JENNIFER LIPMAN
WHEN FRANÇOIS Matarasso visited Thessaloniki, he immediately felt at home. In some way’s that’s unsurprising — his father Robert’s family had lived in the Greek city, then known as Salonica, for generations. His grandfather Isaac was a respected doctor there, still remembered today for his compassion. And yet this was the site of the Matarassos’ worst times, the place from whence François’s great-grandfather and up to 50,000 other Jews were deported to Nazi death camps.
Many were sent to Auschwitz; only an estimated 2,000 returned. A community dating from the arrival of those fleeing the Spanish Inquisition would never recover.
Robert and Isaac were the “lucky” ones. Escaping torture and imprisonment, they joined the resistance and when the few survivors trickled back, they were there to help them, with Isaac providing medical care and his teenage son supporting him.
Their survival against the odds is astonishing, but more so is that Isaac had the prescience to take notes, building a meticulous account of the community’s fate. In And Yet Not All Died, completed in January 1946 and published two years later, he writes: “Dear Jews of Salonica, I have used my weak voice to bring many of the stages of your calvary to public knowledge.”
He recorded in painstaking detail statistics, dates of deportations and numbers taken, the restrictions placed on Jews, medical records (including of survivors) and more.
He included first-person descriptions of Auschwitz from the first to return. Leon Batis, who arrived back in May 1945, tells Isaac “I’ve passed through different countries, and more or less everywhere they took me for a madman”. Isaac logged every detail, from the transportation to the selections, the brutality of the guards and the horrors that unfolded.
His account is now being released in English for the first time, as part of a book, Talking Until Nightfall, that is part history, part memoir (as written by Robert before his death in 1982) and part analysis.
Publication is thanks to Robert’s British widow Pauline, a professional translator, and their son François, now 61 and a community artist who divides his time between France and Nottingham.. “I’m very conscious that there is a point at which the last people who knew this first hand are dying,” says François.
Publishing “felt like the discharging of a responsibility, because it ceases to be simply stuff we know and becomes another little stream that joins the river of history.”
Isaac comes across as extraordinary; a cosmopolitan doctor with a strong sense of duty. François has encountered people who were treated by him as children. “The memory of him remains very warm and evocative in the Jewish community in Greece and that is very moving.”
“In my mind he is still really alive and very present, because he was that kind of person,” recalls Pauline, now 91 and living in Oxford. Even at the end of his life, “he was so determined to go on living”.
The Salonica Isaac was born into in the tail end of the Ottoman Empire was culturally diverse “and didn’t have a problem being so”, explains François. Jews were one of the largest groups but the population was mixed, with Greeks, Turkish Muslims, and smaller communities of Bulgarians, Spanish, Italians and, Germans.
“It’s really important not to idealise because of course there were tensions, but I don’t have a sense that any of those groups questioned the legitimacy of the others,” says François. Boosted by the Alliance Israélite Universelle, which set up Jewish schools across the Ottoman Empire, Salonica was a modern community, with a thriving Jewish professional class alongside a big working class of dockers, porters and other trades.
Isaac studied in France, there meeting his Catholic bride. Robert, accordingly, was not brought up to focus on his Jewish lineage (although Pauline emphasises he was close to his relatives and still grew up within the community). Some of the most affecting passages are Robert’s descriptions of a friend rejecting him after he was forced to wear a yellow star. “It was a shock to discover [being Jewish] could be held against him, that this was a bad thing to be. I don’t think that had ever occurred to him,” says Pauline.
She herself is not Jewish, although she had early exposure to the experiences of Jews under the Nazis, thanks to her mother hiring a German Jewish refugee as a governess just before the war. “My mother felt very strongly about this, and looked for her in particular, so I knew something about Jewish communities and their persecution by the time I was ten, which in England at that time was not very common.”
François, for his part, refers to himself as Mischling, co-opting the derogatory Nazi term for those of mixed blood.
“My whole sense of identity has been of not belonging and I neither feel Jewish nor not Jewish. Clearly I wasn’t brought up in that way but I was brought up with an enormous body of tradition and sense of love for a group of people who were my relatives.”
The Matarassos left Salonica after the war, first for Athens and then France. François has visited multiple times. “I have never felt so welcomed or accepted anywhere as by Jewish communities in Salonica and Athens. People knew my grandfather, so I don’t have to explain myself, it’s the only place where I have that sense of belonging.”