Thessaloniki Jews remember the Nazi train of shame (photos)

A crowd of 2,000 people gathered at Freedom Square, Thessaloniki, to commemorate the 72nd anniversary of the deportation of 56,000 Greek Sephardic Jews. They solemnly marched from the square to the city's old railway station where the first of 18 trains departed for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex on March 15, 1943.

The locomotive where people spent nine days locked up on their way to the extermination camp had initially been a cattle train. 72 years onwards, people on Sunday laid flowers and wreaths in honor of the dead. Heinz Cunho, aged 87, one of the few 100 Greek survivors remembered the "horrible, mournful, rainy day" where "even the skies were weeeping." He said that the carriages could have held 50 people, but 80 were pushed onto each wagon and kept locked up throughout the 9-day trip.

Greece's government is now calling for reparations to also be paid as a ransom to Nazi occupiers in 1942 to free about 10,000 Jewish men used as slave laborers in Greece. Though they were freed they were still later sent to death camps.

Thessaloniki was once hope to 800,000 Sephardic Jewish refugees from Spain, but after WWII the numbers are fewer than 2,000. Of the 56,000 that were sent to camps, only 1,950 survived.