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...
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...
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.
"My father always said: don't ask how we survived. Things happened - and we did - that the human mind can't possibly imagine." With the number 116244 engraved on his left hand and the number 77029 on his right, 75-year-old Shlomo Sevi, from Rehovot, Israel, tells the story of his parents, who managed to survive the horrors of the Holocaust.
A story that, in addition to his soul, has been engraved on both of his hands, with the numbers that his parents carried as prisoners in the hell camps of the Third Reich. Sitting on the tracks of the old railway station of Thessaloniki, where 80 years ago the first train to Auschwitz left, Slomo Sevi considers it his duty, as long as he lives, to participate in memorial marches for the victims of the Holocaust, such as the one on March 19 2023, in Thessaloniki, so that he too can contribute as much as he can to preserving the memory.
He holds a cardboard with black and white photos of his parents' families - in the right and left corners - and a photo of the distinctive striped overalls worn by prisoners in the Third Reich's hell camps in the middle. With his three daughters by his side, he recounts how despite the fact that many of the survivors did not speak for years - some never - about what they experienced, his parents (Malka-Kula and Michael-Oscar) told everything to so did his brother.
The memories that sealed her mind and soul, at the tender age of three, when she was in the Bergen-Belsen camp, she unfolded on 29.1.2023, on the sidelines of the memorial event at the Holocaust Memorial of the Jews of Thessaloniki in Eleftherias Square. Rina Barzilai Revach, one of the hostages in the Nazi concentration camps.
"I was in the camps at a very young age. My memories, which I have said, are poor, they are few from a child of three, four years old, but they are indelible" were her first words, before she began to describe the memory that she says she remembers more than anything she just did yesterday.
“I was in the camp, I was sick all the time and I was coughing and I was in the third bed because the beds were on top of each other and it had a little skylight up there. Opposite was a labor camp and I was fooling around all day. One day there came a big cart, very big, with high wooden sides, it was pulled by horses and two workers underneath were throwing naked corpses of workers into the cart, because they had to distinguish the living from the dead. When the cart was filled with corpses, an officer stepped up with a long big black well-polished boot and started jumping on the corpses so that others could sit and fit. I don't know what I understood but I started crying and the sick ladies who were there, because everyone else was leaving for work - forced labor -, were trying to find some sugar to give me, which wasn't there," he said. She noted, however, that there were not many children in the camp as she only remembers one other little girl who was a little older than her.