Maternal words, community anguish: on the eve Holocaust in Thessaloniki

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University is pleased to partner with the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre to present a Gefyra lecture with Dr. Leon Saltiel.

Join us on Tuesday, February 4th at SFU Vancouver, Segal School of Business, 500 Granville Street, room 1400, at 7:00pm for his talk "Maternal words, community anguish: Intimate family correspondence on the eve of the Holocaust in Thessaloniki ".

This talk will be moderated by Dr. Dimitris Krallis, Director of the SNF Centre at SFU.

Attendance is free. The event will be in person only and is open to the public and will be recorded.

This programming is made possible thanks to the generous support of the
Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).

ABSTRACT

Between 15 March and 10 August 1943, some forty-three thousand Jews of Thessaloniki were transported to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. Of those, less than one thousand returned. This was a devastating blow to the Jewish population of Thessaloniki, a major Jewish center in Europe since the arrival of the Sephardic Jews after the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. The Jews had constituted most of the population —and at times even the absolute majority—thus marking the city’s character for centuries. Little is known about the everyday lives of individual Jews during the years of the Nazi occupation, let alone the period of ghettoization and deportation. This gap in historiography can be bridged by a unique find: a series of fifty-three letters written by three Jewish mothers living in Thessaloniki and sent to their sons, all residing in Athens—all three women victims of the Holocaust. This considerable number of letters from three different eyewitnesses, as well as the long period covered sheds light on the lives of ordinary Jewish citizens of Thessaloniki, free from hindsight and the influence of what had followed. The lecture will discuss the general framework of the Holocaust in Thessaloniki and the great contribution these letters can make in our understanding of this dark period.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Leon Saltiel is a historian specializing on the Holocaust in Thessaloniki, Greece. He holds a Ph.D. in Contemporary Greek History from the University of Macedonia, in Thessaloniki, Greece, and has been a post-doctoral researcher at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His publications include The Holocaust in Thessaloniki: Reactions to the Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1942–1943 (Routledge 2020), which won the 2021 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, and ‘Do Not Forget Me’: Three Jewish Mothers Write to their Sons from the Thessaloniki Ghetto in Greek (Alexandria 2018), English (Berghahn 2021) and French (Denoël 2023). He also serves as Director of Diplomacy, and Representative at UN Geneva and UNESCO, for the World Jewish Congress.