World War II (continued from WW I) German Occupation Page 4

Similar assertions about the United States, in relation to the Jewish holocaust in general were made in a book entitled, ‘While Six Million Died’, with the difference that the latter asserted that anti-semitism among higher-ups in the U.S. State Department, were against American partipication in the war, even when journalistic reports were filtering back, attesting to the tens of thousands of Jews per day being taken to concentration camps.

It is also known that in Thessaloniki, many Greek businesses helped themselves to the goods remaining in Jewish shops after their owners were taken away by the Nazis, and that insult was added to injury after the war when the huge Jewish cemetery, which had been desecrated by Nazis, became the site for the construction of the University of Thessaloniki and fairgrounds expansion.

After the war, most Jewish survivors in Greece moved to Athens, or emigrated to Israel and other countries, with some 6000 in Greece in 1997, about 1000 of them in Thessaloniki (Sephardim), and about 3000 in Athens (where one can visit the Jewish Museum of Greece to learn of the long history of Jews in this country), with about 300 Sephardic Jews in Larissa (Thessaly), and some smaller communities of around 100 members in Halkidha, Kerkyra (Corfu), Ioannina, Trikala and Volos.

The Greek gypsies also suffered severely at the hands of the Nazi, whose policy was to send them directly to their deaths, with no preliminary period of slave labor. Gypsies had been in Greece since the 11th century, and traditionally practiced such trades of metal-smithing, animal (especially horse) trading, shadow puppeteering, and music.

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