Post on 30-Apr-2023
Shayna Zema
Brown University
Spring 2013
History 1978A
Professor Paris Chronakis
Final Paper
11 May 2013
I Am No Other: Defining Jewish Identity in Vienna and Salonica
during the Holocaust Era
“It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a narrative, and that this narrative is us, our
identities... Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by
through, and in us.”
—Oliver Sacks (105)
People living in Europe in the years between WWI and WII
found themselves to be victims simply because of their identity
—Jew, gypsy, communist, homosexual, or disabled. Anti-Semitism
transcribed millions of people throughout Europe as “Jews.”
Nazism defined the same group as “non-humans.” But how did the
Jews themselves subjectively construct identity with their own
agency and “practices of the self” (Foucault)? People could celebrate
or resist the subject positions offered to them, and
ultimately, place themselves in relation to the surrounding
socio-cultural practices, or “position their identity” (Hiles
33). Philosopher John Searle focuses this complex issue of
identity by outlining several problems: (1) In what sense can
we retain our identity through life’s changes? (2) Is it
necessary to propose a “self” separate from our body and its
experiences? And (3) what exactly makes me the person I am?
(Hiles 33 & Searle 2004 37) Careful analysis of Jewish
Holocaust survivor testimony from two incredibly multi-ethnic
cities, Vienna, Austria and Salonica, Greece, aids in the
exploration of responses to Searle’s questions with regard to
how Jews perceived their own Jewishness, established a sense
of self, and delineated the role of their birth city in
constructing their identity.
Jewish surviving victims of the Holocaust, Henry Wegner
from Vienna and Morris Venezia from Salonica, share their
stories in an attempt to structure the uprooting, migrations,
and persecutions enveloped with violence and horror that they
encountered; they simultaneously unconsciously reveal their
identity construct before WWII, during their time in Auschwitz
II- Birkenau, and after the war as they settled in the United
States of America. Both narratives begin with identity
positions constructed through references to birth, location,
parents, family, home, allegiances, religion, and afterward
go on to describe confusion with identity, and the ways in
which it could be retained, only to ultimately uphold an
identity based on not simply ethnicity, but also their
original spatial setting regardless of location (Hiles 34).
Judith Butler's notions about the constant pre-determined
materiality of gender and sexuality can be readily applied to
the notion of ethnicity, an integral part of identity based on
one’s origin, which emerges as a scripted social performance
when defined by others. Social identity is a “performative
act” of the regulatory fictions assigned by racial and
cultural difference (Butler); however, creation of one’s own
identity becomes one’s true performance, manifested through
traits, such as language, kinship, and city. This creative
process of defining oneself is what is done throughout the
narratives of the two survivors from multiethnic cities.
Born in Vienna on December 20, 1922 as an only child to
David and Grete Wegner, Henry Wegner spent his childhood in
the cosmopolitan and multiethnic city during the interwar
years. He lived in the second district of Vienna, where he
said a heavy concentration of Jews had lived, especially those
from Russia and Poland that came before and after WWI. Living
in a Jewish area provided him with some initial security even
after Hitler came to power. His mother's parents were Austrian
and part Czechoslovakian, those of his father came from
Austria Hungary, or what would be considered Poland. Wegner
never really had much time to spend with his father who died
young after being wounded in WWI. He lived in an old apartment
with his grandparents, uncles, aunts, and mother alongside
gentile neighbors, with whom they had “good relations.” Wegner
and his relatives created “…a strong unity within the family
and [they] lived all together...until the rest of the family
was deported” (Interview with Henry Wegner). Focus on the
family, a common feature in testimony from interwar Vienna,
served to provide an escape from the problems that the Jews
would soon face (Rozenblit 148). While his family celebrated
major Jewish holidays, such as Rosh Hashanah and Passover, and
he had a ceremonial Bar- Mitzvah in 1935, Wegner identified
his family as more conservative or reform in terms of their
practice.
With no separation between church and state, religious
education was part of the public school system in which Wegner
enrolled. There was a majority of Jewish children in the
school, and even amidst non-Jews, he “didn’t feel hate or
anti-Semitism, unless kids were fighting among each other, but
that wasn’t related to religion” (Interview with Henry
Wegner). Cosmopolitan ideas echoed resoundingly among Jews.
The ambiguity of Austrian nationality in the early twentieth
century gave Jews an opportunity for negotiating Jewish and
national identity. Jews were not only “the most loyal
supporters of the monarchy, but the only ones who were
unconditionally Austria” (Block 390 cited in Hacohen 115). Yet
in the 1930s, anti-Semitism began to seep into Vienna and
change the identity of Jews from Austrian or Viennese to
“money-hungry, untrustworthy, swarthy Jews.” Wegner shared a
story about his time in high school during which he had a
couple of professors who were glorified Nazis who exalted
Germany and lauded anti-Semitism. One teacher said to his
mother, “Your son is a very smart kid—the only trouble is he
is a Jew” (Interview with Henry Wegner). Jews in Vienna
experienced their marginalized social positions purely because
of prejudice as an effector on their identity perceived by
others.
In 1936 on Rosh Hashanah, Henry explained how German
officers in brown uniforms were “…trying to pull Jews out of
synagogues and the Austrian police ignored it” (ibid). In
referring to the Viennese police as “Austrian,” Wegner is
revealing a key feature in the beginning of his identity
positioning. While throughout his testimony he refers to
himself as Viennese, he rejects any connection to an Austrian
identity. “Austrian” is a term in “constitutive opposition to
a Jewish self” and by using it in such a fashion in his
narrative serves to represent his resistance to it (Bunzl 64).
Therefore, “Vienna” is in opposition to “Austria” in that
Vienna’s urban space was viewed as synonymous with the
possibility of living as a Jew (ibid 66). Although Wegner
reintroduces the socially constructed dichotomy of “Jews” and
“Austrians,” he does so by simultaneously defining his own
identity in relation to his birthplace of Vienna. He gives
himself the agency to design the Jewish self within his own,
alternative field of spatial identification and social
geography.
When Wegner lost his corporate job in 1938, he joined the
field kitchens of the Jewish Community Center that provided
food for the Jewish people. Jews from non-Jewish districts
began to move to Jewish areas in order to obtain food and work,
emphasizing the importance of space in defining what it meant
to be a Jew in Vienna on the brink of WWII. The Jewish
Community Center was “a link between the Jews of Vienna.” When
Germany annexed Austria, Wegner and other Jews were subject to
whatever the Nazis demanded of them. When he explains how he
was forced to wear the star, or even place a star upon his
dwelling place, he emphasizes how literal the social construct
of Jew as other and sub human was manifested.
Morris Venezia was born on February 25, 1921 in Salonica,
Greece to a family of Sephardi Jews who traced their origins to
the expulsion from Spain in 1492. His ancestors had fled Spain
to Italy and afterward, migrated to Greece. The oldest of three
other siblings, Morris spent time emphasizing his “real” name,
or the Hebrew pronunciation of his name, Moshe, and that of all
his brothers and sisters, thereby creating a connection between
identity and language.1 Like Wegner, Venezia’s father died
young and he went to live with his grandparents in the Baron de
Hirsch Jewish neighborhood. “They were a very close family with
too much love” (Interview with Morris Venezia). Although he
didn’t consider his family super religious, he recalls his
grandfather waking him up every morning at 6:30am to go to
Temple to pray before his Bar-Mitzvah. He attended a
neighborhood Jewish school in Salonica as a young boy, then
transferred to an Italian school in Salonica, and later went to
college in Milan with a scholarship from the Italian consulate,
because he was an Italian citizen. He associated with a diverse
array of Jews and non-Jews, as there was no anti-Semitism among
friends. He spoke Italian in school in Italy and was the only
Jewish boy at Church. Although he was not religious, Venezia
1 Identity and language are very much connected with regard to Salonican Jewish identity. This topic is explored toward the end of this paper.
resisted the priests as they tried to proselytize and convert
him, as he said, “I’m not religious, but I am Jewish.” He spoke
Greek and Ladino is his household and as for German, “I spoke
German in the camp…but I don't want to know anything about it”
(Interview with Morris Venezia).
During the interwar period, a “Greek Jewish” culture
emerged in Salonica. Following the annexation of Salonica into
Greece, there was a concerted effort to “make the city Greek,”
a process that shifted the identity positions of the thousands
of Jews in the direction of Hellenization (Mazower 275). The
Salonican community was ardent in lobbying the Greek Parliament
for clarification of the legal status of Jews in Greece,
resulting in Jews from 1920 onward not simply belonging “to a
minority ‘ethno-confessional’ group, tolerated so long as it
remained quiet,” but rather having the right to be different
and be respected and protected by the law (Fleming 22). Jews
were recognized in the interwar years as rights-bearing
citizens, allowing their identity to expand beyond religion to
spatial identification and “Greek”-ness. The Jewish community
in Salonica began referring to itself as the “Greek Jewish
Community” as the Jews were increasingly drawn together with an
identity that was determined by their place, just like the
Viennese Jews as explained by Wegner (ibid). When anti-Semitism
gained force in Italy with the outbreak of WWII, he was forced
to return to Salonica. Venezia refers to the Germans as
animals: They closed the Baron de Hirsch neighborhood and made
a ghetto. Greek Christians rejected the German persecution of
local Jews, rejecting the Nazi social construct, as historian
Mark Mazower describes “Greeks' overwhelming disapproval of
German policy towards the Jews,” (Inside 261) ultimately
concluding that “overall, Orthodox Greeks showed a remarkable
generosity of spirit towards the Jews” (ibid 259). A Salonican
named Hasson who spoke German garnered a relationship with the
German officer who oversaw the ghetto. Serving as a spy, he
informed the Germans about the rich individuals so that the
Germans can claim their goods and transport them away. “He
could have saved some of the lives, but instead he sent them to
the concentration camps. A Jewish guy,” said Venezia. Venezia
positions his identity as Greek in the interwar years as he
defines “Greek” with a Jewish tint in that he separates Jews
from non-Jews and expected Jews to function as a community, or
whole unit.
Wegner explains how he and his family were deported in
October 1942. Standing on trucks to the Vienna train station,
he boldly states, “nobody showed compassion among Viennese,
[whereas] in Germany, people stood on streets silently, afraid
to show compassion. It was like taking pigs or chicken to
slaughter” (Interview with Henry Wegner). Wegner recounts an
incident upon arrival at the concentration camp Theresienstadt
in Czechoslovakia, “I remember one guy, maybe sixty-five-years-
old, was a highly decorated officer from WWI who was blind and
could barely walk...The Viennese officer got off the horse,
kicked him, and said what you did in WWI is of no interest to
me. You're just a dirty Jew.” In this excerpt taken from
Wegner’s description of the war years, the association between
Viennese and Jew as complimentary terms was no longer existent.
Being a Jew as a subhuman social construct of Nazism overrode
the cosmopolitan character of Jewish identity that had formerly
existed. Yet beyond the confines of the city, Wegner found it
still possible to connect his Jewishness to his Viennese side,
not breaking off from his city roots that had subjectively
abandoned him.
In the ghetto, he established a clique and routine among
fellow Viennese Jews who worked on the performing arts in
creating beautiful art, music, and films. In addition to the
place of city in identity positioning amidst the Austrian,
German, and Czech Jews in the ghetto, one’s community, such as
that of musicians, opera singers, and filmmakers for Wegner,
played a huge role in helping to solidify identity. In 1944,
Wegner was transported to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. “We were like
cattle there,” said Wegner, emphasizing the subjective
construction of the Nazis that transformed the Jews into
cattle. Since he arrived toward the end of the war, the Nazis
wanted to put Wegner to work and almost instantly sent him
along with other young men on another transport. “We had a
signal among ourselves that all Austrians, all Viennese people
lets stay together and line up for the same railroad car,”
explained Wegner emphasizing his association with people who
had the same city as an integral part of their identity. When
the train stopped in the center of Vienna, “It looked like you
were looking down on your family, your mother, where you
played, where went to school, where your whole life was and yet
it was only two-and-a-half years ago you left it and yet you
were so close and so far” (Interview with Henry Wegner). Wegner
arrived in Kaufering, Germany to make jet planes in underground
factories. As he exited from the train, his friend exclaimed,
“Oh my G-d. It’s dark in here.” A man responded in a typical
Viennese accent, “Are you from Vienna?” Wegner’s friend
responded with the affirmative and the SS became distressed
exclaiming that they should be at another camp. The Viennese
guard defended Wegner and his friend, responding, “What
difference does it make to you if you have one-hundred Jews to
work here!” and the SS agreed to let them stay. The Viennese
man had been a top communist from Vienna now working in the
concentration camp. Wegner strongly believes that this
seemingly little incident may have saved his life—all because
of the connection of spatial geography and its integral part in
his identity positioning. In the barracks of the camp, he laid
next to future famous psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor
Viktor Frankl; they quickly developed friendship based on the
fact that they had had heard of each other during their time
back in Theresienstadt. Since the majority of people in the
camps were Jewish, identity needed to be established based on
another factor—and ethnic origin served as the essential
ingredient.
Morris Venezia had most of his friends with him in the
ghetto in Salonica and even became part of the partisan
resistance with his cousin, Dario Gabbai, before being
deported. “We were animals. Not people. Not human beings,”
describes Venezia regarding Nazi treatment en route to
Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The Nazis associated Jewishness with the
sub-human, a number, and identity positioning took affect among
the Salonican Jews in Auschwitz. Venezia and Gabbai took jobs
as barbers cutting the hair of the deceased and burning bodies
in the crematorium as part of the sonderkommandos. “We were not
all Greek in my barrack. There were some Russians too. We
couldn't communicate,” explained Venezia. He spoke Ladino and
Greek with Dario Gabbai and used hand gestures with the Polish
because they couldn’t understand Polish and the Polish couldn’t
understand Greek. The Greeks’ appearance, habits, and, above
all, their inability to speak Yiddish struck the Eastern
European Ashkenazim who dominated Auschwitz “as the least
Jewish thing they had ever seen” (Fleming 22). With such a
language barrier, Greek Jews sometimes suffered more than other
Jews in the camps because of their inability to understand
commands in German. While in Greece Ladino identified Jews as
outsiders in Greek society, in Auschwitz it branded them
definitively Greek. Unlike for the Viennese Jews (for which
language was not a particular means of fostering unity since
Yiddish was widespread), for the Salonican Jews, language and
inability to communicate served as a means of creating
solidarity among Greek Jews. As famous author and activist Eli
Wiesel wrote, “I remember in the camp, in our block, there were
Jews from Thessaloniki. They didn’t understand my Yiddish and I
didn’t understand Greek or their ‘Ladino.’…the solidarity
between them struck all of us as amazing” (ibid 23-24).
In addition to their emergent Greek identity, Venezia’s
Italian ethnicity also factored into his immediate community,
and became part of his forefront identity positioning, with
regard to his cousin Gabbai and brother Solomon, for example,
they used to sing Italian songs together in the camp for
camaraderie. After killing over 30,000 Hungarians, the Nazis
began killing some sonderkommandos because there were no more
transports. A revolt was planned among the workers of the
crematorium to execute the two guards that oversaw them and
from there, simply make a mess because they believed they would
be killed anyway. While Venezia and the other Greeks were
courageous and believed in their strength and unity, the Poles
were afraid. Together, the disharmonious identities based on
how Jews perceived themselves from different cities and
ethnicities led to a failed rebellion. On the death march
through the freezing cold and snow, Venezia was placed in a
barrack and was forced to line up sitting on the floor with
hundreds of others. As a guard came in seeking the
sonderkommando that Venezia recognized, he panicked. Two men
sitting behind him proceeded to sit atop him as he lay flat in
order to hide him and procure his life. Venezia’s story is not
clear about whether these men were fellow Greeks or not, but
what he does emphasize is their almost inexplicable solidarity,
thereby demonstrating a rarity of broad Jewish identity. People
were no longer simply seeking unity that was limited by urban
solidarity; rather, as soon as people were transported out of
the death camp, an “Auschwitz identity” emerged as another
aspect of one’s identity based on space. During the interwar
years in Greece, Jews had felt “more Greek” or “less Greek”
based on their cultural practices and the language they spoke.
There was a major divide between Jewish Salonican and
Hellenized Greek; however, in Auschwitz, Jews from Salonica,
ultimately, became “more Greek” than they had ever been in
Greece based on their differences with Jews from Eastern
Europe. “The Salonican traded his fez for a Greek sailor hat,
danced traditional Greek dances, played the bouzouki, and drank
ouzo” (Fleming 36).
Wegner registered as Austrian to get repatriated after he
was liberated. After returning back home to his original house
and finding his soon-to-be wife, he took a job with the
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) to subsidize
people who just returned from the camps. Wegner explained that
he had very little contact with the Austrians upon returning.
When he went to his uncle’s farm seeking his relatives, an
Austrian officer referred to his uncle as “Oh the Schwarz Jew,”
as if Jewishness were the sole composition of his complex
identity after the war. When Wegner and his wife decided to
emigrate to the United States and obtained a visa, he
describes: “We went to our railroad station to get to Munich,
and they, the Austrian railroad people, put us into two-box
cars, like by Auschwitz, in 1947” (Interview with Henry
Wegner). To the Viennese, the Jews were simply defined as
freight cars and Jews even after the war. They could not
possibly subjectively construct an identity for them that would
include Vienna, Austria, or anything European; they still
classified them as other. During WWII, the two hundred thousand
Jews living in Austria, of whom 90% lived in Vienna, were
almost completely exterminated and less than five thousand Jews
remained in the country (Cohen-Weisz 1). In 1948, the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency reported that, “For Jews there is no life in
Austria, no future” (Special Report).
Upon arriving in New York, Wegner describes feeling strange
because he “didn’t have the language” (Interview with Henry
Wegner), thereby exemplifying the essential role of language as
a means of creating unity and becoming part of one’s identity.
Bouncing from job to job as a messenger and then child
caretaker with his wife, he eventually settled in a job working
for a Viennese company that rented his family a room, and his
wife worked as a designer for a jewelry firm. “I was very
active among my people and strictly stayed among my people…and
we met all our friends, people from Theresienstadt and we
became each other's family,” declared Wegner (ibid). After the
war, despite trying to part with his past identity as a
Viennese Jew, based on his employment and friendships he still
undoubtedly viewed himself as Viennese; Vienna, as his
birthplace, and even Theresienstadt, a place where he felt a
sense of solidarity among other Viennese and creative artists,
continued to be prevalent in his identity formation such that
even an event like the Holocaust could not rupture the powerful
grasp of space on identity.
Venezia was in a coma for three months after the
liberation. When he got stronger and healthier, he was sent to
Bari, Italy and then to Athens, Greece, where he met up with
his brother, sister, and cousin Gabbai. Venezia found it
difficult to return to Salonica immediately following the war:
“I found my house destroyed and then all my friends, we only
returned 1.5% from 56,000” (Interview with Morris Venezia).
After getting married and having a daughter in Greece, he moved
to the city of Los Angeles in the United States in 1951 in
order to be near Gabbai. Family and the city of Salonica, or
the notion of being “Greek,” influenced his decision to settle
on the West Coast of the United States. Jews in America didn’t
harbor an outsider status, and the celebration of ethnicity
present became almost mandatory, augmented by the victimization
of Jews due to the Holocaust of the past (Flanzbaum 101-102).
Therefore, without being defined as other, non-human, or
animal, both Wegner and Venezia were able to embrace their
ethnicity rooted in their birthplace, even in the land of
America.
In sharing their stories, Wegner and Venezia were able to
provide certain details that inevitably constructed their own
identity positions. “The self is both outer and inner, public
and private, innate and acquired, the product of evolution and
the offspring of narrative” (Bruner 159). Working with
painful, emotional, and traumatic memories through speech acts
and bearing witness involves a shift for survivors from being
the object of someone else’s speech to the subject of their
very own. The victims were able to react and resist the
systematic terror of the Nazis through constructing a social
reality based on interpersonal and inter-group relations in the
native cities as well as in the concentration camps. According
to Auschwitz survivor and author Primo Levi, behavior in the
extreme situation of the concentration camp does not contrast
with that in civil society; rather, there is continuity between
the two seemingly polar environments (Lochner 8). The extreme
condition of living in a place where a large number of like
individuals, i.e. Jews, are cut off from the wider society led
to the development of identities best used as strategies for
survival.
While self-concepts are vulnerable to social construction,
the cases of the two survivors from Vienna and Salonica
exemplify that certain key aspects, such as ethnicity,
religion, language, and space can never be removed. Patterns
such as language and ethnicity as key factors in identity
positioning in Salonica and the urban city as integral to
Vienna both served as different means of creating an identity
that would best serve Jews as a survival strategy. Therefore,
in answering Searle’s first question, “In what sense can we
retain our identity through life’s changes?,” the answer would
be quite simple: Even under extreme anti-Semitism and
unimaginable horrors like Auschwitz, certain aspect’s of one’s
identity remain steadfast in order to aid in survival.
Responding to Searle’s second and third question—is it
necessary to propose a “self” separate from our body and its
experiences? and what exactly makes me the person I am?—
requires the examination of first-person testimony. For the
first time in the “modern” world of the twentieth century, Jews
were designated as Jews. Discrediting conversions, mixed
marriages, and assimilation, anti-Semitism and Nazism
identified Jewishness with heredity and defined the Jew as the
other, the non-human. But in telling their narrative, two
courageous Jews, Henry Wegner and Morris Venezia, allow their
identity to tell their life-story: Their place of birth,
religious beliefs, ethnic heritage, spoken languages, survival
strategy in Auschwitz, and their place in a new environment
after WWII.
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