Transport from Nea Zikhna, Serrai, Macedonia, Greece to Treblinka, Extermination Camp, Poland on 04/03/1943

There were only 5 Jewish families with 19 members who had to be deported from Nea Zichni. Their round up was carried out simultaneously with the arrests of the Jews in the rest of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace on March 4, 1943. Unlike places with larger Jewish populations, in Nea Zichni the arrests were carried out only by the local police. They were immediately transported to the closest city with an assembly site for Jews – Seres – and held together there with their local compatriots in a tobacco warehouse. The only person not deported was an elderly woman who was too sick to be transported and was left in the town. On March 5 the Jews from Nea Zichni and Seres were loaded onto a train and sent to Bulgaria. On the way they were transferred twice because of changes in the track gauge at Sidirokastro and Simitli on each side of the old Bulgarian–Greek border. The transfers were carried out in a brutal manner by Bulgarian police and soldiers guided by Commissariat officials Ovcharov (in Sidirocastro) and Popov (in Simitli). The Jews from Nea Zichni, together with the deportees from Seres, Drama, Kavala and Alexandroupolis were detained in a temporary assembly site located in two schools and a tobacco warehouse in Gorna Dzumaya. In his post-war testimony at the People's Court in 1945, Bulgarian Jewish doctor Nisim Kyoso who was arrested in Drama testified that, "…in the camp in Gorna Dzumaya we were visited by Dr. Popov from the Commissariat who, in a conversation with us doctors - Bulgarian citizens - assured us that all the deported Jews would be sent to Palestine. The transfer, he said, would be conducted on the Adriatic coast for which there was already an agreement between the Bulgarian and British governments mediated by Switzerland. Of course, none of us believed him, and a colleague told him that this was mere talk and that we knew that we were all being sent to be slaughtered in Poland. We were also visited by [Yaroslav] Kalitzin who (after he inspected the rooms) decided that they were not crowded enough despite the fact there were 80-90 people in each room. He then gave an order to squash everyone together even more so that the feet of one person would touch the head of the other, like a can of sardines…"...