Do Not Forget Me: Three Jewish Mothers Write to Their Sons from the Thessaloniki Ghetto(32 War and Genocide)

Following the Axis invasion of Greece, the Nazis began persecuting the country’s Jews much as they had across the rest of occupied Europe, beginning with small indignities and culminating in mass imprisonment and deportations. Among the many Jews confined to the Thessaloniki ghetto during this period were Sarina Saltiel, Mathilde Barouh, and Neama Cazes—three women bound for Auschwitz who spent the weeks before their deportation writing to their sons. Do Not Forget Me brings together these remarkable pieces of correspondence, shocking accounts of life in the ghetto with an emotional intensity rare even by the standards of Holocaust testimony.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Foreword to the English Edition Serge Klarsfeld Foreword to the Greek Edition Yannis Boutaris Introduction Note from the Jewish Museum of Greece Zanet Battinou Acknowledgements Chronology Maps Introduction Leon Saltiel Translation Note Leon Saltiel and Jenny Demetriou Prologue: Instructions to Jews Migrating from Thessaloniki List of Letters Letters of Sarina (Sara) Saltiel     Introduction     Eleni Saltiel     Short biography of Maurice Saltiel     Eleni Saltiel     Exercpts from the Autobiography of Maurice Saltiel     Letters of Sarina (Sara) Saltiel Letters of Mathilde Barouh     Introduction     Leon Saltiel     Letters of Mathilde Barouh Letters of Neama Cazes     Introduction     Leon Saltiel     Letters of Neama Cazes Bibliography

About the Author :
Leon Saltiel holds a doctorate in Contemporary Greek History from the University of Macedonia, in Thessaloniki, Greece, and has been a post-doctoral researcher at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is a member of the Greek delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

Review :
Praise for the Greek edition: “Letters of this kind are uniquely valuable testimonies, for the simple reason that they were not intended as testimonies; they were not written with posterity in mind.” • Kathimerini “The testimonies of the extermination of the Jewish community of Thessaloniki are not mere evidence or potential historical sources. They are in a way a means of communication, phantasmagoric, whose function is based on the recognition of distance—physical or metaphysical.” • Ta Nea