The Ancient Agora Square in the 1940s: ‘In those days…’. Extract from the book Refugee Capital by Y. Ioannou

In 1983, in his book Refugee Capital, Yorgos Ioannou documented his own teenage recollection of how the Jewish population of Thessaloniki was first confined to ghettos, stripped of their possessions and rights, and then forced into a mass exodus towards extermination camps. As Ioannou mentions in his work, he records his testimony ‘for the benefit of those innocents and no one else…’

Ioannou, a teenager at the time, lived at 8 Ioustinianou Street, at what was then the centre of the main Jewish ghetto in Thessaloniki. It was one of the four ghettos in Thessaloniki used to imprison the city’s Jewish population during the Second World War. Ioannou places the centre of this ghetto on the western part of Ioustinianou Street, between Venizelou Street and Chalkeon Street. On its western side, the area bordered on what today is Ancient Agora Square, but used to be called the ‘Old Jewish quarter’.

The central Jewish ghetto was T-shaped and was made up of Ioustinianou Street and Siatistis Street, the exits of which could easily be controlled and blocked by the Nazi administration. In April 1943, the Jewish ghettos of the city were evacuated. According to Ioannou, the Jewish residents were arranged into rows and taken to the Baron Hirsch quarter from where they would eventually depart for the extermination camps of Central and Northern Europe. Soon after the evacuations of the Jewish ghettos, the looting of their houses began. In the central ghetto, the Jewish shops were first looted and then granted by the Nazi administration to individuals for commercial use.

Similarly, in his work ‘Pages of an Autobiography’, vol. 2, the poet Giorgos Vafopoulos mentions that ‘pessimism started setting in when the goats were separated from the sheep, when a yellow star was forcibly pinned to their lapels […]. Then, the Jews were not allowed to use the trams and buses. […] And the day came when they were not allowed to walk the streets […]. Jewish stores were appropriated […]. The next stage of the persecution was the formation of Jewish labour battalions […]. The final act of the parting played out at the railway station […].’