Patrick Comerford
Yom haShoah, the Jewish world’s annual day of remembrance of the Holocaust, was marked yesterday (24 April 2025), with moving services and ceremonies at which survivors and guests lit yellow candles in memory of the people who were murdered. The day is a reminder too that each person who was murdered is an individual – a person, and not a number.
Last week also saw the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945.
In Greece, it is estimated that 50,000 men, women and children from Thessaloniki were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. It had been one of the great centres of European Jewry. The eradication of about 90% of Thessaloniki’s Jewish population was paralleled only in Poland, which had similar mortality rates.
Thessaloniki was known as the ‘Mother of Israel’ before the Nazi occupation, and Jews far outnumbered Christians in the city well after its incorporation into modern Greece in 1912. Most of these Jews were Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews, the descendants of exiles who settled there after their expulsion from Spain in the 15th century. In other parts of Greece, about 17,000 Jews died in the Holocaust.
On my flight to Crete last week, I read an interview in the Guardianby Helena Smith in Athens with Lola Hassid Angel, one of the very last of Greece’s dwindling Jewish community to have survived Bergen-Belsen.
Her memories reminded me of the story of Sebastián de Romero Radigales (1884-1970), the brave Spanish diplomat who helped Jews in Greece during the Holocaust. He was the Spanish consul in Athens during World War II and was posthumously honoured by Yad Vashem as one of the ‘Righteous among the Nations’ in 2014.
Romero was born in Graus in Aragon on 20 January 1884 into a political family: his father was a life senator and his brother was a cabinet minister in the 1930s. He studied law, began his diplomatic career in Spanish consulates in New York, Tangier, Santiago de Cuba, Belgrade, Sofia, and Galati in Moldavia, Romania. He moved on to San Francisco and Chicago.
Romero was the Spanish consul in Athens on three occasions: 1937-1938, 1939-1940 and from 1943 as the head of the Spanish diplomatic delegation. There he felt responsible for the Sephardic Jews of Greece, especially those of Spanish descent who had acquired Spanish passports.
The deportation of Jews from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz began in March 1943, and within five months 48,000 Jews had been deported. For pragmatic reasons, the Germans agreed to exempt Jews holding Italian and Spanish citizenship from deportation, on condition that they returned to either Italy or Spain. But Jews with Spanish papers faced a reluctance on the part of the Spanish government to allow them to be repatriated.
By April 1943, Romero was working diligently to arrange the repatriation of 510 Jews from Thessaloniki with Spanish citizenship. He asked Franco’s regime in Madrid for approval to give those Jews an entry permit to Spain before the Nazis dealt with them, Due to his intervention, Jews with Spanish passports were the last Jews in Greece sent to Bergen-Belsen.
The Spanish government gave Romero a list of strict requirements Spanish Jews had to meet in order to return to Spain. The requirements were so strict meant that only a very small number of Jews actually got entry permits. Even when Romero signed the visas for Jews who met those requirements, the question then of how they would get to Spain proved to be complicated.
The Spanish government wanted to transport them by sea in Spanish ships, while Romero suggested using Swedish Red Cross ships that delivered food to Greece. When the Germans blocked both ideas, it was proposed they would return to Spain on a train. When the Spanish government stepped back and refused to accept the return of any Jewish citizens, the Germans decided on 22 July 1943 to deport the Spanish Jews to Bergen-Belsen.
Romero begged for mercy for those Jews with families in Athens, pleading in vain that women, children and the ill would be spared. Without approval from Madrid, he then started to organise a plan to send Jews from Thessaloniki to Italy or an Italian-occupied zone in Greece. This infuriated the Spanish government but Romero continued to attempt to move Jews from Thessaloniki to Athens and to Italian-occupied zone.
The Jews in Thessaloniki with Spanish nationality were moved to Bergen-Belsen on 2 August 1943. Romero held on to their belongings, promising to take care of them. When Italy surrendered to Germany, the Jews of Athens were obliged to register with the Germans, who began a lockdown of all Jews. Romero protested against, but to no avail.
A group of 367 Jews with Spanish citizenship arrived in Bergen-Belsen on 13 August 1943. Romero continued to work tirelessly to protect these Jews until the Spanish government relented and allowed the transfer of this group to Spanish Morocco. Their travel documents bore his signature.
The Germans arrested 3,000 Jews in March 1944. Of these, 150 had Spanish citizenship and were sent to Haidari concentration camp (στρατόπεδο συγκέντρωσης Χαϊδαρίου), run by the SS in the suburb of Haidari in Athens. On 11 April 1944, 155 Greek Jews with Spanish nationality and 19 with Portuguese citizenship were sent to Bergen-Belsen. Through Romero’s intervention, they were moved to a neutral zone where they did not need to work, thy could wear shoes and had comparably better conditions. He tried to have 155 Jews moved from Bergen-Belsen to Spain in June, yet again to no avail.
The Spanish government agreed on 17 August 1944 to allow Romero to start planning to move Jews to Spain 25 at a time. Romero replied to the Foreign Minister, explaining this was unreasonable and would take two years to complete. But his requests to increase the numbers and for Jews to get visas immediately on arriving in Spain were both denied.
Romero then took upon himself to assist the Jews in Athens who had escaped deportation and sheltered them in an hotel owned by a Greek Jew who had been deported. When the German forces found six Jews who were hiding in Athens, Romero intervened to stop their deportation in return for them reporting to a nearby police station on a weekly basis.
As the Allies got close to Bergen-Belsen, 2,700 Greek Jews were moved by train from the camp on 6 April 1945. The train was intercepted by advancing US troops on Friday 13 April.
Romero continued to work in different diplomatic roles in Athens after World War II, and was appointed ambassador in December 1950. After his retirement he lived in his family home in Graus (Huesca), which he named Villa Elena. He died in Madrid on 31 July 1970.
After his death, Sebastián de Romero Radigales was posthumously honoured as one of the ‘Righteous among the Nations’. The award was received by his granddaughter, Elena Colitto Castelli, at Yad Vashem on 30 September 2014. The attendance included Isaac Revah, a Holocaust survivor who had been rescued from Bergen-Belsen in February 1944 through Romero’s intervention. He was a child at the time and was sent to Spanish Morocco.
Isaac Revah recalled how his group was permitted to leave the camp in February 1944. ‘Being released from a Nazi camp is an extraordinary event. It all happened thanks to an outstandingly courageous and humane man,’ he wrote to Yad Vashem. Revah never forget his rescuer’s actions, and applied to Yad Vashem to have Romero honoured and recognised as Righteous Among the Nations.
In her interview in the The Guardian last week, Lola Hassid Angel told Helena Smith, ‘My legs shake, my head spins, knowing what really happened not so very long ago. The Nazis finessed the art of killing people, down to how much Zyklon B gas was needed to kill hundreds at the same time. Technology has progressed so much since then. My big fear is if another Hitler comes along, the next war will be much worse.’
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
