Talking Until Nightfall: Remembering Jewish Salonica 1941-44, by Isaac Matarasso
Talking Until Nightfall: Remembering Jewish Salonica 1941–44
By Isaac Matarasso, translated by Pauline Matarasso
Bloomsbury £16.99
On 15th March 1945, a thin man, his hat pulled down well over his head, walked into the Aegean port of Salonica (now Thessaloniki).
His name was Leon Batis and he was the first of the Greek survivors to escape from Auschwitz. A group of eight Salonican Jews gathered round to hear his story: they would at last learn what had happened to the 46,000 other members of their community deported during the war. Where had the trains taken them – and would they, like Batis, now be coming back?
Before the German army arrived in April 1941, Salonica had been the home of 50,000 Jews, many of whose Sephardic ancestors had settled here after their expulsion from Spain by Ferdinand of Aragon. The few hundred who remained had survived the occupation by hiding in the mountains.
‘I’ve passed through different countries,’ Batis explained, ‘and more or less everywhere they took me for a madman. What I’ve seen! What I’ve been through!’
Coleridge had described such a figure in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach.
We know about Leon Batis because one of the men who gathered round was a doctor called Isaac Matarasso, who had developed a treatment for the permanent removal of freckles. Matarasso later wrote down what Batis taught him: that the deported Jews had not, as the Chief Rabbi had promised them, begun a new community in Krakøw. They had been gassed in concentration camps.
Listening to his tale, Matarasso ‘saw in a flash, in this acrid, suffocating, deathdealing air, the bulging eyes, the constricted throats, the distended veins in the neck. We saw hell on that evening.’
Matarasso, whose wife Andrée was a French Catholic, similarly recorded the stories of the next six arrivals from Auchwitz, and the names of the last eight Jews murdered in the city in September 1944, and the unanswered questions of the people being herded onto the 19 transports that left Salonica between 15th March and 9th May 1943: ‘How long will the journey last?’ ‘Where are they taking us?’ ‘Why?’
He also remembered the life of a rabbi called Harbi Haim Habib, a man so holy that he walked, one woman said, ‘like a scroll on the move’, and a much-loved teacher of literature called Mordoh Pitchon with whom Matarasso would ‘talk until nightfall about our dead’. Pitchon, like Harbi Haim Habib, soon ‘vanished’, wrote Matarasso, ‘into the smoke from an Auschwitz chimneystack’.
Isaac Matarasso died in 1958, and his meticulous account of the destruction of an ancient civilisation, originally written in French, has now been translated into English for the first time. It is published together with the unfinished memoir of his son, Robert, who was 14 when the Germans appeared and had no idea he was considered Jewish until he was ordered to wear a yellow star on his breast.
Robert, who died in 1982, married an English Catholic called Pauline and it is Pauline Matarasso, now aged 90, who has translated the work of her late husband and father-in-law, and created this utterly devastating book.
‘Can there be anything left to say about the Shoah?’ she asks in her introduction. It is, of course, a rhetorical question: I knew nothing about the fate of the Salonican Jews before reading these pages. ‘It is necessary to say it again like a prayer,’ Pauline writes, ‘not because it makes anything happen but because it might change us.’
Talking Until Nightfall is more than an invaluable historical document. It is a testament of faith, or more precisely what Pauline calls espérance, which translates as ‘theological hope’. Isaac Matarasso never, says Pauline – who describes herself as ‘witness to the witness’ – showed any sign of anger, or lost his joy in being alive.
The book closes with a memoir of Robert by his son, François Matarasso. His father, François writes, told many stories about Salonica but these, he later realised, were selective. Raised as a Catholic in rural England, François was a teenager when he discovered that his father’s Greek family were Jewish. Robert had no stories about his time in the ghetto or in prison. He never described himself as a ‘Holocaust survivor’, let alone a Catholic Holocaust survivor.
This remarkable document is thus the work of three generations of Matarassos and, ‘as far as the family is concerned’, we read in the foreword, the ‘sacred duty imposed by the custodianship of those primary sources’ has been discharged.
‘Memory that does not become history is lost.’ This, Pauline Matarasso’s warning, is what we must never forget.