Greek families recover personal belongings of Jews deported to Nazi camps

More than 80 years after the Holocaust, Greece has returned personal belongings of four Jews deported to Nazi concentration camps, in an emotional ceremony in Athens at the Greek foreign ministry. Among the items were a watch, a ring, coins, notebooks and photographs. One recipient, Katie Kersiotis, received the watch of her husband Evangelos, who was deported in May 1944 at age 19 to the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg.

Kersiotis was later found by Greek schoolchildren taking part in a memorial campaign for Holocaust victims. Speaking to AFP, she said, “I cannot believe it,” adding, “I took out the photos I had set aside. I went back to the past, and I said to myself that he was not forgotten after all.” The return of the items was part of a wider effort involving Greek foreign and education ministry programs and the Arolsen Archives.

Arolsen Archives director Moritz Wein said, “As the number of camp survivors continues to decline, new and more collaborative forms of remembrance must be developed.” The archives launched the restitution campaign in 2016 and still hold 2,000 envelopes containing personal items of deportees from several countries that have not yet been returned to families.

Students in Greece spent months searching municipal archives, police records and Greek Red Cross files to find descendants of deportees from 1943 and 1944. In Thessaloniki, students traced Evangelos Kersiotis' family, while students in Athens contacted dozens of people by email and phone before locating one daughter of Nicolaos Pasouliotis in Cyprus. Pasouliotis, a Cypriot who lived in Greece and was deported in 1944, died in 2000 after rebuilding his life and fathering six children. His daughter Constantina received his 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.”