The Holocaust survivors and Righteous Among the Nations that greeted the Pope during the ceremony:
Avraham Ashkenazi was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1939 to a traditional, affluent family. Avraham’s family owned a tannery, and his maternal grandfather owned a wholesale store. In April 1941, with the German invasion of Greece, the city came under attack, and the family hid in the basement of a relative’s store in the center of town. After the Germans occupied the city, the family returned to their house and tried to continue their daily routine, but in the beginning of 1943 they were forced to flee after they found out about the upcoming deportation. Avraham’s father remembered how, in July 1942, together with some 9,000 other Jewish men aged 18-45, he was humiliated by the Germans in the town square, in what later became known as “Black Saturday.” Seeing the writing on the wall, he gathered his family together and declared: “We will not sign up for deportation to Poland, we are escaping!” “That was his greatness, and because of that I admire him until today,” relates Avraham.
The family – Avraham and his father, mother, grandfather and uncle – obtained false identity papers from Greek Christian friends. With the papers, the family masqueraded as Christians, and managed to move to the Italian-occupied zone of Greece. They arrived in Larissa and then moved to Athens, where they worked in a tannery set up by Avraham’s father. While in Athens, the family was subject to threats of denouncement and informers, and was thus forced to move from one sanctuary to the next, and to bribe Greek officers. On Sundays they even went to church, and Avraham remembers how as a boy he would remind his parents to take him every week.
With the help of the Greek underground, the family eventually escaped Greece by fishing boat, with some 40 other refugees, a few of them Jewish. After a voyage through the islands in the rickety boat, the family reached Turkey. Turkish soldiers caught them in the evening, starving and thirsty, cross-examined them, gave them bread and let them sleep in a school hall. From Turkey the family crossed to Syria, where they met members of the Haganah, and decided to immigrate to Israel. In 1944, the family boarded a train, reaching Israel via Lebanon.
Avraham settled in Tel Aviv. On reaching adulthood, he worked as a marketing and sales director, and today is the administrator of a marketing services company.
Avraham is married to Yaffa, and they have two children and five grandchildren.
Ruth Bondy was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1923. After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, she was forced to work in agricultural labor. Later she was interned in the Terezin ghetto, and in 1943 she was transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she looked after young children who were later sent to their deaths. In July 1944 she was transferred to a number of different labor camps in the Hamburg district. With her liberation in the spring of 1945 at Bergen-Belsen, Ruth weighed just 35 kilograms (77 pounds), and was sick with typhus. He parents had died during the Shoah.
After liberation, Ruth returned to Prague. With the establishment of the State of Israel, she joined “Gahal” (Recruitment in the Diaspora) and immigrated to Israel. “On 31 December 1948, in the afternoon, a low mountain range came in to view on the horizon, behind which I expected to see the Carmel Mountains. Only when we entered Haifa port did I realize that it was Mount Carmel itself, and that the State of Israel would actually be very different from the Land of Israel I envisioned in the Diaspora…. On the way to the Sarafand Base the driver stopped, after hearing our cries of amazement, next to the orchard, and allowed us to gather the fruits that had been left behind: golden oranges rolling on the ground and nobody had bothered to pick them up! All of us, future IDF soldiers, filled our pockets with oranges, and on the bus we peeled them, inhaled their scent and ate them very slowly: they had the taste of the yearned-for Land of Israel, as I h