Remembering

Last Sunday marked the 72nd anniversary of the first train that left from Thessaloniki carrying Jewish people to Auschwitz.





Holocaust Memorial, Athens.

Nearly 50,000 local Jews were transported to Nazi death camps during World War II. Thessaloniki had the largest Jewish community in Greece, mostly Sephardic refugees from Spain and its Inquisition. In 1943 the Nazi German forces occupying Greece forced the Jews in Thessaloniki into a ghetto near the railway station and later deported them to concentration and labour camps. Of the 46,091 Thessaloniki Jews who were sent to the camps, only 1,950 survived. Only the Polish Jews experienced a greater level of destruction.

 

 



looking closer.