“The voices of 50,000 deported Thessaloniki Jews must not be forgotten. It is time for Greece to delve back into its memory.”
Those are the heartfelt words of David Saltiel, president of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community, which today numbers barely a thousand, three-quarters of a century after it was nearly wiped out by the Nazis.
Sunday saw residents gather at the city’s old railway station in memory of the first of 19 convoys of Jewish residents deported to Auschwitz under Nazi occupation.
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 75 years ago this week, the community in the city, which was mainly Sephardic Jews chased out of Spain in 1492, had developed to the point where it 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 four percent of them surviving the Nazi death camps to which they were dispatched.
Over the past five years, Thessaloniki has held commemorations in mid-March, instigated by mayor Yannis Boutaris to remember the first of the convoys of Jews rounded up and sent off to the camps from Thessaloniki’s railway station on March 15, 1943.
In January, Boutaris said the Greek authorities had been deeply remiss in waiting so long to officially commemorate the Jews’ fate. He asked, “Who has mourned neighbours who disappeared? What monuments did we erect? What ceremonies did we celebrate?”
He also denounced the looting of the belongings left behind by deportees.
By building a museum and developing memorial tourism to accompany a surge of literary works on the subject of the wartime extermination of the Greek city’s Jews, the Greek authorities are now busy revisiting a sober page of their history.
In January, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin visited to lay the first stone of Thessaloniki’s 7,000-square-meter (75,000-square-feet) Holocaust Museum, financed by Germany and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, due to open in 2020.
It was only in 2004 that teaching about the Shoah became compulsory in Greece, and 10 years later that a monument would be erected at the site of the former Jewish cemetery which the Germans razed and where the city university now stands.
“As the extreme right gains ground across Europe, Greece must remind its young generation where racism and antisemitism can lead,” warned Saltiel.
In 2016, a Pew Research study indicated 55% of Greeks have a negative opinion of Jews.
Saltiel, who will soon publish in Greece a work featuring correspondence between mothers stuck in the Thessaloniki ghetto and their children who had fled to Athens, stresses “the progress of the past few years.”
He points to the creation of a faculty of Hebrew studies and better-informed teachers of Shoah-related material.
Furthermore, he says, “the new museum will plan an even more important role — replying to Holocaust deniers with historic proof at hand.”
