A Memorial to Greece’s Holocaust Victims at Athens

ATHENS — Mediterranean winters are generally dreary affairs, but the region’s great metropolises like Athens will always surprise you, irrespective of season. A new temporary outdoor exhibition that commemorates Greek victims of the Holocaust is a case in point. A plan to find a new view of the Acropolis before a curtain of snow descended was interrupted by a succession of poster-sized photographs from the daily lives of Greek Jews before and during World War II, displayed without fanfare along a prominent but mostly pedestrianized avenue that hems the National Garden. Each black-and-white photograph in the exhibit, entitled “The Holocaust of Greek Jews, 1941-1944,” is paired on the reverse side with color photographs of miniature tapestries by the contemporary artist Artemis Alcalay from her work “Trauma as Memory and Life.” According to the program notes, Ms. Alcalay’s works “raise issues of identity, personal and historical memory, trauma, bereavement, but also resistance through creation.” But it is the historical photos, almost inevitably, that stick.The small Jewish community of Greece is one of the oldest in Europe, but Nazi barbarism ensured that it would become even smaller: according to the State Department, of the estimated 71,600 Jews who lived in Greece at the time of the 1941 Nazi invasion, at least 58,885 perished in the Holocaust. The tragedy of the deportation of most Thessaloniki’s Jews to Auschwitz in winter 1943 is vividly chronicled in Mark Mazower’s book, “Salonica: City of Ghosts”.One of the most harrowing portions of that book is Mr. Mazower’s description of the destruction of Thessaloniki’s vast Jewish cemetery, which was established in the 15th century by Jews who fled Spain and which contained nearly 500,000 burials. Now, on Vassilis Olgas Avenue, one can view an arresting photograph of 500-year-old tombstones that were ripped from the hallowed ground and used to line a makeshift swimming pool for the Nazi occupiers. Another photo, no less haunting, shows a vibrant, well-dressed young man from Thessaloniki, Alberto Errera, who was deported to Auschwitz and killed when he attempted to escape in 1944.It is not all dark. There are many scenes of Jewish life in Greece before and after the war years. There is a photo of a young family smiling from the window of their house in the Petralona section of Athens in 1942. Largely due to geography, the mainly Romaniote Jews of Athens, while not numerous, were mostly spared the kind of systematic deportions that befell their northern neighbors. Of particular if inexplicable resonance for this correspondent is a 1971 photograph that shows craftswoman Anna Cohen hammering out a copper engraving in front of her small shop on the island of Rhodes. Though seen in black and white, those metallic figurines seem to gleam beneath the stone arch storefront. Joggers dressed in red and black whooshed by, oblivious to this most unusual exhibit, which is organized by the Jewish Museum of Greece and the City of Athens and runs through February.“Our greatest enemy is ignorance, which is also the greatest obstacle to our joint journey for building tolerant and inclusive communities,” the mayor of Athens, Kostas Bakoyannis said in a press statement. “Greece lost more than 80 percent of its pre-war Jewish population. The works of Artemis Alcalay place us in the microcosm of the Greek Jews’ home and refuge during the Nazi occupation.”

A Memorial to Greece’s Holocaust Victims at Athens

More from the New York Sun

Luxury Minivans Are Having a Moment

Trump Vows To Keep Strait of Hormuz Open as America Sends Warships, Global Coalition Forms

Americans and South Koreans Train by Building a Bridge in ‘Real War’ Exercise

Texas Convictions Validate Trump Move To Label Antifa as Domestic Terrorist Organization

Trump Names Diplomat To Replace Kari Lake at Helm of America’s Overseas Broadcasters

Man Linked to Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett’s Security Detail Dies in Dallas Police Standoff

Two Billy Joel Tributes Honor New York’s Utmost Piano Man

Trump Releases Renderings of ‘New, Highly Improved’ Kennedy Center