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Greece’s old Jewish city: Salonika — 9 Comments

  1. The U.S. Sixth Fleet used to visit Salonika, or Thessaloniki. I don’t know if they still do. Unfortunately, we knew little of the history, and found little to amuse us there. Looking back, it is a shame that more efforts were not made to acquaint crews with the history of the locales we visited. Aircraft carriers had Chaplains, and they set up tours for the ships in port, and no doubt sponsored other cultural opportunities. But, they reached relatively few.

    There is one vignette from Salonika that I retain some fifty years later. My wife had come over for a short visit, and we were in a small shop to buy a doll in traditional Macedonian dress for our daughters. The woman shopkeeper spoke no English, and we spoke no
    Greek. In some European cultures we would have been written off, but this woman persevered with good humor, as did we. The sale was eventually consummated amid gales of laughter all around over our cross cultural struggles.

    My room mate on that deployment was second generation Greek. When we visited Istanbul, he managed to be elsewhere. He feared that he would be recognized as Greek, and his name would certainly give him away. Actually, he went with his own wife and son to the Greek mountain village from which his father emigrated. As an American Naval Aviator, he was treated as a hero; but, his wife was treated like the women of the village, and she did not enjoy that at all.

  2. Oldflyer, I was aboard the USS FD Roosevelt (CVA-42) late 69 early 70. I remember the visit we made to Salonika. Interesting place. Of course being enlisted we saw liberty a bit different. I remember getting a Coke that was bottled there. I found that fascinating. There was a USO there too, if I remember right. We could make a call home. Now of course sailors have the internet.

    This post was very interesting. I too wish we would have known more about the history of the city. I was just out of college with a BA in History. I would have loved the info in this post.

    The observations of the Jews in the concentration camp, how they acted, reminds me of stories of the Greek soldiers during the Korean War. If a higher level solider died/killed, the next in line took over. Strong unit cohesion. Even in the POW camps.

    What did you fly?

  3. Lynn, since you asked, I started my career in the venerable AD-6 Skyraider (it was later corrupted by the universal designation system–no doubt another McNamara brainstorm–into the A-1H, and the much loved nickname–Able Dog–degenerated into Spad for reasons I never understood.) Our primary mission in the late 1950s was nuclear attack. If worse became worst, we were going to cruise across enemy territory at 50ft and 162 knots and in the highly unlikely event that we ever reached the target, loft a bomb with a maneuver aptly named the “idiot loop”. The fact that we accepted that scenario as more–or less–reasonable, and trained for the “idiot loop” constantly, tells you all you need to know about our intellectual capacity. Fortunately for all, worse never became worst.

    I finished in A-4s; and at the age 50 started my airline career in Boeing 727s. I am four times retired. Once from the USN, twice from airlines via bankruptcy, and finally from British Aerospace. Now you know more than you ever cared to know.

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  5. Paul Mirengoff’s comment sparked this comment by Neo, and I am grateful for both. There is so much history and each day it grows more distant. My own connection to these horrors is yet more remote but I offer it anyway, not so much as evidence of the suffering of the Jews of Salonika, or anyone from Greece, as the suffering of any human being caught in this cruel and pointless machine.

    My father-in-law led an infantry platoon across Europe in 1944-5 and this is an approximation of what he, at 96, finally felt able to tell us.

    Refeeding Syndrome

    Over Christmas
    We had been bled
    Hard at the Bulge
    And then for months
    We fought Eastward
    Through dragons’ teeth
    Laced with tracers
    That took many
    O my brothers

    Late in April
    Reaching Munich
    Tough as gristle
    Nothing of war
    Could still shock
    And this shocked us

    The guards in flight
    Left uniforms
    Dropped their weapons
    Unlocked the gates
    As if to free
    The men we found
    Who were too weak
    To leave their bunks
    Or stand to meet
    Their rescuers

    What I recall
    Like a sickness
    Was how they died
    From what we gave

    Some on the meat
    From ration cans
    Simply choking
    But with others
    Poisoned by food
    Too rich for them
    It took a week

    Their blood damaged
    By such rich stuff
    Hearts unsteady
    Beyond our help
    And our learning

    Later their cases
    Were written up
    “Refeeding syndrome”
    Being a thing
    We could watch for
    And try to treat
    By keeping back
    And doling out
    What instinct said
    We should provide

    Seventy years
    I kept this down
    Like half-chewed food
    And even now
    I can’t say much
    More than these words
    But O those men
    O how we fought
    In ignorance

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