Out of Chaos: Hidden Children Remember the Holocaust

Zamboni’s List

45 First Name: Isaac Last Name: Daniel Date of Birth: October 7, 1933 City of Birth: Thessaloníki Country of Birth: Greece Zamboni’s List Isaac M. Daniel I was born in Salonika (Thessaloníki), Greece, in 1933, the second of four children of Mordochai Daniel and Bella Modiano Daniel. Before the war we moved to the town of Veria (Veroia), my father’s hometown, about seventy-two kilometers west of Salonika. Veria had an over two-thousand-year uninterrupted Jewish history. The Jewish community of approximately eight hundred people out of a total population of about fifteen thousand had one synagogue and a single Jewish school. The synagogue is said to be the same one that Saul of Tarsus (Saint Paul) visited around the year 50 c.e. to preach to the community. Exiles from Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries transformed the community into a Sephardic, Ladino-speaking one. Almost the entire community lived within a walled ghetto around the synagogue . The ghetto had two gates that in old times used to be locked every night as well as during epidemics in the town. In September 1939, I entered the Jewish school just as the war started and before I turned six years old. The school covered the regular secular curriculum of the Greek public schools supplemented by religious Jewish instruction. I studied Greek, history, geography, arithmetic, art, and calligraphy. I remember the angry outburst of my Greek teacher when she discovered that I spoke only Ladino and didn’t understand Greek well. “How can they raise children in this country without knowing the language?” I do not remember how, but before the end of the school year I learned to speak, read, and write perfect Greek. 46 Out of Chaos In October of 1940, Greece was invaded by the Italians under Mussolini, but the Greek Army managed to hold and even push back the invaders into Albania. One of the first casualties of that war was the highest-ranking Jewish officer in the Greek Army, Colonel Mordechai Frizis. The Germans came to the rescue of the Italians through Yugoslavia and invaded Greece in 1941. All of Greece fell to the Axis powers and was divided into three occupation zones: German in the north, Bulgarian in the east, and Italian in the south. Salonika and Veria fell in the German zone; Athens was in the Italian zone. It was in late 1942 when rumors started circulating that the Germans were going to relocate all Jews to near Kraków, Poland, to establish an independent Jewish state. The faithful saw it as a sign of the coming of the Messiah; others were apprehensive but never suspected anything really dangerous. I remember only an old senile woman in the ghetto screaming, “mos van a matar a todos” (“they are going to kill us all”). “Shush, old lady,” they said to her. A few skeptics, like two of my uncles, moved their families to the villages in the surrounding mountains. We stayed in our house because we were hoping that my mother’s Italian citizenship would help us. We were ordered to wear the yellow star (concarda). It was the last day of Passover in 1943. I was in the synagogue with my father. During the service, three armed Greek policemen, accompanied by a Jewish collaborator from Salonika, came and blocked the front door. My father grabbed me by the hand and led me through the women’s section (snoga) and out by a side door that was not guarded (miracle number one). My Uncle Joseph, whose family was already in the mountains, also escaped by the same route. My father, my uncle, and I were the only three people from that synagogue service who survived. We ran to our house just outside the ghetto and hid in the basement with the rest of the family. We decided in a panic that my father, with my twelve-year-old brother Anri and me, would try to escape to the mountains and send somebody from the village later to bring my mother, my six-year-old sister Sarica (Sarah), and my two-year-old brother Samico (Sam). We walked for hours and came to the Aliákmon River. We approached the bridge to cross it, when a peasant came out of nowhere and recognized my father. “Don’t go there,” he shouted, “German soldiers are guarding the bridge and checking papers” (miracle number two). Frustrated to find our last escape route...