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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/03/eighty-years-after-thousands-of-greek-jews-were-murdered-thessalonikis-holocaust-museum-is-finally-set-to-open>
"Few places are more representative of the horrors that befell Greece during
Nazi occupation than the old railway station of Thessaloniki.
It was here, in what is now a dusty building site on the outer edges of this
northern city, that thousands of Greek Jews were loaded with brutal efficiency
on to cattle trucks that took them to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. And it is
here, on ground set aside for the construction of a long-awaited Holocaust
museum, that Germany’s head of state, Frank–Walter Steinmeier, last week
launched an emotionally fraught three-day visit, declaring: “Anyone who stands
and speaks here as German president is filled with shame.”
The eight-storey, octagonal-shaped Holocaust museum has been branded the most
important behemoth to be erected in Thessaloniki since the second world war.
Construction workers have been laying its foundations since the year began,
with the building due to be completed in 2026. Germany was the first to commit
€10m in funds. “Finally it’s happening,” says David Saltiel, who heads
Thessaloniki’s now vastly diminished Jewish community. “We’ve waited for this
for so many years.”
More than 80 years have passed since the Third Reich’s war machine orchestrated
the death convoys that would see an estimated 50,000 of the city’s men, women
and children killed in Nazi concentration camps. It was a loss of life that
destroyed one of the great centres of European Jewry – about 90% of
Thessaloniki’s population was eradicated – paralleled only by Poland, where
similar mortality rates also occurred. Before the Nazi occupation, Salonika, as
it was then called, had been known as the “Mother of Israel”, a reflection of
the community’s ancient roots in a Balkan metropolis where Jews far outnumbered
Christians well after its incorporation into the Kingdom of Greece in 1912.
Most were Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews who had settled in the trading port
after their expulsion from Spain in the 15th century. Elsewhere, about 17,000
perished, ensuring that as much as 90% of Greece’s total prewar Jewish
population fell victim to the “final solution”.
For Saltiel, a straight-talking businessman who has headed Greece’s central
board of Jewish communities for 25 years, the Holocaust museum is long overdue.
Replacing a small if resplendent Jewish museum that opened its doors in 2001,
it will, he believes, finally allow a “wound to be healed”."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
