The Holocaust's sudden echoes: My parents were Turkish Jews. My mother made me aware of the Holocaust when I was 5. I think what prompted it was my question about Hitler, who an older boy had mentioned. But its horror seized her and shaped her. But: She made it clear...
...it didn't "happen" to us. My parents were in Turkey. Turkey was with the allies. My father and uncle were in the Turkish army. My father recalled learning as a soldier of Winston Churchill's secret visit to Turkey. It didn't "happen" to us. I grew up with the sense...
...that it would be appropriative and inappropriate for Jews in parts of the world unoccupied by the Nazis to claim the Holocaust. As an adult, I learned that there were indeed echoes in my family. A Nazi map of Europe I saw when I was 18 and visiting Yad Vashem...
...that counted Jews in each country, and included the Jews of Turkey. Then, slow revelations that family that had remained on the Greek side of the post WW1 Greek Turkish split had been consumed by the Shoah: A great aunt on one side in Thessaloniki...
...a great aunt on the other side in Rhodes. People my family had not been in touch with really since the 1920s, but whose disappearances were learned of in the 50s, 60s, 70s, even the 90s. My mother mourned the death of Ladino - she wept when I got a Yehoram Gaon album for her..
...when I was 14, because the language saddened her. But that was as much a function of Turkey's hypernationalism shunting aside markers of minority identity as it was the disappearance of Greek Jewry. The Holocaust was not "us." Then in 1997, I visited Greece for the first time-
...and Thessaloniki, touring it, meant little to me. There were no markers I could identify, that anyone had in my childhood told me to find. My then-fiancee and I spent one breezy, sunny afternoon at a villa on the Halkidiki peninsula...
...with Greek friends, and we watched Mt. Athos and gossiped about the monks there and the custom of banning females of any species from its soil. There was a lot of retsina and a lot of toasts ("Yassous, Ronous!") and I had too much and lay down on a bed to sleep it off...
...with its window open and allowing in the Aegean air and the slowly fading blue light. Half asleep, I heard Costas ask my fiancee, "Where is Ronous?" and she said, "he had too much retsina" and Costas laughed and sang "Durme, durme." I opened my eyes...
...the lullaby, the one song in Ladino I was vaguely familiar with, that my mother did not deny me, in her frantic bid to raise Canadians unwounded by a dying culture. I got out of bed and went downstairs and asked Costas, "How did you know that song?"...
...He was nonplussed, it was a song! Why should he not know it. It was a lullaby. I tried to explain its significance, but it was too much to explain on a breezy, sweet evening in a villa by the sea. It was a lullaby, and it was somehow allowed to stay and inhabit...
Greek souls after Jewish souls had disappeared. It was all Thessaloniki could offer me. My mother was right, the Holocaust didn't "happen" to us, it would be grotesque for my family to claim its depredations as our own. But there it was in a lullaby in the shadow of the sea.
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