Old Town Rhodes has walls built by the Romans and structures which date back to the Byzantine Empire. For a city of it’s age, most of it has held up very well. While it has become far more touristy than residential, it’s still very much lived in.
Amazingly, prior to World War II, Old Town Rhodes had a thriving Jewish Quarter with approximately 4,000 Jews. They had homes, businesses and six synagogues. At the end of the war, only 151 survived.
We visited the only remaining synagogue, Kahal Shalom which is also the oldest one dating back to 1577. It has clearly had some restoration and maintenance, but instead of housing an active congregation, it serves as a Jewish Museum, educating about the people who were.
We thought at first that maybe there would still be a small congregation, but we showed up on a Friday evening and found only a sign with the museum hours.
Just down a narrow street from there, we found an abandoned old synagogue identifiable only by the Hebrew inscription carved in stone over the door. The building is old, lifeless and in sad shape.
In the nearby square at the center of the Jewish Quarter there is a memorial to the Rhodes Jews who died at Auschwitz. It has six sides, each with the same inscription in six different languages – English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian and German.
While I was photographing it, an Israeli man and his wife and daughter walked up and asked me if I had seen the synagogue. I told him where it was but that I didn’t know if it was still active. He did a little asking around and later told us that it was not – and that there are only maybe 25 or so Jews left in Rhodes.
I’ve been to Holocaust memorials before. The one in La Roselle, the Jewish section of Paris was hollow – a French concession to a past they prefer not to acknowledge. And while what happened in Paris was atrocious and of course inhumane, it somehow made more sense to me.
The Nazis stormed and occupied Paris. It was firmly under Nazi control. Sure, the French did actually turn over their Jews and there is no excuse. But, the city fell and as far as they knew, they might be German subjects for a long time.
Nazis didn’t overpower Rhodes. Sure, Greece was officially occupied – but maybe only a handful of German soldiers stepped foot on Rhodes. Rhodes town isn’t a tiny village, but it’s really a small community.
People could have protected their neighbors. In a town like Rhodes, people could have easily been hidden if need be – or better yet, sent to the sparsely inhabited South of the island for awhile.
I wasn’t there. I can’t fairly assess. I probably have no clue all the factors that existed at the time and what it was like for the people of Rhodes.
But I seeing it with my own eyes, I can’t imagine how the Jews of Rhodes could have been identified and taken by the Nazis without the locals handing them over. It seems to me there had to be local participation.
Of course, it also makes me think of a scene from the movie Sunshine which follows the real story of four generations of a Jewish family in Budapest. Only three members of the family survive the Holocaust – the grandmother, her brother and the grandson who is probably 16 or so when the war ends.
The boy’s great uncle had returned from France where he had fled years before since he was a renown socialist leader in Hungary and got chased out by a coup. His socialist friends in France hid him.
He asked the boy what had become of the boy’s father. The boy answered that his father was killed in front of him in a camp. The uncle asked what people did to stop this. The boy answered, “nothing – they could do nothing.”
The uncle asked what the boy did. “nothing – I could do nothing!” The uncle asked how many of them were at the camp at the time to which the boy answered several hundred. “How many guards were there watching you?” the uncle asked. “Probably ten or fifteen” the boy answered, “but they had guns pointed at us!”
The uncle asked why, if there were hundreds of Jews in the camp and so few guards, why didn’t you charge them and take their guns? Sure, some people would be shot and killed, but far fewer than going to the camps.
The boy responded, “There was nothing we could do. We could do nothing! We could do nothing….”
Who knows what everyone thought and felt at the time. Like so many things, perhaps their time and reality can only be fully understood by those who experienced it. All I know was that I was saddened and that in front of that poor, dilapidated, abandoned synagogue – the tragedy felt all too real.
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