(RFI).- ““There is nothing left in Thessaloniki.”“, his grandfather Leon told him, referring to the cemetery demolished by the Nazis. A cemetery with 300,000 graves.the largest in Europe, and among these tombs were the graves of their ancestors.

Martin Barzilai decided to go in search of the remains of the cemetery whose Tombstones were scattered throughout the city and used as building material.

It all started with photographs his father found when his grandfather died. Some photographs taken in the 1920s or 1930s at the Jewish cemetery of Thessaloniki, showing Mamute in the Jewish cemetery next to the grave of his sister Dudun, who died in 1926.

The cemetery was built on the remains of a Byzantine cemetery. The oldest tomb that has been deciphered dates back to 1493.At that time, Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain by the Catholic monarchs arrived en masse in this city, which was then under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. At the end of the 19th century, 80% of Thessaloniki’s population were Jews.

Complicity of local authorities

Its history was erased after the Nazis destroyed the Jewish cemetery in 1943 and deported 45,000 people to death camps. The Nazis’ goal was to exterminate the Jews, but local authorities wanted to expand the city so as not to interfere with its destruction.

The photographer explains.

That’s a lot of people, 75,000 Jews were deported from France from all over French territory. At that time, Thessaloniki was a city perhaps the size of Marseille.

“I want to find what they made invisible, traces that resisted time.”, Varzilai writes in the book. And in October 2018, he went there in search of these traces. The cemetery no longer exists, and in its place is the university campus of Aristotle University.

There are three key people who will help you understand the erased history of Thessaloniki’s Jews and find the remains of tombstones. They are Jackie Benmajor, an expert on Spanish Jews and the Jewish history of Thessaloniki, Joseph Vaena, a pharmacist, and Leon Saltiel, a historian and coordinator of the fight against anti-Semitism at the Jewish Council.

“Benmajor told me that the tombstones were scattered throughout the city and that they were used for reconstruction after the war, for the restoration of churches, the construction of municipal walls, for example for the new railway station and other private places,” explains the author of the book. a book in which he publishes evidence stating that even tombstones from a Jewish cemetery were used to make dissecting tables for the university’s medical faculty.

“The place that impressed me the most is the largest church in Thessaloniki, called Saint Demetrius And “The esplanade in front of the temple, according to historians, is made up of tombs from the Jewish cemetery.”– says Barzilai.

What happened to the bodies?

Some of them were rescued and stored in bags at the factory thanks to the relatives of one of his interlocutors, Jackie Benmajor.

Barzilai explains.

They hid these remains during the war years, and when they were able to return to the city after being deported to Auschwitz many times and having lived through this terrible experience, they recovered the remains and placed them in the new Jewish cemetery, which is located in the outskirts of the city, which is much smaller .