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*Reception to follow in the Simpson Center, CMU 202/204*

Between 15 March and 10 August 1943, around 43,000 Jews from Thessaloniki were transported to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. Of these, fewer than 1,000 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 the majority 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 became victims of the Holocaust. This considerable number of letters from three different eyewitnesses, as well as the extensive period covered, sheds light on the lives of ordinary Jewish citizens of Thessaloniki. The talk will discuss the general framework of the Holocaust in Thessaloniki and the great contribution these letters can make to our understanding of this dark period.

Dr. Leon Saltiel is a historian specializing in the Holocaust in Thessaloniki, Greece. He holds a Ph.D. in Contemporary Greek History from the University of Macedonia and was 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 (English version Berghahn 2021). He also serves as Director of Diplomacy and Representative for the World Jewish Congress at the UN and UNESCO in Geneva.