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68 additional memorial stones were laid on Saturday 1stη June 2019 at the 1st Boys' Gymnasium of Thessaloniki in memory of the student victims of the Holocaust. A confrontation with oblivion, a valuable guide for the future.
Walking down Vasilissis Olgas Street in Thessaloniki you now stumble upon the dark past of the city. One hundred and forty-nine bronze stones inscribed with the names of the Jewish students of the 1st Boys' Gymnasium are placed in the ground outside the school to remind them of the harsh route of their transportation by the Nazis to the Auschwitz concentration camps during the Occupation. Of these only six managed to survive. The school yard this time was not filled with voices of small children but with residents of the neighborhood of Agia Triada and old graduates of the school who came to honor the students of their school who prematurely left life in such a brutal way.
The project
“I was curious to know how many students at my school were victims of the Holocaust. We thought at first it would be five or six but after a thorough investigation we discovered that there were 149, of which 143 were murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camps and six barely survived in the USA, Israel and two in Thessaloniki," he says characteristically speaking to Deutsche Welle Apostolos Dereklis who took the initiative for placing the memorial stones in collaboration with the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The project was far from easy as it required thorough research, dealing with various bureaucratic problems regarding the placement of the memorial stones and was completed after 8 years.
The so-called "Stolpersteine" which in Greek are called stones of memory are the idea of the German artist Gunter Demnig who started the pioneering project in 1994 in Berlin managing to place 73.000 such stones in 24 countries across Europe. The small bronze stones, size 10X10 cm, cost 120 euros, are handmade. Why; "I wanted to emphasize the following contrast: Because the extermination of the Jews was done in an industrial way, I wanted the construction of this memory to be done with my own hands," emphasizes the German artist, who travels almost 270 days a year to promote of his work. "It is very important for young people and students who see a memorial that is very specific: with the name, age, date of death of the Holocaust victim, not abstractly. It is connected to the residence of each victim like a school here today. This motivates them to search the story further. But also for the relatives of the victims to have a place of remembrance and pilgrimage where this does not exist", Guder Demnig points out.
The importance today
Anyone can participate in the deeply democratic and interactive artistic project of memorial stones and request the placement of a Holocaust victim's name on the ground after providing the necessary historical evidence. However, not everything is rosy in this endeavour. During the 25 years, eight hundred stones have been removed by opponents of the effort. One such attempt almost succeeded in the "commemorative strip placed in front of the house that was the headquarters of the German Ministry for the expulsion of the Jews, where Alois Brunner lived on Velissariou and Agia Triados Streets in Thessaloniki", points out Mr. Dereklis, continuing on the importance of this memory today: "In Romania Roma are persecuted by Nazi elements, in Poland any mention of Poles' collaboration with the Nazis in the Holocaust is criminalized, in Germany in some areas no one can wear the Jewish kippah and in France we have many Jews fleeing in Israel due to pressure from Islamists. This is not the example of Europe, and unfortunately has similarities with the interwar period. Thus, such a project acts as a wake-up call, especially for the Greek society that is constantly forgetting". Memory is placed on the ground to indelibly inscribe what must not be repeated. As the outgoing Mayor of Thessaloniki Yiannis Boutaris emphasized in his substantive intervention at the honorary event: "It is our duty to remember our fellow citizens who were lost in this way. To learn to live, to respect diversity. We may brag that we are succeeding but we still have a long way to go."
of Diogenes Dimitrakopoulos, Thessaloniki
SOURCE: website www.dw.com, 6.6.2019