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.
The commander of German Security was then Walter Blume and his close associate Friedrich Linnemann. Both were considered suspects for the crime against the Jewish community of Ioannina after the end of the Second World War. Ultimately, however, Blume and Linnemann were irrevocably acquitted in 1971, after the prosecutor Siegfried Heffler decided that they were not "collaborators" in the extermination of the Jews of Ioannina, but simple "accomplices" carrying out the orders of their superiors. Under German law, however, complicity in "homicide" was statute-barred within fifteen years.
The Germans finally decide to "strike" on March 25, 1944, the day of the national holiday. It's Shabbat, the Sabbath holiday for the Jews, and most people are still in their beds.
Esther Stella Cohen, a survivor of Auschwitz, recounted:
"I go downstairs, open the door and there was a gendarme "read it" he says in 2 hours you are leaving, I close the door for him and go upstairs I knock on my brother's door crying. He gets up, opens the window and that scream is heard, those obituaries, those knocks on the windows on the doors, the people were deflated, in 2 hours they had to chew everything they had, what could they take, what could they take?
In 2010, Marcia Haddad Ikonomopoulos (director of the Kehila Kedosha Janina Museum, located in New York) managed to find the identity of the crying girl on the pier of Ioannina. She was Fani Haim (Svolis), born in 1925, so 19 years old in the photo. She survived the death camps, the only one in her family, married a Christian, and happily became a grandmother before she died in 2008.
Ioannina was the metropolis of Romaniotic Jewry. The historical Jewish community of Ioannina was large, went through booms and busts and to this day, although its members are small, it remains active.
It is one of the oldest Jewish communities in the wider Greek area, with a history of at least a thousand years. The existence of Jews in the city of Ioannina is intertwined with the founding of the city, at the end of the first millennium.
Without knowing the exact date of the settlement of the Jews in the city, the first written testimony is the golden bull of the emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos in 1319, which gives financial, ecclesiastical and administrative privileges to the various minorities and to the Jews who lived in the city of Ioannina .
They were mainly engaged in trade, like all Jewish communities. Especially in central Europe they were not allowed to work on agricultural land, so they were forced to be in the urban centers and mainly engaged in trade. Apart from merchants and artisans, the great mass were artisans, porters and itinerant peddlers.
SOURCE: iefimerida.gr, 27.1.2023
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