Adrenalin pumped through Naomi’s veins as she turned the page. She wondered how her grandmother ever survived. A sheet of newsprint, carefully folded into quarters, lay between the next pages. She teased the layers apart and read the front cover of a Rhodes newspaper.
The child, fatally shot on Sunday in the village of Marietta, has not been identified. The girl, aged between twelve and fourteen years old, and believed to be called Evangelisa, will be buried in the cemetery of Filerimos tomorrow. Police are asking for anyone with information relating to this tragic death to come forward. Seventeen-year-old Xanthi Streusel, a young Rhodian woman, found fatally shot on Mount Filerimos, was buried in the town cemetery at 11 a.m., yesterday.
Naomi flipped the newspaper and scoured the reverse side but saw nothing about a murdered German soldier. Some mother’s son, how tragic. Perhaps simply another naive idealist eager to end the war, or a white supremacist on a witch hunt, or just an army boy with no choice but to follow orders.
‘Naomi!’
She looked up from the diary to see Marina running across the road. ‘Naomi, you’ll never guess what I’ve found! Grandpa’s wetting himself; he wanted to tell you himself but had a little job to do at the church.’
‘What is it?’
‘I was surfing, looking for angles on your products and, as Bubba is Jewish, I hit on a Jewish website out of curiosity.’ She gulped, beaming. ‘It’s the official papers that prove you own the property in town. It looks like they’ve been found!’
Naomi thought for a second. ‘Sorry, Marina, but you must be mistaken. In Bubba’s diaries, she said they had to hand their documents to the Nazis in L’Aeronautica. They confiscated and destroyed everything.’
Marina could hardly speak for excitement. ‘No, no! This is what I’ve just read. You know the big police station in town, the headquarters?’
‘Opposite the fire station?’
‘Right on. Well, according to this website, decades back, a former employee of the Greek bureaucracy – I forget his name – kept pestering to have a storeroom in the police station unlocked, but they refused permission. Nobody wanted to reveal the contents of the sealed room. Finally in 2002, out of frustrations, he began writing to people higher up.’
Naomi wondered where this was leading.
‘This guy, well, he claimed that Rhodes police headquarters contained a locked vault full of old files and records, all of the utmost importance to historians. One of his letters landed in the archives office of the Dodecanese Islands.’
‘And . . . did anyone do anything about it?’ Naomi asked.
Marina shook her head. ‘No way. At least not for the next ten years. In 2012, a new boss, a woman, got appointed as director of the Dodecanese State Archives. Now, here’s the cool bit: at the same time, an Italian historian carried out research on the island, because Rhodes used to belong to Italy, remember?’
Naomi nodded.
‘The historian had also come across rumours about the same locked room. He wondered what could be in there. Finally, the historian and the Archives’ director got together, and in 2013 they managed to get permits to have the vault opened.’
‘A search warrant for Rhodes police headquarters? That must have been difficult.’
‘Exactly,’ Marina said.
‘What on earth did they find?’
‘Some records had rotted away with the damp, but around ninety thousand documents from the years between1912 and 1946 were rescued.’
Naomi blinked at her. ‘What an incredible discovery!’
‘Well . . . yes, it is.’ Marina beamed.
‘I’m finding all this hard to take in,’ Naomi said. ‘Such an important historical find. Why didn’t we know about it? Why wasn’t it on TV, splashed all over the national news, or at least in the local papers?’ She had a vague recollection of Georgia and Heleny gossiping about a secret door on the day she posted the first gun part to Rebecca. Was this what they were prattling on about?
Marina shrugged. ‘Grandpa said we have to come to our own conclusions about that.’
‘Iced tea?’ Naomi asked, reaching into the fridge.
‘Yeah, great, thanks. So, with the documents being found, Grandpa says we stand a chance, as long as the papers we need aren’t among the ones that rotted away.’
‘I’ll have one of those too,’ Bubba called, shuffling into the room on her Zimmer.
‘Did you hear all that, Bubba?’
‘I did. It sounds promising.’
‘Naomi! Ah, there you are.’ Papas Yiannis hurried into the kitchen. ‘Good news, hey?’
‘But, Papas, didn’t you say the Rhodians changed the names on Jewish property deeds in the land registry?’
‘They did, but these papers are from the Italian census, long before that. The survey was locked away after they shared the information with the Nazis. It consisted of land deeds, business, bank accounts, vehicle documents, houses, loans. Everything! Also, it recorded religions. It has the names of all the Jews, the lists of the possessions of the families that never returned, and the addresses of buildings in Rhodes Old Town and all over the island that belonged to the thousands that left or were forced off Rhodes.
‘Several important people didn’t want this news to get out. Apart from everything else, think of the effect it would have on tourism. If the rest of Europe learned that the happy, fun-loving Rhodians assisted with the deportation of the Rhodian Jews to Auschwitz and then stole their property, the world heritage site would be seen in an entirely new light.’
‘Yeah, just imagine,’ Marina said thoughtfully. ‘Who could enjoy a meal in a taverna if they knew it had been a house stolen from its real owner? If that owner had starved to death in a concentration camp, after their children had been thrown into the furnaces alive?’
Naomi’s stomach cramped. The young woman had an unapologetic way of expressing the truth. ‘It’s amazing news, a miracle . . .’ She recalled Georgia saying as much, and Naomi had laughed, not taking her seriously.
Papas Yiannis nodded. ‘The historian said the room contained the largest collection of records for that era, outside Italy.’
‘But how does all this affect us? I don’t understand.’
The priest smiled triumphantly. ‘What happened to all the property that belonged to the Jews? Not only the ones sent to Auschwitz, but another two thousand that left before all that transpired? The Nazis used that census to round up the Jews that remained in Rhodes and they made them bring all their papers with them, to be confiscated, so nobody could ever prove what was theirs.’
‘Right, I’m getting you. So, the documents that the historian uncovered tells us who owned what?’
‘Basically, yes, we’re hoping so. The Rhodians are worried because they invented a law that made it legal – and easy – to change the name on the deeds of any buildings. All you had to do was get a witness to sign a paper that said you’d lived in the property for fifteen years, and nobody could object. A regulation that still stands today. At the beginning of the war, the Jewish community counted almost four and a half thousand people. Let’s not forget that these were Rhodian citizens – families who migrated here from Spain many generations earlier. Jews lived here even before the Christians and, until the war, they were respected members of the community. Their only difference was religion: they believe in the Old Testament, while the Italians and Greeks follow the New Testament.’
‘But a lot left the island, didn’t they?’
‘Yes, that’s true. They applied for visas to other countries. These application letters were also kept, but in July 1944 the Germans used the list of the remaining Jews to round them up and deport them to Auschwitz. Eighteen hundred Jews were taken from Rhodes and Kos. Only one hundred and sixty-three survived; more than half of those died before returning to their island, and the majority of the survivors stayed in Italy or left Europe altogether.’
‘Jacob lived in Italy,’ Bubba said quietly, her eyes glazing.
Naomi recognised the look. Bubba was away with her memories. She caught the priest’s eye and mouthed, Jacob, Bubba’s brother?
‘Played the violin at your mother’s wedding.’ He nodded, then shook his head. ‘Best leave it for the moment.’
‘It’s uncanny that all this should come out now,’ Naomi said. ‘Easy to understand why the Greeks are keeping quiet. Must be a legal minefield with the island having belonged to Italy.’
‘The papers contained data on a hundred thousand people that lived in Rhodes,’ the priest said. ‘Information about their economic and social life, their friends and foes, their political leanings, their faith, and so on. Under Italian dictatorship, the “Enemies of the State” were black-listed. The Carabinieri, a division of the Italian army, kept records on spies, fanatics, partisans, and their religions: Muslim, Catholic, Orthodox, or Jewish. The files concerning the Jewish race came to the attention of the Germans when they took over the island.’
‘And you hope these documents will help get our property back?’ she asked again.
‘I’m not sure, but they can’t harm our case. The main problem is that they’ve all been taken to Italy. Getting the relevant papers in time for court will be near impossible. We have to think things through. See what we can do.’
Naomi said, ‘So, the local government of Rhodes were aware of the census being found, knew about our case to reclaim family property, and they chose to keep quiet about the documents.’
‘A little underhand, perhaps,’ the priest said.
‘A little?!’ Marina cried. ‘Grandpa, it’s disgraceful!’
*
‘Will it help?’ Bubba asked when the priest had gone.
Naomi shrugged. ‘I guess we’ll have to wait and see.’
‘Will you give me the diary? I’d like to read some. I can’t recall much of what I wrote.’
‘It’s pretty powerful stuff, Bubba. I don’t want you getting upset. I’ve just read about you shooting the German to save the Andartes in the villa. My heart’s still thudding. Can you hang on until you are a little stronger?’
Bubba’s eyes glazed for a moment, then she nodded and quipped, ‘Perhaps you’re right. I’ll sit outside and do my gymnastics for a while.’