On 27 January each year, the United Nations remembers the Holocaust that took the lives of six million Jewish people during World War II. This day is called the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.
On this day in 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Nazi concentration and death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. Like many, I will be today attending the annual commemoration in Athens at the Holocaust memorial, to lay a wreath of remembrance on behalf of the British Embassy and British people in Greece.
I will join many others in expressing the strong hope that our acts of remembrance will stand not only as a witness of the grotesque and tragic events that took place in Europe 70 years ago, but also as a statement of our unceasing and unshakeable commitment to the prevention of anti-Semitism in our societies today.
Prior to the Nazi Occupation, the Jewish population in Greece was one of the oldest and most distinguished in Europe. The Romaniote communities of central Greece, Athens, the Ionian Islands and Crete had been established for some 2000 years. The Jewish population in Salonica had settled there in the 15th century, after its expulsion from Spain, and numbered some 50000 people.
The cultural and commercial richness of the Jewish community in that city can be glimpsed in the very moving Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki on Agiou Mina Street. You can find out more about this museum’s collection and narrative at http://www.jmth.gr.
The scale of the horror in Salonica can hardly be grasped. From March until June 1943, around 49000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Hardly any ever returned home. Some 96.5% of the Jewish population of the city was exterminated. Elsewhere in Greece, deportations began only as the Nazis took control of the entire country from September 1943.
In Athens deportations of over 1000 Jews took place in March 1944; in the same month, 95% of the ancient Jewish population of Ioannina was driven over the Metsovo Pass, and taken subsequently by train to Auschwitz. The Jewish communities of Athens and Ioannina are planning major commemorations to remember the 70th anniversary of these terrible events. They have my strong support.
Last year, it was my great privilege to attend the opening of an exhibition called “Greek Jews in the National Resistance”, at the Jewish Museum of Greece on Nikis Street, Athens. This exhibition recollects the personal histories of 24 men and women from various Jewish communities of Greece, who took up arms in the dark days of the Occupation.
They were christened ‘comrades in arms’, the supreme title of honour among the fighters of free Greece, and fought as equals among equals. The stories of the Jewish resistance fighters in Greece is little known here or abroad, and I strongly encourage everyone who wants to understand this tragic period in Jewish and Greek history to see it. It’s open until 25 April. More information is available at http://www.jewishmuseum.gr/en/exhibitions/upcomming_exhibitions/item/5.html.
As I mentioned in my last blog, the UK will be taking up from April the chairmanship of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The Holocaust in Greece was one of the most brutal and extensive in Europe. I shall be working closely with the various Jewish communities of Greece in the next months to take forward the crucial work of commemoration and remembrance.
In the words of Lord Sachs, former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth: “We cannot bring the dead back to life, but we can bring their memory back to life and ensure they are not forgotten. We can undertake in our lives to do what they were so cruelly prevented from doing in theirs. In doing so we make a great affirmation of life.”
*********
For those who may be unfamiliar with the events of the Holocaust in Greece, I recommend the sober and moving account in Mark Mazower’s Inside Hitler’s Greece (1993), chapter 19.