Greece marked the anniversary of the departure in 1943 of the first train from Thessaloniki taking members of the city’s thriving Jewish community to the Auschwitz death camp.
Thessaloniki had a population of more than 50,000 Jews before World War II — some 46,000 of whom were deported and killed at German Nazi death camps.
Before the deportations started, the Jewish community in the city, which mainly comprised Sephardic Jews whose ancestors had been chased out of Spain in 1492, had flourished to the point where it had earned the nickname “The Jerusalem of the Balkans.”
The Holocaust of the Greek Jews was one of the darkest episodes of the Nazi occupation of the country.
