ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 focuses on the memory of child survivors from Volos, the majority of whom went into hiding in Mount Pelion and, to a lesser extent, in Athens. The comparison between the two communities, that of Volos and Salonika, the former marked by a high percentage of survivors and the latter by a high percentage of deaths, shows that the trajectories of escape and their underlying networks shaped the survivors’ cultural, civic and religious attitudes and that identity after the Shoah was not homogeneous. Thus, questions such as postwar reintegration in the city, relations with the Christian population, the role of anti-Semitism in shaping postwar identities and mixed marriages can be better understood when situated in a comparative perspective. The persistence of anti-Semitism in Volos against a highly assimilated community shows that there are no easy equations between survival and assimilation or between help by non-Jewish locals and a lack of anti-Semitism. Assessing the role of the resistance, the chapter concludes that participation in it was decisive in changing hidden children’s sense of their status as citizens and transformed the meaning of Jewishness in postwar Greece.
