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She Learned the Truth after 60 Years...
Thanks to help from the staff of the Office for Information on Former Prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, Auschwitz survivor Denise Karagiorga learned of her brother’s tragic fate 60 years after the fact.
Former Auschwitz prisoner Denise Karagiorga first returned to Oświęcim in 2003. She inquired at the Office for Information on Former Prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum about her brother, one year younger, whom she last saw in the camp in January 1945.
Denise arrived in Auschwitz, along with her grandmother, mother, and brother, together with 2,500 Greek Jews deported by the Germans that same day, April 11, 1944. After selection, 320 men and 328 women were sent to the camp. The others, including Denise’s grandmother Elsa, were murdered in the Birkenau gas chambers. Denise and her mother ended up in the women’s camp, while 15-year-old Johann was sent to the men’s camp.
Denise and her mother worked first in one of the “outside” labor details before being assigned to one of the storehouses where victims’ property was stored and sorted. They remained in Auschwitz until evacuation, which was when they saw Johann for the final time.
With the front line approaching, Denise and her mother were among the thousands of prisoners whom the Germans led out of Auschwitz on January 18, 1945. After marching for dozens of kilometers, they were carried in open railroad cars to Neustadt Glewe, a sub-camp of Ravensbrück. They were liberated there in May 1945.
As soon as she was free, Johann’s mother began looking for him. She contacted the Polish and the Greek Red Cross, in vain. When she died on April 8, 1985, she still knew nothing about her son’s ultimate fate.
Not until 2003 did Denise come across a trace of her brother. A search of the partially preserved Auschwitz prisoner records turned up several documents mentioning Johann. The last entry connected with him was dated December 22, 1944.
Denise asked the Information Office staff to search further, and they came up with more facts. After exploring several blind alleys, they sent an inquiry to the Gross-Rosen Museum in Rogoźnica-Wałbrzych, Poland. In return, they received information that, combined with additional searches, enabled them to reconstruct what had become of Johann.
In January 1945, Johann arrived at the Gross-Rosen sub-camp of Geppersdorf (Milęcice). From there, he was transferred in April 1945 to one of the camps that made up the Riese [“giant”] complex in the Sowie mountains, where thousands of prisoners of war and slave laborers worked excavating underground halls and tunnels that were probably intended as a future headquarters for Hitler and his staff.
Johann survived long enough to be liberated on May 8, 1945. However, he died of typhus in a hospital two weeks later. He was 16.
Denise Karagiorga was in Poland last year, and she is coming back this year. On January 27, 2006, she will take part in the ceremonies marking the 61st anniversary of Auschwitz. Afterwards, members of the staffs of the Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen memorials will accompany her to the Mausoleum of the victims of terror in Kolce near Głuszyca, Poland, to pay homage to her brother.
The Deportations from Greece
The Nazis deported about 55 thousand Jews from Greece to Auschwitz. The majority of them were deported in 1943 from the ghetto in Thessaloniki, the largest center of the Jewish population in Greece. Several thousand more Greek Jews were deported to Auschwitz the following year from areas that had been under Italian occupation until 1943. About 13 thousand of the deportees were selected for labor, with the other 42,000 being killed in the gas chambers immediately after arrival.
Source: Pro Memoria 14, Franciszek Piper, "The Roads to Auschwitz", pp. 4-5
