January 27 is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the date the United Nations chose to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust during World War II.

The anniversary, which is marked each year since 2005, falls on the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland by the Russian army in 1945.

In Greece it was the residents of Thessaloniki who paid a heavy toll in the period of Nazi occupation.

The approximately 50,000 indigenous Greek Jews members of a flourishing social, economic, cultural life of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community were led to crematoria, on nineteen rail death missions, from the old station (March to August of 1943).

Less than 2,000 of them managed to survive and return to Thessaloniki after the war (a thousand of them from the camps and the rest from the countryside, where they had been hiding) in a city that hardly resembled the one they had left behind.

The Greek state, in a very difficult period after the World War II and before the civil war, was among the first countries in Europe to adopt laws on the restitution of property.

Many Jewish beneficiaries fought in courts for years to prove that they own their property as their title deeds had been lost or destroyed, and their relatives, acquaintances, neighbors, friends, witnesses who could confirm ownership of property had died.

Today we celebrate in Greece, the “Day of the Greek Jewish Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust,” that the Greek parliament adopted, unanimously, by Law 3218/2004 (Government Gazette A 12).

It is the first time since the day it was established that a delegation of Greek Jews will attend a special session of the parliament plenum held on the occasion on Wednesday. Guests of honour will be the Greek Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.

Thessaloniki has been declared a “martyr city” since 2012 and is included in the “Martyr Cities & Villages of Greece Network.”