"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.
He remembers his father telling them that "the Jews from Greece, who were sent to the concentration camps, were tighter, stronger." “They've always stuck together because of that and they've been able to survive. They helped each other. Even the Nazis of the SS were "afraid" of this unity of the Greek Jews", he says characteristically.
Shlomo Sevi was born in Israel after his parents laid the foundations of their new life there, after the Holocaust. "My mother's family (Shemo) was from Arta and my father's family (Sevi) from Thessaloniki. Of all the members of the two families, only my mother and my father survived. They were 16-17 years old when they were released and went to look for their families in Thessaloniki and Arta. They found nothing and no one. They met through acquaintances and got married. After a year they went from Sounio and from there they arrived, in June '46, in Haifa, where they were caught by the English and put in prison at first."
Years passed and the Sevi family settled in Rehovot, with the parents talking to their children about what they experienced and teaching them Greek, which Shlomo Sevi never forgot. "What our parents told us got our blood flowing. Let's not throw away bread, help people in need, do good in life and God will return all this to us," recalls the 75-year-old, who has also participated in other memorial marches in the past. Besides, as he says, he still has relatives here.
The first time he visited Greece, however, was many years ago, in the distant 1955, together with his mother. "It's been so many years and yet I remember everything like it was yesterday," he says, emotion evident in his voice. With the same emotion and with his father's striped overalls in his hands - the one he has as a photo on the cardboard he is holding in his hands - Slomo Sevi goes wherever he is called to talk about what his family lived through. "So that the memory doesn't fade," he tells us, shortly before we renew our appointment for next year's course.
Source: Newsit.gr, 19.3.2023