Eighty years on, Thessaloniki Holocaust survivor recalls cart of trampled bodies

People leave candles and flowers on train tracks during a memorial marking the 80th anniversary of the first deportation of Jews from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz, in Thessaloniki, Greece March 19, 2023. REUTERS/Alexandros Avramidis

ATHENS (Reuters) - Eighty-four-year-old Rina Revah was nearly four when she was sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany with her parents in 1943. She would spend the next two years of her childhood there and witness events that would stay with her forever.

"I never had a toy, I never had a doll," Revah said from her home in Thessaloniki, where a thriving Jewish Community once existed for centuries before the second world war.