Napoli Salonicco Auschwitz. Cronaca di un viaggio senza ritorno

July 1938. Like a bolt from the blue, the racial laws strike the Italian Jewish Community. They also strike Rachele and Abramo Hasson, two Greek merchants who had emigrated to Naples after the Thessaloniki fire of August 1917. Amid mounting hardships, marked by the rapid loss of all their rights, the Hassons are forced to leave Italy. They arrive in Thessaloniki, the city they had left more than twenty years earlier, on the eve of the Fascist invasion of Greece. With them are also their two youngest children, Giacomo and Dino, born and raised in Naples like their sister and elder brother, who, thanks to a ticket probably paid for by “Delasem”, manage to emigrate to the United States. The partition of the Greek state and the Nazi occupation of Macedonia would coincide with the last chapter of the long history of the Jerusalem of the Balkans and its fifty thousand Jewish inhabitants. Against the backdrop of a story that repeats a script already staged in all the countries occupied by Hitler’s armies, there is room for the incredible story of the consuls Guelfo Zamboni and Giuseppe Castruccio, of Lucillo Merci and Riccardo Rosenberg, who at the most tragic moment in the history of the Jews of Thessaloniki manage to distribute hundreds of documents attesting the Italian nationality of as many Jews, who find themselves diverted to Athens from the convoys bound for the gas chambers of eastern Poland. A lifeboat on which, however, the Hassons find no place, their story being already destined to end elsewhere. In a place with a grim and terrible name: Auschwitz