
Zanet Nachmia, the last Holocaust survivor from the city of Ioannina, Greece died shortly before her 100th birthday the Jewish Museum of Greece announced on Wednesday.
Nachmia was born in Ioannina in 1925, one of the six children of Haim Nachmias, who ran a taverna, and his wife Revekka (née Mordechai), and grew up within the walled Kastro, opposite the synagogue.
She attended primary school at the Alliance Israélite Universelle until the fifth grade, when she left to help her mother with the chores of their large household.
On March 25, 1944, the entire Jewish community of Ioannina, including Nachmia and her family, was rounded up and deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Of the 1,960 people deported, 1,850 were murdered in the camps.
Nachmia also passed through other camps, including Mauthausen and Gelenau, and was a forced laborer in a factory in Breslau (now Wroclaw).
Only she and her older brother Michael survived out of their entire family.
After her liberation from the camps in 1945, she returned to Ioannina and married fellow Auschwitz survivor Israel Tsitos and they began to rebuild their life.
Nachmia, who is survived by her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, remained in Ioannina for the rest of her life.
“We were saddened to learn of the unexpected loss of the late Zanet Nachmia from Ioannina, the last survivor of Auschwitz in the city, and grandmother of our director, Zanet Battinou,” the Jewish Museum of Greece said.
Nachmia “supported the work of the museum through the donation of family photographs as well as by depositing her personal testimony in our oral history archive,” it added.
Jews of Ioannina perish in the Holocaust
Zanet Battinou recently related the tragic story of the Jews of Ioannina.
“When the Axis Powers gained control of Greece,” she said, “Ioannina came under Italian administration, and that situation was relatively benign for the community as they were left in peace.”
However, in July of 1943 a German division arrived and took charge of the city, she explained—which was the death knell for many residents of the historic community.
On March 25, 1944, Battinou stated, trucks arrived in Ioannina which were meant to transport the Jewish residents of the city—whose ancestors had lived there for nearly two thousand years—to their doom.
“1,870 Jews were loaded onto the trucks and taken through Trikala to Larissa and from there crammed onto trains and taken to Auschwitz,” Battinou states. Ninety-two percent of the Jews of Ioannina were never to see their homes again.
At the end of the war, she said, the Jewish community “numbered only 181 souls. And even many of those left for the United States or Israel. Still, however, “they never lost touch with their hometown, maintaining their sense of belonging and community spirit that common roots produce.”
Related: The Holocaust of Greek Jews: When 59,000 Perished in Nazi Camps