Do Not Forget Me by Leon Saltiel

Do Not Forget Me by Leon Saltiel

Following the Axis invasion of Greece, the Nazis began persecuting the country’s Jews much as they had across the rest of occupied Europe, beginning with small indignities and culminating in mass imprisonment and deportations. Among the many Jews confined to the Thessaloniki ghetto during this period were Sarina Saltiel, Mathilde Barouh, and Neama Cazes—three women bound for Auschwitz who spent the weeks before their deportation writing to their sons. Do Not Forget Me brings together these remarkable pieces of correspondence, shocking accounts of life in the ghetto with an emotional intensity rare even by the standards of Holocaust testimony.

Praise for the Greek edition:
“Letters of this kind are uniquely valuable testimonies, for the simple reason that they were not intended as testimonies; they were not written with posterity in mind” • Kathimerini

“The testimonies of the extermination of the Jewish community of Thessaloniki are not mere evidence or potential historical sources. They are in a way a means of communication, phantasmagoric, whose function is based on the recognition of distance—physical or metaphysical.” • Ta Nea

Leon Saltiel holds a doctorate in Contemporary Greek History from the University of Macedonia, in Thessaloniki, Greece, and has been a post-doctoral researcher at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is a member of the Greek delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).