In a fading ritual, WWII rescuer reunites with Jews she saved
JERUSALEM » 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 very 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-yearold Melpomeni Dina said she could now “die quietly.”
Sunday’s emotional encounter was the first time 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, such gatherings are rapidly dwindling due to the advanced ages of both survivors and rescuers and may not happen again. The soon-to-be-extinct reunion is the latest reminder for Holocaust commemorators preparing for a post-survivor world.
“The risk they took upon themselves to take in an entire family knowing that it put them and everyone around them in danger,” said Sarah Yanai, 86, who was the oldest of the five siblings Dina and others sheltered. “Look at all these around us. We are now a very large and happy family, and it is all thanks to them saving us.”
About 6 million European Jews were killed by German Nazis and their collaborators during World War II. More than 27,000, including about 355 from Greece, have been recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations,” Israel’s highest honor to those non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
The most famous cases are Oskar Schindler, whose efforts to save more than 1,000 Jews were documented in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film “Schindler’s List,” and Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who is credited for having saved at least 20,000 Jews before mysteriously disappearing.
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 an 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, unventilated attic.
That’s when Dina and her two older sisters took the family of seven into their own single-room home on the outskirts of the city, sharing with them their meager food rations.