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The Greek city of Thessaloniki was long known as the Jerusalem of the Balkans. There was the main Jewish cemetery in Europe, a cemetery that was confiscated and destroyed by the Nazis in 1942 and whose tombstones were later scattered and reused for the construction of the city after World War II. A story that has just been rescued in the book 'Cimetière Fantôme' (Ghost Cemetery) by the Franco-Uruguayan photographer Martín Barzilai.
“There was nothing left in Thessaloniki,” his grandfather León used to tell him, referring to the cemetery that was razed by the Nazis. A cemetery in which there were 300,000 tombs, the largest in Europe, and among them were those of his ancestors.
Martín Barzilai decided to go in search of the remains of that cemetery, whose tombstones were scattered throughout the city and used as construction material.
It all started from some photos that his father found when his grandfather died. Some photos taken in the 20s or 30s in the Jewish cemetery of Thessaloniki and those of Mamoute in the Jewish cemetery next to the grave of her sister Doudoune, who died in 1926.
The cemetery was built on the remains of a Byzantine cemetery. The oldest tomb that was deciphered dates back to 1493, at that time there was a massive arrival to that city, then under the Ottoman Empire, of Sephardic Jews who had been expelled from Spain by the Catholic Monarchs. At the end of the 19th century, 80% of the population of Thessaloniki was Jewish.
Complicity of local authorities
Its history was erased with the Nazi destruction of the Jewish cemetery in 1943 and the deportation of 45,000 people to extermination camps. The Nazis had the goal of exterminating the Jews, but the local authorities wanted to enlarge the city so they did not put much in the way of its destruction.
“I want to find what they made invisible, the traces that have resisted time,” Barzilai writes in the book. And in October 2018 she traveled there in search of those footprints. The cemetery no longer exists, in its place there is a university campus of Aristotle University.
There are three key people who will help you understand the erased history of the Jews of Thessaloniki and find the remains of the tombstones. This is Jacky Benmayor, a specialist on Spanish Jews and the Jewish history of Thessaloniki; Iosif Vaena, who is a pharmacist; and Leon Saltiel, historian and coordinator of the fight against anti-Semitism of the Jewish Council.
“Benmayor tells me that the tombstones are scattered throughout the city and that they were used for reconstruction after the war, to rebuild churches, to build municipal walls for the new train station, for example, and other private places,” explains the author of the book where he publishes testimonies that say that even tombstones from the Jewish cemetery were used to make dissection tables for the University's Faculty of Medicine.
“The place that impressed me the most is the largest church in Thessaloniki, which is called Saint Demetrius and the esplanade in front of the temple is, according to historians, made with tombs from the Jewish cemetery,” says Barzilai.
What happened to the remains?
Some were rescued and stored in bags in a factory, thanks to relatives of one of his interviewees, Jacky Benmayor.
“They hid those remains during the war years and when they were able to return to the city after, many times, having been deported to Auschwitz and having survived that terrible experience, they recovered the remains and placed them in a new Jewish cemetery that is on the outskirts of the city, which is much smaller,” explains Barzilai.
On his trips to Thessaloniki he did not find the tombstones of his ancestors, but there is much left to discover since, according to some testimonies, there are tombstones even in the sea. “They told me about four places where there are those types of tombstones. This book is the beginning,” says Barzilai. 'Cimetière Fantôme' was published by Créaphis éditions.
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