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My name is Jack Valmayor.
I was born here in Salonica 70 years ago.
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my family and I are from Salonica.
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Apparently our family roots
are from Mallorca,
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we came here
before 1492 or after 1492,
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it's not exactly clear.
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Our... our country was always
the city of Salonica but not the [Greek] country,
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because here...
there where before the Byzantines,
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the Romans, the Byzantines,
the Greeks.....then the Romans,
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then came the Byzantines,
then the Venezians,
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from Venice....
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then came the Turks
for nearly 500 years,
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the Ottomans, until 1912,
when the city was liberated from the Greeks,
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and since then,
the city of Salonica is a Greek city,
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and we -and me personally-, and my family
were born in Greek Salonica
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so from that moment
on we were born Greek citizens
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And since that moment...
all the culture that we learnt at school...
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The basic culture
is always the Greek culture.
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After what happened... in 1943,
what happened here...
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the extermination of the Jews
from Salonica... who were...
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ahh, 60,000 Jews in Salonica
were executed in the camps
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of Poland, Auschwitz-Birkenau.
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Eh... all of my father's
family died there,
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the only survivor was my father,
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and like him another 1,500 people
that managed to return from the camps after the war
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and who started... the beginning
of the construction of the city of Salonica,
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that before the war was...
about 25% to 30% of the population of the city.
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It was very difficult because...
they had to build a new community,
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without any economic resources
and without the people needed to build a new culture
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or to continue with the old culture,
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and then the important part
of the culture, which was the spoken language that
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the Jews of Salonica spoke. It was
the Spanish language that we are speaking now.
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It's called ladino,
it's called Djudezmo, it's called Judaeo-Spanish,
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but here among us,
we say "we speak Spanish".
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This language was only spoken
by the families of my generation,
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after my generation
the families no longer spoke Judaeo-Spanish,
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and that's why there are
very few, in Salonica at least,
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who can speak this language,
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much less read it,
"meldarla" ['to read' in ladido], because
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the old scriptures
that were in Judaeo-Spanish
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were in a Hebrew alphabet
and today there are very few people...
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who can read it,
and that's why this culture, unfortunately...
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I don't think it will last
until the end of this century,
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-and that's asking too much-.
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Those of us that can speak it,
speak it poorly, as you can see, as I speak it,
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I don't have much fluency to speak it
because we don't have the possibility...
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of speaking it everyday. When our families
lived, we could speak it;
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now not even living
families can speak it.
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And this is just only
regarding language.
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The community made some efforts
to revive the use of this language
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and we had.....we were interested
at the beginning, but aparently the new generations
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have more important things
to worry about,
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and that's why there's no effort anymore.
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Whenever we have the opportunity,
we help anyone interested in
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this language, in this culture,
and we hope that in the future..
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more and bigger efforts are made
so as not to let... not to let this language die.