Document

[Page 1]1
[Lines 2 through 7]
Please send this
letter to the
nearest Greek
Consulate
[Remainder unreadable]
[Lines 8-10]

I request that the enclosed

letter be delivered to the next
Greek Consul.
[Lines 11-16]
[] ces quelques mots
par[s?] un condamne [?] a mort []
[] le remettre en plus prochain
Consulat de la Grece
[Lines 17-20]

Dimitrios A. Stefanides
Rue Kroussovo No 4
Thessaloniki
GRECE

[Following Text]
To my dear Dimitris Athan.[asius] Stefanidis2, Ilias Koen3,- Georgios Gounaris4.
To my beloved companion, Smaro Efraimidou5 <from Athens> and so many more, of whom I will always think, and
finally, to my beloved fatherland: ELLAS, to whom I was always a good citizen.

On April 2, 1944 we were transported from our Athens, after I suffered through a month in the camp Chaidari6
where I always [word crossed out] received good Smaros packages, and his efforts on my behalf remain
unforgettable in these terrible days I am going through. always, that you search for her.
Dear Misko7 and at sometime get her address for me our Ilias and that you always look after him and that
Manolis has not forgotten them8.

1
Note from the translator (from the original Greek to German), Niels Kadritzke: The first page contained no Greek text.
Lines 11 through 16 are composed in French. It would have made little sense for Nadjari to write this short accompanying
note in Greek, as he could not assume that his report would be found by someone who could speak this language. It is a
trilingual note, divided as follows: German (Lines 2 7), Polish (Lines 8 10), French (Lines 11 16). It would appear
that the Polish text was written by a native speaker. The German text, however, was clearly not. The French text appears to
have been written by a different hand. As it is likely that Nadjari was able to speak and write French, this section has been
attributed to him. Should the German and Polish texts in Lines 1 10 have been composed by someone else, everything
points to the author having been a Polish Jew who also belonged to Nadjaris Sonderkommando (special unit).
2
This is a friend of Nadjaris, with whom he had operated an animal feed business. He is addressed in the following
multiple times with the short form Misko.
3
This is a cousin of Nadjaris. Both belonged to an underground organization that worked to bring Jews to Palestine. Koen
was executed in 1944.
4
There are no records as to who this was or what role he played.
5
A young Christian woman from Athens, whom Nadjari most likely met in the resistance movement. Nadjari had her
photo with him in Auschwitz.
6
Police custody and transit camp on the northwest edge of Athens. Constructed in October 1943. Transports to Auschwitz,
among other things, were organized here. Marcel Nadjari was brought to Chaidari following a stay at Athens Averoff
Prison, where he admitted under cruel torture that he was not the Greek Manolis Lazaridis, but rather the Greek Jew
Marcel Nadjari.
7
Short form of Demetrios; intended is the above-mentioned Demetrios Stefanidis, the addressee of Nadjaris letter.
But also that it looks like we will unfortunately not see one another again.

After a journey of ten days we arrived at Auschwitz on April 11 where they brought us to the camp Birkenau, we
stayed approximately one month in quarantine and from there they relocated us, both the healthy and the sick.
Where? Where, dear Misko? To a crematorium, I will explain for you below our lovely work that the Almighty
wanted to have us perform.

It is a large building with a wide chimney with 15 <fifteen> ovens. Underneath a garden there are two huge endless
cellars. The one serves as a place to undress and the other as a death chamber, where the people enter naked and
after the room is filled with approximately 3000 people, it is locked and they are gassed, where they breathe their
last after 6 to 7 minutes of martyrdom. Our work consisted of first receiving them; most did not know the reason
breaking down or sobbing they were told that this was for a bath and they went to their deaths suspecting
nothing.

Until today I said that each [Fragments of words that cannot be deciphered] I said to them, that I didnt
understand the language in which they spoke to me, and to those people, men and women, where I could see that
their fate was sealed, I told the truth.

After all naked, they went further into the death chamber in which the Germans had affixed pipes on the ceiling
so they would believe, that the bath was being prepared, with whips in their hands the Germans drove them
closer and closer together, so that the largest number possible would fit, a real sardine tin of people, after which they
hermetically sealed the door. The boxes of gas always came in cars from the German Red Cross with two SS people
It was the gas people that then poured the gas through the openings.

After a half hour we opened the doors and our work began. We carried the corpses of these innocent women and
children to the elevator, which transported them to the room with the ovens, and there they put them in the ovens,
where they burnt without the aid of fuel because of the fat that they had.

A person produced only about half an okka9 of ashes [bones or, crossed out], that the Germans forced us to crush, to
then press through a coarse sieve, and then a car picked it up and poured it into the Vistula River10, which flows by
in the area and thus they eliminate all traces.

The dramas my eyes have seen are indescribable. About 600 000 <six hundred thousand> Jews from Hungary have
passed by my eyes, - French - Poles from Litzmannstadt11, roughly 80 000, and now most recently about 10 000
<ten thousand> Jews from Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia arrived.

Today a transport came from Theresienstadt, but thank God they were not brought to us, they kept them in camps,
which means that the order was given not to kill any more Jews, and that appears to be the case, they changed their
minds at the last moment now that there isnt a single Jew left in Europe, but for us things are different, we must
disappear from the face of the earth, because we know so much about the unimaginable methods of their abuses and
reprisals.

Our unit is called the special unit, it included at the beginning about 1000 <one thousand> people, of these 200
Greeks and the rest Poles and Hungarians, and after heroic resistance, because they wanted to only remove 800,
because all one hundred outside of the camp and the others inside.12 My good friends Viko Brudo and Minis Aaron13

8
Manolis is the writer. It is clear that this is a nom de guerre. After his arrest, Nadjari identified himself for a long time
as a Greek named Manolis Lazaridis.
9
The okka is a measure of weight from Ottoman times that was still used in Greece; a half okka corresponds to 640 grams.
10
The word Vistula () is used, in German: Weichsel. What is meant is clearly the River Sola. The Sola flows
past the main Auschwitz camp and into the Weichsel just north of Auschwitz/Owicim.
11
od, located in the annexed Reichsgau Wartheland, was referred to by the Germans from 1940 onwards as
Litzmannstadt, as was the large ghetto there.
12
It is possible that with the number 800 Nadjari is referring to the prisoners killed because of the uprising. These sentence
fragments were not fully comprehensible in the original.
from Thess/niki were killed in action. They will eliminate us too, now that this command has been given, we are 26
Greeks overall and the remaining ones are Polish. At least we Greeks are determined to die like true Greeks, just like
every Greek knows how to leave life, by showing until the very last moment, despite the dominance of the
criminals, that Greek blood is flowing through our veins, like we have also shown in the war against Italy.14

My dearests, when you are reading what work I have done, you will say: how could I, Manolis, or anybody else, do
this work and burn fellow believers. At the beginning I told myself the same thing, many times, I thought about
joining them, in order to end everything. However, the thing that kept me from doing so was revenge; I wanted and I
want to live, to revenge the deaths of Dad and Mum, and that of my beloved little sister Nelli.15

I am not afraid of dying, after all, how could I fear it, after everything that my eyes have seen? Because of this, dear
Ilias, my beloved little cousin, you, and all my friends, should know your duty, once I am no longer. From my little
cousin Sarrika Chouli <you remember her, the small one that was at my house back then?> who still lives, I learned,
that Nellika was together with your little sister Errika, until their very last moment. My only wish is that what I am
writing reaches your hands. My familys property, I leave for you, Misko <Dimitrios Athanasiou Stefanidi>, with
the request that you will take in Ilias, my cousin. Ilias is a Koen and you should view him as if he were myself, you
should always look out for him, and in case my cousin Sarika16 Chouli comes back, you should treat her, dear
Misko, like your beloved niece Smaragda17, since here we are all experiencing things that the human mind isnt able
to imagine.

Remember me from time to time, like I am remembering you.

Fate doesnt want me to see our Greece as a free man, as I experienced it on 12.10.43.18 Whenever someone asks
after me, simply say that I no longer exist, and that I have gone as a true Greek.

Help all those, dear Miskos, who come back from the Birkenau camp.

I am not sad, dear Misko, that I will die, but that I wont be able to avenge myself the way I would like to. If you
receive a letter from my relatives abroad, please give the fitting answer that the family A. Nadjari is annihilated,
killed off by the cultivated Germans <the New Europe>19, do you remember, dear Giorgos?20 Please pick up, Misko,
the piano of my Nelli from the Sionidou21 family and give it to Ilias, so that he always has it with him in
commemoration, he loved her so much and she loved him, too.

Almost always, when they kill, I ask myself, if God exists, and nevertheless, I have always believed in Him and I
still believe, that God wants His will to be done. I'm dying happy, because I know that at this moment our Greece is
free. My last words will be: Long live Greece.

Marcel Nadjari

13
Both were also Greeks in Nadjaris special unit and were killed in the uprising.
14
This refers to the war between Greece and Italy between 28.1.1940-23.4.1941, in which Nadjari fought as a Greek
soldier.
15
Marcel Nadjaris sister was two years older than him. She was deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1943, which was
earlier than Marcel, and died together with their parents in the camp.
16
Nadjari had met Sarika in Birkenau.
17
Smaragda was Miskos sister.
18
The year was probably a mistake. Instead Nadjari is most likely referring to 12/10/44, the day the German troops
withdrew from Athens.
19
The New Europe was the title of a collaborationist, strongly anti-Semitic newspaper which appeared in Thessaloniki
from April 1941 to Oct 1944.
20
He probably meant Ilias, whose alias in the resistance was Giorgos.
21
This may be good Christian friends or friends of the family Nadjari.

For about four years now they have been killing the Jews they killed Poles, Czechs, French, Hungarians, Slovaks,
Dutch, Belgians, Russians und all Thess/nikis, except the 300 who are still alive today, (in) Athens, Arta, Kerkyra
(Corfu), Kos and Rhodes.

A total of around 1,400,00022

The honored Greek Embassy which will receive this note is asked by a good Greek citizen called Emmanouil or
Marcel Nadjari from Thess/niki, previously resident in Odos Italias No. 9 in Thess/niki, to send this note to the
following address.
Dimitrios Athanassiou Stefanidis
Odos Krousovou No. 4
Thess/niki
Greece

This is my last wish. Condemned to death by the Germans because I am Jewish.

Thank you.
Nadjaris

Translation of the document from Modern Greek to German by Niels Kadritzke.

Translation of the document from German to English by the staff of the German-Canadian Centre for Innovation
and Research.

22
Nadjari's estimation of 1.4 million people murdered in Auschwitz comes surprisingly close to the conclusions of the
current research that at least 1.1 million people died in the concentration and extermination camp complex.