NAKI BEGA, AUSCHWITZ PRISONER 77092 SAYS TO "K": "LET US DIE NOW. WE CAN'T DO ANYTHING ELSE" - Central Jewish Council of Greece, coordinating body of the Jewish Communities of Greece

By Athanasios Katsikidis

Eighty years after the first train shipment from Greece to the German and Polish concentration camps, the last survivor of the Holocaust from the Jewish Community of Trikala remembers and recounts in "K" the horrors of the Holocaust. Moved, she recalls images from the 14 months of captivity, the harsh living conditions in the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen camps, as well as the 22-day death march through the frozen lands of Germany that led many to their deaths. The 96-year-old Esther (Naki) Matathia-Bega, born in July 1927 in the area of Trikala, was to witness the hatred of the German troops towards the Jewish citizens of the countries of Europe. As he tells in "K", "I had two older sisters. My mom (Miriam) and my dad (Matthias) had two other girls who were lost, I was the last in line. When they caught us, I was still going to school."

The persecution of the Mattathias family begins with the invasion of the German forces in Greek territory. According to Mrs. Bega, "my family and I left (from Trikala) and went to a village, in Korbovo. But later my father got sick and we went down (to Trikala). Our house had been bombed and we moved very close to my dad's brother's house who lived in Volos. This house had too many rooms. It was the period when the villages around Mouzaki had burned down and all the fire victims had come down and ordered them. Before they caught us, they had issued an order for us all to go and report ourselves. When the Germans came to catch us, we were not declared, but unfortunately it was these traitors, the traitors who betrayed us".

On March 24, 1944, the curfew order from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. aggravates the movements of the population, while the arrests of Jewish citizens begin. "They came once and didn't catch us, but they caught us the second time. We couldn't leave, but my dad caught up and went to the next room. There was a very good family there with their son and my dad hid in there and they didn't catch him."

The Germans adopt the "Final Solution" of the Jewish question and send thousands of citizens to concentration camps. In the area of Trikala, the Nazis trigger a series of persecutions, arresting 142 members of the Jewish community.

"When they caught us, they had already arrested the whole neighborhood they were declared. They dragged us to the square, put us in the cars and brought us to Larissa. They had gathered people from Larissa, Karditsa, only from Ioannina they didn't catch them immediately. They took us on a Friday and we left the following Monday. At the train station the Red Cross came and gave us food. Then the Germans put us in the wagons, with a small window and a box to relieve ourselves, and after 13 days we arrived at the camp."

In the camp

"The Germans didn't talk to us at all, they just locked us in there (on the trains). When we got down (to Birkenau), they were with some dogs and they were shouting "Raus, Raus". Then came the screening. At screening, we girls, that is me and my sisters, said that we will go together. "Go together", my mother tells us, "and we will reciprocate". Unfortunately the very young and the elderly were put into cars and, as we later learned, taken to the crematorium. They told us "you will meet your parents later", but we never saw them again.

"We entered Auschwitz. First of all they gave us the number (77092), then they put us in the bath, cut our hair and gave us some old clothes. Then they took us to the shelters, which had some beds, bunks, and after a few days they put us to various jobs. I had been put in Biberai commando. There they brought us all the old clothes, we cut them into strips and braided them to clean their weapons."

The nightmare of the camp and the miserable living conditions were not Ms. Bega's only problem. A few days after arriving at Auschwitz, the German guards decide to separate the sisters, leaving Naki alone. "At first we were together with my sisters, but then they separated us. It was Lager A and Lager B; there was a big gate. When they left me, sometimes I would go and see them. My second sister had had severe pleurisy and was heavy, with punctures, and she got sick. They took her to the hospital. As another one who was in the hospital with her told me, my sister died there.

"My other sister and I were together in the camp until the end. At one point she went outside the kitchens where they were throwing away the peels from the potatoes and radishes, to find something to eat, and a German hit her on the head with the glop, pierced her and took her to the hospital.

"In the morning they would wake us up very early and put us in line to be counted; it was called "Appell". Then we went to work with music and step. All around was barbed wire. When anyone tried to escape, they killed him and put him on the way to work. They would make them stand up with some kind of shovels so that we could see them to set an example. No one could leave.

"One Sunday I went to a trough of water, which for a time was full and there were barbed wire around it, and I took a cup that they gave us tea and soup and went to wash it; I slipped and as my feet were in the water, the wires caught me. I have the scars on my back. A woman came to pull me and she got caught (the wires) too. He took a stick from inside and pulled me. They took me almost dead, but I recovered. The Germans only called us "Raus, Raus".

The living conditions and the crematoria

"In the corner where we were there was a wall and you could see the chimney. At night the sky turned red from the flames and it smelled of meat. At first we didn't know, we thought we would retaliate with our parents, but the Thessalonians who had gone earlier were hardened and told us: "Don't expect to see them again. They are finished". In time we understood. We saw the fougaras and we knew.

"When we went to the bathrooms, as soon as we entered, our hands were raised and our bones were visible. Whichever was weak, they wrote it down, took the number, there were no names but numbers, and when the number of people was completed, they collected them and took them to the crematorium. Then we entered the room, made our clothes into a ball, we had to have the number from the outside, and we waited in a large room naked, until the clothes came out of the furnace to be given to us, to get dressed, to leave ».

The living conditions in the Auschwitz camp did not allow for any glimmers of hope. The German detention-extermination model was designed with the aim of psychological and physical deterioration of the prisoners. As Mrs. Bega explains, "they stopped our periods, they injected us with medicine and we no longer had periods, and the men were injected with medicine again. We could not even observe our religious customs. Who can observe the customs, where is the mind for such things? There we were like animals."

Among other things, Mrs. Bega had to deal with the language gap. Living with prisoners from all over Europe and the difficulty in communicating with her fellow inmates proved to be one of the biggest problems. “The prisoners were from many states and tribes. I didn't get lucky with Greek women, they were foreigners. The beds were a small square, upside down, and we slept in them 5-6 people".

From Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen and the death march

"They didn't know what to do with us. After Auschwitz they picked us up and took us to the Bergen-Belsen camp. There they put us on some lathes to make different things. We didn't stay there long. Then they took us to a city, to a big building, there were many floors, and they separated me and my older sister and probably killed her. Then they took us every morning and it was a wall and they told us to throw stones at each other. When it was May, it was very cold, freezing and they made us throw stones at each other to do something. Meanwhile the Germans began to retreat."

"We marched for 22 days"

"The next day they took us from there and we marched for 22 days. During the day we marched and in the evening they left us in some meadow to rest and in the morning we walked again. Those who were not afraid entered the houses and begged. I remember the last day before they let us go, I went into a house and saw a German. He seems to have been good. As he had some bread, he cut a slice and gave it to us, as well as a dessert. We were trying to hide them, so that the others wouldn't take them from us. We got back in line and walked. If we didn't walk they would kill us.

One day it was raining and the Germans were calling us to give us something and no one was coming and we were saying, "let's die right now. We can't do it anymore." Meanwhile, we were full of lice. In the camp we were put through the furnace, but all these days we walked we were full of lice.

As soon as we reached a village they left half of them. Chaos was created there, with the people they left behind. In the other village we went to, they left us the rest. Now what should we do there?

We found a multi-story house, probably soldiers would live there. We went in, it had bunks and it had big stoves. We went, we begged clothes from the houses and then where we lived we took the boards out of the bunks, put them on the stoves and lit a fire. Later we went down to the basement and left all the scabby clothes.

The liberation

5 Greek women had been released, 3 from Ioannina, 1 from Corfu and me. The 2 from Ioannina were sisters and when we freed ourselves from the fear we had, we decided it was better not to say we were Jewish and we didn't. This resulted in those who rescued us putting us in the same group as the workers who had gone to Germany to work. For this reason they did not immediately bring us to Greece. From May when we were liberated we came back on the 15th of August 1945. I remember there were flags because it was the Fifteenth of August."

The return to Greece

After 14 months of captivity, pain and poverty, Naki Bega returns to Greece. The bombed landscape and destroyed villages were not reminiscent of pre-war Greece, while the ashes of the war were not going to die. Soon the war sirens sounded again and civil war conflicts came to the fore. After her many-month journey Mrs. Bega returns to her place of origin and is reunited with the remaining members of her family. "I found my dad who hadn't been caught. I had an aunt in Athens and she picked me up and took me to Volos where my dad lived. In Volos my father had a brother and even his mother lived. He came and got me. After some time, my dad died of hardship, very young, 48 years old. Then I got married." The Jewish community of Trikala counted a total of 139 victims, while only 10 arrested survived and returned. Mrs. Bega having experienced the persecution and the loss of her relatives, still has the brutal behavior of the German soldiers engraved in her memory. It is estimated that the Holocaust claimed the lives of 58.886 Greek Jews, i.e. 90% of their population. 80 years later, Ms. Bega remains with the question and conveys her own message: "Why did they do this to us? While the Italians were so good, they helped us, gave us medicine, on the other hand the Germans were very cruel. But we shouldn't hate. It wasn't all the Germans' fault. Crazy Hitler did them. What did the Germans do to us?"

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SOURCE: Everyday, 28.1.2023

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