Four Greek families are receiving personal belongings taken from their relatives by the Nazis, in a ceremony held June 2...

Four Greek families are receiving personal belongings taken from their relatives by the Nazis, in a ceremony held June 25 at Greece's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The items, including two wristwatches with hands frozen in June 1944, are being returned 81 years after their owners were deported from Athens to the Neuengamme concentration and forced-labor camp near Hamburg. The restitution is part of the international StolenMemory campaign run by the Arolsen Archives, the institution that preserves records from Nazi camps worldwide. What makes this effort unusual is how the families were found: Greek secondary-school students spent the 2024-25 school year combing municipal, military, and archival records to trace the descendants of former prisoners, successfully identifying four families this year alone. One watch belonged to Evangelos Kerasiotis, arrested by the SS in May 1944 at just 19 years old during mass roundups in Nikaia. He survived the camps and returned to Greece in August 1945, but died in February 1949 at age 24 from a heart condition tied to the hardships of imprisonment. His niece Sofia Kerasoti, who grew up hearing stories about "Uncle Vaggelakis almost as if he were a legend," will pass the watch to her 27-year-old son. The second watch belonged to Georgios Sagmatopoulos, the son of Pontic Greek refugees who arrived in Greece during the 1923 population exchange. He reached Neuengamme on June 6, 1944, at age 24, was transferred to the Bremen-Farge satellite camp, and never came home. Official records confirmed his death in April 1945. His relative Panagiota Galani, who is receiving the watch, says she plans to visit her grandmother's grave immediately after the ceremony. Her grandmother kept a large photograph of her brother in the house and wept every time she spoke about him. The teacher who led one of the student research teams described the project's purpose plainly: to heal a wound of the soul by returning a personal object the Nazis once took. #Greece #Holocaust #StolenMemory