Never Forget Your Name. Alwin Meyer

wouldn’t starve, they had to think up some scheme every day. Sometimes they bought poppyseed cake, which they couldn’t actually afford. There were many other things Eduard and Heinrich couldn’t have bought either, even if they had had the money, because they needed ration cards: for fat, ersatz coffee, sugar, bread, meat. The same applied to restaurants.

      So I stood at the counter, took a piece from the tray and bit into it. While the saleswoman was busy with other customers, I took a second small bite. I held the cake in front of me. When the woman looked away, I quickly stuffed the entire cake in my mouth. And then I took another one, bit a piece off it, and held it as before.

      If possible, we repeated this several times. When the saleswoman looked away, we chewed. If she looked in our direction, we held the cake. This only worked when the shop was full.

      Another strategy was to buy forged ration cards, which they sold for a profit to Slovak refugees. Eduard Kornfeld remembered all these events every day of his life as if they had just happened. Then he got a nervous disease, probably as a result of undernourishment, and kept on making involuntary movements.

      One day the brothers ran into one of Eduard’s former schoolmates, who was also in Budapest illegally. He told them: ‘Your parents and sister were deported.’ This news was ‘like a slap in the face’. ‘We didn’t yet know anything about the gas chambers but I still had a feeling.’ It was ‘terrible – indescribable’.

‘I’m at a loss today to explain how we managed for a whole year’, he once said. ‘But at some point I couldn’t go on anymore. I was completely emaciated and terribly hungry.’ Eduard had discovered in the meantime that refugees under the age of 15 could be legalized if they had relatives in Hungary who would stand surety for them. He knew he would have to keep quiet about the fact that he had been there for over a year, and that he would be interned initially. Without his brother – ‘he was already 15’ – Eduard went to the police and said: ‘I arrived this evening from Slovakia. I’m a Jew.’ He was arrested and sent to an internment camp. The police took his personal details and questioned him:

      ‘When did you arrive?’’

      ‘Last night.’

      ‘Who brought you over?’

      ‘A farmer.’

      ‘What did he look like?’

      ‘I don’t know. It was dark. I didn’t get a good look at his face.’

      ‘What? You went with him and don’t know what he looked like?’ Eduard got a ‘hard smack’. ‘It knocked me over. I understood straightaway. The last thing I wanted was to get hit. I imagined someone and described him.’

      ‘You see, you knew after all! Why didn’t you say so straightaway?’ Eduard remained in the camp for six weeks. His uncle from Vel’ký Meder, where he and his brother had stayed at the start of their flight, stood surety for him – for accommodation, food, clothing – for everything the boy needed for his daily existence.

      ‘So I returned to the small town of Vel’ký Meder.’ Once a week, he had to report to the local gendarmerie.

      Heinz Kounio On 6 April 1941, the German Wehrmacht invaded Greece. The Greek army, supported by a small number of British soldiers, could not prevent the advance. Greece was divided up between the allies Bulgaria, Germany and Italy. Nazi Germany secured strategically important points for itself, including the island of Crete and the port city of Thessaloniki, which was occupied by the Wehrmacht on 9 April.¹²

Heinz Kounio recalls: ‘We knew beforehand that the Germans were going to enter Thessaloniki on that day. I can remember the sunset on the evening before. The sky was red, completely red. Like blood.’ The next day the Germans arrived. ‘We all stayed at home. We heard a car. A small jeep – this Volkswagen – stopped in front of our house. We observed it through a crack in the window shutter. On the vehicle was a big red swastika.’ Someone got out. The doorbell rang. Then – something Heinz Kounio is still unable to understand today – his father, ‘although he could speak German well’, said to his wife: ‘Hella, open the door.’ She opened the door, where a young officer was standing. ‘He was nice’ and asked: ‘Do you speak German?’ Hella Kounio said that she did. ‘Good, I would like to talk to you.’

      ‘Please come in’; Hella Kounio led the young man onto the terrace, and he said: ‘Very nice, dear lady. Please tell your husband to come with me. Don’t be afraid. I’ll bring him back. But he has to go with me to the shop. We need to get something from it.’ Salvator Kounio came onto the terrace. ‘He was now more courageous.’ The officer produced an invoice and said: ‘You received thirty-three Leica cameras from Germany. Where are the cameras?’ They were whole sets with a camera, a normal lens, a wide-angle and a telephoto lens. His father said to the officer: ‘I’m sorry but these cameras have not yet arrived. But I know where they are.’

      ‘Where?’

      ‘At the post office. They haven’t yet been released by customs.’ As the building was already closed, the director of the post office was found. He gave the cameras to the officer. The officer wrote on a piece of paper confirming the seizure of the sets. Then he brought Heinz Kounio back home unharmed. ‘Those of us who had had to stay home were so relieved!’ The thirty-three camera sets were sent back to Germany. The family did not receive any compensation. Every set was worth 38 gold pounds, which is what the pound sterling was unofficially called in those days. This was a bitter loss for the Kounio family. ‘That was our first contact with the Germans who had entered Saloniki.’

      Some time later, two rooms in the Kounios’ house were requisitioned. A commissar and his orderly from the Gestapo moved in.

      The Gestapo were responsible for systematically combating supposed political opponents of the Nazi regime. They were able to make arrests without legal basis. The people in their clutches were frequently maltreated, transported to concentration camps or summarily executed.¹³

As the Gestapo commissar was courteous towards the Kounios, grandfather Ernst Löwy in particular – who had had to flee from Karlsbad with his wife eighteen months previously to escape the Nazis – saw this as confirmation of his basic estimation of the Germans: a cultured people who had produced Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, Heine and Schiller could not be so evil. Of course, there were the brutal SS and some other bad Germans. But, thought Ernst Löwy, they were the exception.

      In reality, however, the face of Thessaloniki had changed completely. The Germans were everywhere, giving orders and controlling everything that went on in the city. The 55,000 Jews in Thessaloniki – like their brothers and sisters in the other occupied countries – were quite literally caught in the German death trap.

      Just a few days after the Nazis arrived, the Jews were banned from visiting cafés, cake shops and other public establishments. All Jews had to hand in their radios. Several Jewish newspapers were closed. Jewish houses and the Hirsch hospital were seized and were now in the hands of the German army. Finally, the members of the Jewish community council were arrested.¹⁴ A short time afterwards, the Germans systematically looted the 500-year-old Jewish cultural and literary treasures in the city: in synagogues, private houses and public libraries, everything old and valuable was confiscated and sent to Germany.¹⁵

      Meanwhile, Salvator Kounio was still able to go about his business, albeit at great risk. And the two children were still able to go to school. As their previous school had been requisitioned by the Germans, however, the classes were taught in a replacement building. Heinz and Erica no longer laughed. And they were not blind to their parents’ constant fear.

      On Shabbat, 11 July 1942, the public registration of all Jewish men between 18 and 45 years of age was ordered. On that day, between 8,000 and 9,000 Jews were to assemble on Plateia Eleftheria, ‘Freedom Square’. They were forced to stand to attention in the heat for eight hours. Anyone who moved had to march on the spot until they were exhausted. At the end of the day, some 3,500 Jewish men were taken away to work as forced labourers in road and airport construction. Around 400