Terra Nostra: Liliane Fernandes

This is the featured weekly post from Discarded Lies at Winds of Change.NET. The Terra Nostra series is about the Jewish Holocaust in Greece, righteous gentiles, tales of heroism and simple human will to survive, and the beauty of human souls even in a horrific tableau. The Children of the Stoplights series about child trafficking returns next week.

Liliane Fernandes was the first person to save baby Reina Gilberta's life. Liliane was Reina's mother's best friend, and entrusted her to a convent. (Click on Reina Gilberta's name to read her story if you missed it last week).

The Fernandes family was one of the most prominent in pre-WWII Salonica, one of the familias excelentes. They were originally from Italy and had kept their Italian citizenship. The house they built, Casa Bianca, was one of the most beautiful in the city, large and sunny, decorated with rare works of art. Bianca and Dino Fernandes had two children, Pierre and Aline. Aline had married Spyros Aliberti, an officer in the Greek army, despite her parents' dismay about converting to Christianity in order to marry him. Pierre was married to Liliane, a beautiful girl, also from one of the oldest Jewish families in the city.

Their Italian citizenship afforded them a modicum of freedom in German-occupied Salonica. They were exempt from racial measures and they didn't have to move to the ghetto but as time passed they felt the danger growing and decided to escape to Italy while they still could. Pierre Fernandes was able to procure fake papers and passports through the Italian Consulate in Salonica and the family left.

Bianca, Dino, Pierre, Liliane and their three children rented rooms in a hotel in Meina, a small village resort on Lago Maggiore. Hotel “Meina” belonged to an Istanbul Jew by the name of Alberto Behar, who felt safe because of his Turkish citizenship. In Meina, they met with two other Jewish families from Salonica, the Torres family and the Mosseri family, and Daniel Modiano, also from Salonica but living in Milan.

Here's what happened next:

"Fifty-five Germans invaded the shores of beautiful Lago Maggiore on the Swiss frontier. In Meina, a village on the lake between the more famous tourist towns of Arona and Stresa, 16 Jews from Greece took lodging in the Hotel Meina. Someone informed the Nazis. On Sept 16, 1943, one week after the German occupation [of Italy], the SS stormed the hotel. They seized a family of six from Salonika, including the children aged 15, 12 and eight. They kept this family and ten other victims under guard for a week, apparently debating what to do with them. Finally they shot each victim in the back of the neck and tossed the bodies into the lake… The next morning most of the bodies rose to the surface of the waters. The bodies were taken to the center of the lake and thrown in again. After this, only one was ever recovered for a proper burial."

The story, based on the documents used in the subsequent trial of those responsible, indicates that 12 of the Meina Jews were killed in the night of September 22 to 23, and the remaining four, the Fernandez grandfather and the three children, on the following night.

The trial took place 25 years later, in Osnabrück, in Austria, in 1968, simply because one of the defendants was Austrian. It was Daniel Modiano's Belgian wife, Georgette, who set in motion the process that led to the trial. She was not in the hotel when it all happened. She was staying at a nearby mountain resort. She returned the day after the massacre and raised hell with the authorities. She even appealed to the Archbishop of Torino but to no avail. After the war she asked the Italian president De Gasperi to help bring to justice the killers of her husband.

A key to the outcome of the trial was that she remembered the face of the SS officer she saw in the hotel lobby the day after the killings. The trial lasted 630 days. The defendants were officers of the SS Liebstandarte "Adolf Hitler", the elite armoured division that served as personal guard to the Fuehrer. Their units occupied the area around Lago Maggiore. The tribunal found that they had decided on their own initiative and without orders from above, to kill all the Jews who had found refuge in the area. The motive, the court said, was racial hatred and greed.

The author, however, questioned this conclusion of the court and insisted that there must have been orders from above. The Meina Jews were not the only victims. In all, it was estimated that about 50 Jews were assassinated in the same manner in this district.

Five of the German officers were found guilty and condemned: three to life imprisonment, two to three years' imprisonment. Daniel Modiano's name is carved on the memorial erected there to honour those (Jews and non-Jews) massacred by the Germans. The inscription says: "Here, in the night of 22 to 23 September 1943, under the blows of nazi ferocity, were killed…" The names follow. The inscription concludes: "May their sacrifice serve as a warning and a beacon towards a better humanity."

The Modianos