Greek Holocaust victims’ belongings from Nazi camp returned to their descendants |
ATHENS, Greece (AFP) — A watch, a wallet, a ring: personal effects taken from Greek prisoners at a German concentration camp were returned to their descendants on Thursday, 81 years after the Holocaust.
Kaiti Kerasiotis’s eyes filled with tears as she held in her hands the watch of her husband, Evangelos, after an emotional ceremony at the Greek foreign ministry.
He was deported in May 1944, aged just 19, to the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg. Decades later, Greek school pupils taking part in a historical memory campaign found his elderly surviving spouse.
“I can’t believe it,” she murmured, speaking to reporters, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, as she recalled the evening she was contacted by the pupils.
“I took out the photos I had put away. I went back into the past, and I told myself he had not been forgotten after all.”
‘Participatory remembrance’
The restitutions in Athens were part of the #StolenMemory campaign launched in 2016 by the Arolsen Archives — the world’s most comprehensive records on victims and survivors of Nazi camps.
Greek pupils were tasked with tracing the families of prisoners deported between 1943 and 1944, in a project with the Greek foreign and education ministries.
“As camp survivors become ever fewer, new, more participatory forms of remembrance must be developed,” said the Arolsen Archives’ director, Moritz Wein.
Interest in such personal stories shows no sign of waning, Wein added. Requests from families seeking traces of relatives deported to Nazi camps........