by zorkmidden. This is the featured weekly post from Discarded Lies at Winds of Change.NET. The Terra Nostra series is about the Jewish Holocaust in Greece, righteous gentiles, tales of heroism and simple human will to survive, and the beauty of human souls even in a horrific tableau. It's also about contemporary Greek attitudes to Jews, Judaism, and Israel. Other posts in the Terra Nostra series on Winds of Change include Reina Gilberta, Liliane Fernandes, Loving God and Hating Jews, The Exodus From Spain, The Occupation, The Deportations, 'We were from a different level', Athens, Rabbi Barzilai, Rabbi Koretz and The Passover Trap
While the Allies were getting ready to invade Normandy, the Germans systematically continued to round up and deport the Jewish communities throughout Greece.
In the town of Kastoria, the Jewish community numbered about 900 people at the beginning of World War II. On March 25, 1944, 763 Jews were rounded up for deportation to Auschwitz. In the days before they were deported, they were imprisoned in an abandoned school with no food or water and the young girls were raped by German soldiers. Thirty-five Jews from Kastoria survived the Holocaust. Only one Jewish family remains after 500 years of a Jewish presence in the town.
In the town of Volos, Rabbi Pessah, through his contact with the resistance, obtained shelter for more than 752 people from his community. One hundred and thirty who could not flee, were deported to Auschwitz.
In Trikala, 470 Jews found refuge with Greek villagers in the mountains. Fifty were captured and deported.
In Patra, the German consul wrote to his superiors that "after the newspapers announced the obligatory registration of all Jews, they disappeared."
In the town of Ioannina the Jewish community was one of the oldest Romaniote communities in Greece, already settled in the city before the influx of Sephardim in the 15th and 16th centuries. In the beginning of the war, Ioannina was occupied by the Italians and Jews did not experience any discrimination until Italy surrendered.
After the Germans took over, they told the community leaders that there was no need to worry about deportations. The Germans promoted the idea that since the Ioannina Jews were Greek-speakers they were in no danger at all.
In March 1944, however, they arrested the president of the Jewish community in Ioannina. While he was detained, he learned of the German plans to deport the Jewish community and he managed to smuggle a note out to a community leader, advising everyone to flee. Unfortunately, this warning was not relayed to the people and on March 1944, the entire Jewish community of 1,860 people was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Leave a comment
Here are some quick tips for adding simple Textile formatting to your comments, though you can also use proper HTML tags:
*This* puts text in bold.
_This_ puts text in italics.
bq. This "bq." at the beginning of a paragraph, flush with the left hand side and with a space after it, is the code to indent one paragraph of text as a block quote.
To add a live URL, "Text to display":http://windsofchange.net/ (no spaces between) will show up as Text to display. Always use this for links - otherwise you will screw up the columns on our main blog page.