His hand, bearing the indelible number 116257, continued to wipe away tears. That day he was determined to tell everything. For the persecution and violence in occupied Thessaloniki, for the Nazi atrocities in the Auschwitz camps, for his injury as a “guinea pig” in Mengele’s “medical experiments”. While silence had sealed his mouth for more than half a century, on that day his speech became a stream. “Father, don’t cry. Try to forget.” “Remembering hurts, but forgetting hurts even more, my child.” He wanted the living evidence of those who doubt the Holocaust to exist. Let’s not forget.

A few months after his story, Joseph Saias passed away, and the daughter of Beatricis Saias-Magrisu, who describes to us that shocking day, kept her promise. In her novel Fire Bracelet (Kastaniotis Publications, 2006), she brought her family’s story to life and now she is taking on a second life in the new ERT series of the same name, directed by Giorgos Ghikapappa, which will premiere tonight on the first channel of public radio and television. with the first two releases. Both the book and the script for the series combine real events with fiction to chronicle the dramatic journey of the Jewish family of Moses Cohen (Nikos Psarras) through the dark days of the 20th century.

It traces the tragic fate of Jews from the fire of 1917, when Benuta’s wife (Elisabeth Mutafi) gave birth to Joseph (Christos Loulis and Dimitris Arianoutsos at a young age) to the Holocaust and back. Screenwriters Nikos Apirantitis and Sophia Sotiriou respectfully touched on historical events in order to convey for the first time on a television channel “the truth that we must tell about the destruction of 45,000 Jews of Thessaloniki by the Holocaust.” Because if we forget them, it’s like killing them a second time,” the author tells us.

In fact, Joseph, the youngest of the seven siblings of Benuta and businessman Mendez Sayas, was not born in the fire of 1917, his daughter explains to K. He was 16 years old in 1943 when, together with his father, two brothers David and Mair (Miko), his wife Estreya and daughter Betty, they left Thessaloniki for Auschwitz, boarding wagons with two barrels of water. , one out of thirst, the other out of need – “the highest humiliation of man,” as Joseph Saias said. His brother Zakinos died on the Albanian front, Raul left for Israel before the war, his sister Frida (Zaglin in the series, played by Nefeli Kouri) is cut off from her family because she fell in love and married a Christian Konstantinos Dimadis, they fled to Kozani to save himself, taking with him his second sister Sarah (Rula is the mother of Albert Burla, managing director of Pfizer).

When Rula returned to Thessaloniki to find out what had happened to her family, her friend handed her over to the Germans. She was arrested, but seconds before her execution, she was released thanks to Konstantinos Dimadis, who used Max Merten. She was saved by the fact that she was hiding in a psychiatric clinic for some time.

Mengele’s experiments

Joseph’s father, his daughter-in-law and granddaughter were sent straight to the crematorium. The siblings survived by ignoring the danger of a 16-year-old who was stealing food from the trash. Joseph was one of the prisoners selected for medical experiments by Dr. Josef Mengele. He underwent surgery for appendicitis without anesthesia. He survived, but he was haunted by killings with painful and traumatic experiments on the vital organs of even children. David’s brother was lucky too. He escaped certain death just before the Soviet army entered the camp. In a group execution, he fell under a pile of lifeless bodies without being shot.

They returned to Thessaloniki alive. From the ruins they rebuilt their lives. “Our survival was our victory over Nazism. We won because we lived,” my father said, says the author. “He taught us to love our lives, to live every day, to accept minorities. He did not inspire hatred in us, but he swore we would never forget.”