LETTER FROM ATHENS
At the beginning of the XXe century, in Thessaloniki, the second city of Greece, more than a third of the population is Jewish. The cosmopolitan and commercial metropolis was then nicknamed the “Jerusalem of the Balkans”. Series The Fire Braceletdirected by Giorgos Gikapeppas, which will be released on February 4 on the public television channel ERT and from January 25 on the Ertflix group’s platform, retraces for the first time the story of a Jewish family from Thessaloniki through the darkest events of the XXe century.
The fiction is taken from Béatrice Saias-Magrizou’s book (2006, untranslated) which tells the story of her own family. In 1917, a terrible fire ravaged the city center, inhabited mainly by the Jewish community. His grandfather, entrepreneur Moïse Cohen, loses everything. He is forced to take refuge with his wife in a Gypsy camp where Joseph, his father, is born. Joseph faces the Campbell pogrom on June 29 and 30, 1931, when Greek fascist militias attack the Jews rehoused in a district of Thessaloniki by the sea, but also the bankruptcy of his father’s business and the runaway of his sister, who has fallen in love with a Christian. But the real test for Joseph will remain his deportation in 1943.
“He was just 16 when he arrived at Auschwitz, and Dr. Mengele chose him to perform medical experiments on him. He sees other children dying next to him… He took a long time to open up, to share his story, but one day he felt the need to tell me everything, a few months before his death, develops Béatrice Saias-Magrizou. He said to me then: “I am living proof of what Nazism has done and yet there are still Holocaust deniers. What will happen when the survivors are all gone?” This worried him a lot, and he repeated to me: “We must not forget!” »
“Combating stereotypes”
With this series adapted from her book, Béatrice Saias-Magrizou hopes that “the history of the Jews of Thessaloniki, long remained taboo in Greece, will reach a wider audience and combat the stereotypes that still persist about this community”. The writer is always surprised by the questions she is asked about her origins: “I am often asked, for example, if I am Israeli, and I have to explain that the Jews are also Greek, that they have been present in the country since Antiquity! » In 2019, a survey by Pew Research Center showed that 38% of Greeks had a negative opinion of Jews, one of the highest percentages of unfavorable opinions among European countries. Today, some 5,000 Jews live in Greece, mainly in Athens.
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Source: Lemonde
