Ioannina’s last Auschwitz survivor passes

It was June 2007 in Ioannina, the capital of Epirus, when Zanet Nahmia, seated on her living room couch, reflected on all she had endured as a prisoner at Auschwitz. In a segment of that recorded interview, she pauses her narration to welcome her hometown peer, Nina Negrin, into the room. The two women had shared a common fate in the death camp. With remarkable simplicity, they resumed their description afterward. "We saw four crematoria in our camp and knew they were burning our parents," one said. The Thessalonikians had arrived earlier and told us: 'Do you see that flame? That's where they are burning your loved ones,'" the other added.

At some point during the conversation, Nahmia remembered a song. She recounted to historian Alexis Menexiadis, who conducted the interview for the Jewish Museum of Greece, how they had crafted a floral wreath for one of their fellow...