This article explores the political and discursive framing of the emerging project Holocaust Museum of Greece (HMG) based in Thessaloniki (announced in 2013). As an “in situ” Holocaust museum, the HMG could represent an important step toward recognizing Jewish suffering in a country where—compared with the rest of Europe—unprecedentedly high levels of antisemitic attitudes have been recorded over the past decade. Supported by a qualitative media analysis and supplemented with data from our online survey, we explore how HMG stakeholders and potential local visitors reflect on the project. Occurring amid contemporary endeavors in Holocaust commemoration and Greek-German reconciliation, we connect it with their persistence in combating far-right tendencies and antisemitism. Specifically, we investigate whose memory HMG stakeholders aim to display, how they reflect on dominant Greek historical narratives and whether they express a clear memory commitment and a genuine effort to produce a more integrated historical interpretation of the Holocaust in Greece.

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The Greek Civil War officially ended in 1949 with the defeat of the communists; however, the battle over the interpretation of the conflict, its consequences, and the manner of remembering it is ongoing. In this context, we focus on the relation between two polarized master narratives of the Greek Civil Warthe communist and the anticommunist-and personal accounts of former child refugees of the Greek Civil War living in the Czech Republic. Based on oral testimonies, we explore how narrators remember and convey the most contested issues related to their displacement, institutional care, education, political positioning, and social belonging as child refugees in Czechoslovakia. We claim that this shared community of memory outlived the times of narrative uniformity comforting its members by providing shared meaning to both their past and present, reinforcing their group belonging and preventing yet another uprooting within the Czech(oslovak) society. In this way, our study contributes to a better understanding of the ideologically-imposed interpretations of the consequences of the Greek Civil War and of the Czechoslovak history and minority politics.

Faced with vast human and economic losses, the small number of Jews in Greece who had survived the Second World War found themselves shortly afterwards in great need of social and financial assistance simply to survive in the post-war world. Although some humanitarian relief had been provided immediately after the end of the once Italian, Bulgarian and German occupations, the reconstruction of Jewish communities and development of a legal framework for property restitution in Greece were long-term processes. This is also true of the post-war German government’s provisions regarding compensation for the victims of Nazism. The article analyses Jewish efforts to receive compensation in the wider context of Greek–German relations in case of Salonika, a former metropolis of Sephardic Jews beyond the Balkans. Drawing on rich primary sources, in particularly archive records from the German Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office (PA AA), the article examines the links between humanitarian aid, moral obligations of the political elites, and political as well as economic pragmatism in Greek-German relations on both the national and international levels between the Second World War and 1961, when a bilateral compensation agreement was ratified by both countries.

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