The Israelite Community of Athens and ALEXANDRIA publications organize it Sunday, January 22, 2023 at 12 noon at the Community Center of I.K. of Athens (Vissarionos 9, Athens) the presentation of her book Berrys Nahmias "CRY FOR TOMORROW".
The book will be discussed by George Antoniou, Asst. Professor, AUTH, h Hara Karagiannopoulou, Assistant Professor, Panteion University / IDIS and the editor of the book Odette Varon-Vassar, Jewish Museum of Greece / IDIS.
Excerpts will be read by the actress Olia Lazaridou.
A short greeting will be addressed by the author's daughter Rita Ventura, the KISE Public Relations Manager Efi Ezratis and the director of the EME Janet Battinou.
A few words about the book:
The testimony of Berris Nachmia for her arrest, deportation and confinement in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp was one of the first surviving testimonies issued in Greece. It is the first of the few testimonies of women who returned to Greece and had the courage to record the extreme horror they experienced in the camp where almost one million Jews from all over Europe were exterminated.
After an introduction to her childhood and adolescence in Kastoria, the author recounts her deportation and ten-month confinement in the Birkenau camp, where all her loved ones were lost, the death marches and other Nazi camps where she was held, and finally odyssey of her return to Greece, through a ruined Europe, in the summer of '45. The reader follows the course of an inanimate girl from a small provincial town, faced with the most inhumane condition, the Auschwitz experience, and the inexhaustible reserves of power she drew from within to survive.
The new, revised edition was edited by the historian Odette Varon-Vassar, who also signs the extensive epitaph that highlights the personality and actions of Barry Nachmia and her special contribution to the Holocaust remembrance period just as it is emerging in the Holocaust. Hellas.
They wrote about the book:
Berry Nahmias, a survivor of the camps, wrote a personal narrative in which she condenses her painful experience. Its reissue, together with Odette Varon-Vassar's epitaph that accompanies it, helps to ensure that Berry Nahmias is not trapped in the barbed wire of Auschwitz, but continues to fight, expressing her intense "renunciation of life".
Angeliki Tseti, THE BOOKS' JOURNAL, vol. 115, January 2021
Each word of the title as well as the elements of the publication are links in a significant chain and always represent something more. Also, the attentive reader realizes that these are essentially two texts that maintain an almost symbiotic relationship. The testimony guides the work of the editor and writer of the epimeter, but she also carries the sensitivity of the historian in order to include it in its historical context and highlight its polyphonic background.
The work is, therefore, historical. But it is also polyphonic, because Berry Nahmias does not obviously speak for herself, she speaks from the place of extermination about the fate of hundreds of thousands, millions, dead, on the occasion of her narration.
Christos Tsambrounis, CURRENT ISSUES magazine, vol. 150-151-152
Berry never became a writer, never published anything else. Although her book belongs to the testimonies of the Greek-Jewish survivors and not to the so-called camp literature, it clearly conquers the literary status. With her spontaneous description, combined with the neutral, steady pulse of her narrative, it's as if the horror she experienced emerges through the rhythm of the text.
Katerina Dafermou, THE NEWS, 30/1/2021
The Cry for Tomorrow, republished by Alexandria publications, edited and edited by her niece, Odette Varon-Vassar, is one of the most important testimonies in Greek, a necessary and timely reading at the time of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27.
Markos Karasarinis, THE STEP, 31/1/2021