He died at the age of 97 Vaso Stamatiou, the last Greek survivor of Auschwitz. Vaso Stamatiou, the girl “82224»according to the tattoo the Nazis had given her in the concentration camp, she was one of the few Greek women who, without being Jewish, reached the Auschwitz camp and managed to survive.

Her funeral will take place tomorrow, Saturday at 12.30 noon, at the church of Agia Aikaterini in Stylida.

The meeting with Dimitris Koutsoubas

Vaso Stamatiou was met by the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the KKE in December 2022, Dimitris Koutsoumbas.

As the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the KKE had emphasized, “it was shocking to me I considered it a great honor, a great pleasure, the opportunity I was given to speak and meet her. She is a woman, a real fighter of life, of our world. For high ideals he fought, suffered, like other fellow human beings. But she was a 19-year-old law student when she was arrested by the Germans, transferred to the prisons of Pavlos Melas and then went through several camps, including Auschwitz”.

Mr. Koutsoumbas referred to the difficulties faced by Vasso Stamatiou when she returned to Greece in September 1945, since she could not even find a job, labeled a communist as she was, even though she belonged to the people “who gave their very lives, their youth to free our homeland from the conqueror, from the Nazi-fascist Germans at the time, from the concentration camps”.

The General Secretary of the KE of the KKE emphasized that one more reason why this meeting was particularly moving for him has to do with the fact that his grandfather, Dimitris Koutsoubas, who was a priest and teacher in the village of Velesotes Domokou in the prefecture of Fthiotida, executed in 1944 by the Germans.

The meeting of V. Stamatiou with D. Koutsoubas – Rizospastis

The announcement of the KKE

“The KKE sadly bids farewell to Vaso Stamatiou, a heroine of the Resistance against the Nazi occupiers and the struggle of the Greek people, the last surviving Greek woman imprisoned in Auschwitz.

Vaso Stamatiou was born in Aridaia, Pella prefecture and grew up in Thessaloniki. On March 28, 1944, being nineteen years old and a law student, she was captured by the Germans and on April 1, 1944, she was transferred from Pavlos Melas prison to Banica prison outside Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

On June 28, 1944 he was transferred to Auschwitz in Poland and on September 30, 1944 to Ravensburg, Germany. From there, on October 27, 1944, to Buchenwald and returned to Thessaloniki on September 14, 1945.

She is one of the few Greek women who, without being Jewish, reached the Auschwitz camp and managed to survive.

After Liberation, she went to Milan, Italy and studied theater costume design and fashion costume. He returned to Greece and took charge of the wardrobe of the Lyric Theater. He also received a diploma in scenography from the School of Fine Arts in Athens.

Vaso Stamatiou spent the last years of her life in the “Old People’s Home – Petri Foundation” in Stylida. There, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the KKE, Dimitris Koutsoubas, had the opportunity to meet her, during one of his tours in the prefecture of Fthiotida in December 2022, characterizing this meeting as shocking, speaking of “a great honor and joy, as she is a woman a true fighter of life, of the world, who fought for high ideals and was tortured.”

Her funeral will take place tomorrow, Saturday at 12.30 noon, at the church of Agia Aikaterini in Stylida. The KKE expresses its deepest condolences to her relatives”.