School Honours Jewish Students Murdered During Holocaust

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The German School of Thessaloniki has unveiled a memorial plaque honouring its Jewish students who were deported and murdered during the Holocaust, at a ceremony in Thessaloniki attended by German diplomatic and Jewish community representatives.

The ceremony, held today at the school, recalled the lives of Jewish boys and girls who had formed an integral part of the school and the wider social life of Thessaloniki before the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust.

German Consul General in Thessaloniki Monika Frank opened her speech with the story of Nelly Benroubi, one of thousands of Jewish children in Thessaloniki whose lives were destroyed during the Holocaust.

Benroubi graduated from the German School of Thessaloniki in 1933. Her school record described her as diligent and gifted, with a particular aptitude for her studies despite difficulties linked to her multilingual upbringing.

“Thanks to her inexhaustible talent and constant diligence, her performance was always satisfactory,” her teachers wrote.

Ten years later, Benroubi boarded the first train to leave Thessaloniki for Auschwitz-Birkenau on March 15, 1943. She never returned.

Frank said the memorial ceremony honoured the Jewish students of the German School who were deported and murdered because they were Jewish. She also highlighted the decisive contribution of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community to the development and continued operation of the school.

During the school’s first decade, Jewish children accounted for around 25 per cent of its students. By the beginning of the 20th century, their share had risen above 50 per cent, while during the 1915-16 school year it exceeded 67 per cent.

Prominent Jewish families in Thessaloniki, including the Allatini, Modiano and Misrachi families, did more than send their children to the school. They also participated in its administration and helped finance its operations.

“Without their contribution, its operation probably would not have been possible,” Frank said.

A German-Jewish School in Thessaloniki

Frank also described the school’s distinctive character during its early years. From its foundation until the First World War, August Sigmund served as its director and introduced Hebrew-language teaching while organising scholarships for children from poor Jewish families.

“The German School of that period therefore had a strong German-Jewish character and reflected the social composition of Thessaloniki at the time,” Frank said.

That relationship changed dramatically during the 1930s as Nazi policies began to affect Jewish families in Thessaloniki.

Frank referred to a 1933 report by the German Consulate General which recorded that many Jewish children were leaving the German School for the French School because their families believed they would no longer be able to study at German universities.

The document already reflected the impact of Nazi policies on the daily lives of Jewish families in Thessaloniki.

Frank said the new plaque represented only a first step in confronting the history of the school’s Jewish students.

“This ceremony should have taken place a long time ago. And it is not enough,” she said.

She stressed that remembering the victims requires more than a symbolic memorial. Referring to the first article of Germany’s constitution, she said: “Human dignity is inviolable.”

“Part of human dignity is also every person’s name. These children are not anonymous. They are not numbers,” Frank said, noting that the Nazis later tattooed numbers on prisoners at Auschwitz unless they sent them directly to the gas chambers.

Frank called for further research to identify the names of all Jewish students who attended the German School and to publicly recognise the contribution of Jewish families to the school’s existence and identity.

She also recalled former German President Joachim Gauck’s 2014 visit to Ligiades, near Ioannina, the site of one of the worst Nazi massacres in Greece. Frank cited Gauck’s warning that unspoken words and missing knowledge can create “a second guilt” by removing victims even from collective memory.

Jewish Community Calls for Students’ Stories to Be Preserved

Lazaros Sephiha, vice president of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, said the stories of the school’s Jewish students form an essential part of the city’s collective memory.

He said the ceremony represented not only an act of remembrance but also an effort to restore the students’ presence in Thessaloniki’s history.

“The Jewish students of the German School of Thessaloniki were part of this history. They were children of the same city, classmates and friends, and children of families who actively participated in the economic, social and intellectual life of Thessaloniki,” Sephiha said.

He stressed that their memory belongs not only to their families and the Jewish community but to the entire city and to the history of the German School.

“For the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, the individual stories of the Jewish students of the German School form an inseparable part of collective memory,” he said, adding that “the best answer to oblivion is knowledge.”

Holocaust Education at the German School

Maria Anthopoulou, head of the German School’s History Department, outlined the school’s work teaching the Holocaust and preserving its history.

Holocaust education forms part of the school’s history curriculum and includes educational activities, museum visits and visits to sites of remembrance.

Among its initiatives, students took part in the “Names Behind the Numbers” programme during the 2018-19 school year, researching the stories of 86 Jewish people murdered at Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. Half of them came from Thessaloniki.

A research group also studied the history of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community and the fate of Jewish students at the German School. Its work led to the documentary Memory, which screened at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival.

Historian and German School alumnus Andreas Assael then shared the story of his father, Josef Fred Assael, who left the school while in the third year of secondary school and continued his education at the French School.

Assael recalled how his grandfather decided to withdraw his children from the German School after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany.

His grandfather reportedly told the school’s director, Huf, that he was taking his son out because of what Hitler was doing to Jews in Germany.

According to Assael, Huf replied: “It took me so long to educate such a brilliant student as your son, and now Hitler is taking him from me.”

The ceremony also featured an excerpt from the documentary Memory and a musical interlude featuring Mikis Theodorakis’ Song of Songs.

Among those attending were Bergen-Belsen survivor Rina Barzilay-Revah, French Consul General and Director of the French Institute of Thessaloniki Cécile Valla, French School of Thessaloniki Director Alain Hardy, Spanish Honorary Consul and Jewish Community of Thessaloniki member Sam Nahmias, University of Macedonia Vice Rector Spyros Litsas, Regional Director of Education for Central Macedonia Alexandros Koptsis, Jewish Community of Thessaloniki General Director Victor Naar and Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki scientific director Xenia Eleftheriou.

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