Published: 11 April 2013
Country: Greece
The Greek organisation Symβiosis organized a short tribute for the victims of the first deportation of the Thessaloniki’s Jews to Auschwitz 70 years ago.
The city honoured the 50,000 victims of Nazism with a three-day commemoration in March. Under the slogan “Never Again”, many walked in a peaceful parade from Freedom square to the old station, where the first train with Jewish hostages left in 1943.
“In that limited space of each carriage, eighty people were forcefully loaded. With no water. With nothing. One person on the top of another,” said a demonstrator in a public speech.
“Old people, women, men, children, infants, people who should be on their dying beds, mothers to be, and mothers who had just given birth, they all lived on four roads, behind this very same wall. The roads still exist but with different names.”
“One by one, Jews from all districts of the city were moved here to be sent away to Auschwitz. To honour the memory of victims means no tolerance. No tolerance and no indifference,” she concluded.
For 450 years Thessaloniki was a vibrant Sephardi-Jewish urban metropolis, from the Jews’ expulsion from Spain in 1492 until the Holocaust in 1942.
Men and women in Thessaloniki also remembered the Nazi atrocities through a photographic exhibition and a concert. The Symphonic Orchestra of the municipality of Thessaloniki did its performance at the Aristotle University, which was built on the site of a destroyed Jewish cemetery.
Symβiosis, which works to fight discrimination and to promote equality, participatory democracy and social justice, documented the remembrance events with a video that can be watched here.
