#The Story

The Facts

A month after the Germans entered Thessaloniki, Albert Revah, the grandfather of the main character Renée Revah, a dynamic, independent, and educated man, does not tolerate the harassment by the Nazis. He closes his shop in Emporiou Square and goes to Athens, where, with the help of his friends and his fluent Italian, becomes a foreman in the mines of Lavrion.

Albert writes to his mother, Sol Venezia, and his siblings, Olga, Lina and Isaac, to go to Athens. He assures them that he has a way to hide them, but they refuse, believing they are not in danger.

“Where should we run?… Where to leave our home?… We’re fine here… The Germans aren’t hurting us. They’re only confining us…”
And so, they stayed in Thessaloniki.

Albert spends two years in Lavrion relatively well, calm and protected by his Italian friends. In September 1943, when Italy capitulates and sides with the Allies, the Germans arrest all the Italians who are in Greece, including Albert, who escapes and arrives on foot in Athens. There, he finds two other old friends, Nikos and Evangelos Papadopoulos, who hide him without a second thought in a small apartment at 50 Karneadou Str. And Marasli Str. In Kolonaki.

He has now learned that his family had been transported from Thessaloniki along with 45,000 other Jews, but he believed, as everyone did –and as even those who got into the cattle cars did- that they were taken by force in Eastern Europe, where wartime deaths had left the factories empty. After the Germans leave Athens, Albert has the sole purpose of preparing the return of his own family. With borrowed money, he starts buying beds, mattresses, blankets, food, clothes, etc., and every day he does nothing but collect things he can find in derelict Athens.

I see you hiding full of fear and hope,
falling off a cliff into the depths of the abyss,
and getting lost. That’s where I travel and meet you.

A few months later, he learns that some people have returned from the camps and searches for his old friend Heim Benveniste, who had escaped since before the war was an employee of the German Consulate in Thessaloniki and speaks fluent German. The Germans had placed him as a secretary in Birkenau, and Heim was listing the names of everyone who went to the gas chamber and then to the crematoria. Albert asked him if he had seen his family, only to get the answer:
“Albert, don’t wait for them anymore… No one is alive…”.

He returns silently to his apartment on Karneadou Str., takes a single chair from the dining room, puts it on the balcony facing the Evangelismos Hospital, sits, and stays there for three days and nights, without crying, without talking, without eating…

At this place, years later his granddaughter Renée Revah, a successful photographer, meets him through the family’s narratives and talks to him:
“You are the image that my heart formed. I imagine you sitting in the chair on the balcony of Karneadou Str., looking at the Evangelismos Hospital. Countless times I imagine the chair, until in the end I believe that it is a wooden one; sometimes it transforms into a chair from a café, other times into one made out of heavy solid wood. I wish I could hold your hand when the flood approaches. I see you hiding full of fear and hope, falling off a cliff into the depths of the abyss, and getting lost. That’s where I travel and meet you.”