Between 15 March and 10 August 1943, some forty-three thousand Jews of Thessaloniki were transported to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of those, less than one thousand returned back alive. This was a devastating blow to the Jewish population of Thessaloniki, a major and among the oldest Jewish centres of Europe. The Jews had constituted the majority of the population and at times even the absolute majority, thus marking the city’s character for centuries.
Marking 80 years from the dark anniversary the Consulate General of Greece in Sydney commemorates the deportation of Greek Jews from Thessaloniki to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp with a series of events.
Renowned historian Dr Leon Saltiel, will give two free lectures in Sydney, unfolding the history of the Thessaloniki Jews through valuable testimonies of Holocaust victims, while elaborating on the aftermath of this calamity for the Greek Jewish community.
1. Personal correspondence as Holocaust testimony: Letters sent from the Ghetto of Thessaloniki
The event is co-hosted by the Disciplines of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies and Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies, University of Sydney and co-sponsored by Mandelbaum House.
Little is known about the everyday lives of individual Jews during the years of the Nazi occupation, let alone the period of ghettoization and deportation. This gap in historiography can be bridged by a unique find: a series of fifty-three letters written by three Jewish mothers living in Thessaloniki and sent to their sons, all residing in Athens—all three women victims of the Holocaust. This considerable number of letters from three different eyewitnesses, as well as the long period covered sheds light on the lives of ordinary Jewish citizens of Thessaloniki, free from hindsight and the influence of what had followed.
The lecture will discuss the general framework of the Holocaust in Thessaloniki and the great contribution these letters can make in our understanding of this dark period.
When: 18 April, from 3pm to 4.30pm
Where: Mandelbaum House
Info: https://bit.ly/3MipV50
2. The Holocaust in Thessaloniki and its blow to a 2000-years-old Community
The second seminar held at the Consulate General of Greece in Sydney is titled “The Holocaust in Thessaloniki and its blow to a 2000-years-old Community.” Archbishop Makarios will address the audience with a foreword ahead of Dr Leon Saltiel’s presentation.
The event is supported by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia and the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies and will be hosted by the Australian Archaeological Institute in Athens at the premises of the University of Sydney.
The presentation will narrate the long history until the last days of the once prominent Jewish community of Thessaloniki, the overwhelming majority of which was transported to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in 1943. Almost 95 per cent of the 50,000 Jews in Greece’s second largest city did not survive the war, most of them deported and exterminated in German-occupied Poland. The Jews constituted a large percentage of Thessaloniki’s population, with a long presence in the city, who contributed to the social, economic, political and cultural life, and their loss has marked the development of the city and the whole country, to this day.
When: 20 April, from 6pm for a 6.30pm start
Where: The Australian Archaeological Institute of Athens, University of Sydney, CCANESA Boardroom, Madsen Building
ABOUT THE PRESENTER
Leon Saltiel holds a Ph.D. in Contemporary Greek History from the University of Macedonia, in Thessaloniki, Greece, and has been a post-doctoral researcher at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His publications include The Holocaust in Thessaloniki: Reactions to the Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1942–1943 (Routledge 2020), which won the 2021 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, and ‘Do Not Forget Me’: Three Jewish Mothers Write to their Sons from the Thessaloniki Ghetto (Alexandria 2018) in Greek and (Berghahn 2021 in English). He is Director of Diplomacy, Representative at UN Geneva and UNESCO, and Coordinator on Countering Anti-Semitism for the World Jewish Congress.
