Anatolia USA

Remembering and Honoring our Jewish Anatolians and heritage

This is the story of a city, a school, and some of its most promising students whose lives were cut short at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943.  The city is Thessaloniki, known fondly by many as Salonica, and founded in the time of Alexander the great; the school is Anatolia, one of Greece’s oldest and most distinguished private education institutions; and the story is inspired by, and dedicated to, the memory of Anatolia’s Jewish students and to all students in Greece’s second city, lost or unaccounted for in the Holocaust. 

From its founding in Marsovan, Asia Minor in 1886 through war, genocide, and a forced closing in 1921, Anatolia is no stranger to the challenges and consequences of human conflict.  When Anatolia was invited as a refugee itself, along with its students and faculty, to Thessaloniki in 1924, the future was yet unknown.  The school began to regain its bearings with thanks to its new home’s support.  This was in large part thanks to the welcoming nature of the Greek-Jewish community, a driving force in its home of ‘Salonica,’ having been there since ancient times, and a refuge to influxes of fellow Jews fleeing from the inquisition and wars throughout the region during the times of the Ottoman Empire.  Many of the community’s 50,000 members enrolled at Anatolia, and fervently supported the institution.

WWII posed Anatolia’s next major challenge.  The school was again closed, and taken over by the Nazis as a command center.  Shortly after the Nazis withdrew, Anatolia reopened its doors once again, to a new group of
12-year-old students, eager to become part of the adventure of learning which Anatolia symbolized.  But it was not the same population that had studied Greek and English, or practiced sports on the campus grounds.  There was a group of students missing, students who were born in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but who would never return.  Older brothers and sisters, parents, aunt and uncles, grandparents, and friends- they too had been lost.  In the space of a few brief months in the spring and summer of 1943, Salonica’s vibrant Jewish population of some 50,000 had been almost entirely exterminated at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Thessaloniki lost over 95 percent of its Jewish population, and among them were Anatolians.

It is important to Anatolia’s cultural fabric to acknowledge, share, and memorialize its history and its community.  It is therefore appropriate as we approach the 65^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz that we take pause and reflect on the impact of these events to the Jewish community of Thessaloniki, and to over 90 of Anatolia’s Jewish students that were lost.