“It was hell over there. Only blows, continuous blows, and quick work… The stones were like blades” Sam Cohen, 1922-2014

“We were each given an empty can to eat and another to pee in, because we weren’t allowed out of the barracks at night” Sam Nahmias, 1920-2016

Karya Fthiotidas, 1943. An unknown chapter of the Nazi occupation in Greece was written there, a chapter of hideous forced labor, which is inextricably linked to the annihilation of the Jews of Thessaloniki and the Holocaust. There, the Wehrmacht, trying to ensure supply routes, set up one of the most horrific places of martyrdom in Greece, which disappeared from the pages of history and memory.

In Karya, approximately 400 to 500 Jews of Thessaloniki were transported and forced into prisons. They literally dug a mountain with their hands to build a railway siding that would facilitate the Nazi troops. Many died there and those who survived, after the work was completed in August 1943, were transferred to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, tragically ironically again passing through Thessaloniki.

The story of Karya and the people who suffered there is brought to light by a new Greek-German exhibition entitled “Karya 1943. Forced Labor and the Holocaust”, which is on display until March 2025 at the Nazi Forced Labor Documentation Center in Berlin, which is also housed in a Nazi forced labor camp located German capital. From mid-October, it will also be presented at the Benaki Museum in Athens, in collaboration with the Jewish Museum of Greece. An important, accessible and well-made exhibition, which illuminates dark pages of European history, aiming to attract a younger audience, pupils and students.

It all started in an antique shop

The story of Karya came to light through a photo album, which Andreas Assael, engineer and researcher, son of Holocaust survivor Fred Joseph Assael from Thessaloniki, accidentally discovered in an antiquarian shop in Munich. We met him at the opening of the Karya exhibition in Berlin at the beginning of September. Speaking to DW he said: “It all started in 2002 with a chance discovery in a German antique shop. I found an album, which I realized was about the worst construction site in Greece during German occupation. I knew this was the worst even though nothing has been written about this construction site beyond half a page in a book, In memoriam.”

For Andreas Assael, the album of 400 photographs, 80 of which depicted Greek Jews in the forced labor of Karya, was an enigma, although the photographs themselves were gruesome: bony bodies lifting boulders and an entire mountain that had to be moved. Under the Greek sun that illuminated the most heinous crimes of the Nazis.

After years of analysis of the photographs, he managed to categorize and identify them, reaching not only the company that had undertaken the project on behalf of the Wehrmacht and the German chief engineer, but also the hitherto unknown German commander of Karya, whose traces , but mainly the crimes he committed in Greece, had disappeared. “Karya was the Greek Mauthausen,” Andreas Assael characteristically tells DW, at the same time expressing bitterness over the fact that for years in Greece there was ignorance to indifference about this dark chapter of hers Greek history. His hope is that Karya will one day officially become a “martyr’s place”, a monument to the Nazi atrocities in Greece.

“Grandpa never talked about Karya”

Crucial to Assael’s research was the testimony of a survivor, Sam Nahmia, whom Assael met in 2004. Then he spoke for the first time in his life about the earthly hell of Karya, a deep trauma that he never confided in his own life. family. Sam Nahmia’s grandson, Albertos Sassoon, was present at the Berlin event with his daughter and Nahmia’s great-grandson, Errika Sassoon.

“As a family we learned about Grandpa Sam Nahmia’s detention in the Karya forced labor camp in 2004, when Grandpa was already 84 years old. Then Andreas Assael sought him out to show him photos from the camp,” he tells DW. Nahmia’s narration to Assael was detailed and chilling. After this conversation and despite his family asking to know more, Sam Nahmias never said anything about Karya again until his death.

For the young student Errika Sassoon, preserving her grandfather’s memory is a duty: “I feel very happy that the world will finally learn about Karya and the forced works. I believe that my generation, we have the obligation to talk about them so that they are not forgotten and also so that something similar never happens again”.

Memory gaps and post-war silences

As historian Alexis Detorakis, one of the curators of the exhibition, tells DW: “Karya, like the other locations with forced labor camps for Jews in Greece, are unknown. They remained unknown after the war partly because the survivors were few and of course because the experience of displacement in Uvitz and the fact of the extermination and mass murder of the population somehow overshadowed the forced labor inside Greece”. As he notes, this is an unknown story on many levels “unknown at the local level, unknown in general in the collective memory of the country but also unknown within the memory of the Jewish community of Greece and Thessaloniki”.

Iasonas Chandrinos, historian and one of the curators of the exhibition, also speaks about an underestimated chapter of Nazi crimes and the occupation. “The research on the construction site of Karya sheds light on one of the tens of thousands of places where Nazi crimes were committed during the war. It is certainly not a unique point on the map of National Socialism and the Second World War, but it is exemplary for Greece and concerns an experience that is quite forgotten, not to say understudied and completely ignored in Greece, that of Jewish forced labor. I’d say it’s a footnote to the Holocaust that deserves both to be studied and shared with as wide an audience as possible.”

As he observes, even in post-war Germany, the Nazi crimes committed in Greece were unknown. At least in the first generations, as he reports to DW, it was the “silences” that prevailed and the refusal to confront the Nazi past, because the legacy of the war was “insurmountable”. But also “the lack of willingness to ascertain the crimes and the perpetrators”. As he notes, of the 350 cases of war crimes committed in Greece, for which case files were filed, none ever reached the court. For Jason Chandrinos, do similar investigations that elucidate the crimes of Nazism, that deal with the genocide of the Jews have special weight today? “We must constantly return to these issues as long as, in my opinion, they are supplemented with references to the collective reflexes that we need today, such as the defense of democratic values, collective assertion, anti-fascism, solidarity with the victims, values ​​that are receding in our time and we must definitely stimulate”.

The exhibition “Karya 1943. Forced Labor and the Holocaust” is the result of research and collaboration of the Nazi Forced Labor Documentation Center which is part of the Topography of Terror in Berlin in collaboration with the Memorial Foundation of the Murdered Jews of Europe and the European Museum of Greece. The University of Osnabrück and the AUTH participate scientifically. The project is under the auspices of the Greek Minister of Culture Lina Mendoni and the German Deputy Minister of Culture Claudia Roth.