Excerpts of Four Reviews of the Illusion of Safety (First Edition)
“The Illusion of Safety, actually four books in one, is a magnificent fusion of objective history with the impassioned testimony of recognizable, palpable human beings. It is difficult for us to conceive that in 1943, after half of Poland’s 3 million Jews had been murdered, the Jews of Greece had no idea what was about to occur.” – Professor Curt Leviant
“Michael Matsas has written a major book, the result of 30 years of investigation, research and interviews.” – Willard Manus
“The last major collection to be derived directly from those who experienced the war period in person.” – Professor Steven Bowman
“The first extensive study of the fate of the Greek Jews to include both State Department and OSS (Office of Strategic Services) reports. Sadly and indisputably, those reports reveal the hypocrisy of both Great Britain and the United States.” – Fotine Z. Nicholas
Book Review (First Edition) of Dr. Michael Matsas’ book The Illusion of Safety, The Story of the Greek Jews During the Second World War
by Professor Curt Leviant
The Jewish-Greek Tragedy During the Holocaust
The tragedy of European Jewry during the 1940’s knew no boundaries. East and West, North and South, all were efficiently trapped and either massacred on the spot, like the Jews in the Ukraine by the Einsatzgruppen or sent long distances to Auschwitz, like the Jews of Greece. Indeed, very little has been written about this centuries’ old community of Jews in southern Europe, where 67,000 Jews were killed by the Germans, or 86% of the population, among the highest percentages of losses of any country during the Holocaust.
In this comprehensive and moving account in English about the fate of Greek Jewry during WWII, Dr. Michael Matsas provides us with a magnificent history enriched with many personal memoirs, including his own year in a mountain village during his early teens.
The Illusion of Safety is actually four books in one, and therein lies its unique achievement, for it fuses objective history with an impassioned testament as to what happened to recognizable, palpable, human beings.
The first book depicts the Greek Jews under the three zones of occupation: German, Bulgarian and Italian. In the Bulgarian zone the Bulgarians deported 5,409 Jews. Only 122 survived. In the Italian zone, which included Athens, the Jews were not persecuted; racial laws were ignored. Only when the Italians surrendered, and the Germans entered did the horrors begin. General Stroop, who in 1943 was assigned to liquidate the rebellious Warsaw Ghetto, led the assault against the Jews of Athens. The Greek Resistance was always helpful and average citizens, at great risk, sheltered Jews.
The second book gives the personal memoirs of Jews in the three areas of occupation; the third presents the memoirs of Jewish resistance fighters; and the last focuses on the Ioannina-born own recollections of survival.
We live in a world supersaturated with instant information. Hence, it is hard to conceive that an entire population, a decade after the rise of Hitler, was ignorant of the Germans’ intentions. But in 1943, when more than half of Poland’s three million Jews had already been murdered, the Jews of the thousand-year-old community of Greek-speaking Jews in Ioannina; the Sephardic, Ladino speaking community of Jews of Salonika (the only port beside Haifa that shut down on Shabbat); and dozens of smaller towns and villages, had no idea what was going to happen to them. Like Jews at an earlier time in Eastern Europe, they believed the Germans – masters of deception and manipulation – that they would be resettled near Cracow, Poland. After all, in the internment camp in Greece, they were able to change their Greek drachmas for Polish zlotys!
All this Dr. Matsas dramatizes with empathy and erudition. He is the first to make use of hitherto closed archives of the WWII Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the State Department files pertaining to Greece. He got access to telegrams that US diplomats from Turkey had sent to Washington, describing the arrests, humiliations and violence against the Jews. The author also shows how the British, ostensibly the allies of free Greece, knew of German actions and plans but did not make them available to Greek Jews.
Matsas does not spare his fellow Jews either, especially the feckless Jewish leadership of Ioannina and the semi-collaborationist Chief Rabbi Zvi Koretz of Salonika who, on the one hand, helped the Germans by giving them lists of Jews and, on the other, instilled in Jews a false sense of hope, (Nearly 95% of Salonika Jews were killed.) Matsas also lists Jewish traitors. A name that keeps reappearing in various memoirs is of two Recanati brothers, who, fluent in Ladino and in the employ of the Germans, lured Jews into the Gestapo net.
Matsas is particularly severe against Jewish leaders who did not urge their fellow Jews to flee to the mountains, as did the Matsas family. On the contrary, they counselled that if the Jews obey the laws all will go well for them. The author repeatedly contends that given the freedom of the mountains, under resistance control, many more Jews could have been saved. Matsas particularly praises the ELAS resistance units for welcoming, protecting and saving Jews – the only such helpful organization in Greece.
One of the most memorable vignettes in The Illusion of Safety – a book filled with many memorable, touching and exciting personal accounts – is the one that depicts the fate of the 275-member Jewish community of the small island of Zakynthos. When the German commander asked Mayor Karrer for a list of the Jews, the mayor gave the German an old gold ring and told him that Jews are listed in the city register along with other citizens and that there was no way of separating them. The next day, Bishop Chrysostomos, who had studied in Munich, and the mayor handed the commander an envelope. When he opened it, he saw there were only two names in it – the Bishop’s and the mayor’s.
Combining the narrative skill of a novelist in the personal memoir section, the objective scholarly stance of a historian in the historical part, and the moral outrage of an engaged Jew from an ancient and noble community of Jews, The Illusion of Safety is a gripping and brilliant work which will hold the reader in thrall in more ways than one.
Book Review (Second Edition) of Dr. Michael Matsas’ The Illusion of Safety, The Story of the Greek Jews During the Second World War
by Steven Bowman, historian and professor emeritus at the University of Cincinnati
The International Jerusalem Post | April 8 – 14, 2022:
A Monument to the Greek Jews
Michael Matsas’ The Illusion of Safety (2nd edition) is a comprehensive, easily read story of a community during World War II
Michael Matsas presents his readers with an updated and expanded version of his groundbreaking memoir, which he rightly calls The Illusion of Safely.
It is an uncommon memoir of his youthful experiences in occupied Greece during 1943 and 1944, with a description of life in a primitive, yet hospitable mountain village running messages for the partisans only slightly older than him alongside his parents, who also survived. These adventures entertained his young daughters, who were curious about the war years.
As they grew older, he began to tell of his extended family, the extended tribe of Matsas in Ioannina and western Greece, rounded up by the German occupiers and sent in cattle cars to Auschwitz, where nearly all were killed on arrival.
He and his father researched national archives and libraries, in private archives, especially the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, and translated the hundreds of letters he received from fellow Greeks, survivors of the camps and mountains, and members of the resistance still living in Greece, Israel and the United States. He voraciously read scholarly literature on the Holocaust and was shocked at his findings.
This expanded edition by a self-taught historian is replete with restrained anger, pathos and praise. It is a monument penned in the words of those who lived through the war years, the heroes and the villains. It is a comprehensive and easily read story of the Greek Jews during World War II.
His anger and sadness are paramount throughout the book. He emphasizes the abandonment of the Jews, a theme developed later by many scholars, that no one warned the nearly 80,000 Jews scattered through the major and minor towns of Greece that the Germans were intent on deporting them to their deaths.
The BBC, still sometimes accused of bias on various issues related to Jews and Israel, never mentioned the danger in the news bulletins that trickled through the clandestine radios. The British liaison officers and the American agents, most of them American-Greeks who fought and led among the partisans, never mentioned or even knew of the ongoing Holocaust. Even the agents of the Palestinian Yishuv who helped to rescue Jews escaping to Turkey were silent about the deaths of the deported men, women and children.
Matsas excoriates the Allies for their silence and supports his anger with official documents from top secret files now available to scholars and the public still ignorant of the fate of Greek Jews. It is a shocking record of silence that includes Pope Pius XII, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, and even the Jewish leaders of Palestine. This silence is a damning reminder of the two millennia of animosity toward the Jews and Israel.
Even pre-Israeli statehood Arab hatred is represented, with the story of the grand mufti Amin al-Husseini, who advised Hitler and tried to organize Balkan Muslims to fight in the war.
The book chronicles the destruction in three zones of occupation under the Germans, Bulgarians and Italians. Of the many worldwide instances of massacre during the war only the Jews were especially marked for annihilation. There were many saviors but too few survivors.
The author presents the stories of camp survivors that he collected, as well as those of resistance fighters including the heroic doctors, translators, spies, and local leaders. It is a tour de force not matched in the literature of Greek Jewry. This expanded edition contains new stories reminiscent of the ancient Greek motto “Freedom or death.”
But even these heroes were betrayed by history. Not only were their stories and accomplishments ignored by historians but they themselves were punished by the post-war Greek state, whose leaders supported the collaborators and persecuted the leftist resistors. Some Jews were executed and many were forced to emigrate and lost their citizenship. Many survivors contributed to a small but worldwide Sephardi and Romaniote Diaspora.
The one lacuna is the lack of an updated bibliography to list the plethora of publications of the past 20 years. Even so, the Greek story is not as well-known as the plethora of publications on the fate of Ashkenazi Jewry.
Matsas’ new edition still remains the most comprehensive story of Greek Jewry with its emphasis on heroes and victims and the unacknowledged guilt of the bystanders, an absorbing and well-written book for the ages.
The Illusion of Safety 