by Giorgos Lialiou
Two months ago I was in Israel for the second time and visited it Yad Vashem, the Holocaust History Museum located near Jerusalem. The museum experience, reconstructed in 2005, is sensational. The main part of the museum is an elongated prism-shaped building that creates a claustrophobic atmosphere. It is 180 meters long, but the visitor cannot cross it in a straight line: he must follow a serpentine path that "enters" and "exits" the prism, following a narrative.
At the entrance we are greeted by a projection, a ten-minute video created by Michal Rovner entitled "The world that was", a collage of images showing the life of European Jews before the Holocaust. Here is the "unfolding" of the story. From the early anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis and how propaganda portrayed Jews as inferior beings – it is shocking, for example, that a board game of the time, called Juden Raus, in which the first player to “kick” six Jews out of the city. Then we see how the first ghettos were created, the beginning of the persecutions and murders, how the concentration camps were created. And the museum narrative culminates in the story of survivors and coping with loss and a dome of 600 faces of Holocaust victims, accompanied by an ever-expanding archive of all victims.
During the tour, the tour guide asked if there were people from Greece in our international group. He reminded us that our country had numerically fewer victims, but percentage-wise the most, since 98% of Greek Jews were exterminated. In the museum there are several references to Greece, such as lists of children from Thessaloniki, the tickets they were given when they boarded the train that would take them to the death camps and wrote "round trip", to reassure them. One of the most moving references is in the room that pays tribute to those non-Jews who risked their lives to save their fellow Jews. Among the examples listed by country, there is also that of an elderly couple from Greece. You hardly leave this museum without being moved. Even if somewhere inside you there is a big thorn for what is happening in Palestine.
Writing a few days ago about the completion of the urban planning framework for the construction of the Holocaust Museum, I was thinking about the opportunities this will offer to Thessaloniki and to Greece in general. First, it will (finally) shed light on the history of Greek Jews in Thessaloniki, confronting the city with "trauma". Furthermore, with a museum narration of the aesthetics of Yad Vashem it will be a valuable educational tool for all of us (do not forget the anti-Semitism of a part of society) and, why not, a pole of attraction for visitors: Israelis love Greece and visit it more and more more. It is in the interest of our country to surround this case with great care.