Two songs by Salonican Jews

These are two songs by Salonican Jews from the musical archives of Alberto Nar, housed in the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive Society (ELIA-MIET) in Thessaloniki. The songs were recorded by Alberto Nar, an important researcher of the history of the Jewish community in Thessaloniki.

The first song is entitled ‘I come from Rezi Vardari’, written by Iakov Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, and performed by Oli Rafael, another Salonican Jew and survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau. We do not know when the song was written. With its simple lyrics, the song speaks of the composer’s nostalgia for Greece which he calls ‘his first homeland’. These are the song’s lyrics:

I’ve been away from you for years

I’ve lived and wandered everywhere

But I will always miss

The earth of Greece.

You are my first homeland

And I will never forget you

You are my first homeland

And that is why I miss you.

I come from Rezi Vardari

The old neighbourhood

Where many Jewish lads saw their first light

I will shout it out and brag, I am from Thessaloniki

And to the end I will remain

A genuine and faithful Greek.

The second song’s composer is unknown and it was performed by Matathias Nissim, a Holocaust survivor from Corfu. The song speaks of the nostalgia for the homeland and the need to return, while also describing the tragedy and the hardships experienced by the Jews in the extermination camps. According to the testimony of Leon Hagouel, the song was sung by Salonican Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau to the melody of ‘I remembered 1912’, a song by Markos Vamvakaris. The song presented here has a different melody. The lyrics are:

Oh, my sweet Thessaloniki

My glorious homeland

When will the time come

When we will reunite?

So I can tell you the hardships

I went through

In the cells of Poland

Night and day, in the camp.

They dressed us in blue and white stripes

As if we were insane

And our brothers dropped like flies

From despair

They hit us like the cowards they are

Hard, until our heart bled

Those foul murderers

They burned women and children

And you, children of liberty,

You learned of our tragedy,

And destroyed fascism,

To you I leave this song as a thank you.

Hagouel described how Salonican Jews in the camps chose to use Greek when singing and talking rather than Ladino, probably in an effort to stay connected to their homeland. The emergence or reinforcement of a Greek identity, or a local identity associated with a specific place of origin, in this case Thessaloniki, was a process both fluid and complex, which took place in the extermination camps as a way for people to assign meaning to their existence, to survive practically and symbolically, and to humanise their unspoken and unspeakable pain.