Rhodes
Hedviga's second husband was born on Rhodes in 1913, into a Sephardic community that was almost entirely destroyed in 1944 — and he died in South Africa in 1997. How he came to be alive to marry her is the most interesting unanswered question in this archive.
The tree records him plainly and briefly: Santou (Shemtov) Isaac Codron, born 13 September 1913 at Rhodes, died 16 April 1997 in South Africa of cardio-respiratory arrest, married to Hedviga about 1973. That is every fact held on him. Each one opens onto a large history.
Shemtov — shem tov, “good name” — is a Sephardic given name, and Codron is a known Rhodes Jewish surname. He was, on the face of the record, a Rhodesli.
What happened to the community he was born into
Rhodes held a Sephardic Jewish community that had been there since the fifteenth century, speaking Judeo-Spanish — the language their ancestors carried out of Spain in 1492. In the quarter called La Djuderia it was still, in 1944, a living world.
On 20 July 1944 the SS ordered the island's Jews to assemble for a document check. 1,615 people from Rhodes, together with 94 from Kos, were packed into the cargo holds of livestock ships, taken to the Greek mainland, and put on a train. They arrived at Auschwitz on 16 August 1944 after what is generally called the longest deportation journey of the Holocaust. About 1,200 were murdered on arrival. Roughly 150 survived.
The likelier explanation, and why
He probably was not there — because the Rhodes Jews had been leaving for southern Africa for fifty years, and that is exactly where he turns up.
Rhodesli men began going to Africa for work at the end of the nineteenth century; Mousa and Solomon Benatar settled in Southern Rhodesia in 1895. Emigration accelerated through the 1920s and 1930s, to the Belgian Congo, Southern Rhodesia and South Africa — for economic reasons first, and from 1938 because of the Italian racial laws, Rhodes then being Italian territory. Sephardim from Rhodes settled in Salisbury, today's Harare, and founded a synagogue there in 1932. In all, close to two thousand Jews from Rhodes lived in the Congo and Southern Rhodesia between the 1920s and the 1960s.
Now set Hedviga's own movements beside that. She came to South Africa from Zimbabwe — that is, from Rhodesia — in April 1975, and she is recorded as marrying Codron around 1973, which places the marriage in the Rhodesian years.
What this archive does and does not claim
| Documented | Born 13 September 1913, Rhodes. Died 16 April 1997, South Africa, of cardio-respiratory arrest. Married Hedviga Blažević c. 1973. |
|---|---|
| Inferred | That he was a Rhodes Sephardi — from the given name Shemtov, the surname Codron and the birthplace together. |
| Inferred | That he most likely reached southern Africa before the war, as part of the documented Rhodes-to-Rhodesia migration — because he was alive in 1973 and because that route was well travelled. |
| Not claimed | That he survived Auschwitz. Nothing in this record says he was deported, and treating him as a survivor because he was born in the right place at the right time would be an invention. It would also be a serious one. |
| Not claimed | That his family escaped. The Codron name appears among Rhodes Jewish families; who among them was deported in July 1944 has not been checked here against the Yad Vashem or Rhodes Jewish Museum registers. |
What would settle it. South African immigration and naturalisation papers would give his arrival year and last residence outright. The Rhodes Jewish Museum and Yad Vashem hold community and deportation registers in which a Codron born 13 September 1913 would either appear or be absent — and either answer is worth having.