It was June 2007 in Ioannina, the capital of Epirus, when Zanet Nahmia, seated on her living room couch, reflected on all she had endured as a prisoner at Auschwitz. In a segment of that recorded interview, she pauses her narration to welcome her hometown peer, Nina Negrin, into the room. The two women had shared a common fate in the death camp. With remarkable simplicity, they resumed their description afterward. “We saw four crematoria in our camp and knew they were burning our parents,” one said. The Thessalonikians had arrived earlier and told us: ‘Do you see that flame? That’s where they are burning your loved ones,’” the other added.
At some point during the conversation, Nahmia remembered a song. She recounted to historian Alexis Menexiadis, who conducted the interview for the Jewish Museum of Greece, how they had crafted a floral wreath for one of their fellow inmates and placed it on her head during a break from forced labor. “We sang: ‘Today the sky is white / Today is a bright day / Today an eagle and a dove are being crowned.’ The Germans saw us laughing and became furious,” she said. “We were young and didn’t care.”
‘Do you see that flame? That’s where they are burning your loved ones’
Even amid the unspeakable horror and the Nazis’ dehumanizing practices designed to strip prisoners of their humanity, Nahmia’s description illustrated how they clung to anything that reminded them of life.
On Monday, December 2, shortly before her 100th birthday, Nahmia passed away. She had been the last Auschwitz survivor from the Jewish community of Ioannina. Her funeral was held on Thursday. Now, only two former Auschwitz prisoners remain alive in Greece. Nahmia was born in 1925 to Haim and Revekka Mordechai. She and her family lived within the fortified old town, across from the synagogue, where her father operated a taverna. In March 1944, the Germans arrested her entire family and deported them to Auschwitz. According to her biography published by the Jewish Museum of Greece, Nahmia was also detained in other concentration camps, such as Mauthausen and Gellenau, and was forced to work for a time in a factory in Breslau (today’s Polish city of Wroclaw).
“We stayed three months in Breslau. One night, at midnight, they woke us up. The war was near. We could hear the cannons. They took us further into Germany – on foot. Don’t ask. From where we started, only half of us made it. Three to four days and nights of walking, starving, without water, without anything. Day and night,” she had said. Only she and her older brother Michael survived the camps.
After the war, Nahmia returned to Ioannina. In a black-and-white photograph taken at Lake Pamvotida, she is pictured with two friends, Eftyhia Yosseko and Esther Cohen, who also survived Auschwitz. Ioannina had been occupied by the Germans in July 1943. On March 25, 1944, around 1,870 Jews from the city were transported by truck to Larissa and from there by train to Auschwitz. Few survived the Nazi camps.
“One morning, they knocked on our door. ‘You will prepare in half an hour because you are leaving. We’re deporting you,’ they told us. My mother cried. We grabbed clothes to wear, blankets – whatever we could manage in half an hour. That day, it was windy and snowing,” she recounted. She described how, upon arriving at Auschwitz, their hair was cut, and they were dressed in rags. Each person was assigned a number. Hers was 77113. The dangers they faced became evident quickly, as did the extermination plan that was under way, even if they had initially struggled to believe the accounts shared by older inmates. Perhaps her youth helped her survive. During inspections, if they appeared weak or frail, they could be removed from work assignments and sent to the crematoria.
After returning to Greece, Nahmia had two children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Her granddaughter, Zanet Battinou, is the director of the Jewish Museum of Greece, where her entire recorded testimony is preserved. “I told my children many times about what happened. They were saddened,” she said in one excerpt. “Whatever conversation we had, it always ended with Germany.”
By Yiannis Papadopoulos via ekathimerini.com