Menorah in Flames: Nandor Glid's Holocaust Memorial in Thessaloniki

Thessaloniki, Greece. Holocaust Memorial "Menorah in Flames," Nandor Glid, sculptor, 1997. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022.

 

Thessaloniki, Greece. Holocaust Memorial "Menorah in Flames," Nandor Glid, sculptor, 1997. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022.

 

Report from Thessaloniki 1:

Menorah in Flames: Nandor Glid's Holocaust Memorial in Thessaloniki

By Samuel D. Gruber 

One of the most prominent and certainly artistically accomplished Holocaust memorials in Greece is the memorial titled Menorah in Flames by the Serbian Jewish sculptor Nandor Glid installed in Thessaloniki in 1997 and then moved to its present location in 2007. 

Glid, who was a Hungarian Jew from Subotica (now Serbia) lost his entire family at Auschwitz. He was sent to a labor camp in Szeged (Hungary), from which he escaped before joining Tito's partisans with whom he fought for several years and was wounded in 1945. After the war he studied sculpture, and by the 1950s he established himself as one of the most expressive and creative Jewish artists of the post-war generation. He is best known for his sculpture at the Mauthausen (1957) and Dachau (1965-68) concentration camps. Subsequently he made several other Holocaust memorials, which embrace a more symbolic language. The one in Thessaloniki was his last. He died in 1997 before it was cast in bronze, and his sons completed the project.

Dachau, Germany. Holocaust memorial sculpture," Nandor Glid, sculptor, 1965-68. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2006

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Dachau, Germany. Holocaust memorial sculpture," Nandor Glid, sculptor, 1965-68. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2006.

Thessaloniki, Greece. Holocaust Memorial "Menorah in Flames," Nandor Glid, sculptor, 1997. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022.

 

hessaloniki, Greece. Holocaust Memorial "Menorah in Flames," Nandor Glid, sculptor, 1997. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022.

 Glid's striking monuments have come to represent a particular era of Holocaust remembrance that allowed the melding of abstract and representational elements to address suffering and horror more directly without undo distance, sentimentality, or romanticizing. Until a visit in May, I'd only known the Thessaloniki memorial from photos, but most of the photos published of Glid’s work do not do justice to the complex expressive detail that is evident in the patterns of the work and in the emotional power of the abstracted human figures which are caught up in the inextricable net of wire (in the case of Dachau) or fire (in the in the case of Thessaloniki).

The tangle of figures here recalls those in the Dachau Memorial. Both refer directly to the unforgettable images of piles of emaciated corpses found when the Camps were liberated. The title too, encourages the viewer to see a menorah and thus overlook the tortured figures entangled within the work. From the photos, too, I had always imagined this to be a larger work. It is of good size, but it's prominent location and its formal qualities - that is, the way it expands outward and upward from a narrow base - suggested something larger and loftier. In fact, it is set almost at ground level and the viewer approaches and looks at the monument head on. This is extremely effective because we encounter the anguished faces of the victims. Close up, once sees less of the menorah form and more of the thicket of flames and limbs and human heads.

Thessaloniki, Greece. Holocaust Memorial "Menorah in Flames," Nandor Glid, sculptor, 1997. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022.

 

Thessaloniki, Greece. Holocaust Memorial "Menorah in Flames," Nandor Glid, sculptor, 1997. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022.

 

Thessaloniki, Greece. Holocaust Memorial "Menorah in Flames," Nandor Glid, sculptor, 1997. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022.

 

Thessaloniki, Greece. Holocaust Memorial "Menorah in Flames," Nandor Glid, sculptor, 1997. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022.

 

The work was originally installed in a public square named in 1996 as the “Square of the Jewish Martyrs of the Holocaust.” This was done in anticipation of Thessaloniki holding the title European Cultural Capital in 1997. The city was shamed into remembering. In that year (1997) the Greek government installed Glid’s sculpture in the square as the first public recognition of the deportation and murder of more than 50,000 Jews – a large segment of the city’s population. 

Unfortunately, the monument was often vandalized so in 2005 it was moved to its present more visible location on Plateia Eleftherias (Freedom Square), facing the waterfront. The new setting has some significance to the suffering of the city’s Jews. On July 11, 1942, the German occupiers of the city held 9,000 Jewish men here and subjected them to a degrading registration process in blazing heat. Today, most of the large square is a parking lot, but (unlike Sopron) the monument is screened off from the cars.

Thessaloniki, Greece. Holocaust Memorial "Menorah in Flames," Nandor Glid, sculptor, 1997. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022.

 

                            

Thessaloniki, Greece. Holocaust Memorial "Menorah in Flames," Nandor Glid, sculptor, 1997. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022.

 

Two plaques affixed to base of monument refer to the original installation and its removal and new dedication. The first, written in Greek and English, solely remembers the victims:

Thessaloniki, Greece. Holocaust Memorial "Menorah in Flames," Nandor Glid, sculptor, 1997. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022.

 

The second, in Greek, Hebrew, and English, commemorates a moment in contemporary (2006) Greek and Israeli politics:

Thessaloniki, Greece. Holocaust Memorial "Menorah in Flames," Nandor Glid, sculptor, 1997. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022.

 

Perhaps the truest form of memorial in the city is the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, opened in 2001, the tells the millennia-long history of the community as well as of its destruction. The museum, of which I plan to write more about in another post, culminates in a memorial room fo names created form the decades-long research of Auschwitz survivor Heinz Kounio, who has collected definitive information on 37,000 individual victims, although it is known that thousands more remain undocumented.

Kounio was one of the first Greeks to tell his story of survival. His memoir was published in Greek in 1981, and subsequently in an abbreviated English version in 2003 titled A Liter of Soup and Sixty Grams of Bread: The Diary of Prisoner Number 109565 (Sephardic House and Bloch Publishing, 2003). Kounio is also featured in the 2019 documentary film Heroes of Salonika. Heinz’s daughter Hella Matalon, an expert on Jewish Thessaloniki, was my guide in Thessaloniki for the day. Learning the identities of Salonika victims has been difficult. One needs to know multiple languages, including Greek, Ladino, French, Hebrew, and German. Archives and records were destroyed or are inaccessible This was compounded by the common practice of repeating widely family names within extended families. Thus, it was not enough to know a name, it was necessary to learn birth dates and addresses and other information. Thus, researching victims created many data points that begin to sketch the depth of the Jewish community. Numbers become names and names become individuals with their own biographies. 

Kounio has been at this work for many years, and it will have to continue for years when he is gone. There are several other Holocaust memorials scattered about Thessaloniki. But no amount of commemoration can give a true indication of the size and importance of the Thessaloniki Jewish population which was deported and murdered in 1942. The destruction of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community tore the heart and soul of the Sephardi and Ladino culture. Even though the community had suffered other calamities in the previous half century, the murder of the community marked the end of remarkable Jewish culture and civilization. Yes, there are descendants of Thessaloniki Jews living today around the world, but whatever they create cannot replicate what was lost in lives, language and culture. 

After World War II, so few Jews lived in the city where once they had constituted the majority of the population, that they were hardly noticed, and the Jewish history of Thessaloniki was virtually erased. Jews have lived in the city for millennia. the Christian New Testament records that Saint Paul preached in a synagogue in Thessaloniki in the 1st century C.E. 

Since the 1990s, there have been many efforts by the city of Thessaloniki, the Greek Jewish community, and many Greek Jews living abroad to rectify the situation. Very slowly, monuments and memorials have been erected to Holocaust victims, synagogues have been restored, and new museums and exhibitions have opened. Still while this more evident Jewish presence has informed and educated many, it also regularly provokes resistance. Greek Holocaust memorials have been often vandalized. This does not represent the attitude of most Greeks; but it is evidence of a persistent stream of antisemitism among a section of the population. In the past fifty years, Antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment have been used politically by both the Greek Right and Left.