Larissa, 2014
Everything was decorated with flags… the Assumption of Mary.
… I was a little girl; I was still going to school. My sisters, the eldest, was beautiful, she was a good dressmaker; my mum had sent her to Volos, to a sister of hers, who lived there… this Tovil [family name]… who first lived in Volos, she had learned to be a dressmaker there and she was a very good dressmaker and the other one was a great embroiderer… very skilled in handwork… my mum wanted to send me to school, I was in a six-class school. I was attending the seventh year when the Germans… the Germans got us then…
[…]
… when they got us, they got my sisters, mum, and me… my dad hadn’t been caught… he fled to the villages… so sad… He saw our things, our house, ravaged… Our house had been bombed, half of it had collapsed… and he stayed, he went to a brother of his who lived in Volos… that’s where I went back to, Volos. Then, my dad died.
[…]
They would take us from one concentration camp to the next. When they retreated, they took us to a… it was a big city… and had us stay in a building, it had many floors… the Germans took us to that building and afterwards, one could hear the cannon, bvvvvvvv… they retreated… they took us with them, and we walked nonstop for two weeks… We would walk in the day… step by step, in rows of five… and they would leave us in a meadow by night and once again the same thing in the morning… This went on for three weeks… We had become emaciated… many also died after the liberation, because they had food and their bodies were weakened… Fortunately I didn’t want to, I didn’t feel like eating… The Russians were going back… the army was passing through… they would give us food… and then… Meanwhile, we made this mistake, we were five Greek women left there, three women from Ioannina, one from Corfu, and myself… the two of them said “it’s better”, because we were so scared by this point, “better not to say we are Jews”… yes… and we didn’t tell them… and they put us together with free labourers, because back then free labourers would go to Germany and work there… and they put us with them. Of course, they didn’t bring us immediately back to Greece… they would take us from one concentration camp to another, the Germans left us in May, on May 8th, we came here on August 15th…to Patras.
When we were in Italy, we came across many Thessalonians… and finally, there, we revealed ourselves as Jewish women and they put us on a ship, from Bari… and they brought us to Patras. The 15th of August. I remember everything was decorated with flags… the Assumption of Mary.
Citation: “Naki Matathia Bega”, excerpts from her interview to Artemis Alcalay as part of the Greek Jews Holocaust Survivors project, Larissa, 18 May 2014, https://greekjewsholocaustsurvivors.art/en/profile/naki-bega/