Double Jeopardy: The Holocaust and the Sephardic Women of Salonika

A Jewish couple in Salonika in 1942 or 1943 (US Holocaust Museum).

Judith Baumel coined the term “double jeopardy” to explain the double victimization of women during the Holocaust—they were persecuted both as Jews and women. Narratives about the Holocaust have often either favored Western, Central, and Northeastern Europe over Nazi Occupied Territories such as Greece, or they have advantaged men as the central characters in histories of the Greek Holocaust. “Double jeopardy” offers a useful framework to reconcile Greek Jewish women into Holocaust and Greek historiography, and make sense of the near-total destruction of Greece’s Jews.

Gender and the Holocaust

Beginning in the 1970s, the separate and growing fields of Women and Gender and

Holocaust Studies facilitated feminist inquiry into the Nazi regime’s racial policies that targeted Jews as a whole and challenged assumptions of the Jewish experience as uniquely male. However, much of the research overlooked women in Nazi Occupied Territories, especially in Greece, and perpetuated a historical perspective that privileged German, Polish, and Northern European voices.

While Greek women were largely ignored in the gendered study of the Holocaust, several historical monographs have detailed the social and economic history of Greece, its uniqueness in Europe, and the unparalleled destruction by the Nazis that took place within its national borders. Overwhelmingly, the protagonists in the preceding narratives have been male and reinforced the discourse that the Holocaust was gender neutral because it targeted all Jews. 

Beginning in the 1980s, women’s resistance activities against Nazi occupying forces became a catalyst for further Holocaust narratives about Greece. However, women were often relegated to supporting roles, as nurses, couriers, or seductresses revealing a gender bias in many Holocaust accounts of Greek Jewry.

In the last two decades, scholarly research has focused on incorporating the personal narrative with the geopolitical history of modern Greece, taking into account the fragmented story of the Jews, whose national identity did not fully emerge until after the Holocaust.

However, little scholarly examination has been devoted to events or topics that centered Greek women’s experiences before and during the Holocaust. For example, there are reports that Dr. Mengele targeted Greek women for his sterilization experiments, based on archaic beliefs about their virginity and modesty. These accounts exemplify how Greek Jewish women were violated because of their nationality and ethnicity, in addition to their gender.

Also, seminal tales like the Sonderkommando uprising, one of the few prisoner revolts at Auschwitz and a great source of Greek Jewish pride, are chronicled from the male prisoner’s perspective, erasing women’s instrumentality in providing gun powder for the munitions and smuggling explosives to men. Four young girls were hanged for their actions in the rebellion and their stories must be integrated into a cohesive narrative of the Holocaust that intersects national origin, gender, and ethnicity and enhances our understanding of women’s and Greeks' fate in the camps and beyond the Holocaust.

The Greek Holocaust: Two Outcomes

Little academic scrutiny has been given to Greek women’s experiences of deportation or camp life during the Holocaust and has not prioritized differences in the Jewish life of pre-war Greece, largely divided in two communities. In general, Greece’s Jews can be split in two groups: the minority, Greek-speaking Romaniotes, and the Ladino-speaking Sepharadim.

The Hellenized Greek-speaking Jewish communities were mostly situated along trade routes from Istanbul to Italy and were dependent on their Christian neighbors for trade and economic survival. In addition, Hellenized Jews in Athens were employed in many of the careers and professions found throughout Greek society, embracing connections and institutions that mirrored non-Sephardic life.

In contrast, the difficult Hellenization of Salonika following the Balkan Wars and fall of the Ottoman Empire, coupled with intensifying economic pressures and antisemitism brought on by the collapse of the Venizelos Government, emphasized the separateness of Salonika from other Jewish communities in Greece. The lack of integration into larger Greek society was partly to blame for desensitizing many to the horrors to come and further marginalizing Salonika’s Sepharadim from the Greek nation.

Hellenization and Family Relations in Salonika

Recent scholarship has challenged the construct of a pre-Holocaust, “Greek Jewish” identity. A gendered approach to analyze the communities of Athens and Salonika can be helpful to explain why Salonikan Jewry experienced such high losses in the Holocaust and account for the near-total destruction of Greece’s Jews.

In the Hellenized city of Athens, Jews attended Greek schools, whereas many Salonikan Jewish girls attended Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU) institutions where instruction was in French. Secular assimilation has been highly correlated with Holocaust survival and we would expect the Jews of Athens, who primarily spoke Greek and were educated in government schools, to fare better than those in Salonika—and they did. 

Salonikan women relied on Ladino—the language of the home—to communicate. Their relative insularity from other Greeks and distinctive Judeo-Spanish accent made them particularly vulnerable to deportation.

In addition, widespread food shortages and famine in 1941-1942 exacerbated women’s vulnerable status in Greek society and accelerated the destruction of the Jewish family. High rates of starvation and death among married men created a class of destitute Jewish widows, facing the dependency of children and extended family members, defenseless against the impending ghettos and deportations where they had few resources and limited options to flee or seek refuge. Gender offers a valuable lens to interrogate the underpinnings of the Greek Holocaust and the overall ineffective response to the Nazis’ genocidal intent and consolidates Survival and Resistance Movements

The traditional performance of gender and paternalistic family relations also explains the disparate outcome of Athenian and Salonikan Jewries. Many Salonikan Jews lived with their large extended families and resisted breaking up their families to send members into hiding—especially if it meant daughters traveling far away, unchaperoned, or going into exile in harsh mountainous terrain where resistance movements were most active. Participation in organized resistance movements was particularly onerous for Salonikan Jews, whose family size limited mobility in the German zone, and lack of personal and communal funds constricted their ability to flee Greece. 

In addition, given the traditional roles of Jewish girls and women in Salonikan society, most did not have established relationships with non-Jews they could turn to for aid or rescue. Until late 1943, Athenian Jews were free to move about unrestricted and leave the Italian Zone, while Salonikans, confined to the Baron Hirsch Ghetto for roughly one month, experienced the swift deportation of all Jews, initiated in March of 1943 and completed a mere four months later.

Between 1943 and 1944, twenty-two transports left Greece for Auschwitz, an eight-day train trek. Nineteen convoys from Salonika alone destroyed over seventy percent of Greece’s Jewish community—resulting in the slaughter of almost sixty thousand Jews—the highest per capita death toll of any occupied country during the Holocaust.

Deportation and Camp Life

The overall survival rate of Greek Jews in the camps was quite low, with close to eighty-five percent of Greeks dying upon arrival from travel illnesses like dysentery and typhus or sent directly to the gas chamber. In addition, Poland’s harsh winter climate, in contrast to Greece’s Mediterranean weather was particularly detrimental and injurious. However, girl’s outcome and survival in the camps was significantly worse than their male counterparts, where traditional Sephardic values encouraged girls to be obedient and deferential to authority.

Moreover, most Salonikan Jews did not speak German or Yiddish, and the inability to speak and understand German made Greece’s Jews particularly defenseless. By 1944, life in the camps often required instant compliance, especially since the gas chambers were working at “optimum efficiency”—any hesitation could mean the difference between life and death.

Finally, feminist Holocaust narratives have chronicled central and Eastern European women’s success in recreating familial bonds with fellow prisoners, such as shared pre-deportation life skills like sewing and cooking. Yet, Greek survivor memoirs have revealed that survival outside the Ladino-Sephardic sphere was difficult. The Sepharadim were often marginalized and excluded due to their inability to speak Yiddish and this impacted their opportunity to join established groups necessary for camp solidarity and survival. 

The Holocaust systematically targeted Jews, regardless of class, ethnicity, nationality, or

gender; yet each of these social and cultural norms uniquely affected its victims. Until the

1970s, the prevailing scholarly voices of Holocaust history were mostly Western and Central European and male, overlooking women in Nazi Occupied Territories such as Greece. As a result, it is imperative to restore and conjoin Greek Jewish women to our knowledge of the Holocaust, Greek, and Sephardic histories and make their experiences and contributions visible.