Vaso Stamatiou, one of the last Greek survivors of Auschwitz, has died at the age of 98.
She had spent her last years in the Ecclesiastical Nursing Home of Stylida, Central Greece. In her single room she kept a binder with photos from her youth and painful memories of decades past, her own sketches depicting the horrors of Auschwitz, along with letters she sent her parents from the Gestapo detention facilities in Thessaloniki.
She belonged to the group of Greeks who were sent to the death camps during World War II after being accused of resistance activities and leftist-communist sentiments.
She was arrested by the Gestapo on March 28 in 1944 in central Thessaloniki, while a first-year law student, for participating in an attempted demonstration to commemorate the March 25 Greek Revolution of 1821. She returned to Thessaloniki in September 1945 but, like others, did not get the reception she expected.
