The House by the Sea: A Portrait of the Holocaust in Greece [Paperback]

Rebecca Fromer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1997

A compelling Holocaust memoir exposes the little-known annihilation of the Jewish community in Greece

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Although this biography does not offer the wide scope that its subtitle promises, it does work as a look at one man's experience. Elia Aelion was from Salonika, a major Sephardic center that claimed a Jewish population of 56,000 before WWII. Of those, 96% died, but Aelion was one of the lucky few to survive. After a helpful introduction into the history of this era, Fromer (The Holocaust Odyssey of Daniel Bennahmias, Sonderkommando) jumps into a contrived first-person account: "I have not used a tape recorder, and we were not conducting interviews. In invoking the past, we spoke as the storytellers of old, without impediments, and in earnest to inform." Unfortunately she tells her subject's story with this same cloyingly artificial tone and thereby robs it of a more natural dignity and clarity. Still, the details are moving. Aelion lived a rather cloistered life as a child, mostly traveling from his grandparents' house (the idyllic family home mentioned in the title) to his own parents' house and to a private Jewish school. Eventually he moved from Salonika to Athens, and when the city became occupied by Germans he struggled across the mountains to reach free Greece. Photographs and small details of his family's daily life give individuality to an often incomprehensible loss, while informative sidebars help clarify the history.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Almost 90 percent of Greek Jews were killed in the Holocaust; of its pre-war population, less than 2,000 survived. The seaport city of Salonika was a center of Sephardic Jewish life and culture. By August 1943 the nineteenth and last transport to leave Salonika emptied the city of its Jews, and the following year the Jews of Athens and Korfu were sent to Auschwitz. Writing in the first person, Fromer chronicles the life of Elia Aelion, one of Salonika's few survivors. From 1939 to 1941, Aelion served in the Greek army. When it was defeated, he escaped to Athens, then he returned home to Salonika to aid his family and attempt to salvage the family business. Aelion again fled to Athens, and hid from the Germans until the city was liberated by British troops. Fromer, through Aelion, reminisces about his family, who perished in the Holocaust; gone, too, was his childhood house by the sea. His compelling book vividly recounts the horror of life in Greece during the Holocaust. George Cohen

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Mercury House; 1st edition (September 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1562791052
• ISBN-13: 978-1562791056
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,235,688 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A book worth reading once, July 12, 2001

By 

Anastasios Sarikas - See all my reviews

This review is from: The House by the Sea: A Portrait of the Holocaust in Greece (Paperback)

While this book is certainly worth reading once,I must say that I can not share in the glowing review presented above.Aside from the fact that the book contains several historical inaccuracies,the "hero"- Elias Aelion is neither particularly heroic nor interesting.

As to the author's inaccuracies, I will posit but two examples(although there are several):1.the author points out that the Albanians "defeated the Italian Army" when the latter invaded Albania as a first step in their disasterous subsequent invasion of Greece.Well,check again because this never happened;2. the author states that Elias Aelion, the principal character marched back from Bulgaria-Yugoslavia,after the defeat of the Greek Army by the Germans, for a distance of 300 miles.This is quite suspect for two reasons:1.The Greek Army was never in either Bulgaria or Yugoslavia, and 2. the distance from the border in question to, lets say Athens is far less than 300 miles. Yes, I know this sounds a bit picky, but either the author failed to do some basic homework or Elias Aelion is not telling the events quite right.

And speaking of Mr. Aelion. I wondered, as I read the book, why a trained soldier, such as he, spent his time either lounging in Athens or having little parties while tens of thousands of others, including Greek Jews, were fighting in the mountains of Greece with the Resistance, against the Germans. I remember my father telling me about "David'- a Greek Jew who was his comrade in the Resistance. David lost everyone- but he never lost his love for his country nor his thirst to avenge his murdered family. He was always first in battle...and he took no prisoners.

Yet,while Elias Aelion feared capture and went in to hiding-- he did so in the relative comfort of Athens,with a roof over his head and with some food in his stomach. While I find the description of his return to his home quite touching, I am sorry to say that I found little else sympathetic about him.

One single, solitary chapter in Mazower's book "Inside Hitler's Greece" on the plight of Greek Jewry in the Holocaust has more power, force and accuracy than this entire book.

5.0 out of 5 stars The loss of a Sephardic culture in the Holocaust, February 11, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The House by the Sea: A Portrait of the Holocaust in Greece (Paperback)

BOOK REVIEW - 2/10/99

THE HOUSE BY THE SEA: A PORTRAIT OF THE HOLOCAUST IN GREECE by Rebecca Camhi Fromer Reviewed by R. Bortnick

There are far too few books in English on the Sephardic experience in the Holocaust. There would be fewer still if it weren't for Rebecca Camhi Fromer, author of the groundbreaking The Holocaust Odyssey of Daniel Bennahmias, Sonderkommando (University of Alabama Press,1993) and co-author, with Rene Molho, of They Say Diamonds Don't Burn (Judah Magnes Museum, 1994.) In her latest book, The House by the Sea, she weaves the facts of the Holocaust in Greece around the personal story of Salonica native Elias Aelion. Elias is not a Holocaust survivor in the usual sense, for he was never in a German concentration camp. There are no descriptions here of concentration camps, mass murders, or crematoria. Yet the book is subtitled "A Portrait of the Holocaust in Greece" because, as the author says in the Preface, this is "a serious work that is grounded in the past, the tenor of the struggle to survive, and the nature of the loss in Greece due to the Holocaust." Elias Aelion was born in the house at the edge of the sea, a house which remains associated in his memory with "all that seemed worthwhile, warm and loving, simple and natural..." His grandparents lived there, and it was the focal location of the very large family's life (his parents had sixteen siblings between them!), of gatherings on Sabbaths, holidays and special occasions, of games and fights with cousins, and of other mundane events of a normal life. Elias was inducted into the Greek army in 1939, becoming part of the defense army against the invading Italians in 1940. When the Germans invaded in April, 1941, the Greek soldiers fled in disarray, and Elias escaped on foot with his comrades, walking for about 300 miles from somewhere between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia into Greece. When his family and friends and all the other Jews of his hometown went on the infamous "transports", he was in Italian-occupied Athens.. His tale of the war years, of running, evading, riding on cattle trains and stolen trucks, hiding, and avoiding a German arrest by-the skin-of-his-teeth, or, rather, by the force of some hard green beans (you'll have to read the book to see what that means!), absorbs the reader like an adventure movie. When he returns to Salonica and finds his community and family gone, we feel with him, in the depths of our souls, the tragedy before our eyes. Besides lending her own poetic eloquence to Elias's language, Ms. Fromer also speaks to us directly in the Introduction, the notes, the Appendices and the Afterword, in order to to create a complete picture of the events. In the Introduction, she presents a general historical background of the Jews of Greece, the culture of the Jews of Salonica (the city that "was a main center of Sephardic life, not a mere outpost of Jewish survival"), and the destruction of their great culture in the Holocaust in a period of less than five months, culminating with the nineteenth and last transport out of Salonica on August 18, 1943. Alongside Elias's story, Ms. Fromer adds side notes which are generally very illuminating and interesting. The Appendices include a historical time-line, a chronology of the Holocaust in Greece, a map, and archival information on the transports. One of the documents is especially important. This, from the O.S.S. (Office of Strategic Services), declassified only in January of 1998 and published here for the first time, dispels any doubt that at least by 1943, the Allies had clear information about the planned extermination of the Jews of Europe. Having established the importance and beauty of this book, we intend no detraction by mentioning two mistakes which, although not significant in context, did catch our attention. One is in the explanation given for the origin of the term sefer tasin - a portable food pot - which in fact has nothing to do with the Hebrew sefer, meaning book, as is indicated, but comes from sefer tasi in Turkish - sefer, meaning journey or expedition (related to the English word "safari"); the other is in the use of the term Inquisition for the Spanish expulsion of the Jews. The House by the Sea is an eloquently-told piece of little-known history. It is an intimate look at the destruction of a great and vibrant Sephardic culture. If we are to understand the full scope of the Holocaust, this history must be known, and that culture must be understood,. This book should be on every Jew's - and certainly on every Sefardi's - bookshelf.