Greece Has Been Slow to Come to Any Kind of Terms with Some of the More Complex Aspects

The Edinburgh Greek Film Festival (2 – 7 December at Filmhouse) will include CLOUDY SUNDAY, a film we suggest will be of interest to the Jewish Community.

Greece has been slow to come to any kind of terms with some of the more complex aspects of its history and until recently one of these was the multi-cultured history of Salonica and its Jewish population’s near extermination in World War II.

Mark Mazower’s books – Hitler’s Greece(ISBN 0300089236) and Salonica: City of Ghosts (ISBN 0375727388)– opened up the story to general readers and this year we are showing Cloudy Sunday (Ouzeri Tsitsanis), made in 2015 by the Greek Director Manousos Manousakis.

Cloudy Sunday is set in 1942 during the German Occupation as the Holocaust begins. We see Greeks trying to come to terms with the Occupation – resisting, collaborating, abstaining – and the Jewish community trying to comprehend the incomprehensible disaster that threatens them.

The focus of the film is the Ouzo joint run by Vasilis Tsitsanis the great Rebetiko musician, a crossroads of attitudes where collaborators, resisters and the uncommitted meet.

The film raises and outlines important questions about Occupation and how people deal with it. The musicians try implied musical resistance, the young are tempted into often rash resistance, the old try to navigate a course through it all.

98% of Thessaloniki’s Jews were sent to Auschwitz. The film accurately tells part of their story – the debates, the attempts to believe that the German offer of ‘a new life in Poland’ were credible, the petty humiliations, the forced labour, the attempts at resistance.

This is war seen from the inside of a conquered nation. The military version has often been told. This is the civilian version – complex but understandable. We suggest it as an insight not into the strategic events of the war but into the lives of those who had to live with its complications and personal tragedies.

We write to you to invite you all to come. Our Festival involves talk –an awful lot of talk – and it would be a very fine thing to hear some Edinburgh Jewish voices in amongst the Greek, the English, the Scots and the Hiberno-Irish (I’m Irish). Perhaps your book club would be interested – we have some recently arrived Greek historians. We have group discounts. Mostly what we have is a welcome.

Kevin Anderson

Kanderson12@btinternet 0131 229 4047