The initial decades following the Second World War and the extermination of European Jews by the Nazis in the occupied countries were marked everywhere by the silence that aimed to cast the event into oblivion. The difficulties which this memory faced and needed to overcome in order to resurface from the deep in the initial postwar decades were considerable. It was not an easy matter for any society to grapple with and the emergence of the memory took place at different paces in the various countries that had seen the extermination of their Jewish populations.

The memory of the extermination of the Jews was difficult for everyone: for a start, it was extremely difficult for the victims that had survived the persecution. They needed to heal their wounds and overcome the guilt of survival and the mourning for lost families and communities. Sinking back into this old trauma and assuming the role of witnesses who testify about their ordeal was a slow and painful process for the victims themselves and gave them a new identity. The concentration camp “hostages” – as they were called in the initial decades – would acquire the status of “witness” and “survivor” since the 1980s, as Annette Wieviorka has noted, describing it as “the era of the witness”.¹ It was difficult for perpetrators and their collaborators, who had to deal with a guilty “a past that does not pass”, according to the term used by Eric Conan and Henry Rousso in the Vichy context.²

This memory was, of course, also difficult for the rest of the society, for those that did not want or could not bear to listen. And no one wanted to listen to those who had made it back first from the concentration camps. Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, a major text of concentration camp literature, drew no response when it was first published in 1947.³

It was only the trials of the early 1960s (Adolf Eichmann’s in Israel and the Frankfurt trials in Germany from 1963 to 1965) that began to break the silence and create an initial broader awareness. The witnesses in these trials at last “freed” their testimonies, leading eventually to “the era of the witness”. Up to that point the silence was universal. Later on, the various countries and societies developed different speeds in the “discovery” of the event, the admission of it, the gradual integration of the memory in broader collective memories (as in those of individual nations) and, finally, official acceptance of it. This was first realised in the early 1980s in Western Europe and the US, where the term “Holocaust” was conceived and established. The term was more appropriate for the cultural shock which the event represented for the Western world from then on rather than for the event itself. It was only after the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe the early 1990s that recognition began in those countries. Wieviorka points out that the Polish memory was the only one honoured in the first remembrance ceremony at Auschwitz in 1979, and there was not even a single reference to the Jewish memory in the concentration camp where 960,000 Jews perished.⁴ Other memories preceded the Jewish one: in France, for instance, the memory of the resistance members who had been political prisoners was projected first. Besides the fact that those who returned were far more numerous than the French Jews who survived, the memory of the resistance was a heroic notion that postwar France needed, wishing that the Vichy collaborationist government and Marshal Pétain’s État Français be forgotten. In Poland, where the extermination camps for Jews were located, for many decades only the memory of Catholic Poles and resistance fighters was honoured.

All European societies resisted and were late in embedding the consciousness and acceptance of this memory. Greek society and the state, of course, were no exception. Quite the opposite: the delay was even longer, for reasons related to historical conditions. In this article I will note the most important milestones marking the emergence of this difficult memory and will highlight its awakening in Greece.

The memory of the Jewish Holocaust assumed explosive dimensions internationally in the early 1980s, when books, films, testimonies and studies began to proliferate. It took, therefore, almost 40 years for the realisation to take hold that this was not simply an old, forgotten story, which only the descendants of the survivors had reason to mourn privately, and for it to become a cultural trauma that concerned society as a whole.⁵ In Greece, the memory of the deportation and extermination of the Jews which took place in 1943–1944, lay buried for almost 50 years. Greece kept pace in the “discovery” of the event with eastern rather than western European societies. This was due to a variety of factors, which I deal with below.

The application of the “final solution” meant for Greece the uprooting and destruction of several communities with a centuries-old history behind them. Some of these communities, which had previously been located in the Ottoman Empire, were of Sephardic origin, having relocated to this region in the late 15th century following their expulsion from Spain, while some others, of Romaniote origin, date back at least to Byzantine or even ancient times. For Greece, the Holocaust meant the violent, irreversible termination of their age-old presence and way of life. Apart from having their numbers decimated, the handful of communities that managed to reorganise themselves after the war (only nine of the 31 communities that had existed before the war managed to reestablish themselves) belonged to a different age. Many of them were lost forever; and with them, Greece lost the multifaceted, multicultural character which had been an integral part of its identity for many years.

The Nazi plan had almost total success in Greece. Many Greek towns and cities which had been home to Jewish communities for hundreds of years (as part of the Byzantine Empire, then of the Ottoman Empire and finally of Greece) were rendered “Judenrein”. The annihilation of Greek Jews by transporting them to death camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka) was one of the main aims of the German forces when they occupied Greece in April 1941. The percentage of the Jewish population of Greece that was exterminated was among the highest in Western Europe. In the first major work in the international bibliography, The Destruction of European Jews, Raul Hilberg refers to 60,000 Greek Jews having perished and perhaps 12,000 as having survived.⁶ According to Hilberg, then, Jewish losses amounted to 83.3 percent. More recent research conducted by historian Hagen Fleischer confirms Hilberg’s figures to be roughly correct.⁷ To be more precise, according to Fleischer, of the 71,611 Greek Jews (including those residing in the Dodecanese islands of Rhodes and Kos), 58,585 were deported. The number of survivors who returned from the camps was about 2,000 (half of them from Salonica). Another 2,500 people were not deported but died in Greece of different causes. Fleischer estimates the total number of the victims at 58,885, putting the proportion of victims at 82.5 percent.

The losses were enormous. Centuries-old communities ceased to exist or lost almost all of their members.⁸ But despite the high rates of destruction, the memory and awareness of this loss remained in the shadows for many years in Greece, where the “period of silence” lasted almost 15 years longer than in Western Europe, where it was largely recognised in the 1980s. It took a long time before the Greek state and society started to become aware that the extermination of 60,000 Greek Jews constituted a major part of the tragedy inflicted on Greece under Nazi occupation, since the Jews had become Greek citizens with full rights and obligations under Law 2456 of 1920. In recent years, the state has made a good deal of progress, as we shall see in more detail below.

However, we must note that the silence surrounding the genocide was part of the overall silence imposed on the history of the 1940s in Greece. This universal “censorship” – which primarily concerned the memory of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949) – lasted until the restoration of democracy (Metapolitefsi) in 1974. In the official narrative of the occupation and the bloody civil war that ensued, which ended in victory for the right-wing camp, the issue of the extermination of the Jews had no place. From 1967 to 1974, the military dictatorship isolated the country in a provincialism that did not allow the recognition of any other. Greece had to belong only to Greek Orthodox Christians (“Greece of Christian Greeks” was the dictatorship’s slogan) and, of course, the “right-thinking” ones. After the fall of the colonels’ regime and the final advent of democracy in 1974, still more time had to pass before the history of the 1940s could be confronted.

Let it be noted that the Greek resistance was not recognised until 1981, when the socialist Pasok party came to power and attempted to achieve a so-called “national reconciliation” (official recognition of the resistance, as the “National Resistance”, came in 1982). If the restoration of democracy was a defining moment for change in many issues, the memory of the genocide of the Jews was not one of them. It remained elusive, a binary right-left political reading of events centred on the civil war and its consequences, leaving no room for other distinctions. The national narrative did not include any particularities. The priority remained the integration of the memory of the resistance – a chapter hitherto excluded from public history. But historiography, too, dealt with the building of the Greek nation-state, where the nation was presented as a cohesive entity not amenable to differentiations.

The history of the memory of the genocide of Greek Jews can be divided into three periods. The first is that of silence, which lasted about 45 years (1945–1990). Of course, there was no oblivion for the victims but there was a heavy silence. The second period, which began in the 1990s and lasted until 2004, is characterised by the emergence of interest in the history of Greek Jews among noninstitutional academic circles. This was the period when the first conferences that had a wide public resonance took place, along with the publication of the first testimonies in Greek, as the consciousness of the survivors matured and they wanted to record what had happened to them. This was the “period of emergence” of memory and of the awakening of academic interest.⁹

The third period has lasted since 2004, when Greece recognised 27 January as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, initiating a period of institutional memory, chiefly characterised by the adoption of state initiatives regarding the memory of the genocide. Greece’s joining of international organisations also required it to keep pace with other countries.

Over the last ten years, Greece has made great progress in making up for the lost time before this memory was officially recognised as part of its broader collective memory. During this period, academic research on the issue has flourished, a part of society has “discovered” the event and has begun to realise its importance.

In order to highlight the most significant stages of the process of the emergence of this difficult memory, and before talking about the rest of Greece, we must examine the case of Salonica separately. Salonica occupies a special position. In the international context, Sephardic Jews everywhere view the city as the quintessential place of memory and as doubly emblematic: firstly, because many thousands of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 settled there and very quickly formed the most populous and prosperous community in the broader region; and, secondly, because of the unique position occupied by this community in the memory of the extermination of the Greek Jews it is sometimes mistakenly identified with the fate of all Greek Jews.

Both from the perspective of population – Salonica’s population was majority Jewish until 1922 and the Jewish community numbered 49,000 people according to the 1940 census – and of its long and glorious history, the Salonica community was a special case. Aron Rodrigue considers it to be “the most important lieu de mémoire of our time” and calls the innumerable narratives that they created a “unique ‘novel’ around this special ‘Jewish’ site”.¹⁰ The deportation of the Salonica Jews took place from 15 March 1943 to early August 1943,¹¹ “with unprecedented speed”, as Hilberg stresses,¹² while no more than a thousand survived the camps.

And yet, Jewish roots in Salonica were so deep that the community – tiny of course in comparison with the prewar history of the city – managed to reestablish itself despite the very difficult conditions of the return.¹³ And so Judaeo-Spanish, which had not been heard in the city for about two years (from spring 1943 to spring 1945), returned with the thousand or so survivors of the camps and the 950 people who had managed either to avoid deportation by going into hiding or by participating in the resistance. Together, they would make up the core of the small postwar community. Judaeo-Spanish continued to be spoken until this century, mainly by those who had been born before the war. Those born after the war generally understand the language but do not speak it. Some of the younger people, grandchildren of the survivors, want to learn it and are taking lessons that are provided by the community. Of course, in this case it is no longer a native language, naturally acquired by being spoken at a young age, but is instead learned as a cultural choice. Dedication to the language is, in fact, a fundamental characteristic of the Sephardic identity. Being Sephardic also means speaking Judaeo-Spanish, understanding it to some extent or at least sharing a nostalgia for the language of parents and grandparents.

It is obvious that the life of Greek Jews after the war differed greatly from what it had been before 1940. The processes of integration and cultural assimilation, such as gradual Hellenisation, were concluded during the first postwar decades. As already noted, from 1945 until the early 1990s, this new community of survivors experienced a traumatic period of silence: a silence that was doubly deafening for this city, as Mark Mazower would describe it, in his celebrated book Salonica: City of Ghosts.¹⁴ During this period, the extermination of about 47,000 Salonica Jews did not greatly concern wider society. However, a part of this society profited from the expropriation of Jewish businesses and property. As for the Jewish community, it mourned in private, having closed in on itself. It was a period of private grief, withdrawal and difficult reestablishment. Two recent books by Rika Benveniste deal with the survivors in this terribly difficult period through the methodology of microhistory.¹⁵

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The change became evident in the early 1990s. The first rays of light were cast in the noninstitutional academic field. The establishment of the Society for the Study of Greek Jewry (EMEE) contributed significantly to the awakening of interest with conferences, workshops and events during which, during the 1990s, foreign and Greek academics met in Salonica and Athens and opened the debate on the issue.¹⁶ The first international conference on Greek Jewish history, organised by the EMEE, took place in the early 1990s in Salonica and was soon followed by others, which incorporated the subject into their programmes.¹⁷ In parallel, this was a period when the Jewish community of Salonica adopted a more outward-looking and dynamic stance. In 1992, the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain was commemorated and, three years later, in 1995, the 50th anniversary of the return of the survivors of the camps to Salonica was marked – a return that resembled an appearance by real ghosts.¹⁸

Culturally, the 1990s also saw an unprecedented interest in Sephardic cookery and music, two important cultural elements of Sephardic tradition that were an appropriate bridge for reaching out to non-Jewish audiences. Greek composers and singers rearranged melodies and songs and made them known to the wider public.¹⁹ A guide to the cuisine of Salonica was published in 2002,²⁰ while a little later, a Sephardic restaurant (Gostijo) opened in Athens in the busy Psyrri district. Many younger (and not so young) people born after the war discovered Sephardic traditions and gradually realised that the Sephardic Jews were the bearers of a very rich culture, and had lived for many centuries in Salonica (and in many other cities) before falling victim to Nazi atrocities and being exterminated almost in their entirety.

The deafening silence around the Holocaust in Greece lasted for about 50 years after the war. It was as though the Jews who had perished had never existed. The reasons for this silence were generally the same as in any other country but some were related to the particularities of Greek history. The memory of the trauma of the civil war lay upon all other “memories”. Τhe memory of the Shoah began to emerge in Greece some 15 years after its emergence elsewhere.

Though the 1980s was a decade when the memory of Auschwitz was widely recognised in the Western world, it was not until the 1990s that the process began in Greece. The official national narrative, which used to shroud the resistance and the subsequent civil war in a cloak of silence, affected also the fate of the Jewish communities. The “patriotic” language of school history books gave no space to a tragedy that was about the fate of “outsiders” or “others”, people who did not share the Greek Orthodox Christian identity and were not conceived as “Greeks”. Nor did it speak of the resistance, because this was left-wing in its greatest part. It spoke only about the patriotism and heroism of Greeks in the brief war against the Italians (which is why the only official state commemoration of the war was on 28 October, when Italians declared war on Greece, until 2015, when the liberation of Athens and Thessaloniki, on 12 October and 30 October 1944, respectively, was marked.

The year 1990 marked the beginning of the emergence of this difficult memory²¹ both in academic circles and in the communities. The first personal testimonies were published in Greece at that time. There are numerous reasons for this delay. Not only was there a dearth of publishers willing to invest in writing of this nature, but some of the survivors had reached the point where they were able to speak and write about their experiences – for reasons which the writer Jorge Semprún, deported from France as a political prisoner to Buchenwald, explains so clearly in his book L’écriture ou la vie (Writing or living). Semprún analyses the necessity of oblivion as a prerequisite for the survivor to go back and pick up some earlier strands of life. In the light of such a dilemma, writing lies in the opposite direction of life, while oblivion allows one to live.

The maturation of time rendered writing a liberating process. In the 1990s, however, memory was reassessed, resulting in a veritable explosion in the publication of survivors’ testimonies that broke the 50-year silence. About 25 testimonies of Greek Jewish survivors have been published in the last 25 years.²²

The first published collection of personal accounts of Greek Jews was that of Miriam Novitch, herself an Auschwitz survivor. The author gathered a wealth of material, mostly personal accounts by Greek Jews who had survived the camps or joined the resistance. The Greek translation was not published until 1985, and even then it was not a publishing house venture but was published by the Society for Greek-Jewish Friendship. Never a mainstream publication, it was destined for the bookshelves of Jewish families and had no professional or social function.

In the 1990s, however, as we have said, memory was reassessed, resulting in a veritable explosion in the publication of survivors’ accounts compared to the silence. For many years, Fragiski Ampatzopoulou, a lecturer in literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, was to base her research on this theme; the first accounts to emerge had the benefit of her knowledge and attention. Bibliographies, indices and notes were published with introductions she had written. Most recently, in 2018 she edited the publication in Greek of the testimonies of Dr Issac Matarasso and Marcel Nadjary.²³

I would like to refer here to a pivotal book which, while belonging to the genre of testimony, is also clearly historiography. According to my evaluation, Greek historiography of the Holocaust begins with the translation into Greek of the monumental work by Michael Molho and Joseph Nehama, In Memoriam, originally written and published in French (as often happened with Sephardic writers of French education) from 1948 to 1953.²⁴ In 1974, some thirty years after the end of the war, the year when Greece returned to civilian government, the Jewish Community of Salonica decided to go ahead with a Greek translation of this work. The international readership of the original French edition included the French-speaking Sephardic community of Salonica but not the wider Greek public. Even the Greek translation of this major work did not enjoy the reception it deserved. At that time, it was not able to fulfil its intended role, that is, to function as the seminal work of Greek literature on the genocide. Yet, with its 500 pages, it remains the first and unsurpassed compilation on the subject.

The publication of this first work was followed by a long, literary silence. The subject has not yet entered the sphere of interest of Greek historians. Two historians devoted chapters to the extermination of Greek Jews in their books, namely Hagen Fleischer in Στέμμα και σβάστικα [Crown and swastika] and Mark Mazower in Inside Hitler’s Greece, both of which were translated into Greek in 1988 and 1994, respectively. In his latest work on Salonica and the three different religious communities that were integral parts of it for many centuries, Muslims, Jews and Christians, Salonica: City of Ghosts, Mazower devotes a whole chapter to the genocide of the city’s Jewish population. That same decade saw major books (like Primo Levi’s trilogy on Auschwitz) being translated and published in Greece (by Agra) and conferences by the EMEE in Salonica and Athens. The activity of this society was really significant, as it helped draw the history of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire (and Greece subsequently) into historiography from a previous state of nonexistence. Previously, neither the presence of Jews in Ottoman cities like Salonica nor the Holocaust had been a topic of study in Greek universities (apart from exceptions, like some courses by Fleischer at the University of Athens or by Maria Kavala, at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki). The first chair dedicated to Greek Jewish Studies was officially inaugurated in the 2018–2019 academic year at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and was assumed by Giorgos Antoniou.

Around 10 testimonies have been published in the last 10 years, some of them posthumously. One very important posthumous testimony, published by the Jewish Museum of Greece and the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris, is the testimony of Lisa Pinhas, originally written in French.²⁵ Born in Salonica in 1916, Pinhas was deported in 1943, survived Auschwitz, returned in Salonica and lived there until her death in 1980. She worked hard to help the deportees who returned and save the memory of the destruction, which was not yet named the “Holocaust” or “Shoah”. She gave speeches at the commemorations of the initial years at Monastirioton Synagogue – the only one of 35 in the city that remained, because it had been used by the Red Cross during the occupation. Her book, A Narrative of Evil: Lisa Pinhas Confronts the Holocaust, has been published in three languages (Greek, English, French).²⁶ Needless to say, it is an extremely important Holocaust testimony, published more than 70 years after the events and 40 years after the writer made her last corrections. Had it been published at the time, it would have been the first testimony of a Greek Holocaust survivor in Greek.

The testimonies of two other survivors, Sephardic Jews from Salonica, who took part in the Sonderkommando units – and would not normally have been expected to survive – are also important. The first, published posthumously, is that of Leon Cohen²⁷ and focuses on the uprising of workers in the crematoria where Greek Jews worked in the Sonderkommando. The second is that of Shlomo Venezia, which had initially been published in French, based on a long interview with a French journalist.²⁸ During this period, the first film documentaries were also made.²⁹ In all, the subject proved very difficult to elevate into the collective consciousness, due to the resistance to “otherness” in the prevalent national narrative. The above references to testimonies have, perforce, been selective and are by no means exhaustive. Although the Greek bibliography is still lacking considerably, many publications on Greek Jewry have emerged in the last decade from younger researchers who are also interested in the reconstruction of life of Greek Jews after 1945, like the ones presented in this volume. The testimonies offer the reader the unique vibrancy that can only come from lived experience. They also stand as irrefutable evidence of the catastrophe, for as Jacques Derrida said, “Wretched is the society that does not believe the witnesses”.³⁰

The symbolism of the various lieux de mémoire is well-known and due recognition has been accorded to them. Yet for many years, the Greek state made no provision for Holocaust memorials in Greece. The first memorials erected to commemorate the extermination of Greek Jews were exceptionally discreet, plain and simple memorial columns, erected in Jewish cemeteries by the communities concerned. That was the case in three different cities: in Kavala and Athens in 1954 and in Salonica in 1962. The memorial columns were placed inside cemeteries, simply because at the time the memory concerned only the Jewish community and not its surrounding society.

In the 1990s, Holocaust memorials started to appear thanks to the cooperation between local authorities and Jewish communities, and public spaces began to be marked by them. The first in Larissa (1987), where the resistance saved the majority of the Jewish population, followed by Ioannina and Kastoria (1996). This kind of activity has increased manifold since 2000, although there are still many cities where no monument has been erected. In 1986, Salonica city council named one of the city’s squares as the Square of Jewish Martyrs. In the same city, in 1997 the state erected a memorial which, 10 years later, was transferred to Plateia Eleftherias (Liberty Square) – the lieu de mémoire par excellence of the persecution, where thousands of male Jews were gathered and humiliated by the Germans in July 1942.

Memorials then began to be erected in other towns and cities, like Volos, Halkida or in places where there was no longer a Jewish population – like Didymoteicho, Komotini and Hania – or where there were just tiny communities, such as Ovriaki (Corfu’s ancient Jewish neighbourhood) and Rhodes. This marking of public space is significant in that it acknowledges that this tragic event concerns the whole population of the city and not only Jews. It is thus inscribed in the traumatic events of local history.

Finally, in May 2010, the central Holocaust Memorial of the Greek Jews was unveiled in Athens. The monument was erected in an open space in Thiseio, very close to the two Athenian synagogues, a plot granted for this purpose by Athens city council. It is of extreme importance that, 65 years after the end of the war, the capital finally had a monument that honours the memory not only of the Athenian Jews but of all Greek Jews. Unfortunately, the monument has been vandalised several times, like many other Holocaust memorials in Greece, especially in Salonica. More recent cases of vandalism concern the monuments in Hania, on the island of Crete (the sculpture is a reference to the Tanais which sank with the deportees), and Kavala. Jewish cemeteries have also been desecrated (Athens and Trikala in 2018). Another kind of monument, an original one, the first for the “righteous among the nations”, was placed in the courtyard of the Sephardic Athens Synagogue in January 2016. It depicts a book with names.

The initiatives of Salonica Mayor Yannis Boutaris, since his election to office in 2011, which aim to embed this extinct memory in the city’s life, represent a very significant change. In November 2014, a new monument was unveiled at the Observatory Park of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in commemoration of the huge Jewish cemetery that was destroyed by the Nazis in collaboration with the Greek authorities in December 1942, thus fulfilling an historic debt of the university towards the city’s Jewish community. Before that, there was not even a plaque in the university to mark the destruction of one of the most ancient and great Jewish cemeteries in Europe. The same mayor also initiated, in 2013, an annual march on 15 March from Plateia Eleftherias to the city’s old railway station, commemorating the first transport of deportees which left Salonica for Auschwitz. But the most important project is the Holocaust Museum, which will include a centre for research and education, which was announced by the mayor and the president of Jewish community of Salonica, David Saltiel. The relevant presidential decree for the museum, which will be constructed near the old railway station, was signed in January 2018.

But apart from institutions, there has been an awakening also in society. In 2015–2016, on the initiative of non-Jewish citizens, the first “memory stones” (λίθοι μνήμης in Greek or Stolpersteine, to use the German name by which they have become known) were laid in Salonica: in 2015 at the first high school for Jewish boys, from where 149 pupils were deported, and in October 2016 at the port, commemorating five Jewish dockers who met the same fate. Salonica is now part of the world’s largest decentralised memorial of Stolpersteine, of which more than 60,000 exist all over Europe. Names are finally being given to the “ghosts”.

Upon the recognition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Greece in 2004, there was only one central official event, organised by the Athens Jewish community and the Attica Regional Authority. Since then, the day has grown to encompass films, publications, conferences, exhibitions, TV documentaries, involving more and more people. In January 2018, the National Library of Greece dedicated a whole week with exhibitions and screenings on the subject while the Numismatic Museum of Athens organised a cultural event (with conferences and screenings). Holocaust Remembrance Day has now began to have a real impact on Greek society and education. In Greek public schools, every class marked the day with a two-hour course in 2018.

It goes without saying that education is crucial to becoming aware of and comprehending the Shoah. Until 2006, practically nothing on the subject was taught at Greek secondary level. However, in 2007 the Holocaust was made part of the national curriculum for high school pupils. Since 2004, in its aim to assist schoolteachers in their difficult task, the Jewish Museum of Greece (JMG) has organised a series of two-day annual seminars for primary and secondary teachers on “Teaching the Holocaust”, hosted in Athens and in many other cities.

The seminars are organised under the auspices of and in collaboration with the education ministry, which has shown much interest in and has actively supported such initiatives, especially in recent years. In May 2013, at the initiative of the General Secretariat of Religious Affairs of the ministry and its secretary general, Giorgos Kalantzis, the JMG organised, for the first time, a pilot programme for a study tour by Greek upper high school pupils to Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. The programme was also supported by the Foundation for Youth and Lifelong Learning. Due to the encouraging results and response of both pupils and their teachers, the programme has continued.

Since 2015, a pupil competition has been held, in different school districts nationwide, for the creation of a video on the Holocaust. The competition involved the making of a six-minute video by a group of pupils and their teacher. In 2017 the topic was “Children as victims of the Holocaust” and in 2018 “The extermination of Greek Jews”. The projects are evaluated by a special committee and there are five prizes every year. The winning teams then participate in the study tour. In 2017, 83 pupils, from schools in Attica, Thessaloniki, Hania and Agrinio, visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, while in the following year 82 pupils from public and private schools in Athens, Thessaloniki, Kavala and Hania took part in the trip. Interest in the competition is increasing year to year.

The formation of the academic field of knowledge at the initiative of scholars through publications, studies, conferences and speeches in the 1990s³¹ was followed, in the mid-2000s, by a change in how the subject was treated by the state and the education system. The inclusion of the teaching of the Jewish Holocaust in the syllabus of secondary schools, where tomorrow’s citizens form their social conscience and where their sensitivities are carved, has been hugely significant.

However, the reality is always complex and multifaceted. The positive developments have coincided with an accentuation of racism, which fuels antisemitism. Phenomena that were once impossible to imagine, such as neo-Nazi activities, have been on the rise in recent years, and neo-Nazis have been elected to the Greek Parliament. The vandalism of Holocaust monuments in Athens, Rhodes and Salonica have been added to older, repeated desecrations of cemeteries (in Ioannina and Salonica). The synagogue at Hania, which contained a very important library and archives, suffered a double arson attack in January 2010. Arson attempts were also made on the synagogues of Corfu and Veria. The dissemination of neo-Nazi views through Greek internet sites frequently visited by adolescents is another major source of concern.

The need, therefore, to broaden the knowledge regarding the extermination of the Jews and the realisation that Jews were an integral part of Greek society appears even more imperative. Nevertheless, there is still a long way to go and much work to be done before we can talk about a real inscription of the Holocaust in Greek collective memory. Notwithstanding the fact that resistance to any “otherness” remains widespread, as do antisemitic stereotypes, Greek society has opened up.