Greece’s oldest Holocaust survivor has died

Jewish women and children in Ioannina, western Greece, on the day of the raid of March 25, 1944, wait for trucks to take them to train stations, from where they will eventually be deported to Auschwitz. Esthir Cohen was one of the few survivors.

Skai TV / EPA Press Office

When Esthir Cohen is buried Thursday in the Jewish cemetery of Ioannina, none of her family will be present, including none with whom she spent her childhood and adolescence as a member of the city’s Jewish community in northwestern Greece.

Cohen, born in Ioannina in 1924, last saw her parents in April 1944 on the trail of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. About two weeks earlier, on March 25, the Nazi occupiers had arrested almost the entire Jewish community of Ioannina with the help of Greek policemen: over 1,800 people.

Cohen described to the Greek television station ERT, among other things, how the raid happened and that he saw his parents and five of his six siblings last on the tracks at Auschwitz. “I haven’t had anyone since.”

Until her death on Tuesday, Cohen was the only Holocaust survivor left in Ioannina; until the Second World War the city had been the center of the Romans, the Greek-speaking Jews whose ancestors had lived in Greece since the Hellenistic period.

Cohen’s story became known in Greece in 2014, but also in Germany, when then German President Joachim Gauck toured the country. Gauck wanted to set an example against the oblivion of the atrocities of his compatriots in the Balkan state between 1941 and 1944 and wanted to meet Cohen. On March 8, he gave a speech in the Ioannina synagogue and then approached Cohen. When she shook hands with the then 90 year old, she said in German: “Seven Seventy Thousand One Hundred and Two” – the number 77102 had been tattooed on her in the Auschwitz concentration camp. In an interview, Cohen said she felt transported back to Auschwitz the moment she had to say her number during roll calls. Then she started crying and the federal president hugged her, also with tears in her eyes.

In interviews, Cohen said he could forgive, even if the injustice that was done to the Jews could not be repaired. It is important that people find out; that there is money for education and that the children learn what happened, because it shows that history repeats itself.

“Punch to the pit of the stomach” for Greek society

Cohen’s story is like a “punch in the pit of the stomach” for Greek society, writes the Greek newspaper “Kathimerini” in its obituary, not only for the hell he lived in the extermination camp, but also for the things he it happened to her after she returned to her hometown.

In Greece, Cohen met a company that treated her and her fate with disbelief, indifference or even hostility. After arriving in Ioannina, she went directly to her parents’ home. But this had already been taken by a stranger. When the young woman said it was her home, the man lashed out at her saying that she might have escaped the German crematoria, but he would have burned it right here in the house stove.

This is just an episode that Cohen described in the newspaper “Kathimerini” in 2014 during the visit of Gauck. Their attempts to regain family property also failed in many places. Thus, after the war, he learned that two family sewing machines were now owned by the bishop. But when he asked to have them back, he was told that they had been handed over to the Greek authorities and that the serial number of the machines was needed before they could be searched. Cohen showed the Auschwitz tattoo on his arm: “This is the only number I remember”.

Cohen had a daughter with her husband, Samuel, who died three years ago and had escaped deportation to Ioannina and survived the occupation as a partisan in the mountains. However, this moved to Israel forever in the late 1960s. The girl was deeply traumatized by insulting a teacher who described her as a “dirty Jew”.

Before visiting Gauck, who wanted to meet the Holocaust survivor, Cohen said he wanted to ask him where the hatred of burning millions alive just because they belonged to another religion came from. Throughout her life, however, she was also tormented by the lack of solidarity on the part of her Christian neighbors: “She didn’t hurt anyone, no tears flowed. When they dragged us out of our homes, no neighbors pulled down the curtain to see what was happening, ”he told the Kathimerini. “Most of us were poor, we hadn’t hurt anyone, we lived in Ioannina for centuries. Nobody liked us. “

Today the Jewish community of Ioannina has only a few dozen members; In 2019, Jewish cardiology professor Moisis Elisaf was elected mayor, the first Jewish mayor of a Greek city. Elisaf paid tribute to Cohen’s ongoing struggle against oblivion on the radio.

With his death, the country loses one of the last contemporary Jewish witnesses to the Holocaust, whose fate opened only a few years ago.