Former Secretary General of the UN and Austrian President, Kurt Waldheim, dead at 88, will always be remembered for not wanting to bore readers of his autobiography with too many details of the years 1942-45
Wow, Kurt Waldheim- that name takes me back to sixth grade. I hoped assumed he was burning in a hell he theoretically believed in dead already. Check out this story about his life. Best parts: the writer of the obit refers to Waldheim’s lying about his service in the Nazi officer corps as his “economy with the truth.” Also, during his tenure as Austrian president he was unwelcome in most parts of the world and he took virtually no official state trips to other countries- except to the Vatican (twice) and unspecified “Arab countries.”
My grandmother was a victim if this fiend. On passover 1943 the Bulgarians who were very brutal occupiers of my grandparents town in Greece arrested and deported to the death camps almost everyone. The local Greek Orthodox priest and his young son and other Greeks were beaten to death trying to stop the Bulgarians’ really violent roundup of the Jewish residents of the town. The priest’s wife hid my grandmother and my mother who was 16 years old.
They went from the frying pan of the Bulgarian killers to the German ones by going west to Salonica where they had family. The neighborhood police chief gave them new Greek papers saying they were Christian. But while mom’s Greek was native, grandmother’s Greek was only poor to fair and she had a distinctive Ladino accent. Grandmother was taken but my mom was able to make it hidden by the Greek resistance. She made it to the the states where my uncle was in 46.
Grandmother perished in the camps.
I learned later that the Jews (and some Greeks) of our town in Greece were taken by rail to a concentration camp in Bulgaria near the town of Lom. They were robbed and beaten by the Bulgarians there, placed them on boats and after across the Danube handed over to the Germans.
About 10 years ago I returned to my maternal family’s home town. The Greeks there were so warm. Everyone said I must come back to live or at least build a small summer house. The older people and I all cried. One of the local priests, a young man whose family had been displaced from Asia minor during the 40 years of endless war that racked the area (1910-1950), spent days with me walking the town and surrounding area.
Waldheim was an unspeakable person. He was a central figure of the Shoah and of the profound catastrophication of the country of Greece during the war because the Greeks resisted more than anyone.