Two high school students from Pylaia received a short film award in a competition on “The Holocaust in the collective memory of the Greeks” organised by the Ministry of Education, Religion and Sport. Argyro and Vasiliki Polyzou, from the 1st Class of the 1st High School of Pylaia, with the guidance of their teacher Ioanna Prodromidou, searched the internet to find information about Sam Cohen, from Thessaloniki, who during the Occupation was sent for forced labour to the Karya camp. They even chatted online with his son, Jerome, who now lives in Texas, and he gave them copies of photos and documents as well as a wealth of information about his father’s life. In his video interview with the schoolgirls, he also revealed a side of Sam Cohen’s behaviour, who, like other people who experienced the horror, did not often talk about what he experienced in Karia. “The circumstances experienced by anyone who survives such a situation affect their behaviour. I imagine he would have developed some defence mechanisms, a state of self-protection. So he was more protective of his family, perhaps more so than others,” Jerome Cohen said.
The video, which won second prize out of five awarded in the competition, begins with Sam Cohen’s words describing an incident from Karya: “The German guards came and hit my friend Jacko right in the back of the head and with the rifle and he fell off the ramp onto the train tracks. He pulled out all his front teeth.” Sam Cohen himself was born in Thessaloniki in 1922 and in 1943 when the Jewish population was moved to ghettos, he decided to follow his best friend, Jacko Karasso, who was sent to forced labor. According to the account of Argyro and Vasiliki Polyzou, Sam Cohen described Karya as the most horrible place in the world. There they worked 12 hours a day with pickaxes digging in the mountains to open a supply route for the German army. At one point, Sam Cohen and Jaco Karasso managed to escape. They then made contact with the guerrillas and joined the armed resistance against the German occupiers. Sam Cohen returned to Thessaloniki in 1945 but his property had been looted by the Germans. He immigrated to the US, married and had a family and died in 2014 in San Antonio, Texas.
“The topic touched us from the very first moment,” Argyro and Vasiliki Polyzou, who responded immediately to the call of their teacher, Ioanna Prodromidou, to participate in the competition, tell AP – MPE. At the same time they point out: “She urged us to participate because she is a philologist, a historian and our interest was obvious, so she made this proposal and guided us. As the history of Sam Cohen is not widespread enough, it was difficult to research. We had to devote many hours. Both the creation of the video and the communication with Jerome Cohen required a lot of effort both in terms of communication and finding the right time to contact him because of the time difference between Greece and the US.”
For her part, Ms. Prodromidou told APE – MPE that she herself participated in many actions on the Holocaust and in the context of one of them, where flowers were planted in memory of the children who perished, she informed the classes she teaches in at the 1st High School of Pylaia about the competition on the topic “the Holocaust in the collective memory of the Greeks”. “The Polyzou sisters expressed interest and from my side I suggested that they should work on Sam Cohen, as last year I participated again in the competition on the subject of forced labour in Karya. On the occasion of an exhibition on Karya in Thessaloniki at the Folklore and Ethnological Museum of Macedonia and the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, I met Jerome Cohen, we became friends on social media and I asked him to work with the girls for the competition. He accepted with great pleasure and was very cooperative,” the teacher commented.
About the students’ work, she said they worked hard, finding material from websites and interviews, taking notes, organizing their material, preparing the questions themselves, and then editing. “They were very much looking forward to the results but we weren’t expecting the second prize. The work was done with our mobile phones, it was not a professional job, yet it seemed that the research they did, the search for Sam Cohen’s son, counted a lot,” he added.
Following the good news, the students’ trip to Auschwitz and their visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and Memorial followed. “The Auschwitz experience was obviously soul-crushing and tough. But that was the reality. It was very moving, considering how much these people suffered. I suspect many of us can’t even fathom it. However, it was an experience of a lifetime and we would recommend it to anyone as long as they have the required respect for the victims. However, new friendships were made from both the competition and the visit to Auschwitz. We created new memories with other people, we bonded with these individuals and we will try to maintain this communication in the future,” Argyro and Vasiliki Polyzou stressed.
The video is available on the 1st High School of Pylaia websitehttps://1lyk-pylaias.thess.sch.gr/?p=5303
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