A global monument against racism in Thessaloniki

It took Thessaloniki seven decades to restore its memories, recognize its mistakes, and, above all, to apologize for a piece of its history that was silently buried under the foundations of its university. Three years ago, the city's mayor, Yiannis Boutaris, erected a monument in a corner of the campus as a reminder that this was the spot where, for 500 years, the city's once-large community of Sephardic Jews honored their dead. Then, the mayor spoke of the undue delay in breaking the silence and beginning to talk about the dark moments of the city's history.

It was one of the slow but steady steps toward the target set by the mayor's office. The culmination of it all is the creation of the Holocaust Museum and Educational Center in the area of the old railway station, where the beginning of the end was written for the Jewish population of Thessaloniki.

The move came...