Transport from Preveza, Preveza, Epirus, Greece to Arta, Arta, Epirus, Greece on 25/03/1944

In the early morning hours of Saturday March 25, Gestapo officers arrested and deported the Jews of the city of Preveza. The number of the deportees is estimated at 172 persons. Very few of the city's Jews escaped deportation. At 3:00 a.m. the Jews of Preveza were awakened by knocks on their doors. They were ordered to get dressed and to come out into the street. They didn't have time to take anything with them. A couple of hours later, they were loaded onto trucks and driven to Arta, a city located 50 km northeast of Preveza. In Arta they were detained in the courtyard of a cinema hall together with the Jews of Arta who had been rounded up the previous day. After spending a couple of days there, the Jews of Preveza, together with the 352 Jews from Arta, were transported to Agrinio, a city 80 km from Arta in northwestern Greece. In Agrinio, they were put inside the Papastratos tobacco factory. There, the Jews were denied food and endured humiliation. Koula Sabas, a Jewish woman from Arta, recalls: "Inside the factory, there was a very large bridge, and the Germans told us ' get undressed, take all your gold and go up to the bridge'. There they had placed boxes where we would throw the gold. Naked, completely naked. Women, men, old, young, little children. Everyone had to pass along that bridge. You can imagine how embarrassing that was." After one or two days in Agrinio, the deportees were again loaded onto trucks and transferred, via Messolonghi, to Patras in northern Peloponnese. In Patras, the deportees from Preveza and Arta were joined by twelve additional Jewish families of the city who had been captured one day before that, on March 28 and continued their journey to the main assembly point in Athens. Upon arrival in Athens, the Jews were detained in the Haidari camp for a short period of 2-3 days. On April 2, 1944, the Jews of Preveza, joined by those of Arta, Patras and Athens were loaded into cattle cars. This was the first transport departing from Athens and the largest to depart from Greece. On their way through mainland Greece to the north, the Jews from another seven cities (Chalkida, Volos, Trikala, Larissa, Ioannina, Kastoria, Florina) were added to this transport which carried them all to their deaths. During the 9-10-day journey to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the deportees were transported in cattle cars, with an average of 70 persons in each car. Each car had only one small window covered with a grid and there were two buckets; one contained water and the other was designated to serve as a toilet. There was no place to sit, and the cars were so full that there was not even enough space to lie down. The deportees arrived at Auschwitz on April 11. When the doors opened, the deportees saw light projectors and guns pointed at them. The dead bodies were pulled out of the wagons and the people alive were ordered to get out of the cars and get ready for the "Selektion". The Jews of Preveza had the tragic fate of becoming members of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, the work unit composed of Jews forced to dispose of the corpses from the gas chambers. Only around fifteen of the Jews of Preveza survived the Holocaust.