Holocaust Memorial Day 2023

 

One Hundred Saturdays by Michael Frank (Souvenir Press)

I'm not sure where I saw the first mention of this book but I was very pleased that I'd ordered it and that it arrived in time to read on Holocaust Memorial Day.

I've read many books set in Greece just before and during the second world war, and a couple have touched on the Jewish experiences but in the main they have been about daily Greek life.

This book tells the story of Stella Levi as she talks about her life to the author  (Frank) on Saturday mornings across a few years and it was incredible from page one.

Stella and her community were Sephardic Jews who had made Rhodes their home after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in the sixteenth century. Unlike many European Jewish communities they spoke a version of Spanish rather than Yiddish and in many ways their way of life hadn't changed in that time.

The various rulers of Rhodes over the centuries have all left their mark on the community and by the 1930s the community was slowly modernising. Many of the young were emigrating for better lives in America, Palestine and the Congo, and those that remained were under the control of the Italians who ruled the Dodecanese from 1912. The young people were receiving a Western European education and able to speak Italian and French along with Judeo-Spanish, and assimilating this into their lives, along with the influence of the old Ottoman empire.

When the Italians surrendered to the Allies in 1943, the Germans took control of Rhodes, and at first life didn't change too much for the 1700 occupants of the Juderia but then in 1944 all of them were rounded up and deported to Auschwitz.

Stella's story is fascinating and moving throughout and the style of the book - short chapters covering different topics - added to the way I responded to it hugely. Frank asks questions of Stella that she isn't always comfortable with answering instantly but she often comes back to them later - in a natural way that speaks of the friendship she has with him and that deepens your connection with the story. 

The other thing that really struck me about the book was Stella trying to balance her memories with hindsight and create a complete picture of her life. Frank is at times incredulous of the naivety of the community and it is wonderful how Stella stands her ground and can explain the different feelings of before/during and then what you can say knowing how everything did take place.

The book doesn't spend a huge amount of time talking about Stella's experiences actually in the camps - she herself has never wanted to be a person who only exists as a Holocaust survivor - but being able to speak French and Italian (and not Yiddish) had a huge influence on how Stella and her immediate group of friends survived until liberation. Their experiences in immediate aftermath of the war was also a new aspect of holocaust history for me as they were liberated in the west by American GIs rather than in the East by Russian soldiers.

I've been luck enough to visit Rhodes four times and yet I wasn't aware of this unique history, and I don't recall seeing the memorials (or the museum) dedicated to the Jewish history of the island. It won't be this year that we go back to Rhodes but when we do I'll definitely be searching out the area and putting pictures to the words. More about the area can be found here: https://jewishrhodes.org/la-juderia/