Daily Archives: March 17, 2015

THESSALONIKI – Residents of Greeces second-largest city on Sunday placed flowers on train tracks and inside old cattle wagons in solemn remembrance of nearly 50,000 local Jews who were transported to Nazi death camps during World War II.

About 2,000 people joined together at Thessalonikis Freedom Square for the 72nd anniversary of the roundup and deportation of the Jews. Some held banners that said: “Racism Kills, Let’s Learn from History,” and “Never Again.”

The crowd then marched to the northern city’s old railway station, where the first of 19 trains departed for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex on March 15, 1943.

A locomotive believed to have been used to transport Jews, and four carriages that normally would carry cattle and in which people spent nine days locked up on their way to the extermination camps, were at the station. The crowd laid flowers on the wagons and the tracks.

“It was a horrible, mournful, rainy day. Even the skies were weeping,” recalled Heinz Cunho, 87, one of fewer than 100 surviving Greek Jews who made it back from the camps. “Normally, the carriages held 50 people. There were 80 of us to a wagon, and they had us locked up throughout the nine-day trip.”

Greece’s government has decided to include among its demands for German World War II reparations a sum, today equivalent to 50 million euros ($53 million), paid as a ransom to Nazi occupiers in 1942 to free about 10,000 Jewish men used as slave laborers in Greece. They were freed, but still sent subsequently to death camps.

Jews, mostly Sephardic refugees from Spain and its Inquisition, formed the majority of Thessalonikis inhabitants from the 16th to early 20th centuries. Their numbers dwindled in the early 20th century.

Of the 46,091 Thessaloniki Jews sent to the camps, 1,950 survived. Others avoided the camps by either joining the partisan resistance or escaping to Turkey by boat, with the help of residents, and making it to the Middle East. Today, the Jewish community in the city of nearly 800,000 numbers fewer than 2,000.

“We are marching upon the footsteps that Greek Jews marched back then. We must remain united and opposed to Nazism, racism and anti-Semitism,” said David Saltiel, head of Thessalonikis Jewish community.

source:ekathimerini.com

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin on March 23 for talks expected to focus on Greece’s looming cash crunch even as bilateral tensions remain high.

Tsipras is expected to use the meeting, proposed by Merkel on Monday, to seek a “political solution” to the current deadlock that would allow the release of much-needed funding. However, sources close to Merkel indicated that Athens should not foster high hopes for the meeting. “Our aim is the implementation of the February 20 agreement and to keep Greece in the eurozone,” a source said.

In the meantime, technical experts from the Greek side and the creditors will continue talks in Brussels on Wednesday as diplomats prepare for an EU leaders’ summit on Thursday and Friday.

Tsipras had been planning to raise the matter of Greece’s funding needs and reform proposals with the German chancellor on the sidelines of the summit. Sources conceded that the meeting is likely to be “difficult,” adding that Tsipras may also seek a meeting with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi.

Sources close to Tsipras welcomed Merkel’s overture to the Greek premier, noting that she had so far rejected the prospect of a bilateral meeting. During a phone call with Tsipras on Monday, Merkel underlined the critical nature of the current situation and suggested that a face-to-face meeting would be a good idea, sources said.

The meeting could be the last chance for the two leaders to avert an impasse which some prominent Greek government officials blame on “circles in the EU” that want the current administration to fall and are pushing it to implement measures the previous conservative-led coalition had agreed to.

In an interview with Ethnos newspaper published on Monday, Tsipras insisted that further tough measures were out of the question. “Whatever obstacles we may encounter in our negotiating effort, we will not return to the policies of austerity,” Tsipras told Ethnos.

One reason that creditors appear to be holding a hard line is the Greek government’s delay in enforcing economic reforms. Another is a series of initiatives that have been interpreted as aggressive vis-a-vis Greece’s creditors, notably Tsipras’s decision to resurrect the country’s demands for war reparations from Germany.

In comments on Monday, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said the new Greek government had destroyed all the trust that had been rebuilt in the past.

European Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici and Juncker struck a different tone, with the former warning of “catastrophe” if Greece has to leave the euro while the latter called on other eurozone governments to show solidarity with Athens.

source:ekathimerini.com