The face of Jano (Yitzchak) Angel a member of the remaining Jewish community of Salonika was all aglow. He embraced me like one hugs a long-lost son who has just returned home. “Look ” he said overcome with emotion while pointing to a spot in the center of the city square “this is where it happened.

“I wasn’t even born yet when it took place but my parents have repeatedly told me the story that has become legend by the Jews of this city. I never thought that I would ever meet the great-grandson of the hero Chacham Menachem Shabtai Attas.”

This square bears testimony to the tragic fate of the Jews of Salonika and Angel passionately recounts what actually took place as we stand in the Plateia Eleftherias the Independence Square in the center of the city. Jano places the traditional hat worn by Saloniki Jews on my head declaring “A descendent of Chacham Menachem Shabtai cannot stand here wearing a Polish hat ” and of course I accept it.

For years I’ve wanted to go back to the home of the sainty Chacham Menachem Shabtai Attas my mother’s grandfather. Here upon this square is where he met his death.

On July 11 1942 the Jews of Salonika (Thessaloniki) were rounded up in preparation for deportation to the German camps. Although 2.5 billion drachmas was raised for the release of 4000 young men taken for forced labor this only managed to delay the deportation until the following March when most of Salonika’s 54 000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz most of them gassed on arrival.

Here is where the Jews of the city were initially rounded up by the Nazis on 26 Tammuz. A German crier marched through the streets ordering all Jews to gather at the Independence Square. Some ten thousand Jews obediently did so. The first thing the Germans did was to abuse them.

They forced the Jews to dance and do humiliating physical exercises at gunpoint to the raucous shouts of the German officers who looked on with glee compounding insult with merciless beatings with their truncheons. This was just the preview. Next they commanded the rabbi of the city Chacham Menachem Shabtai Attas Hy”d to step forward. In full view of all the Jews they shaved off his beard.

After seeing the debasement of his beloved brethren the loss of his impressive beard was the culminating blow and he suffered a fatal heart attack collapsing to the ground and thus returning his soul to its Maker. The Germans however did not want his burial place to become a Jewish shrine and had his remains cast ignominiously in some place which remains unknown to this day.

His son — my mother’s father — Reb Baruch Attas z”l returned from his own investigative visit to Salonika in dismay having failed to find his father’s burial place.

I have never been to this city before but a short tour of it was enough to transport me many years back in time to childhood memories of the Greek immigrant neighborhood where my grandparents had lived alongside their old neighbors from Salonika who survived the war and moved to Eretz Yisrael.

These were robust Jews who might not have had the opportunity to study much Torah but who fervently and devoutly observed the Torah’s commandments. While they walked the streets bareheaded these Jews invariably arose at dawn for vasikin prayers.

As a boy I spent much time with my Saloniki grandfather; I absorbed the atmosphere the customs the traditional foods and the language. Most of all I soaked up the nostalgic stories of a city over half of whose population was Jewish and whose major port was closed on Shabbos.

My grandfather passed away when I was only ten putting an end to these tales of bygone times. And the colorful aromatic past began fading from in my memory bank leaving only the fact that I was the great-grandson of the illustrious rabbi last of the rabbis of Salonika from before the Holocaust.

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