The Ancient Agora Square in the 1960s: I.’s narrative

Ι. was born in the 1950s in Thessaloniki and is a member of the city’s Jewish community. Her testimony connects the wider area around what today is the Ancient Agora with the Jewish presence in Thessaloniki. As a member of the second generation of Holocaust survivors, I. speaks of the time after the Second World War. Her narrative refers to the 1960s period, focusing on the conditions prevailing in the area, the most common professions and revealing her own perspective on the co-existence of different religions in this part of Thessaloniki’s historic centre, where the Jewish presence had been particularly prominent before the Second World War.

In her narrative, I. illustrates the shrinking of the Jewish community after the Second World War. Before 1940, it numbered more than 50,000 members. More specifically, according to Dagkas (1998), in 1928 Thessaloniki had 55,290 Jewish residents. After the Second World War, there were 2,000 Holocaust survivors in Thessaloniki. According to the newspaper Israilitikon Vima (23/11/1945, issue no. 1), it was the women that were mostly affected by the persecution.

The newspaper’s brief overview mentions: ‘This is the tragic toll: 250 women returned from exile to our city and another 250 managed to survive hidden in various corners of the country. We are experiencing the painful awakening from the stupor imposed on us by four years of inhumane slavery and Hitlerian terrorism during which our thinking minds had stopped working. With the exception of the very few women who recovered part of their pre-war assets or inherited their dead relatives’, most among us have no job, no home, no clothes, and what is undoubtedly the worst tragedy of all, we have no family and our spirit is broken’.

I.’s mother, one of the very few women who survived the Holocaust in Thessaloniki, encouraged her family’s younger members to study at university so that they would be more versatile and better prepared to survive in various situations, with or without resources if necessary. In the 1970s, I. moved to the USA to study. She has been living there with her husband and children ever since. She visits Thessaloniki every year.