DAILY, 29.1.2017, "The Trauma of the Second Generation of the Holocaust", by Yiannis Papadopoulos:
She was a little girl when she noticed a number engraved on her mother's hand. “What do you want to know now? It's a phone number,” she had been told then to satisfy her childish curiosity. But the years passed, the number did not disappear and the questions multiplied. Why did they experience this? Who betrayed them? How did they survive? At some point, Anna Kampeli's mother broke her silence. She described the trains, the concentration camps and the sorting day at Auschwitz, when she was separated from her family forever.
"He didn't speak easily in the early years, just like others didn't. Maybe because they were trying to protect us," Ms. Kampeli tells "K". Both her parents, Greek Jews from Ioannina and Athens, survived the concentration camps. Every year at this time, on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, the stories of those executed and survivors come to the fore again. But there is another side: that of the descendants of the victims, who have been carrying the heavy burden of memories for decades.
What is it like to grow up in a house with that past? Not have an extended family network? Trying to understand why they targeted his loved ones? Since the 60s, hundreds of scientific studies have been conducted internationally on how the trauma of the Holocaust travels from generation to generation. In Ms. Kampeli's case, her parents' past burdened her childhood shoulders with a heavy sense of responsibility.
“Do we know? Do we remember? Are we learning?' It was the title of yesterday's event for the commemoration of the Day of Remembrance of the Greek Jewish Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust in Athens, which was held at the Cultural Center of the Hellenic World with the full presence of the Jewish community, as well as the representatives of the Greek state. The regional governor Rena Dourou, the ambassador of Israel Irit Ben Amba, the president of the Central Israelite Council of Greece David Saltiel and the president of the Israelite Community of Athens, Minos Mousis, addressed the greeting. The keynote speaker was the president of the World Jewish Congress, Mr. Ronald Lauder, who felt the need to thank the Greek Gentiles with the leadership figures of the Archbishop of Damascus and the mayor and metropolitan of Zakynthos who saved hundreds of souls during World War II. ... READ OUT HERE THE ENTIRE ARTICLE.
The Hellenic Republic, with the representative of the regional governor of Attica, Rena Dourou, and the Israelite Community of Athens with its president, Mino Moussis, are commemorating today in Athens the Day of Remembrance of Jewish Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust, in an event with Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Council.
In the triple question posed as the title of today's event by the organizers ("We know; We remember; We are taught;») the answer unfortunately is a triple negative. Despite the fact that our country was the one that saw its Jewish population disappear in greater proportion than most other European countries in the Nazi extermination camps, even today our knowledge of the Shoah is rudimentary, our memory lacking and the relative teaching in its infancy. What's worse is that, according to all public opinion surveys over the last few decades, the percentage of Greek citizens who harbor hostile feelings towards Jews and Judaism remains stable - if not even increasing - far exceeding the Western European average. After all, even the existence of an openly Nazi figure in the Greek Parliament confirms the tolerance of a section of Greek society for anti-Semitic sermons... READ OUT HERE THE ENTIRE ARTICLE.
of ALEKOU RAPTI, Epirotikos Agon, 28.1.2017
Major Gustav Willy Havranek (Gustav Willy Havranek) was the responsible German officer who gave the guidelines to Ioannina, for the deportation of the members of the Jewish Community of Ioannina, on that tragic day, March 25, 1944.
However, several years later, after the end of the war, in a series of interrogations conducted by the German public prosecutor's office in Bremen in 1968, Hafranek denied everything and declared his innocence.
The interrogation file is contained in German historian Christoph Schminck Gustavus' book "Memories of Occupation II". In the investigative material, the "accused" German officer states: "...Since 1943 I was a major of the Police. I also had this grade in Ioannina. My main task was to act as a link between the Wehrmacht and the Greek Police... I would like to say that my main concern was to maintain radio contact between the Wehrmacht and the Greek Police...
I remember the "Jews operation" in Ioannina. In my opinion it was held in March 1944, because I arrived in Ioannina only in the middle of February of the same year. On the eve of this "settlement of the Jews", senior SS and Police commanders from Athens communicated by radio with us... Then the Hellenic Gendarmerie was notified by me which would be responsible for the implementation of the measures.
I informed the Hellenic Gendarmerie about what exactly they had to do and that the Wehrmacht would have the means of transport, as they had told me by radiogram. Everything was neatly distributed…
The commanders of the units involved, i.e. the Wehrmacht, the Secret Police, the German Gendarmerie and the Greek Police, were themselves responsible for their activities...
More: FROM THE HISTORY OF THE HOLOCAUST OF THE JEWS OF IOANNINES
On the occasion of the Remembrance Day for the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis, the historian and translator Odette Varon-Vassar, founding member of the Society for the Study of Greek Jewry, professor at the Hellenic Open University and author of the book The Emergence of a Difficult Memory (Hestia Bookstore, 2013nd edition XNUMX) speaks to LIFO.gr for the difficulty of emerging and forming this memory, as well as the necessity of its emergence and preservation.
By Thodoris Antonopoulos
The genocide of the Jews of Europe was the leading Nazi crime, not only for the extent of the persecution and the number of victims (5.5-6 million souls), nor for the chillingly scientific methodology with which it was carried out: Its most despicable side was the systematic "ostracism" of an entire population group from the human species based solely on their supposedly inferior racial origin, which allowed abusers to express and project onto their defenseless victims the worst human instincts. It is a memory that does not concern only one people but humanity as a whole since it indelibly marked its moral and cultural status, its evolutionary course as such. For indeed "If this is man," as Primo Levi's iconic testimony of the Shoah is titled, then all the philosophical, ethical, and existential quests of our species throughout the ages, our cultural achievements, the gods we have created trying to define the unspeakable are simply cancelled. This is what makes it so important to preserve this collective memory against not only the oblivion of time but also attempts to question what has come to be known more widely as the Holocaust in a global environment conducive to the cultivation of racist ideas and practices.
The Greek Jewish community was one of those who paid the greatest price, having almost disappeared between 1941-1944. The memory of the extermination of 60.000 Greek Jews (87% of their total population) was one of the last to emerge in a country where even the memories of resistance had been erased for decades due to the civil war. With my interlocutor, who also directs since 2011 an educational seminar on the history, memory and representations of the genocide of the Jews of Europe at the Jewish Museum of Greece, we discussed the adventures of Greek Jewry in the Occupation, the meaning of today's Remembrance Day, the causes of the "delay" and the important steps taken in recent years in highlighting and institutionally recognizing it with the organization of events, the construction of monuments, its even rudimentary inclusion in education, the increased interest of the media, etc., something encouraging in a country where, more or less the same time, a party with clear Nazi and anti-Semitic origins emerged as a third political force, where anti-Semitism in public discourse is not rare and where the vandalism of Jewish monuments is "routine" news. However, she is very careful in her wording, avoiding brackets, simplifications and generalizations as she believes that a cool, objective approach is more essential, fruitful and effective.
More: INTERVIEW OF ODET VARON-VASSAR ON THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE GREEK JEWISH COMMUNITY DURING...
On 29.1.2017 it was published in the Newspaper Everyday the following article by Ioanna Fotiadis entitled A meeting that was delayed... regarding the story of the rescue of the family of Isaac Eliezer.
Viktor, Sofia-Maria and Georgianna chat animatedly, make jokes and tell truths looking straight into the eyes – without, however, the three of them being friends or relatives in the conventional sense. They are descendants of two families on whom the German occupation left an indelible mark and History brought together in a metaphysical way. Victor, the firstborn son of Isaac Eliezer, is a descendant of one of the Jewish families that were saved from the atrocity of the Nazis. Sofia-Maria and Georgianna Moraitou are granddaughters of Maria Dimadi, heroine of the Resistance, who saved Victor's father, but was executed two weeks before the liberation of her town, Agrinio. "We've only met three times, but I feel a great intimacy," Viktor says excitedly to "K", emphasizing that he has paid off a debt inherited from his father. For the two women, the meeting in question strengthens the link with a grandmother they only knew through stories and completes a "puzzle" that had remained incomplete for decades. "I'm only sorry that we didn't manage to meet earlier, so that my 90-year-old mother, who is now suffering from dementia, could also participate in it," says the first-born daughter, Sofia-Maria, bitterly.
The different surname and the distance from Agrinio made it difficult for decades to "identify", which refers to an ancient tragedy. The solution came last October when Victor received a message on Facebook from a mutual friend. Within a few 24 hours they meet for the first time, while a wider meeting of all the members of the families on both sides follows. "The story has touched my daughter a lot, who, looking for additional information about her great-grandmother, has led us to other descendants of people who were saved thanks to the intervention of Dimadi," notes Georgianna.
The child of a bourgeois family, Maria Dimadi, having returned to Agrinio in 1939 from studying Literature in Hamburg, has been assigned as a secretary and translator for the German guard, while she has set up "Center 3", the information network of the EAM.