Vital Hasson, the Jew who worked for the Nazis, hunted down refugees and tore apart families in WWII Greece
- Written by Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Professor of History, Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies, Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director, Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles
I learned a lesson when conducting research for my recently published book, “Family Papers: a Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century[1].” I had discovered the story of a young Jewish man forgotten to history until now, a story that taught me that neither cultural affiliation nor family history is a reliable predictor of future behavior. In short, identity is not destiny, and all of us can fall prey to the tides of history.
Vital Hasson was a native of Thessaloniki, Greece, a cultural capital of the Sephardic Jewish world and a city that once boasted a majority Jewish population, who knew their home as Salonica[2]. He came from an educated, middle-class family of journalists, writers, educators and political leaders.
But Hasson diverged, fatally, from his family’s enlightened values.
Hasson became intoxicated by a populist regime and chose to be swept up by its violence, its false promises, its hatred. He used a position of power to degrade the vulnerable. He was publicly denounced by family for his excesses. After the Second World War, Hasson was the only Jew in all of Europe to be tried and executed by a state, Greece, for collaborating with the Nazi occupiers.
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum[3]‘Less than nothing’
Hasson’s family, like most of the Sephardic Jews of Salonica, were descended from Jews expelled from Iberia in the 15th century who spoke and wrote in a Judeo-Spanish language known as Ladino[4]. For five centuries, they called the Ottoman Empire, southeastern Europe and Salonica home.
But before the war he was not important, “less than nothing,” according to one of the dozens of Jewish survivors who would subsequently testify against him.
When his city was still Ottoman, in the 1870s and 1890s, his great-grandfather introduced the first French- and Ladino-language newspapers to Salonica, chronicling and shaping modernity as it was experienced by southeastern European Jews.
In time, war redrew borders around the family, transforming them from Ottomans to Greeks. Emigration pulled them in many directions, with cousins relocating to England, France, Spain, Portugal, India and Brazil. Hasson himself moved to Palestine for a time, returning to his native town in 1933.
Then, war came, transforming Hasson from a nonentity to an important person.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century, Author providedHasson’s ‘depravity’
Four generations of Hasson’s family were living in Salonica when German forces occupied the city in April 1941[5]. Two years later, Hasson assumed the position of head of the Jewish police of Salonica under ambiguous circumstances.
The position gave him authority over about 200 unarmed men, all local Jews. Among Hasson’s first acts was to volunteer himself as a human bounty hunter, exceeding his charge.
In May 1943, he crossed from German-occupied Greece into Italian-occupied Greece in pursuit of Salonican Jews fleeing the Nazis, whom he was uniquely qualified to identify. His efforts were thwarted, but it hinted at the lengths he was willing to go to satisfy those in power.
When a ghetto was created within Salonica by the Nazis, the depth of Hasson’s depravity made itself known. The Baron Hirsch ghetto[6], one of two areas in which all Jews were concentrated, existed from March to August 1943, by which time Nazi officials completed the deportation of Greek Jewry.
References
- ^ Family Papers: a Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (us.macmillan.com)
- ^ a majority Jewish population, who knew their home as Salonica (jewishreviewofbooks.com)
- ^ U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (collections.ushmm.org)
- ^ a Judeo-Spanish language known as Ladino (www.britannica.com)
- ^ German forces occupied the city in April 1941 (encyclopedia.ushmm.org)
- ^ Baron Hirsch ghetto (encyclopedia.ushmm.org)
- ^ From March to August 1943 (www.yadvashem.org)
- ^ U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, from the German Federal Archives (encyclopedia.ushmm.org)
- ^ Bernie Sanders (jewishcurrents.org)
- ^ You can get our highlights each weekend (theconversation.com)
Authors: Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Professor of History, Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies, Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director, Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles