The Elegant Lady and the Rite of Return

It was there that I saw her, at the table next to ours, a presence that stood out amidst half-naked screaming kids, dishevelled ladies in sarongs, men badly covered over their swimming costumes.

A sharply dressed woman, suits in beige tones, perfectly cut grey hair, sat at a table with three or four people carefully dressed like her in city clothes. But it was not only the attire that was so different from that of the tribe of tourists waiting to jump into the water: there was a special composure or perhaps a singular seriousness about her, something that attracted my gaze for so long that she noticed, smiled at me and greeted me in French. It was thus, with that strange suspension from reality that fortuitous encounters sometimes grant, especially on holiday, that we began to talk.

In fact, she was not a tourist. She came from Belgium and explained to me that from various parts of Europe and even the rest of the world, in July a large group of people came to commemorate the Jewish community of the island deported and forever destroyed by the Nazis in that same month of 1944. The Jews of Rhodes had a long and hitherto fortunate history, which began in the 16th century with their expulsion from Spain and their arrival in various cities in the eastern Mediterranean. The community's fortunes had been interrupted in 1938, when governor De Vecchi had implemented and harshly enforced the racial laws: some had left, many had remained, bound by now to that land by home, family ramifications, trades and professions, rooted traditions of peaceful and serene coexistence with the island's varied population. When, after 8 September 1943 and despite the resistance of some military forces loyal to the king and not to Salò, they had occupied Rhodes, the Nazis immediately turned to the persecution of the Jews. A relentless yet belated doggedness: if the vast community of Thessaloniki, considered the Jerusalem of the Mediterranean, had been destroyed since March 1943, when the Reich was still counting on its victory, in the summer of 1944 the situation was completely different. On 4 June the Allies had entered Rome, on the 6th the Normandy landings had begun and to the east the Russian army was advancing: defeat loomed on the horizon but the extermination machine had not stopped. That of the Jews of Rhodes was the longest deportation journey in the history of the Holocaust: it ended in Auschwitz after more than a month, on 18 August. Of the two thousand or so people in the community, less than two hundred remained alive.

The lady in the beige suit, in her gentle, precise voice, told me that none of the survivors had returned to live on Rhodes. But that did not mean that the lost world that had inhabited that island and its terrible and even mocking fate - less than a year to go before the end of the Reich - was to be forgotten. So every year from Belgium, France, but also from South America or New Zealand, a large group of people from the Jewish communities of those distant countries arrived to commemorate him.

The chance stop at that hotel by the sea had resulted in an unexpected, concise but very passionate history lesson and a lasting memory of that encounter. The most interesting aspect seemed to me this: given the scale of the extermination, those who came to commemorate were not direct descendants of the deported Jews. They were distant relatives, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who had managed to save themselves before '44, or of friends and family members who lived elsewhere. What drove them to the journey was not only the duty of remembrance but a deep feeling of continuity, a challenge to nullification: even without material traces, memory had created an indelible kinship.