A silent march was held on Sunday to mark the 76th year since the departure of the first ‘death trains’ carrying Thessaloniki Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
At least two thousand gathered at the city’s old railway station where that train pulled out on March 15, 1943.
The crowd then walked in silence, carrying white balloons bearing the message “Never Again”, while the march ended with a memorial ceremony organised by the Thessaloniki Jewish community, the Thessaloniki municipality and the city’s universities.
A tribute was paid to camp survivors Heinz Kounio and Achilleas Koukovinos, a former resistance fighter aged 100 years old.
Students of the Thessaloniki Jewish School planted an olive tree at the site and sang, while the grandson of a German soldier in Thessaloniki, Juergen Jauch, apologized for the atrocities his grandfather had taken part in.
Thessaloniki had a thriving 50,000-strong Jewish community before World War II but there now remains only around 1,000 Jews. About 96 percent of the city’s 50,000 Jews were murdered in Nazi camps.