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| Drama, Greece. Holocaust Monument. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022 |
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| Drama, Greece. Holocaust Monument. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022 |
Greece: In Drama, Remembering the Murder of Jews of Macedonia and Thrace
By Samuel D. Gruber
I’ve recently written about Holocaust memorial monuments in
the Greek cities of Thessaloniki,
Chania, Volos.
and Larissa. Those are places where
there is a living Jewish presence, with still functioning synagogues and some
Jews. There is no such life left in the former Jewish centers of East Macedonia
and Thrace. The once thriving communities of Serres, Drama, Komotini, Xanthi,
Komotini, Alexandropouli and Didymoticho
were entirely destroyed and their thousands of members murdered in
1943,
when the Bulgarian occupying military, in coordination with German and
Bulgarian
governments, deported all the Jews from the region to Treblinka in
Poland. The series of memorial monuments built in these towns by the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece since the late 1990s are as little known as is the tragic history they mark.
Twenty-five years ago, in 1997, public remembrance
of this Holocaust history began the town of Drama. A memorial plaque was
installed on the
wall of the tobacco warehouse where the Jews of Drama had been
imprisoned in
1943 on the edge of Agia Varvara (Saint Barbara) Park.
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| Drama, Greece. Remains of tobacco warehouse at where Jews were impronsoed before deportation. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022. |
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| Drama, Greece. Remains of tobacco warehouse at where Jews were impronsoed before deportation. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022. |
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| Drama,
Greece. Memorial plaque affixed to former tobacco warehouse at where
Jews were impronsoed before deportation. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022. |
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ΣΤΟ ΧΩΡΟ ΑΥΤΟ
ΣΤΙΣ 3 ΜΑΡΤΙΟΥ 1943
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On this site on the 3rd
of March 1943
|
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ΣΥΝΕΛΗΦΘΗΣΑΝ
ΚΑΙ ΦΥΛΑΚΙΣΤΗΚΑΝ ΑΠΟ ΤΙΣ
|
Were arrested and imprisoned by
the
|
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ΓΕΡΜΑΝΟΒΟΥΛΓΑΡΙΚΕΣ
ΑΡΧΕΣ ΚΑΤΟΧΗΣ
|
German-Bulgarian occupying
authorities
|
|
1200 ΕΒΡΑΙΟΙ
ΤΗΣ ΔΡΑΜΑΣ ΟΙ ΟΠΟΙΟΙ
|
1200 Jews of Drama who were
|
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ΕΚΤΟΠΙΣΘΗΚΑΝ
ΣΤΑ ΝΑΖΙΣΤΙΚΑ ΣΤΡΑΤΟΠΕΔΑ
|
Transferred to the Nazi camps
|
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ΤΟΥ ΟΛΕΘΡΟΥ
ΚΑΙ ΤΟΥ ΘΑΝΑΤΟΥ
|
Of calamity and death
|
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ΤΡΕΜΠΛΙΝΚΑ
ΑΟΥΣΒΙΤΣ-ΜΠΙΡΚΕΝΑΟΥ
|
Treblinka Auschwitz-Birkenau
|
|
ΟΠΟΥ ΚΑΙ
ΘΑΝΑΤΩΘΗΣΑΝ
|
Where they were killed
|
|
ΑΙΩΝΙΑ Η
ΜΝΗΜΗ ΤΟΥΣ
|
May their memory be eternal
|
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ΔΗΜΟΣ ΔΡΑΜΑΣ
|
Drama Municipality
|
|
ΚΕΝΤΡΙΚΟ
ΙΣΡΑΗΛΙΤΙΚΟ ΣΥΜΒΟΥΛΙΟ ΕΛΛΑΔΟΣ
|
Central Board of Jewish
Communities of Greece
|
|
ΔΡΑΜΑ 1
ΙΟΥΝΙΟΥ 1997
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Drama 1 June 1997
|
(translation courtesy of Elias Messinas)
Drama is a city awash with water (its ancient name Dyrama or Hydrama means "rich in water" and water gushes from natural springs at Agia Varvara
Park, the center of local Holocaust commemoration. The park is a mix of
land and water, with wooden walkways crossing wide water pools and
streams. Nearby is the little church of Agia Varvara.
 |
| Drama,
Greece. Church of Saint Barbara on edge of Saint Barbara Park. This was
the neighborhood where many Drama Jews lived before 1943. Photo: Samuel
Gruber 2022 |
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| Drama, Greece. Saint Barbara Park. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022. |
In 1999, a more substantial monument
for all the Jewish martyrs of the Holocaust – but especially for those deported
by the Bulgarians from Macedonia and Thrace - was erected in the park. It was dedicated on
September 5, 1999. The monument acquired dubious notoriety in December 2020 when it was vandalized. Many people pass the monument daily, and it serve as the backdrop to Holocaust remembrance ceremonies.
The abstract black stone monument sits on a large
base that
sprawls outward in the shape of Jewish star. The monument seems like a
stele about
to take wing. A large, curved stone on top spreads to each side,
humanizing the geometry
of the form. On this stone is inscribed in Greek, Hebrew, and English the
admonition to "Remember and Do Not Forget." To me, the monument looks
like a figure with arms outstretched. Perhaps an angel? Even the
Angel of Death? A Christian might see a Tau-cross. A similar monument
in nearby Kavala - from where many more Jews were deported - is not
nearly so well sited, and does not contain the dramatic upper stone.
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| Drama, Greece. Holocaust Monument. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022 |
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| Drama, Greece. Holocaust Monument. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022 |
An
inscription on one side of the monument shows the locations of the
communities of the region from where Jews were deported. On one side are
listed the towns and the number of victims.
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Drama, Greece. Holocaust Monument. Map of towns from where Jews were deported. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022
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| Drama, Greece. Holocaust Monument. "Jewish Communities murdered by the German/Bulgarian occupiers in spring of 1943."Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022 |
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| Drama, Greece. Holocaust Monument. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022 |
Jews in Drama
(summarized from the community history on the website of the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece (KIS)
Jews had been in Macedonia since at least the Roman period,
and were settled in the cities of Serres, Drama, and Kavala during the Byzantine
and Ottoman periods, too. Drama was
mentioned by the Spanish Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela in the 12th century.
He reported there were 140 Jewish families in the city. Jewish refugees from
Hungary arrived in 1529, fleeing after the fall of Budapest. They settled in Drama
and elsewhere in the region. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews settled
in the region as part of the extensive development of countryside and city for
cultivation and production centers for tobacco and silk. Both industries
attracted Jewish investors and managers, especially Sephardi Jews from
Thessaloniki.
The Jewish centers of Drama, Serres, and Kavala were all linked
by marriage and other family connections. When a fire swept Serres in 1913,
many Jews from there moved to Drama. Jewish refugees continued to settle here in
the early 20th century during the Balkan and the Greco-Turkish wars
and subsequent population exchanges. By
1925 there were about 1200 Jews in the city.
When Germans occupied Greece at the start of the World War
II, they granted control of the area between Serres and Alexandropouli to
their Bulgarian allies. After January 1942, German and Bulgarian forces began to
plan the deportation of Jews in Bulgarian territories and a year later the
Bulgarians announced the deportation of Jews from their occupation zones in
Greece and Yugoslavia.
On the night of March 3-4, 1943, the Jews of Drama were forcibly gathered in a tobacco store house in the St. Barbara area, and from where
they were transported by train to temporary concentration camps in South Bulgaria.
On March 20-21, they were transported by train to the Bulgarian harbor of Lom
on the Danube, and from there to Vienna by riverboat under horrific conditions.
Finally, the exhausted and starved prisoners were taken to Treblinka in Poland, where
they were immediately murdered.
According to official documents, 1096 families of Greek Jews
with 681 children under 10 years old, and a total of 4273 people, were deported
from the Bulgarian occupation zone in March 1943. There were no survivors. The
Bulgarian deportation of the Jews was an event of total annihilation. By 1948
only 39 survivors of the Holocaust had returned to Drama. The community could
not be reconstituted and was dissolved.
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| Drama, Greece. Holocaust Monument. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2022 |
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