Greek Jews remember transport to Nazi death camps

THESSALONIKI - Residents of Greeces second-largest city on Sunday placed flowers on train tracks and inside old cattle wagons in solemn remembrance of nearly 50,000 local Jews who were transported to Nazi death camps during World War II.

About 2,000 people joined together at Thessalonikis Freedom Square for the 72nd anniversary of the roundup and deportation of the Jews. Some held banners that said: "Racism Kills, Let's Learn from History," and "Never Again."

The crowd then marched to the northern city's old railway station, where the first of 19 trains departed for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex on March 15, 1943.

A locomotive believed to have been used to transport Jews, and four carriages that normally would carry cattle and in which people spent nine days locked up on their way to the extermination camps, were at the station. The crowd laid flowers on the wagons and the tracks.

"It was a horrible, mournful, rainy day. Even the skies were weeping," recalled Heinz Cunho, 87, one of fewer than 100 surviving Greek Jews who made it back from the camps. "Normally, the carriages held 50 people. There were 80 of us to a wagon, and they had us locked up throughout the nine-day trip."

Greece's government has decided to include among its demands for German World War II reparations a sum, today equivalent to 50 million euros ($53 million), paid as a ransom to Nazi occupiers in 1942 to free about 10,000 Jewish men used as slave laborers in Greece. They were freed, but still sent subsequently to death camps.

Jews, mostly Sephardic refugees from Spain and its Inquisition, formed the majority of Thessalonikis inhabitants from the 16th to early 20th centuries. Their numbers dwindled in the early 20th century.