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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