Life Before

      Heinz Salvator Kounio enjoyed his life as a young boy. He loved his parents, his sister Erika, who was a year older than him, and his grandparents. Of course, there were things he didn’t like so much: the disputes with boys in the neighbourhood or with classmates in the school yard. But in retrospect they were trivial.

      Thessaloniki – also known as Saloniki, Salonika (Judeo-Spanish), Selanik (Turkish) or Solun (Bulgarian/Macedonian/Serbian) – the second-largest city in Greece, where he lived, fascinated him and promised a good life for a Jewish boy. Until he was 11.¹

      At the age of just 24, his father Salvator Kounio had opened a small photo supply shop. That was in 1924. He sold photographic paper and cameras to the many street photographers in Thessaloniki. He obtained his goods from Germany. At the same time, he and his brother exported sheepskins in the opposite direction. He bought them untreated from the farmers in and around Thessaloniki. The skins were then dried and transported by road or sea to Germany. Heinz’s father and brother were very hardworking and were soon well respected far and wide, not only in Thessaloniki but also in Germany. Their customer base grew rapidly.

      Every year Heinz’s father visited the photography fair in Leipzig, which was part of the Leipzig industrial fair. There he found out about new products and placed orders for photographic paper, cameras and accessories for the whole year. On one of his business trips, he met the ‘self-assured, obstinate and intelligent’ Helene Löwy (known as Hella). The 18-year-old was a fifth-semester medical student in Leipzig. The two fell in love at first sight. They wanted to get married. Hella was determined to abandon her studies to go with Salvator Kounio to Greece.

The young woman’s parents lived in Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) in multi-ethnic Czechoslovakia. Her father, Ernst Löwy, was a well-known architect and engineer; her mother Theresa, ‘a beautiful and educated Viennese woman’.

      The Jewish inhabitants of Karlsbad have a turbulent history. For around 350 years, they were not allowed to reside permanently there. Only during the spa season from 1 May to 30 September were Jews permitted to stay and do business there. Afterwards, they had to leave again.²

      Many Jews had moved since the mid sixteenth century to the surrounding villages, from where they could reach Karlsbad on foot to sell their goods. They were thus able to quickly improve their impoverished situation.

      A large number of Jews living and working in Karlsbad during the spa season came from Lichtenstadt (Hroznĕtín). Die Juden und Judengemeinden Böhmens in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart [The Jews and Jewish Communities of Bohemia in the Past and Present] by Hugo Gold, editor-in-chief of the Brno magazine Jüdische Volksstimme, and published in Brno and Prague in 1934, says of this period:

      We do not know whether individual Jews lived in those cities before 1568. But after that time a larger Jewish community was gradually established … in the town of Lichtenstadt, just two hours’ walk from Karlsbad. It has an ancient Jewish cemetery and an old synagogue. According to legend it is 1,000 years old, which is naturally a great exaggeration. But it is nevertheless a few centuries old, as the oldest gravestones reveal.³

      Over the centuries, the Jews living in the villages near Karlsbad attempted in vain to be allowed to reside permanently in the spa town. Their efforts were not to come to fruition until the mid nineteenth century: a Jewish cemetery was laid out in 1868, and the Great Synagogue was officially dedicated on 4 September 1877.

      The Jewish community of Karlsbad grew rapidly: in 1910, there were around 1,600 Jews living there, and by 1931 their number had grown to 2,650, representing 11 per cent of the total population.⁴

Back to the year 1924 and Salvator Kounio and Hella Löwy’s desire to get married: ‘Neither family’, says Heinz Kounio, ‘was keen on the marriage plans.’ The Löwys asked: ‘Where do you intend to go? Saloniki? To the south? You will be a long way from the vibrant cultural life!’ And the Kounios said of the north: ‘Where does she come from? Karlsbad? The people there have no culture!’

      The young couple finally had their way and got married in Karlsbad in 1925. Beforehand, with the help of his parents, Salvator Kounio had had a nice two-storey house built for himself and his young wife right by the sea in Thessaloniki. ‘She should be made to feel at home’ in this part of Europe, which was completely foreign to her.

      In fact, Hella Kounio’s new home could look back on an old and vibrant Jewish culture dating back more than twenty centuries. It is thought that the first Jewish families settled in Thessaloniki around 140 bce. The community received a decisive boost from 1492 onwards with the arrival of 15,000 to 20,000 Jews who had been expelled first from Spain, where Jews had lived for more than 2,100 years,⁵ then a year later from Sicily and Italy, which was ruled by the Spaniards, and then in 1497 from Portugal. At the time, Thessaloniki was part of the Ottoman Empire, which welcomed the Jews with open arms and also guaranteed them freedom of religion.⁶

      The situation remained unchanged for centuries afterwards. The Baseler Nachrichten reported in 1903: ‘The Jews, who manage their affairs independently and in complete freedom, are staunch supporters of the Turkish government. They know that no other power offers the same freedom as they now enjoy under the sign of the crescent.’⁷

      Among the Jewish refugees from 1492 were important and knowledgeable academics, writers, artisans, merchants and Talmudists – students and experts in the Talmud, the primary source of Jewish religious law.

      This massive new impetus brought about a radical change in Thessaloniki. The Jewish refugees introduced novel methods of working. Many artisanal businesses were established – silk mills, goldsmiths’ studios, tanneries and, above all, weaving mills, where a large number of new immigrants found work. The conveniently located port became a hub for trade with the Balkans and a centre of European Jewish scholarship.⁸

Thessaloniki held a great fascination for students from all over the world. The Talmud Torah school founded in 1520 was both a cultural centre supported by the Jewish community and a school of higher education for trainee rabbis.⁹ It was to produce celebrated doctors, writers and rabbis.¹⁰

      Over the centuries, other schools and institutes, such as a trade school, boys’ school,