The last Greek Jewish Holocaust survivor

Eighty years after the first trains departed Greece on their way to the Nazi death camps in Germany and Poland, the last Holocaust survivor of Trikala's Jewish community recounts the horrors of World War II. Esther (Naki) Matathia Bega, 96, talks to Kathimerini about the 14-month fight for survival at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, as well as the 22-day death march across a frozen Germany.

The persecution of the Matathia family began as soon as the Nazis invaded Greece. "My family fled [Trikala] for the village of Korbovo [in Serbia], but my father got sick and we had to return. Our home had been bombed so we moved close to my brother's father in Volos. The house had so many rooms. All the villages around Mouzaki [near Trikala] had been burned at the time and accommodation had been commandeered for the displaced. We were all ordered to...