On March 15, Greece marks 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.
Before World War II, 55,200 Jews lived in Salonika, comprising two-thirds of the population. By the end of the Holocaust, only 1,950 remained.
“Thessaloniki remembers this day. It is a day that no one has forgotten”, says the mayor of Thessaloniki, Konstantinos Zervas.
“On this day in 1943, a train with 2,400 Thessaloniki’s Jews started from here bound for faraway Poland. A death train with passengers who did not know where they were being led, who did not know that they had no return”, Zervas stated in his remarks.
“Today, 78 years later, it is our moral duty to keep this memory alive,” he added.
Before the deportations started, the Jewish community in the city, which mainly comprised Sephardic Jews chased out of Spain in 1492, had flourished to the point where it had earned the nickname “The Jerusalem of the Balkans.”
But then came the horrors of 1943, when virtually all of the town’s Jews were deported, just 4% of them surviving the Nazi death camps to which they had been sent.
Toward the end of February 1943, they were rounded up in three ghettos (Kalamaria, Singrou and Vardar/Agia Paraskevi) and then transferred to a transit camp, called the Baron Hirsch ghetto or camp, which was adjacent to a train station.
The first convoy departed on March 15, 1943. Each train carried from 1,000–4,000 Jews across the whole of central Europe, mainly to the Auschwitz death camp.
