Rhodes

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.

The question this page asked itself, answered — and it is not a comfortable answer

The table below has said since it was written that who among the Codrons was deported in July 1944 has not been checked here. It has now been checked — not against Yad Vashem, which remains the right register, but against the index of gravestones. It took an afternoon and it should have been done long ago.

The cemetery on the island — 1768 to 1937

The same index holds about twenty Codron graves in the Jewish Cemetery of the Island of Rhodes, with the row numbers, running from 1768 to 1937 — that is, from before the American revolution to seven years before the community was destroyed.

Yaacov Codron, 1768 is the earliest. Then Sara De Salomon-Jeuda (1871), David De Abraham (1878), Dona De Joseph-Franco (1892), Rica De Haim (1892), Rosa De Abraham (1899), Lunar De Hizkia (1901), Raffael (1902), Isaac De Joseph and Miriam De Nissim (1904), Rebecca Mujer de Samuel-Israel (1910), Isaac De Abraham (1918), Risula and Samuel De Matalbria (1920), Abraham De Nissim (1923), Behora Simha David (1926), Paligoria De Behor-Menasce and Rachel De Reuben (1932), Risula De Isaac (1937), and Caden De Abraham Signoru Franco Codron, 1852–1941.

And a Codron family in Cape Town

Six Codrons lie in the Pinelands Jewish cemeteries at Cape Town — which is the other end of the migration this page argues he took.

Two of those are worth staring at. Guditha Codron died on 14 October 1997 — six months after Santou, in the same country. And Isaac Nissim Codron carries both of the names that surround him: Santou's own full name is Santou Isaac Codron, and Nissim is a Codron name on Rhodes three times over in the list above.

Codrons also appear at the Stockholm Jewish Memorial — a survivors' memorial — at the Melbourne Chevra Kadisha, and at Home of Peace Memorial Park in Los Angeles, one of them in a plot marked Western Jewish Institute. Rhodes, Auschwitz, Cape Town, Stockholm, Melbourne, Los Angeles: the shape of what happened to one island's families.

What this archive does and does not claim

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.