On January 27, humanity commemorates the Holocaust of the 6 million Jews who were exterminated in the German concentration camps by the Nazis and their collaborators.

On January 25, 2019, the descendants of the collaborators of the Nazis smashed and destroyed the Jewish Monument in the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in the Observatory Park, in Thessaloniki. They have no moral scruples. They respect neither the living nor the dead.

The University was built upon the shattered tombs and the scattered bones of our forefathers of Thessaloniki, while the Jews of Thessaloniki where confined into ghettos pending deportation. It took 72 years for the city to assume responsibility and pay tribute to the memory of the Jewish necropolis with the erection of this monument in 2014. Today, the memory of the Jews of Thessaloniki, along with the history and the culture of the city, are struck once more by the preachers of hatred.

The Nazis began by burning our books at first, then our Synagogues and our Monuments, then our homes and stores and then… then –with the collaboration of their allies- they burnt our relatives, our friends, our neighbors, they even burnt our dead.

Until when? Until when will the authorities remain bystanders of the vandalisms of memory and civilization? Until when should society tolerate the supporters of Nazism operating freely among us, hurting our human dignity?

Thus, we demand their arrest so that they can be brought to Justice, so that they do not continue their catastrophic work, so that we do not mourn human victims in the name of bigotry and antisemitism.

Sadly, we have to repeat that there remain no other words to describe the sorrow of the Greek Jews: Shame – Shame – Shame.

Excerpt from the inscription on the Monument:

 By Margarita Gokun Silver*, TABLET, January 10, 2019

‘We keep our memories alive,’ said the mayor of Trikala, where a new memorial was recently unveiled

On the morning of Nov. 11, 2018, a crowd of almost 200 people gathered in the center of Trikala, a Greek city located some 300 kilometers north of Athens. Conversing mainly in Greek, but also in Hebrew, English, Italian, and German, they were waiting at one of the main entrances to the old Jewish quarter to participate in the unveiling of Trikala’s Holocaust Memorial. Erected to commemorate the city’s 139 Jewish victims, the memorial is a joint initiative of the Trikala government and the city’s Jewish community.

“It was an obligation to our citizens, to the Jewish Community, to the memory,” Dimitris Papastergiou, the mayor of Trikala, told me via email. The idea first surfaced in his conversation with Victor Venouziou, a native of Larissa who was raised as part of Trikala’s Jewish community and survived the Holocaust because the villagers of Amarantos—50 kilometers away, it was called Mastroyianni in the 1940s—hid him and his family. Last year Venouziou financed a monument in Amarantos to thank them. “Within five minutes we agreed that the city and the Municipality of Trikala also had to erect their own monument,” Papastergiou said.