Rika Benveniste

(University of Thessaly)

Difficult Return.  Despair and Hope in Salonika after the Shoah

Vortrag in englischer Sprache

Jews living in Salonika in 1945 and surviving the extermination will of the Nazis form an exception. In my book, Those who survived, I have explored the experiences and the itineraries of Jewish partisans and camp deportees during the war and in the first years after the Liberation.

Through the story of a woman who had been an Auschwitz survivor, my lecture will explore further the life of camp survivors returning to their home city. Practical relief was mainly organized by the Jewish community. Besides mourning for the loss of entire families, economic hardship scarcity of material needs and political insecurity have been the main characteristics of those years. My talk will focus on the life in a building belonging to the Jewish community, the ex “Allatini Orphanage”, which became a “Dormitory” to shelter about sixty homeless Jews, mostly camp survivors. It examines the extreme poverty, the claims, the sociability and the migration choices of men and women who depended on the community’s care. Their voices, their mourning and their thirst for a new life can be heard piercing the paperwork of the bureaucracy of a welfare system and will help us reconstruct a difficult return to “normality”.

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