Holocaust heroine meets the family she saved
Greek 92-year-old reunited with the Jewish children she hid in her home, 75 years on
‘We are now a very large and happy family and it is all thanks to them saving us’
‘This is probably going to be our last reunion, because of age and frailty’
IT WAS an act of courage that could have cost her everything but 75 years on, a 92-year-old Greek woman has been reunited with Jewish siblings she hid from the Nazis during the Second World War.
At an emotional reunion in Jerusalem, Melpomeni Dina also met around 40 of the two siblings’ descendants, who owe their very existence to her bravery as a young woman.
Clutching the hands of two of the survivors whom she fed and protected as a teenager, she said she could now “die quietly”.
“I would like to have saved more,” Mrs Dina said during the ceremony, which is likely to be the last of its kind given the advanced age of the Jews who were hidden and those who saved them during the war.
Mrs Dina and her two sisters hid the Mordechai family in the attic of an abandoned Turkish mosque before moving them to their home in the town of Veria in northern Greece.
“It is a very emotional feeling, I can’t describe it,” said Sarah Yanai, 86, the oldest of five siblings given refuge.
“We were hidden in her house. She saved all my family. You can’t imagine how dangerous it was for her, for her family, to keep us all. What can I say?
Look at all these around us. We are now a very large and happy family and it is all thanks to them saving us.”
Yossi Mor, her brother, is now 77 but was just a baby when the family was hidden from the Germans.
He said they had to be moved from the mosque attic after a year because conditions there were cramped, airless and “deteriorating”.
“They fed us, they gave us medicine, they gave us the protection, everything, they washed our clothes.”
One of his brothers, Shmuel, fell ill and died in a local hospital.
The Greek sisters then moved the siblings to their own small home, sharing their meagre rations and giving them clothing.
When the situation there became too dangerous, the sisters helped the family scatter, with one brother heading for the forest and another to the mountains to hide.
The family eventually managed to reunite after the war and moved to Israel, where they forged new lives.
The tearful encounter took place at the Hall of Names, in Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, a shrine to the six million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.
“For me, the three Greek sisters always symbolised heroism, a model of life,” said Yossi Dagan, 28, Mr Mor’s grandson. He was one of around 40 descendants who, one by one, leaned down and hugged Mrs Dina as she sat in her wheelchair.
“This is probably going to be our last reunion, because of age and frailty,” said Stanlee Stahl, the executive vice president of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, which sponsored the event.
“Either the survivor has passed on, the righteous has passed on or in some instances either the survivor or the righteous gentile is unable to travel.”
In 1994, Yad Vashem honoured Mrs Dina and her sisters by granting them the title of “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Over the years, Yad Vashem has given the award, on behalf of Israel, to more than 27,000 non-jewish people around the world as a sign of gratitude for saving Jewish lives.
Of the total, around 350 were from Greece. During the 1941-1944 German occupation, almost the entire Greek Jewish population – as many as 80,000 people – were wiped out.