The Holocaust of the Greek Jews is one of the most heinous crimes in Greek History. Of the 77.000 Jews living in Greece on the eve of World War II, only 10.000 managed to survive the Nazi extermination camps.
Unfortunately, the almost total uprooting of the Greek Jews has not taken its proper place, both in official history and in collective memory. At the same time, how Holocaust survivors were treated post-war by the Greek state and local communities is usually kept silent.
As part of the Eteron History Podcasts, Yiannis Albanis talks with the historian Rika Benveniste about the Holocaust of the Greek Jews. Ms. Benveniste teaches Medieval History at the University of Volos and has done important studies on the Holocaust. The discussion with her attempts to illuminate aspects of Nazi atrocities that are not known to the general public, but also to delve into the political and philosophical questions raised by the study of the Holocaust.
At the heart of the discussion, Eleni Katomeri reads excerpts from Rika Benveniste's books "Luna" and "Those who survived" (published by Polis publications). It should be noted that "Luna" has also become a theatrical performance, directed by Damianos Konstantinidis.
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Contents Podcast:
00:13 The testimony of Giorgos Vafopoulos about the Jews in the forced labor (Those who survived, p. 75)
02:43 The presence of Jews in Greece
07:21 Luna's memory of confinement in the ghetto (Luna, p. 40)
08:23 How the Nazis methodized the extermination of the Greek Jews.
19:42 The attitude of Christians towards the persecution of their fellow Jews
22:21 The evacuation of Rezi Vardar to Baron Hirsch's ghetto, from an article in the post-war Israeli Step (Those who survived, p. 79)
24:21 The Jewish resistance
31:33 The story of the Jewish rebel David Aaron (The Survivors, p. 70)
34: 50 Adapting to the horror routine
37:00 Loden Vogel's testimony about the reality of the concentration camps (Those who survived, p. 313)
38:22 What is the uniqueness of the Holocaust
42:24 The course of death (Luna, pg 72)
43:10 The annihilation of the Greek Jews
44:50 A homeland that has become foreign
49:50 Memorandum to the Refugee Resettlement Office (Luna, p. 95)
51:40 The treatment of survivors by the Greek state and local communities
55:35 Speech by Dr Zalman Grinberg shortly after liberation from the camps (The Survivors, p. 173)
57:16 The sense of death and the surge of vitality
1:00:14 What remains of Sephardic culture
1:04:35 By what right did the poets speak? (Abel Jacob Hertzberg, Between Two Streams: A Diary from Bergen-Belsen. Those who survived, p. 173)
SOURCE: eteron.org, 21.10.2022