The Israelite Community of Thessaloniki and the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki present the exhibition "Snapshots of occupiers 1941-1944. The Assael Collection" at the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, 11 Agios Minas.
The exhibition, with the aim of highlighting the history of the occupation period in the city of Thessaloniki through unpublished historical documents and, specifically, through photographs of German soldiers during the period of the Occupation, illuminates unseen aspects of Local History.
Visitors will have the opportunity to tour Occupied Thessaloniki and get to know unknown aspects of the past through rare photographic material. The evidence of the exhibition comes from the extremely rich archive of the collector and researcher Andreas Assaël. Assael's personal archive is different from other collections of possession photographs. The exhibition presents the entire private albums and photo sets of the German conquerors of Thessaloniki. The owners of the albums are not anonymous soldiers, but soldiers who served the Nazi regime, who introduce themselves through the commemorative photographs. Having their official and personal documents in his possession, Assael contributed to highlighting the faces hidden behind the photographic lens. As eyewitnesses to the multifaceted barbarity against the Christian population and especially the Thessalonian Jews, the conquerors immortalized conflicting events, such as the great famine in Thessaloniki and the events of Black Saturday in Liberty Square.
The Assael family is one of the Jewish families that hid with all its members together and were saved inside the occupied Thessaloniki. The story of Freddy, who on Black Saturday was brutally beaten by the Greek Christian dosilog Laskaris Papanaoum, unfolds through the images, and above all, through the narration of his son, Andreas Assael. If we could summarize the specificity of Andreas Assael's collection in one word, it would be the concept of "return".
Return as the collection "returned" to the descendant of one of the protagonists of this dark memory for the city and through him to the place and the wider community of the city, which it concerns, illuminating painful issues through micro-history and recommending a rare testimony with the in which we explore the intergenerational trauma and the traumatic memory of the German Occupation.
The opening of the exhibition will take place on Wednesday, December 11 at 18:00 at the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki. The exhibition will last until the end of August 2025 and will be framed by the scientific evening that will take place at the MOMus Museum of Photography on 12/12/2024 at 18:00. There will be educational tours for schools.
The exhibition was realized with the financial support of the Hellenic-German Fund for the Future and with the support of MOMus Museum of Photography.
Duration: 11/12/2024 – 31/8/2025
Hours: Monday – Friday 9:00 – 14:00 & Wednesday 17:00-20:00, Sunday 10:00 – 14:00
Photo source: from the Andreas Assaël Archive