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When I visited Thessaloniki, I saw in our neighborhood that the houses where Jews used to live before the war now had been taken by Christians. However, the Mizrachi club, which was opposite our home, had stayed as it was.
The grandfather who was the guard didn’t live any more but the son returned. I don’t know if he’s still alive, Solomon was his name. There were very few Jewish people left. A minimum, maybe a thousand souls all together. So I went and didn’t find anyone, no friend, no cousins, no one.
Many of the ones that returned from the concentration camps, of the very few that did return, went to Israel. There was an orphanage or something like that, where they were offered free housing and this organization was helping them to go to Israel.
In reality what they did was to help them get away, transport them and leave them at a shore in Israel because they were not permitted to enter the country legally, as it was under British occupation. Of course, this wave of immigrants wasn’t the first aliyah. The pioneers were the ones that had come from Russia on foot and set up the kibbutzim.
The grandfather who was the guard didn’t live any more but the son returned. I don’t know if he’s still alive, Solomon was his name. There were very few Jewish people left. A minimum, maybe a thousand souls all together. So I went and didn’t find anyone, no friend, no cousins, no one.
Many of the ones that returned from the concentration camps, of the very few that did return, went to Israel. There was an orphanage or something like that, where they were offered free housing and this organization was helping them to go to Israel.
In reality what they did was to help them get away, transport them and leave them at a shore in Israel because they were not permitted to enter the country legally, as it was under British occupation. Of course, this wave of immigrants wasn’t the first aliyah. The pioneers were the ones that had come from Russia on foot and set up the kibbutzim.
Period
Interview
Yvonne Capuano-Molho