On March 15, the city of Thessaloniki and its people held a memorial tribute to the event that marked the beginning of the holocaust of Greek Jews: the departure of the first deportation train on March 15, 1943, carrying 2,800 people to the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. Nearly 50,000 of city’s Jews were sent to the Nazi concentration camps during WWII. Only 1,950 of them survived, accounting for 4% of the population sent to the camps. 

A crowd of 2,000 people gathered at Freedom Square, Thessaloniki, to commemorate the 72nd anniversary of the event. They placed flowers on the train tracks and inside the old cattle wagons, and solemnly marched to the city’s old railway station from where the train left.

The train wagons used for the deportation were found in the city of Drama and are now restored to be kept as museum exhibits. Greek director Manousos Manousakis plans to use the same wagons as a set for a film to be released in December (‘Ouzeri Tsitsanis’), about the romance between a Christian and a Jewish girl from Thessaloniki in the early 1940s.

See also: Jewish Community of Thessaloniki & Greek News Agenda: The Jews of Greece