Athens, 2015
He kept them. We thought that…
They took my father and my brother, who was older, to Beth Saul and from there they asked for their families to join them and they took us to Baron Hirsch and two days later we boarded the train and went to Bergen. Ours was one of the two hundred and thirty families with [Spanish documents]… They were saved because there were a lot of Spaniards that… We could not save our grandmother who was Abuav. I don’t know if you are familiar with the orphanage. We could not bring her with us because she did not have [documents]…She was not included in the two hundred and thirty Spanish families recognised by the [Spanish] state.
Romero, who was at the time the consul in Athens, came to Thessaloniki. “I will help everyone on the list” and a priest came as well, we called him papaziko. Papaziko came to Baron Hirsch, took all the jewelry that we had, everything we had on, and put it in envelopes and we found them. He kept them, we thought that… Because when we entered Baron Hirsch, all the jewelry that we had, the Germans asked that we hand it over, but Papaziko came and said “no, you will give it to me and I will sort everything out with the Germans”. And we did as he said and he returned everything back to us.
Citation: “Anna Benveniste-Leon”, Excerpts from her interview to Artemis Alcalay as part of the “Greek Jews Holocaust Survivors” project, Athens, 6 June 2015, https://greekjewsholocaustsurvivors.art/en/profile/anna_leon/