Oldest Greek Holocaust survivor Esther Cohen dies at 96

RSS Feed

Oldest Greek Holocaust survivor Esther Cohen dies at 96

December 4th, 2020

Awake Goy

Esther Cohen, Greece’s oldest Holocaust survivor, has passed away at the age of 96, local news in Greece reported Thursday.

According to the European Jewish Congress (EJC,) Cohen lived in the city of Ioannina in northern Greece. A representative of the Jewish community of Ioannina said she died “of old age.”

Cohen was only 17-years-old when on March 24, 1994, the Nazis rounded her up together with the rest of Ioannina’s Jewish population before being transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.

“The last time I saw my parents was on the railway platform in Auschwitz, where we were separated,” Cohen previously told Kathimerini, a daily morning newspaper published in Athens.

“I remember that as they were driven away in the back of a truck, they shouted out, ‘Girls, defend your honor.’ One day when our heads were being shaved by one of the prisoners, she asked me what had become of my parents. I said that I didn’t know. She pointed to the flames coming out of the crematorium and said, ‘There they are, burning’,” she added.

Cohen was only saved thanks to the mercy of a German doctor of Jewish descent who hid her while SS officers marched everyone from her ward to the crematorium.

Cohen’s only other family member to have survived the Holocaust was her sister.

In 2014, Cohen made headlines when then German President Joachim Gauck visited Ioannina and met her in a public event. The German president kissed her in tears, begging for forgiveness for the atrocities committed by the Nazis.

The Jewish population of Ioannina consisted of some 2,000 Jews before World War II. Ioannina was home to one of the largest communities of Romaniote Jews in Europe, an ethnic Jewish community native to the Eastern Mediterranean and one of the oldest Jewish communities in existence.

Only 110 Jews from Ioannina survived the Holocaust.

Source