- Informations
On 28.11.2023, the premiere of the historical documentary MY PEOPLE, by the actress and director Anna Rezan, took place at the Athens Concert Hall, under the auspices of the Hellenic Parliament, in the presence of parliamentarians, people of the spirit and culture, journalists and members of the Greek Jewish Community .
- Informations
More than 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II. For the first time, however, a "miracle" that occurred before its end is also known. It's about video which recorded the liberation of 2.500 Jews by the Nazis as they were en route by train from Bergen-Belsen to the Theresienstadt concentration camps on April 13, 1945.
The video is brought to the public for the first time by an American history professor. The train stopped near the village of Farsleben due to fighting between the US and Germany. So when the locomotive stopped, about 80 miles west of Berlin, and an American jeep and a tank appeared, the Nazi officers abandoned their posts and fled, leaving the 2.500 prisoners behind.
- Informations
Above the mountain ridge, beyond the border was the promised land, a neutral area of Spain that loomed as an escape, a second chance, a future.
Behind them was Nazi-occupied France and certain imprisonment or death. During World War II, a dangerous route through the Pyrenees Mountains was the way to escape Nazi persecution for hundreds of thousands of resistance fighters, civilians, Jews, allies and soldiers.
For many the ascent of the mountain through boulders and glaciers was the final leg of a long and perilous journey to wartime Europe, hiding from the German army, the Gestapo secret police and the paramilitary forces of the SS.
- Informations
December 1946. None of the 785 passengers of the ship with the code name "Rafiah" sailing in the waters of the Aegean could imagine that instead of their destination, Palestine, where they would set up their new homeland, they would end up on an almost uninhabited rock island, Syrna near Astypalaia.
Nor how 77 years later a broken part of bronze binoculars, a comb, a toothbrush and two glass bottles that they had in their luggage, would rise from the bottom and take a place in the showcase of a museum on the other side of the Atlantic to tell not only the unknown story of the ship with the double name - "Athena/Rafiah" - and its passengers, but also a chapter of the History of 20 XNUMXth century: that of the immigration of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.
These five everyday objects, however, are the ones that brought back to the news the case of the wreck of the "Athena", the ship that sank twice in its more than half a century of life. And which has not only contributed to the writing of a chapter of the creation of Israel, but also of Greek shipbuilding, as when it was launched in Syros in 1893 it was the first iron steamship built in Greece. For 46 years he traveled in the waters of the Saronic and the Eastern Aegean until he sank in Piraeus.
More: WHAT DOES A WRECK IN THE AEGEAN CONNECT WITH THE HOLOCAUST?
- Informations
At the end of July 1944, a new wind of optimism blows over Europe. On June 6, 1944, the Allies have landed in Normandy, the Allied troops advance and liberate, at the end of August Paris will be liberated, and the outcome of the war has been decided: Nazi Germany now knows that it will lose World War II.
The "Jewish question", i.e. the existence of Jews, has been "solved", with the "final solution" having completed its implementation, since the Jewish element has been exterminated to a different degree in each of the occupied countries. Last country Hungary, cradle of Ashkenazi Jewry, Yiddishland, in Central Europe with 750.000 Jews, saw hundreds of thousands sent to Auschwitz from mid-May to early July 1944. The camp flooded, the crematoria forced to work at breakneck speed . These would normally be the last operations to displace Jews. Those Jews who had survived until then would be saved. But it didn't happen like that.
In June 1944, on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, for the only time in the history of the Holocaust, ships were used instead of trains for the Jewish communities of the islands. In June, from Corfu (June 9 for women and June 14 for men) and from Crete (June 7, from the port of Souda), almost all Jews, regardless of gender and age, are deported, while the 275 from Zakynthos are spared the last moment, in honor of Zakynthos, which became the island of the "Righteous". The 350 Jews of Crete aboard the ship Tanais will be shipwrecked in the Aegean off Santorini as their ship is hit by a British torpedo. This now seems to be the last act of the drama. But there was one more. And this last mission, beyond its drama, proves something terribly important: how in the Nazi logic exterminating all the Jews was an absolute priority, even if they were just a few forgotten on some island, at the edge of the eastern Mediterranean. All of them down to one.
More: ARTICLE BY ODET VARON-VASSAR ON THE DISPLACEMENT OF THE JEWS OF RHODES AND KO
