Galery

1

Kavala Municipality honours today the deportation of 1,484 Jews from the city in March 1943. They were corralled by the Bulgarian authorities and dispatched to the Treblinka concentration camp ten days before the deportation of about 50,000 Jews from Thessaloniki. The entire Jewish community of Kavala was obliterated.

Just two hours after the completion of their harrowing journey to Poland, the Jews were transported to the crematorium and killed by forced inhalation of carbon monoxide. No one came out alive from this extermination camp. 1,950 Thessaloniki Jews returned from the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau.

The Holocaust is forgotten in Kavala and few people mention it, but the way and especially the speed of obliteration of the town’s entire Jewish community are mind-boggling. Two hours in the gas chambers were enough.

The victims’ property was looted. Around 40 people got off the hook for being absent from Kavala at the time or having worked in labour camps. They returned to a "town without memories, without hope, a dead town," as the President of the Jewish Community of Kavala, Victor Venouziou, writes in Ethnos.

After a considerable delay, the Kavala Municipality and the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece are honouring the memory of the 1,484 local Jews who died in the concentration camp by opening a Holocaust monument in the city centre.

The deportation of Jews from Kavala began at 2:30 a.m. on 4 March, 1943. The army, the navy and the Bulgarian administration of the town were mobilized to snatch all Jewish families from their homes.

At the time, Kavala had a population of about 10,000, about 1,500 of which were Jews. Most of them were poor tobacco workers, a few were tobacco traders. Some managed to leave the city before the war broke out.

Bulgarian soldiers closed off all the town’s exit points, and also sealed off its main streets and key locations. Meanwhile, 50 assault groups went around the houses and rounded up 1,484 people from 363 households.

As shown by the multi-annual research by historian Vassilis Ridzaleos, "The Jews of Kavala had little baggage with them and were locked in the tobacco warehouses of the Jewish Commercial Company of Salonica Ltd on 97 Adolf Hitler street (its pre-war name was Venizelou), which at that time already belonged to Vladimir Naumov, a Bulgarian tobacco merchant."

On 7 and 8 March 1943, 15 military trucks arrived from Xanthi and embarked on shipping the Jews to the railway station in Drama. From there, it was a long journey to the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland. The Jews were ordered into the premises and forced to strip off their clothes for a bath.

Thereafter they had to run naked along ‘the tube’, a fenced path leading to the gas chambers. The chambers were labelled as ‘bath house’. The moment everyone was inside the doors were sealed tight and carbon monoxide was released to fill up the interior.

How 45 managed to survive

Shabetay Tsimino was born in 1920 in Kavala. In 1943, he was working in a forced labour camp in Bulgaria. On the day of the deportation he was not in Kavala and knew nothing about the event. The news hit him four days later. A train rattled along the railway he was working on, and on an open platform he saw his mother, his five siblings, his grandmother, as well as his uncles, aunts and cousins. "Shabi, watch out," his mother was yelling. "Come save us," screamed his brothers and sisters. This was the last glimpse of his family that Shabetay kept seeing at night until his death in November 2003. This horrendous memory filled his days as well.

Tsimino and 45 other Jews from Eastern Macedonia who at that time had been working in Bulgaria managed to survive, because the head of their labour camp hid their presence from his superiors.

When the war ended, he returned to Kavala. He married his wife Bella and had 2 children with her. "We were on our own. We found nothing. We built everything from scratch, but you cannot build your soul over again. We tried to get rid of our memories, because they pained us too much. The wound will always be open," said Tsimino in a documentary about the Holocaust. Today the family is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Kavala. Their son Aaron lives in Thessaloniki.