Hela Metalon was twelve years old when one day her father showed up in the living room of their house with an old empty aquarium. The little fish died, and little Hela, like her three siblings, was waiting for him to replace them with others.

However, instead of fish, Heinz Kunio put a lamp and “some, in my opinion, strange things. It was a piece of wire mesh, a glass and inside it a piece of a bush, a diary, an old rosary and a bar of soap! Kunio, a Jew from Thessaloniki and a Holocaust survivor, “arranged” Auschwitz in his house! The aquarium was the first “acquaintance” of his children with the trauma that their father carried in himself.

Kunio fought death fiercely in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany and (survived) “to talk”, in his words. “You ask about all this if you are a child,” Kunio’s daughter tells K today.

“Dad may not have answered us directly, but he probably wanted us to ask. I can’t explain it any other way. We asked, still children, what is one thing, what is another in the aquarium, and, finally, this was the most dramatic part of his life. Instead of fish, he put in a diary in which he recorded his experiences immediately after his release while in the Red Cross hospital in Ebenz, Austria, a piece of barbed wire from Auschwitz, a bar of soap that must have been one of the famous “soaps” they say made people, at least they were told so. And there I began to ask and find out, I first came into contact with the Holocaust and what happened to my father. After my twelve years.”

These days, eighty years have passed since the departure (March 15, 1943) of the first train that carried Jews from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and from there to their death. The family of fourteen-year-old Heinz Kunio was on the first mission that started today to Poland. More will follow, only 18, until August. Only 1,200 out of nearly 48,000 survived. And those who returned fell silent. They avoided talking about what had happened, fearing that they would not be believed. They felt they had to explain to friends, neighbors, society how it happened and how they lived while everyone else died.

How did they manage to cope with the emotional trauma that haunted them all their lives and did not let them forget?

In Thessaloniki, only nine people are alive, who can no longer speak due to their advanced age. Today’s silent procession in Thessaloniki will for the first time be free of witnesses to the most heinous crime ever committed by the human mind.

Kunio, who upon his return from Auschwitz became a “cry of the silent”, bedridden, also fell silent at the age of 96… However, their children live and remember. “K” talked to some of them about how their life turned out with a father or mother who had been through so much.

“As a child, I grew up in a very happy family, with a father who worked a lot as a merchant, and when he was at home, he was devoted to us. Nothing betrayed what was imprinted in him throughout his life. At least we didn’t realize it. But I believe that he kept it from us so as not to create injuries for us, ”Hela Metalon told me.

“In hindsight, I realized that he always had nightmares, he thought about it, it tormented his soul. Fifteen years later, in 1960, my father went to Auschwitz alone. What kind of soul power was he supposed to have? She tormented him, but hid it.

“He was of two minds. He tried to protect us, but in general he searched for and tortured himself with such projects as recording 37,000 names of the exterminated Jews of Thessaloniki, which constantly kept his thoughts there. As I got older, I saw him become more and more committed to society and speak more publicly about the Holocaust. When I was 18 years old, his book “I Survived Death” came out, which at first he did not want to publish. “Who cares if you’re okay? Do you think everyone wants to know about the Holocaust?” – he said.

“Then I understood why he said that and what was happening to those who returned. Because these people returned from the camps and no one believed them. The Jews themselves not only did not believe them, but also experienced survivor syndrome, blamed them for the fact that they returned, while others did not.

However, the mark on the hand, a terrible number-tattoo, could not go unnoticed by children’s eyes.

“That was the first thing I asked him. He told me the truth, he didn’t hide anything from me. I asked him if it was getting out of control and he said, ‘No, and I don’t want it to go away. “.

“When I asked him how he managed to survive in this hell, he answered me sometimes miraculously, and sometimes that he lived so that the world would know what happened there. He told us about his imprisonment in the Auschwitz camp, and there his words were blocked. He told us that they suffered a lot, but he lived because he knew German. That’s why he insisted that we learn German. I have been learning German since the first grade. He desperately wanted us to learn the language, perhaps because it saved him and I couldn’t even digest it.”

At some point, Kunio began an information crusade about the Holocaust in schools and abroad, in Europe and America. The daughter was with him in this effort and describes.

“A big push for that was writing his book. It was this that gave him the will and courage to speak out. You know, Cunio’s book was the first living testimony to come out in Greece in the form of a book. Released in the 80s. Then he began to put pressure on the public to open up on this issue, holding exhibitions, lectures, and speeches.

“I saw him break out at the Ebensee camp in Austria. We were invited to the presentation of the book, and on this occasion he asked to visit Ebenze, the camp from which he was released. They were brought there from Auschwitz by death marches, on foot and usually by trains in gondola cars. My father suffered terribly in the Ebenze mine. More than Auschwitz. They had to work endless hours in mines and adits to hide fascist ammunition and planes. A man with a height of 1.86 m reached 34 kg.

“When we arrived at the mine, we entered the gallery where he worked. He walked alone in front with a cane. We let him go to the end of the corridor. He got up and began to weigh the stone with a stick. In the meantime, we were the whole family, my mother, my sister. He hit the wall with a cane and shouted: “Damn Hitler, where are you? You have turned to dust, I am here with my grandchildren and children. You are the one who was destroyed.” And it was hard, bam-bang wall. It was the first time I saw him in such a state.

“The fact that my father made it his life’s goal to talk about the Holocaust was, in part, the healing of his wound. But he was never completely cured. Now, at 95, he suffers more than ever. He is tormented by nightmares, he wakes up at night and sees how bullets pierce the balcony.

“They had a regret that they lived”

“On their return, they went through a long period of mourning, combined with regret that they were alive, while others, their own people, died. And only in the last 15-20 years, feeling that they were also leaving, who were the last witnesses, they spoke to us,” says Hasdai Kapon, son of surviving Benjamin Kapon.

“They wanted to pass on to the younger generation what happened there and as a token of honor to the people who left. It took them years to overcome their grief and regret and try to fix the events with oral or written evidence,” he adds.

“My father spoke to us in our old age and we went to camp together. Grandpa didn’t even want to discuss the matter.”
Benjamin Capon made it out of the Bergen-Belsen camp alive and told K about the shocking moment when they were forced to eat corpses to stay alive.

“There was no dirt to be seen, but only dead people, all dead in heaps and on the dirt. We had the dead as a pillow, another ate dead meat – not to mention the fact that I also ate – there was no food, there was nothing … “.

How can I tell the truth?

It was Maundy Thursday, and Mrs. Chrysoula Paliadeli-Saatsoglu’s mother was dyeing red eggs for Easter. “I remember how she painted when she cried. I asked her mom why are you crying? Why do Christians believe that as the Jews crucified Christ today, he answered me.

Ms. Paliadely’s mother, Jean Saikarto, is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who married a Christian upon her return. A Jewish woman who returned from concentration camps with severe wounds, like everyone else, in her soul and found a bride in a Christian family. It wasn’t common back then.

“In order to marry my father, she had to become a Christian, there was no civil marriage then. I don’t know how difficult her decision was, but then she resigned herself to her obligations to one religion as well as to another.

This contradiction between the tradition and her life at that time was something she carried. My paternal grandfather used to say that “the most Christian of my brides is Jewish.” This coexistence of two religions in one family atmosphere was good for me and for my brother, in the sense that we went beyond a certain group, became a little more tolerant of diversity.
Of course, on a psychological level, the number on the hand was inside our house. Once, while traveling in Athens, a fellow traveler asked her what the number was, and she replied: “My home phone number.” And when I asked her, mother, why didn’t you tell him the truth, she answered: Where should I start and what should I tell him so that he understands?

One hundred years today, Saikarto no longer remembers. In recent years, he has led a silent march in a wheelchair. She was the first, and perhaps the only survivor, to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, thereby sending a signal to society.