Personal belongings of Greek Holocaust victims returned to families after decades

The personal effects of four Greek Jewish Holocaust victims were formally handed back to their descendants in an emotional ceremony at the Janos Karidiotis amphitheater of Greece’s Foreign Ministry. Among the items returned was the watch of Evangelos Karsiotis, given to his widow Katie Karsiotis, who told AFP, “I don’t believe it,” after learning from Greek students that they had found her. She said she had taken out old photos and felt as if she had returned to the past, adding that he had not been forgotten.

Karsiotis was deported in May 1944 at age 19 to the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg. His family was located by Greek high school students who had been assigned to trace the relatives of prisoners deported between 1943 and 1944, as part of a project with the Greek foreign and education ministries. Moritz Wein, director of the Arolsen Archives, said, “As the number of camp survivors dwindles, new and more collaborative forms of remembrance must be developed.”

The handover in Athens was part of a campaign launched in 2016 by the Arolsen Archives, which hold the world’s most comprehensive records on Nazi camp victims and survivors. The archive still keeps about 2,000 envelopes with personal belongings of deportees from several countries that have not yet been returned. Students in Evosmos, near Thessaloniki, spent months searching municipal archives, police records, and Greek Red Cross files to find Karsiotis’s family.

Other restitutions included keepsakes of Nikolaos Pasouliotis, a Cypriot who lived in Greece and was deported in 1944. Students in Athens sent dozens of emails and made many phone calls before locating one of his daughters in Cyprus. Pasouliotis died in 2000 after rebuilding his life and having six children. His daughter Constantina received her father’s bracelet, engraved with the names of two children from his first marriage, and said, “I hope one day I will find traces of my father’s family.”

Two wristwatches and a signet ring belonging to Stanislaus Shidlewski were also returned to his nephew Harry Klabzinski in France. Shidlewski had been imprisoned in Neuengamme for a year and weighed only 30 kilograms when he came home. On February 21, 2026, volunteer Natalie Latiers-Libig delivered the items after conducting digital research in three countries and eventually locating the family in Masyo, near Lyon. The article noted that nearly 70,000 people, 86 percent of Greece’s Jewish community, were murdered during the Nazi occupation of Greece from 1940 to 1944, and that the community now numbers about 5,500.