The happy coincidence of the discovery of a photographic album in a flea market in Munich led to the revelation of an unknown page of Greek history. Collector Andreas Assael, the son of a Jewish survivor from Thessaloniki, acquired the photo album of a German civil engineer who had served in Greece during the Occupation as an officer of the paramilitary organization Todd and was in charge of several construction projects, including one in Karya in mountainous Fthiotida. The collection includes among other things about 80 photographs from the Karya construction site.
Andreas Assael began to unravel the tangle of the macabre story of hundreds of Jews of Thessaloniki who worked under inhuman conditions in the construction of the railway line in Karya, through research and personal interviews with the few survivors.
The exhibition, which is presented in parallel in Greece and Germany and offers the historical context of the Occupation, the Holocaust and the difficult post-war period, focusing on the history of the Karya construction site. Eight biographies of victims and survivors are central to the exhibition. The old construction site and the Karya station, which is now decommissioned and abandoned, are made accessible through 3D topographical models that will be projected through a multimedia station. At the same station, visitors will be able to digitally browse through the photo album.
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