The Vanished

“The Vanished”, Alexandre Mitchell, 2022
(Canson 180g, 42 x 59cm, Indian ink)

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Here is the White Tower, the emblem of Thessaloniki submerged by a flood of guilt, while Jewish tombstones emerge from the depths of its past.

Thessaloniki was once affectionately known as the Madre de Israel, as its Jewish community represented half of the total population before World War II. It was a cosmopolitan community, made up of all strands of Judaism, whose presence in the city can be traced back almost 2,000 years.

The Jewish population was so large that it took the Nazis six months to deport them all to the extermination camps in Poland. When the few survivors returned, their homes had been sold to local Greeks or poor immigrants from Asia Minor.

A few years later, under the dictatorship of the colonels, the Jewish cemeteries were completely demolished and turned into quarries. Indeed, the city’s university is founded on the largest of the Jewish cemeteries. Despite a few symbolic gestures, the silence surrounding the disappearance of the Jewish population is almost as deafening today as it was in the post-war period.