JTA Correspondent Finds Only 543 Jews in Salonica; 50,000 Lived There Before the War

Three-and-a-half years of German occupation reduced the Jewish community of this city from 50,000 to 543 and resulted in the confiscation and destruction of millions of dollars worth of Jewish property, according to a survey by a special correspondent of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The Nazi new order for Jews – terrorism, intimidation, sadistic persecution vandalism, impoverishment, slave labor and extermination – operated with clock-like perfection against the ancient Jewish community of Salonica.

In addition to the 543 Jews who remain in Salonica, about 1,000 fled the city and reached Athens and about 900 joined the resistance movement and fought in the mountains with ELAS units. All the others, with the exception of few individuals who found shelter in the homes of friendly Greeks in the neighborhood, were deported to death camps in Poland beginning March, 1943.

For fifty days, twice daily, trains carrying Jews to their death left the little railroad station here. Among those jammed into the box cars were blind men, pregnant women, paralytics who had to be lifted into the cars on stretchers, old men and women from the old folks home, orphans, patients from tubercular sanitariums, inmates of insane asylums and thousands of wounded veterans of the Greece-Italian war. Finally, the trains stopped running – there were no more Jews left.

From the first week the Germans occupied the city, Jews were subjected to every indignity that the Gestapo could devise. They were beaten on the streets, thrust from their homes and shops and set to forced labor. Those who hid were hunted down and killed on the spot. At one time the occupation authorities extorted 2,000,000 drachmas from the Jewish community by promising to release all forced laborers. The money was paid, but the men were never freed.

The Jewish cemetery dating back to 1492, in which were the graves of eminent Spanish Jews who had been ministers in the court of Isabella of Spain and famous astronomers and mathematicians, was destroyed on the pretext that the Germans were planning to build a military road through it. Tombstones were sold for anything the Nazis could get. Many were purchased by Greek patriots and churches in order to save them, but others were bought by quislings who used them as door steps, to pave their gardens or sun terraces or as bases for sun dials.