MEMORY

Late Commemoration and Reparations

For decades, the traumatic experience of the German occupation for the entire population of Greece eclipsed the remembrance of the almost 60,000 Jewish victims of the Holocaust. In 1960, Greece negotiated a reparations payment of 115 million Deutschmarks with West Germany. All Greek victims of the Nazis were entitled to claims, but although a third of these victims were Jews, they received not even 10 percent of the funds. Only the few survivors who possessed Greek citizenship were even able to submit applications. Negotiations between Greece and the Federal Republic of Germany over the restitution of stolen Jewish property remained inconclusive.  

First Processing of the Crimes in Karya

In 1945, the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki investigated accusations against a former camp interpreter from Karya, who, like other Jewish prisoner functionaries, was accused of being a “traitor.” 

In 1952, the Jewish community in Thessaloniki received information about a mass grave of murdered Jewish forced labourers in “Karya by Thiva.” The community wanted to properly bury the victims, but the imprecise information about the location made the search difficult. The authorities did not support the undertaking.

Forgotten Crimes of Forced Labour

The forced labour performed by the Jewish people for the occupiers was barely commemorated. Only in October 1988 die the Jewish community of Thessaloniki put up a memorial plaque at the railway platform in Lianokladi, one of the locations where forced labour was performed. Twenty years later the plaque was removed for reasons that remain unknown. Upon the initiative of the community, in 2021 a second plaque was dedicated; a few months later it was destroyed by unknown perpetrators and subsequently taken down.


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