Every word Nina Angelo speaks, whether in Greek or English, is infused with love for her family and Greece. Daughter of Janka and Albert Yacoel, one of the 60,000 Greek Jews who were forcibly deported on Holocaust trains from the Greek port city of Thessaloniki during World War II, Nina not only doesn’t want to forget. Her mission is to ensure that her family’s story and her father’s experiences as one of the few Greek Jews to survive the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp are preserved for future generations. After discovering interviews detailing her father’s memories as a Nazi prisoner, she meticulously compiled all the information into a book titled “Don’t Cry, Dance.”
As painful as it might have been, the process also led Nina on a healing journey that helped her reconnect with her Greek roots and heritage.
“It was important for me to honor all my ancestors in spirit,” Nina Angelo tells Greek Reporter from her home in Australia. She and her parents had migrated there from Greece when she was two.
“Because when your spirit dies so dramatically, in such a horrible situation, and what they went through, that spirit carries that within. And so I wanted [my family] to feel free, that I was here, there, in that book, their names are mentioned, they didn’t just die as a number. But they did have names and they did exist and they were people who contributed to their family, their community, and to Greece. It is their country and Poland, in my mom’s case.”
The memories of Auschwitz and the discovery of her Greek Jewish father’s rare story
Nina’s parents met by chance in Auschwitz. Her father worked there, between 1943 and 1945, for the Kanada Komandos, a group tasked with gathering possessions from Holocaust trains after Jewish prisoners disembarked. Komandos also traded some goods for food. They got their name from the Kanada warehouses at Auschwitz, where the Nazis stored items taken from the gas chamber victims. Those warehouses were named after Canada because prisoners saw them as a sort of “land of plenty”.
“We were better nourished than the others. We were healthier, so we did not die,” Albert Yacoel recalled in his memoirs.
Sometimes, bartered food was offered to female prisoners. “[The Komandos] would entice the women in [to a safe space] with food for a bit of loving, a bit of kissing. And [one day] he saw my mom, who was 16 years younger than him,” Nina says. “He made a pass at her and offered her food. But she knocked him back.”
After the war, Albert and Janka met again at a Red Cross canteen in Paris. Later, they married in London. Nina was born in Greece in 1947, two years before they migrated to Australia.
While Nina was growing up, she knew very little about her father’s suffering in Auschwitz. “He rarely talked about it,” she says. “I knew only he was in Auschwitz because I saw the numbers (tattooed) on his arm. And I knew that he had lost most of his family during World War II.”
Decades later, through some Greek friends, she discovered seven hours of interviews with her dad at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. They had been conducted around 1986 after Nina’s mom had died, and when the Sydney Jewish Museum was gathering stories from Holocaust survivors. “A professor through his assistant pushed my father to share his stories, something he hadn’t done before,” Nina recalls. “I called the museum and they sent me the interviews.”
Then, she took them with her and tirelessly translated them into English because they were in French. The whole process took seven weeks. Though the Yacoel family spoke Greek at home, Nina notes that “French was my first language because when my mom and dad first met [in Paris], French was the language they both spoke, my mom being Polish and my dad being Greek.”
She explains that the interviews were nothing like her father had previously expressed, nor anything she could have imagined.
For example, her father shared a story where “It was snowing. There was this young girl naked walking in the snow. She died there. I saw it with my own eyes.”
Despite the shock from what she heard in those tapes, Nina treasures her father’s Auschwitz memoirs because they were the missing piece to put her whole family’s story together. “I was absolutely thrilled that he had done these interviews because up until this time, I was still going to write about my mom’s story, which she had typed down by the late 1960s and given to us. So I was going to put my story with my mom’s story because originally, I wanted my family to know where they came from,” Nina says.
Rediscovering the Yacoel family’s Greek heritage
But Nina’s story doesn’t end with discovering her father’s interviews.
She traveled to Europe in 2017, with an itinerary including Germany and Greece to do a “big forgiveness” as she says. “I knew that if I had done a forgiveness for all that had happened to my family, it would release me and the cellular memories, the epigenetics that I carried in my body and which my family had carried and I wanted it to stop with me, the trauma that had happened in the cellular memory of all of my family.”
(Studies suggest that severe trauma can be inherited epigenetically, meaning traumatic experiences can be passed down as intergenerational trauma to our children, grandchildren, and society. Epigenetics refers to how our behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way our genes work.)
While in Athens, where she was born during the civil war, she decided to try to find her birth certificate. She traveled on her father’s passport when she came to Australia with her family.
“So I went to the registry office in Athens and the man looked up and found my name. And then he looked at me, shook my hand, and said ‘Congratulations, you’re an Athenian!’ When he said that my eyes welled up with tears and I said ‘I’m going to cry now,’ and he said ‘Don’t cry, dance.’ And that’s how I got the title of my book.”
“Don’t Cry, Dance” was launched in September 2019 at the Sydney Jewish Museum, which helped publish it. However, Nina was diagnosed with stage 4 lymphoma, a type of blood cancer. Although she overcame the illness, she later experienced two additional near-death incidents. At this point, she began to further explore the concept of trauma being carried through cellular memory across generations. Nina attributes her health problems to epigenetics and this intergenerational trauma, suggesting that there was more to her healing journey.
She recalls that after she and her family migrated to Australia in 1949, her parents went to the Hellenic Club because her father wanted to join. “They refused him because they said that he wasn’t Greek,” Nina says. “And from then on, we didn’t have much to do with the Greek community, apart from my uncle Niko, thea (aunt) Olympia, and my Greek cousins from my father’s side of the family. And I just accepted that.”
Over seven decades later, in late 2023, a professor of Modern Greek at Sydney University, and a friend of her late father, asked her to speak at the Greek Writers’ Festival. “I did go along and I did a small introduction of my book. I think I might have sold one or two books,” Nina says. “It was only last year (2024) when I was invited by the Greek community because they were commemorating 80 years since the war and since Jews were deported from Greece. And I was quite surprised by this and that they knew about my story and that of the Sephardic Jews of Greece that had survived.”
Nina attended the event and told her story. That’s when she met Yannis Mallikourtis, the Greek Consul General of Australia.
“He was so interested in my story and told me [Greece] had recognized all of a sudden after 60 years that the Jews had lived in Greece and they had put up memorials etc to commemorate them. I was the only one speaking at the event and I was surprised because I thought that there were others. I didn’t realize how rare my dad’s story was at that time,” Nina says.
A new Holocaust Memorial Museum is under construction in Thessaloniki and will open in 2026. It will honor the 60,000 Greek Jews who were deported to the Nazi concentration camps, mainly to Auschwitz, where 94 percent perished. Only 2,000 survived. Among the survivors was Nina’s father, Albert Yacoel, who passed away in Australia in 1993 from an aneurysm. He had prospered there as a businessman.
But Nina, a working artist and writer, has one more stop before she completes this remarkable journey: return to where it all began.
“I think I’ve already had the closure, except that I wanted [my father’s] story to go back to Greece and I wanted it to be translated not only into Greek but also in French because it is his personal story and my mother’s personal story talking directly to you. I need to go back to Greece and would be lovely to find my grandfather’s grave because he did die before the war and he is buried somewhere. I didn’t know when he died so they couldn’t look it up. I hope that one day when I do go back to Greece to find [my grandfather’s] grave and pay my respects.”