Jill Pipano Weiner
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Elvira
I am the hidden one, a multitude of stories of past and present worlds converging, and
most importantly responsible for choices that cost lives. If I followed my brother Shaul’s advice
and escaped with him and my family, my husband Joseph and I would have been saved, but I
couldn’t believe my brother’s version of our fate if we didn’t leave our home and our country.
At the end of 1943, we’re given a second chance to escape with my sister in law Sol and her
family and all the warning signs were there. I didn’t accept reality, and so the hidden one
reappears through three generations, my mother Doudoun, my nephew Aaron, and his firstborn
Yael.
My name is Elvira Pipano Pelossof. I live in Athens, Greece with my husband Joseph
Pelossof and was born in Salonica, Greece, in 1909, where my siblings and four generations of
Pipanos were born. We were a family of five, and my two siblings, Shaul and Buena followed
us and moved to Athens from Salonica. Shaul and Angele Pipano have a son, Aaron, and Buena
and Aaron Cohen have four children, Sara, Shlomo, Chaim and Dvora. My parents, Rabbi
Aaron Pipano and Doudoun Ezrati Pipano also moved to live in Piraeus, Athens.
We don’t have children of our own. My husband Joseph as the oldest of five is entrusted
by his father Avraham Pelossof, who is my father Rabbi Aaron’s best friend, with titles and
ownership rights for family business concerns and properties, in Greece and in Palestine where
Joseph’s brothers Rafael, David and Levy manage them. Joseph has diabetes along with other
health problems and needs me for his care. Joseph’s sister Sol is married to Albert Amarel who
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is my brother Shaul’s best friend. Joseph chaperoned my brother Shaul and his future bride
Angele on their first meeting in Salonica. Our families are unified.
Salonica, has passed from hand to hand, like Jerusalem. First as part of the Ottoman
Empire, the Turks were good to the Jewish population, then the Greeks took over and required us
to learn Greek at school as we all spoke Ladino and French, then the Germans came. During the
German occupation of Salonica, the Italians occupied Athens, followed by the Nazis.
My brother Shaul had a sugar factory using kharoubs as a raw material as it was cheaper
than sugarcane and obtained business permits at a Gestapo Office in Athens each morning.
Educated for eight years in Berlin in a boarding school for nobles, where my mother Doudoun’s
brother lived, he knew German fluently, which none of the Sephardic Greek Jews spoke. Shaul
had many friends who would do anything for him. One morning when he went to the Gestapo
office, a friend from his boarding school in Berlin, a Nazi officer, pulled him aside and warned
him about all the impending atrocities of the final solution and their effects on European Jewry,
urging Shaul to escape from Greece. Shaul believed him wholeheartedly and advised me, our
parents, our sister Buena, and his wife Angele’s family, the Naars in Salonica.
Shaul implored me to join him and leave Athens with Joseph. I was fearful of leaving
and for Joseph as he wasn’t well. Tolerating an uncertain clandestine long arduous trip was not
feasible. The dim prospect of putting Joseph’s life in danger froze my feet to the ground. I
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hoped for the best and decided our familiar but quickly deteriorating environment was
preferable. The Nazis came to Salonica on April 9, 1942 and in the summer of 1942 Jewish men
in Salonica were taken to forced labor camps. Few Jews are coming from Salonica to Athens, as
it’s possible, but difficult. Athens is in the Italian occupation zone, known not to go along with
execution or racial laws instituted by the German authority. Emmanuel Naar, Angele’s brother
journeys back and forth from Salonica to Athens to see Angele and his nephew Aaron who is
now 6 years old, but Shaul cannot convince Emmanuel to join them and escape Greece. He
cannot leave his 3 younger sisters, Sarah, Rivka and Yvonne, and parents Hananel and Ioanna in
Salonica, the German occupation zone. Emannuel meanders, conflicted, between the two worlds
of his parents’ home and Angele’s home, until he becomes the last Naar Angele sees during her
lifetime. Angele gave birth to Aaron in October 1935 in Salonica, in her parents’ home as she
wouldn’t have it any other way. Her doctor and his wife who was also a doctor accompanied her
to her childhood home. Emmanuel came in her room after the delivery of her only child
declaring: “Look Angele, come see your son, he even has curly payos, he’s fully developed, he’s
complete, and he’s here!” Aaron was named after my father, Rabbi Aaron Shaul Pipano
following family tradition. A huge celebration in the Naar household ensued, people came,
everyone was dancing. In April 1972, Aaron would have a son of his own, named Shaul after
my brother, and in March 1978, he would lose his son, the last Shaul Pipano of our family in an
accident.
My father, Rabbi Aaron died of a heart attack. We had a funeral in Salonica attended by
my mother Doudoun, my siblings and their families, and my husband Joseph’s family. Rabbi
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Aaron, was the last Pipano Family Rabbi in five generations of Pipano Rabbis to be buried in
Greece. It was a last family reunion in April 1941, just before the April 6, 1941 German
invasion into Greece. In December 1942, this Jewish cemetery was destroyed, and the extension
of The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the largest university in Greece, was built on top of
it. The famous Aristotle quote that ‘The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the
living differ from the dead’ should make a university built on top on the remains of 500,000 Jews
and named after Aristotle boast an education worth its weight in marble headstones with Hebrew
names and words. Even the memorial built 72 years later on the university campus to
commemorate the Jews buried over 500 years in this 3.8 million square feet cemetery gets
vandalized every year. Ironically the desecrated cemetery is only 34 miles from where
Aristotle’s ashes were buried in Stagira, his birthplace. A last remaining dignity that was left,
my father’s headstone was preserved and moved to another cemetery 5 hours away, the Agia
Paraskevi Jewish Cemetery, one of the few that survived the desecration.
Shaul and Angele escaped carrying some gold coins Angele sewed into all their clothes
before departing on a fishing boat bound for Turkey. From there they were to take a train to
Alexandria, Egypt.
Meantime, Joseph’s sister Sol, her husband Albert Amarel and my 13 year old nephew
Saul and siblings Sarah (the oldest) and Moshe, left Salonica to hide in our home at 24 A
Kodrigtonon Street in the Patissia section of Athens. I gave them 2 of 3 bedrooms and my maid
Maria as they’d need her more than I did. They stayed with us planning their escape
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and looking for passage to Turkey. My nephew Saul is busy reading about radios,
electromagnetic transmission, political science and philosophy.
It is winter 1941 in Athens and fear coupled with bitter cold and smaller food rations
demoralizes us. We get bobota/corn bread and kharoub cake in the black market. Saul now
ventures to Piraeus, the port city of Athens, an 8 kilometer ride, to find bread and wild herbs
from farmers, brought by boats. I am nostalgically looking at a photograph of Shaul’s
extravagant wedding day in Piraeus. The beautiful white dress and long train Angele wore and
how most of the guests were well wishing non-Jews. How plentiful food was then. Shaul
returned with an economics university degree from Berlin and laughed about the German boys
ridiculing Hitler passing them by on Berlin streets. Now, everyone is fighting for food and in
Omonoia Square, 2 kilometers from our residence, people are huddled in the freezing cold. Out
our window carts are coming and going at all hours of the day taking away dead bodies lying in
the streets.
We are illegally listening to BBC in the fall of 1942. Saul goes back to the 8th grade at
the Gymnasium of Athens in the upper Patissia region, reading politics and philosophy, and
enrolling in French Literature classes at the University in Central Athens. The Gymnasium has
underpinnings of “Ethnicos Apeleutheretico Metopo”, the National Liberation Front of Greece,
an underground resistance formed by the Greek leftists, which gained popular support with time.
Their military arm was “Elinicos Laikos Apeleutheroticos Stratos” meaning Greek Popular
Liberation Army, and partisan forces and students are busy writing anti occupation graffiti on
Athens’ walls.
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In April and May 1943, about 50,000 Salonican Jews are put on cattle trains bound for
Auschwitz and executed. I had no knowledge of what became of the Naars, lifelong friends of
the Pipanos. Our beings were drowning in wartime Athens. Albert was trying to stop
deportations of Salonican Jews using Jewish and non-Jewish Athenian friends through official
channels while I was taking care of Joseph’s ongoing health issues exacerbated by anxiety.
Albert with the assistance of the Archbishop Damaskinos (of the Greek Orthodox Church)
worked to contain the German killings of Jews. The Greek/German Government of Rallis
remained firm in its purpose but Albert was optimistic since Istanbul’s Red Cross presented
evidence from Salonica of specific events to the Vatican Pius II. The Vatican’s apathy to Nazi
atrocities allowed the Germans to take over Athens Jewry as well. We are no longer under the
Italian occupation and as of September 8, 1943, Athens’ Jews are under racial laws and must be
registered in five days as per the German SS Commander, Stroop. Any Jews hiding and their
helpers are treated most severely, sent to concentration camps or executed.
Joe and I and the Amarels inevitably face reality after months of suppression and denial.
There’s no out except going underground, with Athens under German occupation. The Amarels
finally escape, dispersing to multiple hiding places and Joseph and I stay put. Since mid-1941
we were accustomed to a bigger family, and they were sorely missed.
In March 1944 we are rounded and thrown on cattle trains to Auschwitz. I am 35, Joseph
41 and very sick. In the camp living in cold harsh conditions with no nourishment or warm
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clothing, we, the Salonican Jews are the only ones who speak Ladino and French, thereby
isolated but strong. We cling to each other, for warmth, strength, love, familiarity and sanity. I
miss our lost world, but I’m lucky to be with my husband Joseph, to hold him, to know I did all
in my power to save him. I swallow my regrets, but my love for Joseph always comes first, he’s
my last hold on life.
Jewish dwellings, businesses, communities, tombstones and generations of Pipanos
disappear. The Greek government spent the German reparations set aside for the Jewish
population of Salonica. Only 1,500 survived to tell the misfortunes that befell us.
Two boats containing Pipanos and Amarels docked on Turkish shores. The first boat
with Shaul, Angele, Aaron, my mother Doudoun, my sister Buena, her husband Aaron Cohen,
and their children Sara, Shlomo, Chaim and Dvora, and Buena’s husband’s sister and her family,
Doudoun’s silver tea set, and gold coins sewn into their clothes. Albert, Sol, Sarah, Moshe, Saul,
and 23 others that Sarah remembers, arrive later.
Our extinguished hopes remain with our families. Doudoun is her grandson Aaron’s
roommate for the last 10 years of her life in Israel and tells Aaron about us. Aaron’s daughter
Yael finds me, Elvira. I am still here in these words written, no longer hidden.