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By Sakis Ioannidis
“Enserradura” was the name in Hebrew of an old ceremony for young, unmarried, depressed girls. The sufferer would spend a week with an elderly nurse in complete silence, with only soup and water, saying prayers while holding a handful of “mumya”, which were believed to be the ashes of Jewish Saints from the Holy Land. Stella Levi introduces us to the Jewish Hospital of Rhodes with this, almost ancient, medical wisdom in her autobiographical book “One Hundred Sabbaths”.
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"My name is Heinz Dario Cunio, today I am 93." With these words he began his shocking story in 2021 in star.gr, on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27/01, one of the few surviving Greek Jews who were displaced during World War II in the Nazi extermination camps and managed to return.
More: Heinz Kuno: At the age of 15 he experienced the horrors of the Holocaust
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Before the Holocaust, Thessaloniki had 50.000 Jewish residents. After that only 1.900 remained. Of the 77.000 who lived throughout Greece, 67.000 perished in the concentration camps.
The number of Greek Jews who boarded the wagons without turning back is a piece of history that is not even mentioned in school books, perhaps because we lived in a society that did not tolerate diversity, especially in religious matters. "Bracelet of Fire", a series that you can watch on Ertflix if you have a very strong stomach, came to state television this year to change many stereotypes thanks to its truth since it is about the family history of the author of the book Bettys Magrizou.
Her father lived two years in the concentration camps, first in Auschwitz and then in Buchenwald, until liberation in 1945. He never spoke of this experience to his children until one day, a month before he died, he called his daughter close to him. The book will also be published in French, while the series will be shown on TV5.
More: "THE BRACELET OF FIRE": THE SHOCKING STORY OF THE SAIA FAMILY FROM THESSALONIKI WHICH...
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By Stavros Jima, DAILY, 21.3.2023. Hela Metalon was twelve years old when one day her father appeared in the living room of their house with an old, empty aquarium. The little fishes had died and little Hela, like her other three siblings, were waiting for him to replace them with others.
Instead of fish, however, Heinz Cunio put in a lamp and “some, strange to my eyes, things. It was a piece of wire mesh, a glass and inside it a piece of bush, a diary, an old rosary and a bar of soap!'
Kunio, a Jew from Thessaloniki who survived the Holocaust, had "set up" Auschwitz in his house! The aquarium was the first "acquaintance" of his children with the trauma that their father carried inside him. Cunio fiercely fought death in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany and (sur)lived "to talk", as he said. "You ask all these things if you're a child," Kunio's daughter tells "K" today.
More: DAD, WHAT'S THAT NUMBER ON YOUR HAND? Children of Holocaust survivors talk about...
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Thessaloniki honored the victims of the Holocaust in the presence of Katerina Sakellaropoulou. Jews who traveled to the city, captivated everyone with their words…
"We defeated the terrible Holocaust that the Nazis wanted to do against us. I stand here, where our brothers, the Jews of Thessaloniki, left for death to light a candle in their memory. In memory of all the Jews of Greece who were exterminated in the death camps. And in memory of all the Greeks, heroes, patriots and resistance fighters who fought for the Jews of Greece. In memory of the Greek people who stood in the difficult moments of the Occupation", said, clearly moved, but with a particularly thunderous voice, the 81-year-old Jew, Esther Sol.
Mrs. Sol, born in April 1942 in Drama, asked to speak at the event held today 26.3.23, at the old railway station of Thessaloniki, to mark the 80th anniversary of the departure of the first trains to the Nazi camps gathering, in order to explain, before the President of the Republic, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, how she, her mother and father were saved, while all their other relatives were excommunicated.