81 years ago the first “death train” left Thessaloniki for Auschwitz

15 March 1943: Just before dawn the first train leaves the bound for its camps and Birkenau. The damn locomotive was the first to transport them from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. The whistle of departure marked the total almost unscrewing of the Jewish community of Thessaloniki. Of the over 48,000 Thessalonians Jews who entered the “threes of death”, almost 2,000 returned after the end of World War II. This year it is 81 years since that day which is the blackest page in the history of the city. Every year at this time a multitude of memory events take place for Holocaust victims in Thessaloniki. Since the locomotive was located in Drama, it was moved to Thessaloniki and used every year on the anniversary of the memory events. “My dear child, I write you these lines with my eyes full of tears and heart frozen by terror,” said Sarina Saltiel to Maurice’s son, on 17 March 1943, two days after the departure of the first “train of death” for Auschwitz – Birkenau. “I am searching for in my conscience what I have done to suffer like this, I swear to you, my dear child that I do not find anything. I was always good and generous to everyone,” she says in one of her letters. “I don’t know what’s waiting for me tomorrow morning. If we are displaced, I will try to be strong, to endure all the hardships, only to have the happiness to see you again one day. In difficult times your form will give me the strength, I will say “no”, not to let them finish us” he writes afterwards. At another point he’s looking to find a button in the faith. He won’t make it. Sarina Saltiel and her husband were deported with the 4th mission of the “train deaths”, on 23 March 1943, and never returned. Less than 5% of the Jewish population of Thessaloniki escaped displacement. A total of 45,000 Thessalonians Jews arrived in Auschwitz from Thessaloniki, who a few hours after their arrival were killed in the gas chambers. Auschwitz was the largest concentration camp, a camp complex, where the greatest crime in mankind’s history was committed. As part of the implementation of the Nazi “final solution, ” they were industrially eliminated within 2.5 years (1942–1944) 1.1 to 1.5 million people, 90% of whom were Jews. On April 6, 1941, the German forces attacked Greece from the north and after three days, on April 9, they entered Thessaloniki. Thessaloniki was considered vital strategically important and was therefore kept under control by the German army. Two days later, the operation of the “Mesagero” – the only Spanish-Jewish daily newspaper that was in operation until then was suspended. A large number of houses and public buildings were requisitioned, including the Jewish hospital founded by Baron de Hirs and bore his name. On 15 April the entire Board of Directors of the Community was arrested and raided the offices of the Community. The Germans appointed a new president for the community to transmit their orders. Persecutions began in the summer of 1942, when all male Jews aged 18 to 45 were ordered to appear at Freedom Square to be drafted for forced labor. On that day, 6,000 – 7,000 of them gathered together under the hot sun until the afternoon, surrounded by soldiers with automatic weapons. Many were immediately sent to areas plagued by malaria, where they worked ten hours a day with very little food. Within ten weeks, 12% of those who were taken there had died. In the coming months the seizures of Jewish businesses, warehouses, and property continue. On 6 February 1943, a committee led by Dieter Vislitseni and Alois Brunner arrived in Thessaloniki to implement racial laws. Two days later the order was given that obliged the Jews to wear David’s yellow Star. Their stores and offices had to be marked in a similar way. It was the first time in nearly 2,000 years that the Jews of Thessaloniki were forced to stay in a ghetto. Any Jew changing house without permission was considered a deserter and was shot in cold blood. No Jew was allowed to walk the streets after sundown, was allowed to use the phone, nor the tram. Three hundred empty train cars lined up on the tracks waited for the victims. On Sunday, March 14, the Jews of the district-geto Hirsh were told their displacement to Kraków. On the first train 2,800 people piled up in sealed commercial wagons, per 80 in each wagon, eventually bound for the Auschwitz II Birkenau extermination camp. To the passengers of this first train of death, along with the rest of his family, his father, mother and sister, was the 15-year-old then Hines Kunio who recounted: “When we arrived in Auschwitz, after a journey unimaginably hard, sorting immediately began to distinguish those who were able to work.” On 15 July and the last 2,000 Jews had been sent to Auschwitz. Shocking, is the testimony of Sam Prophet, one of the few survivors of that journey of the Jews of Thessaloniki: “Since February 1943, all Jews were forced to wear a yellow star […] Meanwhile, as of 15 March 1943, the Jewish missions of Thessaloniki in Poland had begun to leave. Of course we didn’t suspect what was waiting for us…”. On 17 March another mission left to the north in the same conditions as the previous one. From that day on, the same scene. Trains, one behind the other, headed to the notorious Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. By 2 August 1943, in a total of 19 railway missions, about 56,000 Jews of Thessaloniki were sent to Camp Auschwitz – Birkenau. The last mission left on August 7, 1943. The Germans left Thessaloniki in late October 1944. Of the 54,000 Thessalonians Jews transferred to the concentration camps survived only 1950 and returned to Greece in a state of impoverishment, without property and livelihood resources. Information from Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki and APE-APE Photo source: Eurokinissi