Shmuel Shaltiel

Shmuel stemmed from an old Spanish Sephardic family (a Shmuel Shaltiel is buried in Toledo’s old Jewish cemetery), who had reached prominence in Gerona before los Reyes Cato¤ licos in 1492 expelled ^ or forced to convert to Christianity ^ all Jews and Muslims who were in Spain. Shmuel was proud of his Jewish tradition and culture, which I, a goy, could not fully fathom, but I am told by knowledgeable friends, that he was a scholar. The emigrated Shaltiels kept speaking Spanish (i.e. the one of the 15th century, the so-called ‘ladino’) and became an outstanding part of the highly cultivated, large, £ourishing Jewish community in Salonika. In the twenties the Spanish premier of the time, Primo de Rivera (‘el dictador’), granted the possibility of obtaining the Spanish passport to those emigrated Sephardites who had kept speaking ladino in the country of emigration, in spite of the more than four century elapse. Shmuel’s grandfather made use of this possibility (‘You never know’), and I remember Shmuel showing a copy of his grandfather’s Spanish passport in a slide during a lecture in Spain. This passport would save their lives. In 1940 Mussolini ^ against the suggestions of his generals, contrary to the good sense, and without informing the German ally ^ attacked Greece from southern Albania, vastly underestimating the will and the capacity of the Greeks to put up an e⁄cient resistance in the di⁄cult and inaccessible mountains of the Epirus. (‘We’ll break Greece’s neck in a couple of weeks’.) Actually, the Greeks fought back and occupied part of southern Albania. The Italian setbacks compelled the Germans to come to rescue by occupying Yugoslavia ¢rst from north to south, and then Greece itself. Very soon the Jewish were rounded up and sent to annihilation camps. The cultivated, £ourishing Jewish community of Salonika was no exception: its more than 50 000 Sephardites were sent to Bergen-Belzen, the Shaltiels among them. Shmuel, then a 6 year old boy was with his father, and