High Level Officials, including President Katerina Sakellaropoulou, European Commission Vice-President Margaritis Schinas and Israeli Ambassador Yossi Amrani, participated in a march commemorating the victims of the Holocaust in Thessaloniki.
The march was co-organized by the Municipality of Thessaloniki, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the University of Macedonia, the International Hellenic University and the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki.
The memorial march was titled “Never again, Thessaloniki -Auschwitz – 79 years since the departure of the first train.”
“It is only if we transmit the historical knowledge to the next generation, if we preserve the memory, if we all have the empathy feel the pain and the anguish of the victims as it were our own, if we understand that the Holocaust is part of an international historical heritage, that can we arm ourselves against the march of evil,” said Sakellaropoulou during the march.
The Jewish community of Thessaloniki, with roots since the 15th century, when many fleeing persecution from Spain settled there, was decimated by the Nazis. Of the community’s nearly 50,000 people, almost 45,000 were deported to the extermination camp complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau in occupied Poland, where only a handful survived.
Postwar, the Jewish community in Thessaloniki numbered fewer than 2,000 people.
