The Holocaust, the genocide of the Jews of Europe by the Third Reich, was the landmark event that definitively changed the modern history of Europe and perhaps set early some of the questions of our time. The time when we often tend to forget the past and the events that marked us. An event, which we can say had and has global scope.
This means that our country could not be unaffected by it. Like the Holocaust, the extermination of the Greek Jews was not a Jewish affair, but an affair of the whole society, precisely because it irradiates society. A society where anti-Semitism existed long before the start of the war. The Jews of Greece became part of the "Final Solution" which was inspired, organized and carried out by the Nazis on the scale of the whole of Europe.
In this regard, the their extermination did not occur through political and social processes that took place in the context of the Greek reality. But on the other hand, the events took place inside occupied Greece and the reactions they caused or did not cause help to understand the quality and depth of the previous situations.
The attitude of Greek society towards an unprecedented event, taking into account the previous problems and frictions, had its own significance. The attitude of the state, the state, the attitude of traditional institutions, such as the Church or the Resistance, were not self-evident. The contradictions were there, the attempts to react to the Nazi plans given, within specific limits, however, very narrowly most of the time.
A total of approximately 70,000 Greek Jews in 1940, more than 50,000 were exterminated in the death camps, a rate exceeding 70%. In Belgium, for example, the corresponding percentage was 37% and in France 30%. For many decades the Jews of Greece did not talk about their experience. Holocaust survivors were traumatized by violence, sadism, humiliation, rape of personality, uprooting and a sense of personal powerlessness and were under the influence of conflicting emotions that could not be expressed in words. Their silence expressed their inability to fit their experience into a comprehensible narrative. At the same time, fear led many Jews to silence their Jewishness.
Anti-Semitism today
During the 1990s, but also in the following years, which was for all of Europe a period of "apologies" and deconstruction of national narratives about the war and the immediate post-war period, in Greece there was no departure from the perspective of the politics of memory of the post-war and post-Civil War period. Until now, not enough light has been shed on the relationships between justice, domestic class conflicts, socio-economic reconstruction, identity formation and democratization in post-war Greece.
In our country, attacks on cemeteries, synagogues and memorials for the victims of the Holocaust are often recorded. Even in cities where few Jews remained after the war, such as Kavala, vandalism has recently occurred. According to a survey by the Anti-Defamation League carried out in 2016, Greece has the highest rate of anti-Semitism in all of Europe, at 67%, with a long distance from second Poland (45%) and third France (37%).
In the field of politics it is not only the Golden Dawn that, as a genuine Nazi organization, copies the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Third Reich. Scattered voices of politicians or parliamentarians who adopt the conspiracy theories about the role of the Jews are rallying in the same direction, while there is no lack of those who consider them responsible for the problems of Education, the Church, and also the banks.
Let's not forget the MP of New Democracy, Adonis Georgiadis, who tried for years to convince us that the Holocaust never happened. Especially when he was promoting Mr. Pleuris' book entitled "The Jews, The Whole Truth". But at the same time that he was promoting his book in every way, already being the press representative of LAOS, the party newspaper "Alfa Ena" was publishing main articles with phrases like "the Jew and if you wash him, your soap is ruined. A little more if we let them, they will break Hitler's record" (23.7.2006), while the leader of the party G. Karatzaferis himself wrote that "it is now widely known throughout the world that the Jew smells Blood" (3.1.2009) . At least, we hope that with his last statements in Auschwitz, Mr. Georgiadis really understood his mistake. Because for better or worse his word has an influence on a large part of our population.
A final thought
The genocide of the Jews of Europe is both for Greek society and for the majority of European societies an unprocessed collective trauma that haunts their historical consciousness. In today's Greece, the lack of relevant education or ethnocentrism have played their part in exacerbating racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia.
But also in Europe, where the signs are alarming, despite noble intentions and decades of sporadic, occasional or systematic initiatives. Perhaps it is characteristic of some established perceptions, that the subject of the Jewish presence in Greece at the beginning of the 21st century has not yet been introduced into the history textbooks. Anti-Semitism is here, however, and so are its derivatives, regardless of degree and intensity.
Anti-Semitism, camouflaged and creeping, rears its head at the right moment, many heads to be exact, to remind us of the unquenchable hatred that has haunted our society for centuries now .