Thessaloniki, 2015
My free pass was always tucked between my bosom and my dress
I loved a boy since I was fifteen years old; he was studying medicine in Athens and his name was Alberto Benrubi. We were apart because he was living in Athens; I discouraged him from visiting his parents because he could get caught, so I was visiting them instead. His parents were elderly, as they married and had him at an advanced age. I was reporting to Alberto in Athens about his parents and was telling him “above all don’t come here”, because in ’42 [July 11, 1942, the public humiliation of 9,000 men on Liberty Square, also known as “Black Sabbath”] they rounded up the men from eighteen to thirty years old I think or forty and mistreated them under the sun, in 40 degrees under the shade and they beat and tortured them… This of course I saw with my own eyes since I was free to go out. It seemed so horrible that I said to myself “nobody will survive”.
So we went one day before the persecutions started, because for a year they let us be, we went with my father, Salvator Revah and mother, Lucie Revah to Alberto’s house, because it was customary for the groom to come and say “I will take the bride”, but we went instead and I was helping his father and mother in any way I could. His father was bleeding in the stomach, and one day a friend of mine, Ino Levi, who was in the Jewish police said “Nina, tomorrow, they will round up those who are in the ghetto close to you, so on the street where Alberto’s parents are staying”. I said, “what time is this happening?” and he said “in the morning at 8-8.30”. I got up and went to their house, they left the door open and all their possessions just as they were, they took two bundles because that much was allowed. I carried the bundles down the stairs and helped them down as well; I begged whomever had a cart and donkey for help. I begged the cart driver to put them in the cart since they were elderly and he was suffering from gastric bleeding, I walked alongside… My free pass was always tucked between my bosom and my dress since I was young and at the time young girls did not carry purses. We started walking, they were not of course going to drive them, until we got there, I am not sure of the distance in kilometres, but it is far away, up to Vardari. Vardari is an area of Saloniki that is at the north and close to the train station. There, a member of the Jewish police who joined in order to stay a little longer, in case the war would end, but in vain, tells me “Nina up to here, because if you continue with them the Germans could easily tear your laissez passer [the free pass card] and put you in the train with them. I say “alright”, started crying, I kissed them, of course I never saw them again and they left. When I telephoned Alberto he said “come to Athens because here they have not started rounding people up yet because it’s the Italians”, I responded “that’s impossible, I can’t leave my father and mother. If we both survive, we will…” we had a common acquaintance, a businessman whose name I can’t think of now, we said we would meet at the house of a friend of his in Athens, of Alberto, and he would go to this friend the businessman. He gave his mother’s jewelry that he had taken in one of his trips to Thessaloniki and he told him “I am going to the mountain” even though Evert had given him a Greek identity card and he had the original birth certificate of Konstantinos Moraitis who was also a doctor, so Alberto became Konstantinos Moraitis son of Petros and of… I don’t remember the names, to be honest, because now I am too old to remember everything, but the facts I remember them all.