The Aftermath of the Annihilation of the Jews of Thessaloniki (Salonika) in the Holocaust: From Absence to Inclusion in Local Memory

After the Holocaust, when 54,000 Jews were annihilated, the Jews had a small presence dwindling from an initial returning 2,000 to some 800. Most Jews went to Eretz-Israel since they viewed the city as a graveyard of the past.

Due to the Greek Civil War and the Cold War, the Jews role in the leftist resistance was an illegal taboo subject. The local historiography portrayed a Greek history, and the highlights of WWII were starvation and a harsh German occupation; absent was mention of a Jewish past and loss. Holocaust commemoration became an internal Jewish community event, with the exception of an annual procession in the streets by the Holocaust survivors.

When the Papandreou Pasok Party came into power in 1982, the ELAS-EAM partisans were legalized, and the government officially participated in local Holocaust ceremonies and in Auschwitz. The narrative became that the Greek people rescued Jews in Greece in the Holocaust, and were not the cold bystanders or the collaborators. In the 1990s, local Thessalonikan Jews published Holocaust memoirs in Greek. Local authors lamented the loss of the local Jews and the existing vacuum. In the 1990s, Holocaust education began in Greece and two different Holocaust public memorial statues were placed in central locations. In 2001 a local Jewish museum opened in the market area. At the this point the historical Greek narrative changed to include the annihilation of the Jews in Greece in the Holocaust and noted national and local responsibility.

In the 2010s Thessaloniki mayor Boutaris was very pro-Jewish and led the campaign for a future Jewish Holocaust memorial museum. In recent years Gentile Greek scholars abroad and locally have written books on the Holocaust in Thessaloniki and Greece; no longer leaving it to Jewish scholars. Also the establishment of the Baron Hirsch railroad station train deportation memorial symbolically has shown that the deportation of the local Jews to Auschwitz is part of its history. The university also has commemorated that it is on the site of the past destroyed historic Jewish cemetery.