The 93-year-old Savas Cohen, former director of the OSE, during his recent visit to the Railway Museum of Thessaloniki, in the area of Eleftherios Kordelios, was informed by those in charge of the site of the existence of two wagons – freight cars, of the type used to transport Jewish citizens to the extermination camps of the Third Reich.

A Jew himself, he considered the weight of historical memory and decided to take on the cost of repairing them, with the aim of keeping alive the memory of those who were heinously lost during World War II.

“Last June we came on an excursion to Thessaloniki with the Athens Railway Friends Association, of which I am a member. And among other things we visited the Railway Museum. There, I learned the story of the two wagons with which the Germans transported the Jews from the old railway station of Thessaloniki to Auschwitz and I was moved. I thought that a small offering to the Holocaust would be to donate money to repair them. To honor, in this way, the six million Jews around the world who died,” Cohen said, speaking to APE-MPA.

The wagons are currently at the Railway Museum in Kordelio and are being repaired, according to the president of the Association of Friends of Thessaloniki Railway, Konstantinos Pataras, who told APE-MPE. The same materials were used to give them new “life”, except for the timber, which was replaced entirely, while the work is being done under the supervision of former foremen of the OSE.

“The wagons were abandoned on the OSE network. They are very old German constructions from 1890, which were used after the war as garages. That is, they carried tools for repairing a line,” Pataras explained.

He noted that the wagons sent by the Germans to the crematoria never came back. “The Germans in Europe had a single railway network and these wagons are of the same type as wagons used to collect people for the concentration camps,” he added.

The rescue of these two wagons was done through old photographs and from information gathered by the first president of the Association of Friends of Thessaloniki Railway, Efthymis Kontopoulos. “The wagons were in poor condition and Mr. Cohen decided to finance their repair. They are a piece of the historical mosaic of the history of Thessaloniki. The history of the city, with the presence of Jewish citizens, is intertwined with the history of the railway and the wagons that transported them to the crematoria,” concluded Pataras.

For this movement to save the historic wagons, the 93-year-old Mr. Cohen will be honored tomorrow, Saturday, at 7:30 pm, by the president of the OSE, Yiannos Grammatidis, at an event organized by the Association of Friends of Thessaloniki Railway, entitled “Nostalgia”, at the Thessaloniki Museum. The event will be accompanied by a concert presented by the Mixed Adult Choir “Filomila”.

Mr Cohen was born in Thessaloniki in 1931, studied civil engineering and made his career in the Greek railways. He left the city with his family at the age of 9, shortly before the Germans invaded the country, as his older sister was to study medicine at university. The move to Athens took place in early October 1940 and a few days later the war sirens sounded. During the Occupation, he, being a child, escaped by coincidence being captured by the Germans and taken to a concentration camp, to which his uncle, aunt and cousin were sent.