Tears as Greek heroine meets Jews she saved in Second World War

One by one the 40 descendants of a group of Israeli siblings leaned down and hugged the elderly Greek woman to whom they owe their existence as she sat in her wheelchair and wiped away tears streaking down her wrinkled face.

Clutching the hands of those she hid, fed and protected as a teenager more than 75 years ago, 92-year-old Melpomeni Dina said she could now “die quietly”.

Sunday’s emotional encounter was the first time Mrs Dina had met the offspring of the Mordechai family she helped save during the Holocaust.

Once a regular ritual at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial,suchgatheringsare dwindling due to the advanced ages of survivors and rescuers and may not happen again.

Sarah Yanai, 86, who was the oldest of the five siblings Mrs Dina and others sheltered, said: “The risk they took upon themselves to take in an entire family knowing that it put them and everyone around them in danger – look at all these around us.

“We are now a very large and happy family and it is all thanks to them saving us.”

The names of those honoured for refusing to be indifferent to the genocide are engraved along an avenue of trees at the Jerusalem memorial. Only a few hundred are believed to still be alive.

The Mordechai family lived in Veria, Greece, near Thessaloniki, where nearly the entire Jewish community was annihilated within a few months in one of the most brutal executions of the Nazis.

When the Nazis began rounding up the Jews for deportation in early 1943, the family’s non-jewish friends provided them with fake identity cards and hid them in the attic of the old abandoned Turkish mosque. They were there for almost a year, but eventually they had to leave because their health was declining in the cramped attic.

Mrs Dina and her two older sisters took the family of seven into their single-room home on the outskirts of the city, sharing with them their meagre food rations. She later helped the family flee after they were informed on.

About six million European Jews were killed by German Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War.

More than 27,000, including some 355 from Greece, have been recognised as “Righteous Among the Nations” – Israel’s highest honour to those nonjews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. The most famous case is Oskar Schindler, whose efforts to save more than 1,000 Jews were documented in the 1993 film Schindler’s List.