Lena (Eleonora) Hassid was just sixteen years old when Germany, along with Italy, invaded Greece in April 1941. Born in Thessaloniki (Salonika), she was the youngest of two sisters and two brothers.
Life in Salonika before the war was challenging. The city, along with most of Northern Greece, had been liberated in 1912 after about 400 years of Ottoman rule. At that time, the city’s Jewish population was the majority, numbering over 80,000. After the end of the Greco-Turkish war in 1922, Greek Orthodox refugees from Asia Minor settled in the city as part of the population exchange. The Greek population became the majority. Disputes arose over language, calendar, and holiday harmonization, religious freedom, education, and communal self-determination. This created a deep rift, fueled by strong antisemitic clichés and nationalistic sentiments. By the time of the German invasion, the Jewish population of Salonika had been reduced to around 60,000.
Lena, born Gershon, and her family managed to stay together, including her married sister and her family. Her father, Tsadik, was a dairy merchant with many business contacts in the countryside. By the end of 1941, the family was forced out of their home and into a small, one-bedroom apartment in the newly created Baron Hirsch ghetto. One of Lena’s father’s contacts offered to hide them in the countryside. Unfortunately, he and her mother, Estrella, did not speak Greek well. The spoken language of the Jewish population was Ladino, a language based on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Iberian dialects, primarily Castilian, mixed with elements from Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish, Greek, Italian, and French. He considered the risk of going into hiding greater than the unknown and decided to stay and keep the family together.
During the first year of the Nazi occupation, there were no systematic antisemitic measures against the Salonika Jews. Some Jewish leaders were arrested, and Jewish archives and libraries were confiscated, along with some Jewish businesses. Dehumanization began in the second year of the occupation with the gathering of all Jewish males for forced labor, and the destruction of the city’s Jewish cemetery in December 1942. Lena saw her brothers being taken to forced labor details. In January 1943, the implementation of the “Final Solution” began.
Lena, along with her entire family, including parents, siblings, their children, and extended family, was deported from Salonika on April 10, 1943, and arrived in Auschwitz on April 17, 1943. Only her older sister, Bella, and Lena were selected for the “work” line. The rest of the family went straight to the gas chambers, the so-called “showers”. That was the last time Lena saw her family. In Auschwitz, she was separated from her sister, who ended up working as an orderly at Mengele’s infirmary. Lena was sent to work details, first to the so-called “Canada” section, where she sorted through murdered victims’ personal belongings of value to the Nazis, and later to a munitions factory, under the name of “Union”. Diseases, hunger, and beatings were everyday occurrences. Towards the end of 1944, as the Russian Army was advancing into Poland, Lena was transferred from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Ravensbrück, Germany. The first part of the journey was on foot, the infamous “Death March”. Ultimately, they were loaded into cattle cars and transported to the camp.
At Ravensbrück, Lena met some French women prisoners who ultimately saved her life. When the American Army liberated the camp, Lena was in very poor health, and without these French women, she would not have made it. After liberation, they helped her find her way to a rehabilitation center in Lyon, France. After several months of convalescence, Lena went to Paris, where she knew she had an uncle before the war. While she did not find her uncle, she ran into an acquaintance from Thessaloniki by accident. Lazar (Eliezer) Hassid was an old neighbor who also lost his entire family, murdered at Auschwitz.
A year later, in early 1947, Lena and Lazar returned to Greece to search for other family survivors. Lena reunited with the only survivor of her family, her sister Bella, who had returned to Thessaloniki the previous year. Lena and Lazar married in 1947, determined to build a new life. It took them nearly two years in court to ultimately reclaim family properties that Greeks had taken over. They had two sons and lived in Thessaloniki until 1968, when, pursuing their longtime dream, they immigrated to Israel. Upon Lazar’s death in 1973, Lena began spending time in Houston, where her oldest son had settled. As the years passed, she spent more and more time in Houston to be near her children and grandchildren. She remained active, volunteering at Seven Acres, the Holocaust Museum, and Memorial Hermann Hospital, until she died in 1992.