The Thread (34 page)

It was not the right thing to do. He knew that. Instead, he went out into the street, suddenly desperate for fresh air, and began walking in the direction of the sea. Emboldened by his clean clothes, he went inside a kafenion he had never been to before and ordered. He could feel strange eyes on him, and looked up into the face of a gendarme who was staring at him with some interest.

‘Konstantinos’ son?’ he asked.

Dimitri did not know how to react. To deny such a thing might seem ridiculous if this man knew his father. To admit it, might have different repercussions.

‘You are! Aren’t you?’ persisted the man, who was with a group of half a dozen colleagues.

Dimitri felt his face flush. Perhaps his father had already reported him as a Communist. He went rigid with fear. In the mountains there had always been somewhere to run if you were face to face with an enemy. He glanced past the gendarmes to the door behind them and realised there would be no escape.

‘You must be Dimitri. You look so alike. Do give my regards to your father!’

He hated the idea that he resembled his father, but for now he felt a surge of relief.

‘Yes … of course,’ he said forcing a smile to his lips.

He tipped back the coffee cup, swallowed some of the bitter grounds, got up and left. What a disgusting thought that his father was on first-name terms with a gendarme, he thought, but how predictable.

Dimitri hastened back to Irini Street. Elias was due back soon. Would Isaac be with him?

He had to wait only ten minutes for the answer to that question. Elias returned alone.

‘He won’t come,’ said Elias with a note of disappointment. ‘He says that someone needs to stay here with Mother and Father. He is probably right, you know.’

‘Pity,’ responded Dimitri. ‘We could do with him.’

Elias had run upstairs to get a spare shirt and they both picked up the packets of bread and cheese that Kyria Moreno had left for their journey.

‘Having just said goodbye to Mother, I doubt she would survive if we were both going. It would break her heart,’ added Elias.

‘Well, he knows what’s right for him,’ said Dimitri. ‘Let’s get going.’

He could not bring himself to ask Elias whether he had seen Katerina.

By nightfall, Thessaloniki was not even a speck on the horizon. Within two and a half days the two men were back with their unit in the mountains.

In Thessaloniki, two women cried themselves to sleep that night. The fleeting encounters with their sons had left them feeling almost more bereft than before. Olga could not even discuss her son’s visit with Konstantinos. Dimitri’s name was not to be mentioned. At least Roza Moreno had had the opportunity to kiss her son goodbye.

For the fourteen months since the invasion, apart from seizing synagogue treasures, businesses and homes, the Germans had done little to harm the Jews themselves. In mid-July, this changed. They suddenly announced that Jewish men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five must present themselves for registration. They were to be used as civilian labour in building roads and airstrips.

Kyrios Moreno tried to cheer Isaac up.

‘Well, they need someone to do their hard work for them,’ he said. ‘And it’s not only the Jews. They’ve got Greek men doing heavy building work as well.’

‘But why can’t the Germans do it themselves?’ protested Isaac. ‘I’m a tailor, not a builder.’

‘It’s just the way it is,’ said his mother. ‘I’m sure it won’t be for long,
agapi mou
.’

Temperatures had risen that week to the hottest of the year and, that Saturday morning, nine thousand of them were made to stand in rows in Plateia Eleftheria. Its name seemed ironic that day: Freedom Square. The midday sun beat down on their heads and there was not a breath of sea breeze to cool them.

‘I thought we were going off to start building roads,’ one of the other tailors said to Isaac. ‘Why are we all standing here?’

‘I think we are about to find out,’ he answered.

Orders were being barked from across the square. If the Jews were too slow to understand what they were being told to do, the German soldiers helped them out with the use of sticks. It seemed they were being told to perform a series of keep-fit exercises.

Isaac and eight others from the workshop tried to remain close to one another. Had it been a few months later, Jacob, the oldest of their group at forty-four years old, would not have been obliged to register. He was small, with a portly figure, and found the exercises more difficult than Isaac and the younger ones. The Germans noticed this and he was picked on and made to do a somersault, not once but five times in a row, so that he could be photographed.

One of the city’s newspapers had been stirring up anti-Semitic sentiments during the previous few weeks and a crowd, including respectable citizens of Thessaloniki, had gathered to watch the spectacle of these young men being forced to do ridiculous exercises in the midday heat. There were encouraging claps and mocking catcalls to add to their humiliation.

For several hours, they were made to perform for the assembled mass, without water, shade or rest. After four hours, his bald head exposed to the fierce sun, Jacob vomited and collapsed. He was still unconscious an hour later, but none of his friends was allowed to come to his aid. Eventually, he was unceremoniously dragged away by the feet by two German soldiers, and when Isaac tried to protest, dogs were set loose on him. The crowd seemed to like this. The more terror and humiliation they witnessed, the louder they cheered. Christians being fed to lions had never pleased the braying horde like this. Eventually, the novelty wore off, even for the tormentors, and at this point the Jews were herded together, most of them in a state of collapse, and loaded onto trucks.

The following morning, Isaac and his group, who had managed to stay together, found themselves outside Larissa, south-west of Thessaloniki. Jacob was not with them. He had died without regaining consciousness.

This was where their torture really began. Thereafter, for ten hours each day, they laboured without a break, exposed to the unforgiving sun and the relentless interest of the mosquitoes. At night, while they slept, the vicious insects continued their work and within a fortnight many of them showed the symptoms of malaria. Even then, there was no respite and the soldiers in charge drove them from their beds each morning and forced them back to work. Once or twice, local villagers took the risk of bringing them additional food or a change of clothing, but this was the only kindness they ever received. Many collapsed in front of the guards, who prodded their emaciated bodies with rifle butts to see if they could get another hour of labour out of them. Only death gave them an excuse to stop working.

When the fourth of their close-knit group from the workshop had died as a result of the Germans’ bestial cruelty, two in the group began talking of escape.

‘We’re going to perish here, so we might as well give ourselves a chance!’

‘You don’t know they aren’t planning to let us go when the job is done,’ said Isaac. ‘And anyway, they’ll shoot you if you try to get away.’

‘But they won’t see us trying to get away …’

‘You can’t guarantee that! You might just make things worse for the rest of us.’

Although there was a guard permanently on duty outside their makeshift tent, they always felt that their language created a place where they could not be touched. To the Germans, Ladino was a smudge of incomprehensible sound.

Back in Thessaloniki, a controversy was raging. Although Isaac was watching his fellow Jews collapsing and dying on a daily basis, there was a sudden glimmer of hope that they might all be released.

The Jewish community had been offered the chance to buy back the labourers, and a price of three million drachmas had been set. In sheer desperation, people began to try to raise the money.

A suggestion was then put forward. Instead of finding this unattainable sum, the Jewish community could pay in kind, by handing over their cemetery. The municipal authority had long wished to get its hands on this vast and valuable piece of land in the heart of the city and now they had their chance: the cemetery was given a value that exactly matched the ransom figure.

The Jewish community was in uproar. In the Moreno workshop, where most people had buried their relatives in this ancient and historic cemetery, there were tears of anger and frustration.

‘But the value of our ancestors is beyond monetary value,’ protested one of the older tailors. ‘We can’t let this happen!’

‘And some of those graves are more than five hundred years old!’

‘Look, the buried are already dead, and my sons are still alive,’ said one of the older tailors, who had three boys at the labour camps. ‘How can you even regard it as a choice?’

Everyone had a point of view, and no one was wrong.

Katerina noticed that Kyria Moreno always found an excuse to leave the room when the issue was raised. Once or twice she had followed her and found her weeping quietly in one of the storerooms.

‘Every time I think of Isaac, I have this terrible feeling that I will never see him again,’ she said. ‘And here we have this chance to get our son back from the camps and people complain!’

Katerina put her arm around Kyria Moreno and hugged her.

‘I can’t bear to listen to them,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing I can do about Elias, but at least I might see Isaac again.’

‘Have you had any news of Elias?’ asked Katerina, hoping for a snippet of information.

‘Nothing,’ said Roza. ‘But they say that most of the resistance are in the mountains, so I assume he’s there. Still with Dimitri, I expect. And the weather is on the change, isn’t it?’

‘Snow. Yes. I’ve heard they’ve already had a fall of it there.’

The older woman nodded and both of them sat in silence for a few moments. Kyria Moreno wanted to compose herself before she rejoined the others. Katerina was thinking of Dimitri. She shuddered, imagining him going through another winter without food or proper clothing.

The debate over the cemetery went on for some time, but the reality was that the Jews did not have a choice. The municipality had already lined up a workforce to destroy it, and in December more than three hundred thousand graves, including those of their great rabbis and teachers, were ripped up. Relatives rushed there to try to rescue the remains of family members, but most were too late, finding that bones had already been pulverised and gold dental work ripped out. A few were fortunate and got there in time to save their late, loved ones and would later reinter them in new cemeteries to the east and west of the city.

Marble headstones were taken away to be sold and later reappeared as part of a building or even underfoot, as a pavement slab. The Morenos, like most other Jews, were distraught when they saw the desecration of their historic and sacred burial ground. If it had been at the epicentre of an earthquake, greater damage could not have been done. The destruction was cataclysmic.

Within a few days, however, the Morenos’ tears of sorrow turned to tears of joy. A skeletally frail man appeared at their door. It was Isaac. The bones of several hundred thousand dead had been successfully exchanged for a few thousand of the only just alive.

A
S 1943 BEGAN
, the city descended further into a state of famine. This took over as the main preoccupation of all those who lived in Thessaloniki.

The Moreno workshop was managing to retain all of its remaining employees (as well as Jacob, three others had died in the labour camp) but there was now little work. The Germans no longer came in for their suits and even the wealthier people of the city – ‘who must all be collaborators,’ Kyria Moreno concluded – could not get the fabric for their new clothes. Konstantinos Komninos had put up his prices so much that only the very rich could afford to pay.

One of the few women who continued to have new gowns was Olga. Anxiety over her son, rather than a shortage of food, had caused her to become even more painfully thin. Some might have mistaken it for elegance, but underneath her expensively lined
crêpe de Chine
, her bones were as pronounced as those of the most deprived people of the city. Nowadays, her husband entertained German officers and when they were at the dining table, Olga lost her appetite completely.

Along with all the other
modistras
and tailors, Katerina continued to keep busy with alterations. Cuffs may have frayed and fabric turned shiny with age, but people found dignity in trying to keep up standards in their appearance. The Moreno workshop charged very little for this service, and when the customers were friends, they charged nothing at all.

There had been rumours that Jews were being deported from their respective countries across Europe, but as yet there had been no such action in Greece, so the Morenos had no reason to think that this was going to happen to them. As though it was someone’s new year’s resolution, all this changed in January 1943. One of Adolf Eichmann’s deputies was sent to Thessaloniki with the order to plan ‘the final solution’ for the city’s fifty thousand Jews. Within a month, one hundred German police had arrived to implement new measures.

‘What’s this about a star?’ asked Isaac. He came into the workshop each day, even though he was still frail and his once dextrous sewing fingers had been wrecked by the months of hard labour.

‘It has to be yellow, that’s all I know,’ said Kyria Moreno. ‘And some of our customers have asked us to sew them on.’

‘And it has to be ten centimetres in diameter and with six points,’ said Katerina, who had already started sewing stars onto coats and jackets. Isaac stood and watched her.

With her fine, rhythmic stitching, Katerina managed to make her stars look like pieces of the finest appliqué. She had seen one or two people in the street with these ugly stars tacked on with crude stitches. If her Jewish friends had to wear these things, then they should at least look neat.

‘I don’t see why we should wear them,’ said Isaac. ‘I’ve done my service for the Germans. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s all over.’