Published: 11 July 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
The Jews of Rhodes endured a Holocaust butchery that remains little-known today. VIC ALHADEFF reviews a moving portrait of their experience.
On Sunday, July 23, 1944, air-raid sirens sounded over the island of Rhodes – even though no aircraft were flying overhead and no bombs were falling. The piercing noise provided a chilling backdrop as German military police, German troops and Italian police marched about 1700 Jews to the port, where three dilapidated cargo boats lay at anchor. At the head of the forlorn column was community president Jacob Franco.
In the six hours it took to reach the port, “not a single civilian bore witness or objected or came to say goodbye”, recalls Stella Levi. No-one watched. No-one protested. “It was like a funeral cortege – of people in mourning for themselves.” Weeks later, 90% of those 1700 would be murdered at Auschwitz.
About 50 Jews remained on Rhodes, 43 of them due to the courageous intervention of Turkish Consul-General Selahattin Ulkumen, a 30-year-old Muslim who protested to German commander Ulrich Kleemann that they were Turkish nationals and warned that he would cause “an international incident” if they were not released. In reprisal, German aircraft bombed the Turkish consulate, critically injuring Ulkumen’s pregnant wife. She succumbed to her injuries, but her baby son survived and her grief-stricken mother took her own life.
Meanwhile, the three overcrowded ships took eight days to reach the mainland port of Piraeus, having been joined en route by 100 Jews from Kos – the island’s entire Jewish community except for 13 who had also been saved by Ulkumen. In addition, the boats had docked at Leros to pick up Daniel Rahamim – that island’s only Jew.
These reflections leap from the pages of One Hundred Saturdays – a newly published book by American author Michael Frank and gleaned from six years of penetrating interviews with Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz who was deported from Rhodes. The interviews were mostly conducted in her New York home, but included a visit to Rhodes and concluded when Levi was 96 years old. “We need to finish before I’m finished,” she laconically tells the author in the final lines of the book.
