Eighty years after thousands of Greek Jews were murdered, Thessaloniki’s Holocaust museum is finally set to open | Greece

Few places are more representative of the horrors that befell Greece during Nazi occupation than the old railway station of Thessaloniki.

It was here, in what is now a dusty building site on the outer edges of this northern city, that thousands of Greek Jews were loaded with brutal efficiency on to cattle trucks that took them to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. And it is here, on ground set aside for the construction of a long-awaited Holocaust museum, that Germany’s head of state, Frank–Walter Steinmeier, last week launched an emotionally fraught three-day visit, declaring: “Anyone who stands and speaks here as German president is filled with shame.”

The eight-storey, octagonal-shaped Holocaust museum has been branded the most important behemoth to be erected in Thessaloniki since the second world war.

Construction workers have been laying its foundations since the year began, with the building due to be completed in 2026. Germany was the first to commit €10m in funds. “Finally it’s happening,” says David Saltiel, who heads Thessaloniki’s now vastly diminished Jewish community. “We’ve waited for this for so many years.”

More than 80 years have passed since the Third Reich’s war machine orchestrated the death convoys that would see an estimated 50,000 of the city’s men, women and children killed in Nazi concentration camps. It was a loss of life that destroyed one of the great centres of European Jewry – about 90% of Thessaloniki’s population was eradicated – paralleled only by Poland, where similar mortality rates also occurred. Before the Nazi occupation, Salonika, as it was then called, had been known as the “Mother of Israel”, a reflection of the community’s ancient roots in a Balkan metropolis where Jews far outnumbered Christians well after its incorporation into the Kingdom of Greece in 1912.

Most were Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews who had settled in the trading port after their expulsion from Spain in the 15th century. Elsewhere, about 17,000 perished, ensuring that as much as 90% of Greece’s total prewar Jewish population fell victim to the “final solution”.

For Saltiel, a straight-talking businessman who has headed Greece’s central board of Jewish communities for 25 years, the Holocaust museum is long overdue. Replacing a small if resplendent Jewish museum that opened its doors in 2001, it will, he believes, finally allow a “wound to be healed”.

“I feel I am the voice of all those Jews who were put on trains, with no one stopping them and everyone looking,” he says, visibly shaken as his own voice rises a little. “As the generation after the Holocaust, we have a responsibility to speak on behalf of those who could not say anything.”

News of the museum has come not a moment too soon for Lola Hassid Angel, among the few survivors still alive in Greece. A feisty great-grandmother, the 88-year-old still vividly recalls being deported with her parents, both Spanish passport holders, on one of the last trains to leave Athens, where her family had fled earlier in the occupation from Thessaloniki.

It was April 1944 – three years after the Wehrmacht marched into the Greek capital – and their destination was the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. It was mooted that there they, and other “foreign Jews”, would be exchanged with German prisoners of war, a plan quashed by the D-day landings a month later.

“I remember the train journey very well. It was terrible, the smell, the stench, the people crying. And my father taking me, then barely six years old, in his arms and putting me up to an opening [in the freight car] and saying in French: ‘Breathe Lola, take in the fresh air’,” she tells the Observer.

They were things, she said, that were impossible to forgive or forget.

“They stole my childhood. There are memories that can never be erased. They took away my seven uncles and eight aunts, and all their children and, in the end, Thessaloniki, which we would never go back to.

“But I beat Hitler because I managed to have a big family, and I hope to live long enough to see this Holocaust museum, which, of course, should have happened long ago.”

For Saltiel, the delay is testimony “to the silence” that has haunted Sephardic communities in Greece.

By the time the first death train left Thessaloniki on 15 March 1943, German bureaucrats had mastered the art of mass murder that underpinned the racial restructuring envisaged by the Nazi regime. But the silence of those who looked on as Thessaloniki’s Jews were shunted into ghettoes and then deported was also deafening.

In sharp contrast to Athens and other parts of Greece, where the Orthodox Church, resistance fighters and leftists rallied to hide Jews, in Thessaloniki the community was left to fend for itself.

Fewer than 2,000 survived. Those who returned invariably encountered a city whose inhabitants were not only overwhelmingly Christian but reluctant to face the horrors at all.

“In Thessaloniki silence prevailed,” explains Saltiel, estimating the city’s community today at around 1,000. “The majority did not want to talk about what happened, and certainly not about what did not happen.”

The 9,000-sq ft museum is not only a belated tribute to those who suffered in Thessaloniki at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. It will also celebrate the history of Greek Jewry, including the 39 other Jewish communities that, prewar, were dotted around Greece and, it is hoped, be an educational hub and human rights centre at a time when hard-right parties and Holocaust deniers are resurfacing and gaining momentum across Europe.

Greece’s centre-right government, which has sought to improve ties with Israel despite mounting disquiet over its actions in the Middle East, has pledged to contribute €18m. A further €10m will come from private donors, including Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, who will commit $1m in prize money received for the discovery of an effective Covid vaccine. Bourla was born in Thessaloniki to Jewish parents who narrowly survived the Holocaust.

Yet all agree that had it not been for Yiannis Boutaris, the city’s charismatic former mayor, the museum, even at this stage, might still not exist. A prominent wine-maker who went into local politics to “give back to the community”, Boutaris was bent on opening up Thessaloniki and highlighting its Jewish and Ottoman Muslim heritage.

By reviving its once fabled multicultural past, the progressive businessmen stated bluntly that he hoped to tackle the blatant antisemitism that, for years, had stalked socially conservative northern Greece. Central to that was a proper Holocaust museum. Under his stewardship, a site was found and permits signed.

“Boutaris was unique because he didn’t care about the political cost, and that really helped break taboos in a place where so many pretended the Holocaust never happened,” says Giorgos Antoniou, assistant professor of Jewish studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Now 82, the tattooed, chain-smoking Boutaris regards the venture as one of his greatest achievements. On being sworn into office for a second time in 2014, he donned a yellow star to show far-right municipal councillors from the now defunct neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party that he meant business.

“Wherever I went I’d be asked, ‘why do you want this museum?’” he says. “There was push-back, for sure. With the Holocaust, Thessaloniki lost its future. All the good merchants, bankers and academics were Jewish. It was a huge loss.”

Five years on, Boutaris shakes his head in disbelief that there is still so much to do. A memorial park he had planned to create in Eleftherias [Freedom] Square, the plaza where thousands of Jewish men were first rounded up in 1942, remains a car park because his successor refused to sign off on the project. As a result, the city’s Holocaust memorial stands nearby on the corner of a busy intersection, half hidden by trees.

Even worse, he says, was the decision to build the University of Thessaloniki over an ancient Jewish cemetery. “For a long time, there was no sign or monument on the site, just as there are no signs to suggest that there were once 30 synagogues in this town before all but one was destroyed by the Nazis.”

But Boutaris is optimistic. Plans to transform Freedom Square into a memorial park with the Holocaust memorial sculpture as its centrepiece have been resurrected. And the new museum itself, he says, will not fail to impress. “There are Holocaust museums all over the world but none have been dedicated solely to the history and culture of Sephardic Jews in this part of the world. And none will tell their story like this.”