- Details
HUFFINGTON, 25.1.2017, of Vassos Kollia, former g.g. Gender Equality: On January 2, 2005, the United Nations General Assembly decided to declare January 27 as the International Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust. Rejecting all denial of the Holocaust as a historical fact, the General Assembly adopts resolution A/RES/60/7, in which it condemns "without any hesitation" all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, abuse or violence against persons or communities, based on national origin or religious beliefs, wherever they come from.
This particular date was chosen because on January 27 1945 advancing Soviet troops liberated the largest concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.
Already in 2004, with its unanimous decision, the Greek Parliament had established January 27 as a day of remembrance and honor for the Greek Jews who lost their lives in the Nazi concentration camps, but also for those who selflessly and courageously risked their lives to save their fellow citizens from certain death.
In his message a year later, the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon says:
«International Holocaust Remembrance Day is a day to reaffirm our commitment to human rights. [...] We must move beyond the memory and ensure that new generations know this history. We must apply the lessons of the Holocaust to the world. And we must do our best to ensure that all people enjoy the protections and rights that the U.N. represents.»
The knowledge of History is anyway a valuable tool for the progress and evolution of humanity, so that we do not relive the mistakes of the past.
- Details
of STAVROU JIMA
A sudden downpour that broke out in June 2003 in the city of Thessaloniki was to reveal another tragic aspect of the holocaust of the city's brilliant Jewish community, that of the extermination of the schoolchildren.
As the building of the Italian Educational Institute on Vasilissis Olgas Street was flooded, the professor-employee of the institute Antonio Crescenci ran to the basement where the vaults and boxes of files were kept, in an attempt to save what he could of the precious documents. As he recounts, a page of floating paper got stuck to his water-soaked trousers at one point, and when he took a quick look at it, he saw that it was an exhibition from the interwar period, by Jewish student Giacomo Modiano, entitled "My First Bicycle ». He realized that the boxes with the spidery envelopes threatened by the water were hiding something very serious and he hurried to move them, those first, to a safe place. When he opened them and started flipping through the documents, History leapt out. They were, for example, graduation certificates and exhibitions of Jewish students who studied at the Italian school in Thessaloniki, but they never received them because, in 1943, the "death trains" to Auschwitz caught up with them and some left the city to save themselves.
More: THE SECOND GRADUATION OF THREE STUDENTS WHO SURVIVED THE HOLOCAUST
- Details
Unprecedented publishing success was achieved by the annotated edition of Adolf Hitler's My Struggle, which was republished in Germany exactly one year ago, having not been republished since 1945. The annotated edition, as announced by the book's publisher, has has sold 85.000 copies to date.
The Institute of Modern History in Munich originally printed just 4.000 copies of the annotated edition, but a year later the work is already in its sixth edition.
Hitler's delusional work is accompanied in the new edition by 3.500 explanatory historical notes and commentaries, so that its use for the purpose of Nazi propaganda is unlikely. However, critics of the effort have repeatedly expressed concern over the potential use of the two-volume work to promote Nazi propaganda.
"It turns out that the fear of this publication, that it would facilitate the promotion of Nazi ideology, was unfounded," Andreas Wirsing, director of the Institute of Modern History, underlines in the relevant announcement.
From the statistics collected by the publishers of the two-volume work, it appears that its buyers are mainly "readers interested in history and politics, as well as many educators".
"Debating Adolf Hitler's vision of the world, but also the way he approached propaganda, allowed us to address the causes and consequences of totalitarian ideologies at a time when authoritarianism and far-right ideas are gaining ground," added Mr Wirsing.
It is worth noting that in Germany, for the first time since World War II, a right-wing populist movement, the "Alternative for Germany", is rapidly gaining strength.
- Details
On 14.12.2016, the following article entitled "The Art of Barbed Wire" was published on the website of the newspaper "EPIROTIKOS AGON" regarding the release of the new year's calendar of the Joseph and Esther Gani Foundation.
The Joseph and Esther Gani Foundation released the new year's calendar again this year. Edition, as always, edited with collecting interest, we think among the best editions of the Foundation from an aesthetic point of view, but also because of the originality of the subject. Art as testimony, "Holocaust Art", as the art behind the barbed wire was called, was created in the concentration camps and ghettos by Jewish artists, several of them with important studies in the Art Academies of Europe, as an outlet of the spirit , freed from the black reality.
The rescued works - about 6000 - belong to the Yad Vashem Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, of which 19 are included in the Foundation's 2017 Calendar. But apart from their artistic value - some even at a high level, such as: Karl Bodek–kurt Low "A spring" (With the yellow butterfly on the barbed wire), Mosche Rynecki "Refugees", Leo Haas "The transition from Vienna" etc.- these works are a record - with the hand on the heart and from there on the paper - of one of the darkest periods in the modern history of humanity.
"The painting created inside the concentration camps and ghettos is a shocking historical record, not only of the living conditions of the prisoners, but also of the thoughts, ideas and feelings of the artists who lived in extreme conditions of violence and anguish," he writes between others in the foreword by the president of the Napoleon Margaris Foundation.
More: JOSEPH & ESTHER GANI FOUNDATION NEW YEAR'S CALENDAR RELEASED
- Details
of Kostas Koukoumakas, 8.12.2016
Anecdotal historical evidence for one of the biggest taboos in Thessaloniki's modern history is brought to light by the exhibition of the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, entitled "Divided Memories 1940-1950. Between history and experience". In one of the sections of the report, which was inaugurated on 4.12.2016 by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Greece and Germany, valuable archives of the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki are revealed regarding the most guilty secret: the looting of Jewish properties, the local dosiligos and the destruction of the Jewish cemetery during the German Occupation.
At the beginning of World War II the Jewish community in Thessaloniki numbered around 55.000 people – more than half the city's population. Of the 46.091 Thessalonian Jews who were taken to the Nazi concentration camps, only 1.950 returned alive. But apart from the cold impression of the black statistics, the matter is not at all easy for the management of the city's temper. Not even for the public one 
memory, although nearly eight decades have passed. Just two years ago, the mayor Yiannis Boutaris, at inauguration of the monument of the Jewish cemetery leveled in 1942, he had said: "The city was unreasonably slow to break its unjust and guilty silence, but now it can say that it is ashamed of this unjust and guilty silence."
In the MMST report and in the section edited by the historian Vangelis Hekimoglou, we read that before their violent displacement the Jews had been forced to redeem their cash with worthless Polish notes, while they were asked to declare their assets "for statistical reasons" . From the same historical records we learn that an agency had been set up to "manage" Jewish property, mainly the 1.800 Jewish shops. "The "leaders" of the distributions were a lawyer from Serres, appointed to a senior position in the General Administration by the government of Athens, and a banker, author of a work praising the National Socialist organization of agriculture" we read in the report of the MMST, the material of which will soon be accessible on the Internet.
More: THESSALONIKI TALK ABOUT THE GUILTY SECRET OF JEWISH PROPERTY GRIP