(By: Violette Fintz, Vol. 69, No. 3, Chanukah 2014)
In October 1994, at the invitation of the Brussels-based film company, Les Film De La Memoire, I returned to Rhodes Island to take part in a film on the Jewish community in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of their deportation. Although I was born on Rhodes, in 1911, I had not been there since 1945, when I returned after surviving Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen Belsen.
It is a long trip from Cape Town to Rhodes. I was not feeling well at the time and was reluctant to make such a journey into the past. Fortunately, my doctor encouraged me to go and I do not regret it. Even though the experiences I had were emotionally draining, I had wonderful people to share them with and returned home feeling much better.
When I was liberated from the camps on 15 April 1945, I returned to Rhodes because I had left a very good job there as manager of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. However, I found that I could seldom go into the Juderia (the Jewish Quarter) because I would become so emotional. I would cry all the time. Every stone would remind me of all my people who never came back. After a year, I left and joined my sister in the Congo. Now, fifty years later, I had been asked to go back to give my testimony on behalf of the community of Rhodes.
I travelled with Elsie Menasce of Cape Town. We spent two days in Athens with her kind and hospitable friend Bella Restis, whose mother is from Rhodes. On the morning of 17 October, after a forty minute flight, we arrived on the island, at the same time as the producer of the documentary, Diane Perelszteyn. Soon after, all those involved in the production met together at the Plaza Hotel. Apart from the film crew, there were half a dozen volunteers who had left Rhodes before or after the war and three survivors, one from Brussels, one from Italy, and myself. The volunteers were keen to help record what had happened for future generations. Rhodes, once referred to as the Little Jerusalem, was a great Jewish community that had disappeared tragically in the Auschwitz ashes. In 1925 there were 5000 Jews in a population of 50 000. As a result of continuing emigration, for economic reasons, the community only consisted of 1783 people when it was deported to the concentration camps on 21 July 1944. Of these, 1632 were murdered.
Straight after the meeting, Diane and I went to the Jewish Quarter to see what we could find and what remained of the Rhodes I knew. For me, Rhodes was like a lost planet. I could not even recognise the place where I was born and where I had lived a large part of my life. We went along the road to the Great Synagogue which led to my house. I discovered that the synagogue had bars around it, having been completely destroyed by the wartime bombardment. I looked from right to left because I could visualise the people who used to live there and started crying because every one of them had been killed. Greek people were now living in their homes and I could not see one face I knew.
Our house still stood at the end of the road – the house where I had lived and where my brother and sister had been born, my brother in 1921, my sister in 1924. I cannot describe the feelings I had when I entered the house fifty years after I had been forced to leave. Half of it had been destroyed; the house next door was completely dilapidated. The people who were living there were very kind. We explained what we were doing and they agreed to let us return the following day to film.
We went down the road to my old school, the Alliance Universelle. Once a great school, now there was nothing left but the entrance and the name. We walked along the streets to see what would be suitable for filming. The road was full of puddles because it had rained the previous day. Most of the houses were rundown. I told Diane about the large community centre, the Foundation Notrica, which we had used for festivals like the dance at Purim and how on Rosh Hashanah the Governor of Rhodes used to come to meet the Jewish community there. Some children told me that it was now a school.
I suggested to the producer that we go to the village of Trianda. This was far from the Juderia, so when there was a lot of bombing we used to take shelter there. We walked along the road, but no one had even heard of Trianda. Finally, we discovered that the name had been changed to Ialissos. I went to the nearby bar and introduced myself and was told that my friend’s husband had just left. I phoned the son, Nicola.
He said: “Madame Violette! I shall be there straight away.”
He was a man of 52, so I was surprised that he should know who I was. When he arrived, he kissed and hugged me with tears in his eyes and told me that his mother frequently cried, saying, “Where is my Violette?” I gave him a photo of his mother from an old album that had been given to me.
I had worked for Singer Sewing Machines from 1930 until my deportation in 1944. One hundred people had worked with me, mainly Christian Greeks, and many were young, but I could find no one I knew. I asked, “What has happened to everyone?” They had all died.
I recognised Mr Orfanidis shop. I went in – the owner greeted me effusively but only because he had heard about me from his late father.
The next day, we started filming at the beginning of the road to the Juderia. Located there was a large building, formerly the Rabbinical College, moving onto the road to the Great Synagogue.
Then we went to my house. I could remember clearly being ten years old, my brother just born and our house full of festivities. All this came to my eyes without my seeing that the house was no longer the same. It had been damaged, but it was our house anyway. The home of joy. There was a little string on the door. I undid it and everyone went inside to film. Our rented house had three rooms. I pointed out where my grandmother and where my parents had slept, and where the Shabbat table had stood. I described the beautiful Shabbat songs we sang and was asked to sing some. I felt very emotional. If it were not so muddy, the plaster peeling and the walls all falling in, I could have kissed every stone. This was the house that my father had had to leave in 1937 in order to go to the Congo to earn some money for his family. Unfortunately. he contracted Black Water Fever and had to return in 1940. The Greek woman now occupying the house was very kind and when I thanked her on leaving, she said, “But it is your house. It is not ours.” That impressed me more than anything else.
After this, we moved on through the Jewish Quarter to the school, and the other people in turn gave their testimonies. Everyone had something to say. One of them was Mr Hasson, who now lives in Brussels. He told us how he escaped in a very small boat. The island was fortified and no one was allowed to leave. The other boat in his group was sunk, but his party managed to reach Turkey. He said that his only sorrow was that he had never told his mother that he was planning to leave and that she had never known that he had survived.
We discovered that the boy who had been with him on the boat was living on Rhodes. He was fetched and they were filmed together. It was a very touching moment.
During the day we would film and at night we would sit at the Plaza Hotel and talk and talk, stories about Rhodes and about our parents and our families who were killed so cruelly. On Friday night there was a beautiful service in the Shalom Synagogue, conducted by two of the volunteers from Brussels. There were quite a lot of people there, including tourists. Although it rained on Shabbat, we kept on going for walks through the Jewish quarter to look for something we wanted to find as though it were really possible to find what we had lost.
We decided to include our wedding customs in the film, which was to be in Ladino with English and French subtitles, so we marched to the synagogue where we sang some beautiful Ladino wedding songs (although these songs were traditionally sung at the house during the celebrations). We also had a service in the cemetery. It was raining so hard that we did not think we would manage to go, but the weather cleared up in the afternoon just in time. The cemetery was full of mud and with great difficulty we managed to go to the monument for the Jewish martyrs and hold a ceremony there.
We spent a whole day filming the place where we were interned before the deportation. It was the former palace of the Italian Air Force. We went to the basement where we had been herded and also filmed the toilets, because the day we were interned the Germans confiscated all our jewellery. They collected two big bags of gold and jewellery, documents and passports. Some people did not want to give it to the Germans and threw it into the toilet. The toilets flooded because the gold and the jewellery blocked the pipes. The Germans kept us there for four days without food or water. Only on the fourth day were we given some soup before we were marched to the harbour.
Two of the survivors marched from the building to the port, which was quite a distance away, to demonstrate how far the old, the young, the sick and the heavily pregnant had been forced to march, carrying their luggage in the July heat. The screaming of the children, the suffering of the old and the ill, the agony of that day was unimaginable. After this, the producer wanted us to describe our deportation.
We moved to the jetty. By chance, two small cargo boats happened to be moored in the harbour, the same kind of boats that had been moored there on that fateful day, fifty years ago, waiting to take us away as human cargo. We were amazed and said, “Look at that! It feels as though we are going to be marched into the same boats all over again.”
We told our stories standing next to these ships, one survivor against the one boat, and I against the other. We had not expected to see these boats again, but there they were.
I was filmed in front of the boat and described how on 17 July 1944, the Germans sent a letter to Mr Franco, the President of the Rhodes Jewish community, ordering us to go to the Palace. Every man from the age of 16 had to go to the building. We thought they were reporting for labour. We did not realise that anything was going to happen to us. When the men arrived, their ties and shoelaces were confiscated and two men were sent to the Juderia to fetch everyone else. We had to bring along our jewellery, passports and papers. We were badly treated there. We were given no food or water. There was inadequate sanitation and overflowing toilets. I told them how we had been deported, squashed onto ships, many hundreds pressed into each other.
That is how we were taken to Auschwitz. We did not say more than that, but this is how our community on Rhodes disappeared. Of the one thousand, seven hundred and eighty three Jews who were taken away, only one hundred and fifty one came back!
All the houses in the Juderia had belonged to the Jews, but we received no compensation. When I returned home in 1945, I could not find anything in my house, nothing, not even a spoon. The Greeks denied responsibility for our deportation. After the defeat of Germany, the Allies had ruled Rhodes and the Greeks had taken over from them.
Those Jews who have tried to reclaim their houses have had enormous problems. The Greeks now own everything. Today Greeks live in all these houses. Some look after them, but others have let them fall into ruin. I remember how, when we lived there, everybody used to whitewash the entrances to their houses just before Passover so that it looked like one garden. It was a beautiful life.
The following day we returned to the synagogue and some of us sang a few Ladino songs to make the film a little more cheerful and add some happiness to it. We had a little tambourine and Diane asked me to sing a song by myself.
We had all felt very ambivalent about returning to this island, which held so many sad memories for us, but we felt satisfied at having had the opportunity to give our testimonies about what our lives had been like in this once dynamic Jewish community and about what had happened to us. We had been enabled to honour the memory of our martyrs in this film.
Today no Jews could live on Rhodes. We used to be very friendly with the Rhodes people. Today the people are no longer the same. We talk nostalgically about,”Aah! Rhodes! Rhodes!”
But it would be too painful to live there now, to walk in the streets and see thousands of people but not one Jew, not one-person one knows.
I was glad to have had this opportunity to return to Rhodes. I felt privileged to participate in the making of this film. At times I was surprised that I had had the strength to do what I did. I am happy to have helped in the filming for future generations but it was hard and so very sad.
Violette Fintz (1911-2007) was the long-serving chairman of She’erith Hapletah, the association of Holocaust survivors in Cape Town. Committed to the importance of bearing witness, she was among the first survivors to tell her story to Cape Town audiences in the 1980s, and later at Yom Hashoah commemorations and to groups at the CT Holocaust Centre. This article is adapted from an interview , conducted and transcribed by Gwynne Schrire, following her return from a visit to Rhodes Island, her birthplace, in 1994.
