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Created : March 28, 2022

The text is not a short story, it is not a biography, it is part of my memories. It is truly a testimony of a soul, of a child, who for the first time dares to bring out the few memories he has. I almost feel guilty that I can't remember more, get more pain out of me.

I dedicate the text to my grandson and the family he will have, so that they may learn as much truth as possible about the Holocaust. I'm not a writer. I just want to record my childhood memories because, strangely enough, the older I get, the bigger the problem. I thought it would fade away at some point. The opposite. It is getting bigger and the more I feel it is being questioned, the more I feel the obligation to put a stone in the awareness of this tragedy that I pray this suffering people will not experience again. I hope this testimony carries the charge with which it was written and will be read by my descendants and a few friends as a tribute to those lost.

Camp Bergen Belsen.

I can't remember if they were tin tols or wooden shacks. But they were long narrow buildings, semi-dark with rows of three-legged beds, right and left. Upstairs, in the last bed, a narrow skylight gave a little light, even a nightmarish one, to this mournful landscape. In the middle, a small stove did its best to put out some heat. In beds, sick, sometimes huddled for warmth, with huge frightened eyes, staring at nothing. I was permanently lying on the last bed, looking out at infinity.

More: RINA REVACH: DEPOSIT OF SOUL

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Created : March 10, 2022

On Tuesday 8 March 2022, International Women's Day, the city station dedicated a large part of its program to women sharing their own personal stories with us.

A particularly touching story, from the period of the German Occupation and how an Athenian family hid it in order to escape the Nazi extermination camps, was told on our station by Greek-Jewish Victoria Benuziliou.

"On March 24, 44, they suddenly notified all Jews to report to the Synagogue. I was at home with my mother, I was 2 years old and my sister was five and suddenly a local policeman came and told my mother that she had to follow him, because that was the order of the Germans. My mother then started to prepare mine, hers and my sister's clothes. The policeman asked her if she knew what was going to happen to her and when she said no, he suggested that she leave us and follow him on her own. Leave your kids here. If they are good where you are going, you come and take them… If they are not good, let your children live…” he told her.

More: VICTORIA BENOUZILIO'S INTERVIEW IN ATHENS 9.84: HOW I SURVIVED THE NAZI EXTERMINATION CAMPS

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Created : February 16, 2022

"I loved going to that school with the saints, who looked at us from the pictures hanging on the walls. Pope Athanasoulis was loved by everyone and listened to because he was very good. One day, after class, some of the older boys grabbed my brother and put him in the middle. A boy holding a broken bottle shouted at him: "You killed our Christ!". The priest found out and punished them." In the story of the Jewish girl Rebecca, who became a Kula during the Occupation and, with the help of EAM, hid with her family in the village of Matsani (today Kryoneri) in Corinthia, everything fits. The peaceful osmosis between cultures and solidarity, brutality and fear, family bond and racist bullying, self-denial and risk-taking. Not a few months have passed since I was wondering, writing here about an excellent foreign-language book-testimony to the Holocaust (The Boy from Buchenwald by Robbie Weissman, Pataki Publications), when we will finally have children's and teenage books based on Greek-Jewish stories from Possession (and more!). And here is where my expectation is fulfilled in the best way.

More: MARIZA DECASTRO: "MY PEOPLE", A Greek-Jewish Rescue Story

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Created : February 01, 2022

The much-loved radio producer and musician never hid the number on his arm, a reminder of his martyrdom in the Nazi concentration camps. In his biography written by his nephew Errikos Arrones and published by Fereniki publications in 2012, Jacques Menachem, who passed away in 2008, tells the Odyssey of his life in a shocking narrative that keeps alive the memory of the great Nazi Crime but also that of the survivors who are no longer with us….

"That's what Zac always did. He was surviving.” writes Errikos Arones in the introduction of his biography about his uncle and "by choice" father, the late Jacques Menachem. "At the age of sixteen he went through the concentration camps during the Holocaust, where he took every breath he took wondering if it would be his last.

Then, instead of giving up or feeling bad about what happened to him, he traveled the whole world following his dream of becoming a musician, gaining knowledge, experience and acquaintances. He returned to his homeland, fell in love with an admirable woman and lived a happy life with her, which was to give them two children and three grandchildren.

More: ZAC MENACHEM: HIS SHOCKING STORY