*The following text is the speech delivered by Columbia professor Mark Mazauer, on Sunday 29/1/2023, at the Thessaloniki Concert Hall, as part of the events for the National Day of Remembrance of Jewish Heroes and Martyrs
I would like to thank the Israeli Community of Thessaloniki and its president David Saltiel for giving me the opportunity to speak to you tonight. Today, a day of remembrance for the Greek Jews who died during the war, we think of those who were killed, about 45.000 Thessalonians and over 60.000 throughout Greece. Along with those who were killed, however, let us think for a moment about those who were never born. Two and three generations of children who never came into the world, after those who would have been their parents were killed. They would be the descendants of those who perished and they would be the ones who, under other circumstances, would mourn the dead. But since children died in the camps in addition to adults, and these children who never grew up to do their own thing, we take on the task of remembering.
On the morning of Saturday, March 25, 1944, while the Christian residents of Ioannina had gathered to celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation in the Metropolis, they witnessed the arrest of approximately 2.000 Jews who belonged to the two-thousand-year-old Jewish community of Ioannina. The Germans gathered the city's Jews in two squares, the castle and the pier. After the initial transfer to Larissa, they ended up in Auschwitz and smaller extermination camps, where 1850 of them were exterminated, most of them only a few hours after their arrival. The photos were obtained by the German Army and belong to the Bundesarchiv, which has released them under a special wikimedia license.
On March 25, 1944, the German forces, following the orders for the deportation of the Jews of Ioannina issued by the German Security in Athens, gathered within a few hours 1.850 people and piled them in trucks destined for the infamous concentration camp of Auschwitz, 60 km west of Krakow.
More: "THE CRYING GIRL" - THE SHOCKING STORY OF A PHOTO FROM THE EXTINCTION OF THE JEWS OF...
At dawn on May 20, 1944, the Jews of Crete were arrested by the German army of occupation (Wehrmacht). Most of them lived in the Jewish quarter, that is, in the blocks between Kondylaki, Skoufon, Porto and Zambeliou streets, in the Old Town of Chania. But there were also Jewish residents outside of Ebraiki, in Halepa, the Courts, Splantzia and in other neighborhoods. They were also arrested and, together with the convoy of vehicles from the Old Town, were taken to the prisons of Agia. They were held there in inhumane conditions, as described by their (non-Jewish/Christian) friends who tried to contact them. Many had nothing to wear other than the clothes they were in at the time of their arrest.
From Agyia they were transported to Heraklion by trucks, where they were initially kept in the Stoa Makassi, inside the Venetian Walls of the city. They were then forced to board the Nazi-flagged commandeered ship Tanais, which also contained local resistance fighters and Italian prisoners of war. The ship was bound for Piraeus, from where the Jews of Crete would probably be taken by train to Auschwitz, following the course of the arrested Jews from the rest of Greece, while the rest of the Cretans, along with the Italians, would end up in other Nazi concentration camps .
More: THE SINKING OF THE TANAIS SHIP AND THE LOSS OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF CRETE
Issue 139, May 2022, of the Athens Review of Books has been released, which includes a special tribute to Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner entitled "The Alois Brunner Case and the Divided Consciousness of the Holocaust in Greece" by historian Tobias Blümel.
As it is characteristically mentioned in the introduction of the article: "Alois Brunner was one of Adolf Eichmann's closest collaborators and responsible for the deportation of the Jews of Vienna, Berlin, Thessaloniki and Drancy, and later Czechoslovakia. According to conservative estimates it was responsible for the deaths of at least 128.500 people. After the war, he fled to Syria and was never arrested to face trial. From 1985 onwards, the Central Jewish Council of Greece (KISE) submitted extradition requests to successive Greek governments and attempted to proceed with proceedings against Brunner in absentia. KISE encountered a wall of political reluctance across the party spectrum.
More: NEW ISSUE OF THE ATHENS REVIEW OF BOOKS WITH AN ARTICLE ON THE ALOIS BRUNER CASE
Diligence Joseph Wechsberg,
Papadopoulos Publications, May 2021
The Greek version of the memoirs of Simon Wiesenthal, entitled "The Murderers Among Us", the original version of which was released in Great Britain in 1967, has been released.
When the Allies liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp, Simon Wiesenthal was among the survivors inside a building full of corpses. Losing his wife and family to the war and the gas chambers, Wiesenthal made it his life's goal to find and capture the Nazi war criminals who were scattered and hiding around the world in order to bring them to justice.