Nelli Aruch, Jewish woman originally from Thessaloniki, he is a tour guide in Yad Vashem, Israel. An interview with DW on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of Holocaust. Sometimes, some people’s lives are prescribed from their earliest years. The colors, childhood smells and memories seem to mix sweetly with the memories and experiences of the older ones. It’s what made little Nelli, then a little girl in elementary school in Athens in the late 60s, hide under the blankets “so the Germans wouldn’t catch her”, trying to avoid what the Germans couldn’t avoid “big ones” of the family. A war that changed their lives.

Fortunately, her parents, Jews from Thessaloniki, survived the Holocaust. Mama Lili, a little girl at the time, spent the war with her family in a house that agreed to offer them a hiding place in the basement. Papa Manuel took matters into his own hands, took his gun and went up with the rebels into the mountains. But other uncles, aunts, acquaintances and friends boarded that train and only for some fate saved them the return ticket.

The number tattoo and bracelets

“The survivors, although they were not my immediate family, they existed, they were around me,” confesses Nelli Aruch, who introduces herself as an integral member of the so-called ‘second generation of the Holocaust’. A generation which, although it did not go through this nightmare, has to narrate its own traumas, as crystallized from the experiences and memories of those relatives who survived. “And what didn’t Aunt Lina do to hide that tattoo with the numbers on her arm. What scarves she wore, what bracelets… I could sit for hours stroking the numbers on her hand,” she recalls – perhaps even with some nostalgia. How does the aftermath of annihilation become entangled with innocent childhood habits? And yet.”

Her childhood dream of becoming a teacher seemed early on that it would not come true. As the time for the Pan-Hellenic exams approached, he learned that in Greece in 1977 (in contrast to today) elementary school teachers and high school and high school philologists could not be of a different religion. Only an appeal to the Council of State could declare that particular legislative provision unconstitutional – something that at the time sounded unlikely to happen.

“You” the Jews…

“I didn’t take it seriously. I think her young age made me not analyze it too much”, she recalls with a smile. “The truth is that I did not feel anti-Semitism in Greece as a child,” he clarifies, “but at times, in conversations with friends, there was this ‘us’ and ‘you’.” As, for example, when in the Six Day War in 1967, with the Greek newspapers describing with laudatory comments the tactics followed by the Israeli army in its then confrontation with the neighboring Arab countries, “our family friends told us how you made it!’… How did ‘you’ make it!’. And in this climate, perhaps also with the desire to run faster to adulthood away from his father, he decided to study pedagogy in Israel, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

As Israel began to feel like her new “home”, the family’s magnet in Greece proved stronger. In Thessaloniki, she fell in love, got married, had her two children and finally, her old dream came true, teaching Hebrew language and culture at the city’s Israeli Community school. Later he was actively involved in the formation of extracurricular Jewish education programs for the children and teenagers of the community.

Guide to the Holocaust Museum

Sometimes life makes its own circles, even in our absence. Thus, in 2016, after she had now retired, she decided to settle permanently in Israel, now following her children, who were already living there. It was when the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem announced positions for participation in a seminar, which would include her in the force of its guides. “It was not an easy process at all. It goes without saying that I knew a lot about what had happened in Thessaloniki, but I had to learn a lot of information about many other areas of Europe.” On the other hand, the Holocaust was not something foreign. “It’s on my skin. I carry it inside me. But the details were so horrific that sometimes I felt like I was going to collapse.” However, the Yad Vashem Museum’s specialized instructors emphasized documenting the facts.

“You will never say something that is not backed by evidence” was the key phrase he remembers from the seminars. But on the other hand, the human tragedy reaches the point of being ‘deforested’ by simply quoting the number of thousands of Jews who perished in the various parts of Europe, in the camps and in the gas chambers. “This is why the Yad Vashem Museum places great emphasis on the personal stories of the Holocaust victims, through the letters they wrote, their personal items and public documents that prove how they managed to leave their own hasty mark on life.

Nelli confesses that her first guided tours at Yad Vashem were a challenge, with a large dose of mental testing. The presentation of data and personal memories had to be put “in line” and this was not a simple task. “One of my first guided tours is still etched in my memory,” says Nelli. It was a group of German students, accompanied by their teacher.

“I know that the German education system gives a lot of weight to the Holocaust. But I remember, one child had a completely different behavior from the others. He refused to look at me, wouldn’t put on the headphones we give them to listen to the tour, and kept turning his back on me. I didn’t know how to handle it, it was something that was happening to me for the first time. Maybe it was both the first and the last time I faced it. I thought of going to ask him to understand his behavior, but I was a coward. Who knows what the soul of this child would carry, that maybe a member of his family was involved, possibly from the ‘opposite side’ of this tragedy”.

The most difficult part of the Museum in any of her tours is the one that describes what has come to be called the “Holocaust of shootings”. “Unfortunately for me, this section is in the center of the Museum and you can’t bypass it,” he explains. It describes scenes involving the local population in various parts of Eastern Europe, who were tasked with locating and rounding up Jews until Nazi soldiers arrived, lined them up in front of pits, and shot them en masse.

“I belong 98% to Greece”

“It is a very harsh period of the Holocaust, which had created psychological trauma even for the soldiers. In fact, in the Museum there are the letters of the soldiers describing what they felt” he adds, clarifying that after some time the Nazis had decided to put the gas chambers into operation “so that the soldiers would not be so directly confronted with their victims” . This is a particularly important point, which perhaps has not been shown particularly to the general public.

In recent years, Nellis Arouch’s guided tours are now also in Greek, since the number of visitors from Greece is increasing more and more. These tours bring her back to the Greece she grew up in and loves. Looking back on her life in Greece, Nelli has probably come to the conclusion that she “belonged” there “by 98%”, as she typically says.

“Let me explain it so it can be understood. In my adult life I realized that I especially like moments of reverence. It doesn’t matter which religion. And I like Easter, the Epitaph procession. How can I say it? I get excited. It was then, in 2016, that the days were approaching for me to make my final decision to settle permanently in Israel. I remember, I had gone out alone to follow Epitaphios who was making a tour of my neighborhood in Thessaloniki. After the tour and in the midst of all this excitement, on my way home, I sat down and thought to myself, and I was almost overcome with complaint, and I said,

What a shame that I don’t ‘belong’ to everything I live.

And what a shame that I don’t ‘live’ where I belong.”