Athens, Alexandria, 2020