“We have been organizing these reunions since 1992, but this, I think, will be the last one, as survivors and rescuers are now too frail to make the journey”
With the number of Holocaust survivors dwindling, Yad Vashem this week hosted probably the last event of its kind — the emotional reunion of two survivors and their Israeli-born grandchildren, with the woman who’d rescued their family during the war.
Melpomeni Dina, 92, cried as she met Sarah Yannai (nee Mordechai), and her younger brother Yossi Mor more than 75 years after hiding the Mordechai family in the small Greek town of Veira, near Thessaloniki.
“It’s difficult to come, but I’m so happy to be here to see this family,” said a wheelchair-bound and frail Melpomeni as she embraced the Mordechai grandchildren in Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names. Sitting by her side and clasping her hand, Sarah Yannai spoke of her rescuer as like an “older sister” who’d “risked her life to save me.”
The Mordechai family had lived in Greece for generations when the Germans invaded the country in 1941, after their Italian allies failed to defeat the Greek armed forces. “The Germans announced that they were just sending Jews for labor, but my mother didn’t believe them,” remembers Yossi Mor, now a resident of Be’er Sheva. “She saw how cruel they were, and so we went into hiding. Melpomeni’s family took us in — our parents and all five children — despite their poverty and the danger. They lived in one-and-a-half rooms, and had to provide us with food, medicine, and clothes.”
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