More than 80 years later, an emotional ceremony was held in Greece as the personal belongings of four Greek Jews deported to Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust were returned to their surviving relatives.
Kaiti Kerasiotis received the watch of her husband, Evangelos, during a moving ceremony at the Greek Foreign Ministry. He was deported in May 1944, at just 19 years old, to the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg. Decades later, Greek high school students participating in a Holocaust remembrance campaign tracked down his elderly widow.
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The personal belongings of four Greek Jews deported to Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust were returned to their surviving relatives
(Photo: Arolsen Archives)
"I can't believe it," she told Agence France-Presse, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, recalling the evening the students first contacted her. "I took out the photos I had put away. I went back into the past and I told myself he had not been forgotten after all."
Greek students were tasked with locating the families of people deported from Greece between 1943 and 1944 as part of a project organized by the country's Foreign and Education ministries.
Kaiti Kerasiotis received the watch of her husband, Evangelos, during a moving ceremony at the Greek Foreign Ministry
(Photo: Arolsen Archives)
"As camp survivors become ever fewer, new, more participatory forms of remembrance must be developed," said Moritz Wein, director of the Arolsen Archives. The return of the belongings is part of a campaign launched in 2016 by the Arolsen Archives, which holds the world's most comprehensive collection of records on victims and survivors of Nazi persecution.
(Photo: Arolsen Archives)
(Photo: Arolsen Archives)
The Arolsen Archives still holds some 2,000 envelopes containing personal belongings taken from deportees from several countries that have yet to be returned to the relatives of Nazi victims.
Secondary school students in Evosmos, near the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, once home to a large Jewish community, spent months searching municipal archives, police records and Greek Red Cross files to locate the family of Evangelos Kerasiotis.
The Arolsen Archives still holds some 2,000 envelopes containing personal belongings taken from deportees from several countries
(Photo: Arolsen Archives)
The descendants of another survivor, Nikolaos Fassouliotis, a Cypriot who lived in Greece and was deported in 1944, also received his personal belongings. Students in Athens sent dozens of emails and made numerous phone calls before locating one of his daughters in Cyprus.
Fassouliotis died in 2000 after rebuilding his life and raising six children. His daughter, Konstantina, received her father's bracelet, engraved with the names of his two children from his first marriage.
(Photo: Arolsen Archives)
"I hope one day to find traces of my father's family," she said.
Nearly 70,000 people — 86 percent of Greece's Jewish community — were murdered during the Nazi occupation of Greece between 1940 and 1944. Today, the country's Jewish community numbers only about 5,500 people.