Posted on 06/24/2023 9:21:55 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Vaso Stamatiou, the last Greek woman to survive Auschwitz, has died. At the age of just nineteen, on March 28, 1944, she was captured by the Germans and detained in a series of prisons until she was eventually transferred to Auschwitz.
However, Stamatiou survived the ordeal and later returned to Greece. Many others were not so fortunate. Historians estimate that 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz in just under five years.
Most of the Greek victims who were sent to Auschwitz and other concentration camps were Jewish. By the end of the Second World War, most of Greece’s Jewish population had been murdered by the Nazis.
The life of Vaso Stamatiou Stamatiou was born in the town of Aridaía in Pella, northern Greece, but she grew up in the city of Thessaloniki. When Stamatiou was apprehended by the Germans in 1944, she was a nineteen-year-old law student.
Initially, she was taken to Pavlos Melas Prison but was then transferred to Banica Prison outside of Belgrade, which was then in Yugoslavia, on April 1. However, Stamatiou was transferred again on September 30, this time to Auschwitz in Poland, regarded as the most infamous of the Nazi concentration camps.
Grecian Delight supports Greece Unlike most of the interred Greek population at Auschwitz, Stamatiou was not a Jew. She was given the number 82224, which was tattooed on her arm.
Stamatiou survived Auschwitz and was transferred yet again. This time she was taken to Ravensburg in Germany on September 30, but was moved once more to the Buchenwald camp on October 27.
Ultimately, Stamatiou survived the ordeal and was able to return to Greece after the war ended on September 14, 1945. She later traveled to Milan in Italy where she studied theatre costume design and fashion costume.
Back in Greece once more, Stamatiou put her new qualifications to use as the head of wardrobe at the Lyric Theatre. She also attained a diploma in scenography from the School of Fine Arts in Athens.
Greek victims of Auschwitz The majority of Greek victims sent to Auschwitz and other concentration camps were Jewish or of Jewish descent.
Approximately 59,000 Greek Jews were victims of the Holocaust — at least 83 percent of the total number living in Greece at the time of World War II and the German Occupation.
Thessaloniki was the cultural hub for Sephardic Jews who had been expelled from Spain in 1492. The city counted 50,000 Jews, about two-thirds of the Greek Jewish population. Thessaloniki Jews were politically, economically, and socially well-integrated into Greek society after hundreds of years of living there.
R.I.P.
αιώνια η μνήμη
Memory Eternal!
Blessings, and for RM.
I met a woman who had her grandfathers’ camp tattoo copied onto her arm, in memory of him.
A true conversation killer at parties when we were young.
Now, I would welcome the chance to discuss it with her.
Evil pricks… evil philosophy. Bless this woman.
That tattoo number was their catalogue number for IBM punchcards.
> That tattoo number was their catalogue number for IBM punchcards.
In the 80s I worked at IBM on a project that incorporated a database for all equipment under lease or under maintenance contracts worldwide. The database included card punches and tabulators in Austria and Bavaria with unbroken history back to the 1920s and 1930s, with records of locations where the equipment was sited.
I asked my boss about it and he explained all the IBM entities responsible for the equipment went Nazi during the war but were liberated and returned to the parent company, mostly with equipment, records, and in some cases personnel intact. Apparently most European countries pre war used punched cards in border control, tracking ethnic populations, census, etc. We pulled some of the equipment data and he pointed out locations where records were created/processed for death camp victims. According to him, the information was not complete, apparently the Soviets plundered a lot of equipment and put it to use.
Apparently he had noticed all this when the information was assembled by IBM to combat the EU litigation over anticompetitive practices. Later another project “Selected International Accounts” had pulled together the data along with my boss who knew a lot of back story, having worked at IBM since the 50s.
One of the largest number of an ethnic group of Jews murdered at Auschwitz were Hungarian Jews.
Some 400,000 of them between June and November of 1944.
400,000 people in months - that is so stunning. The senseless killing of people. Churchill was right - if the Nazis had won we would be in this horrible dark age, maybe lasting forever or until the last person was killed.
“If Hitler invaded Hell I’d side with the Devil himself!’’. - Winston Churchill.
God be with her.
God Rest Her Soul.
Wow, poor lady went through a lot and at such a young age…a 19 yr old law student and Sephardic Jew i.e. Catholic at the time of her capture.
1.1 million killed in 5 years at Auschwitz. Who would have thought the world’s supposed moral superpower United States of America would go on to be killing 5 times as many innocent defenseless people per year.
That’s interesting. Thanks.
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