For the first time in Jerusalem in 2019, 92-year-old Melpomeni Dina, from the town of Veria in Northern Greece, met the descendants of a Jewish family she helped save during the Holocaust.
One by one, the forty descendants of the Mordechai family leaned down and warmly hugged the elderly Greek woman to whom they owed their very existence, as she sat in her wheelchair, wiping away the tears that continuously streaked down her face.
Clutching the hands of those she hid, fed, and protected as a teenager over 75 years ago, 92-year-old Dina said she could now “die quietly,” according to a report from the Associated Press. “The risk they took upon themselves to take in an entire family, knowing that it put them and everyone around them in danger..,” Sarah Yanai, now 86, who was the oldest of the five siblings Dina and others sheltered, was quoted as saying.
Greek woman helped save Jewish family from Holocaust
The Mordechai family once lived in Veria, Greece near Thessaloniki, where nearly the entire Jewish community was annihilated within a space of a few months, in one of the most brutal Nazi atrocities.
When the Nazis began rounding up Jews for deportation in early 1943, the family’s non-Jewish friends provided them with fake identity cards and hid them in the attic of the old abandoned Turkish mosque nearby. They hid there for almost an entire year, while often hearing screams and cries outside the building—the sounds of other Jews being rounded up by the Nazi troops.
Eventually, however, they were forced to abandon their safe hiding spot because their health was declining in the cramped, unventilated attic of the mosque. That was when Dina and her two older sisters took the family of seven into their own single-room home on the outskirts of the city, sharing with them their own meager wartime food rations.
One of the Mordechai children, a boy named Shmuel, became gravely ill and had to be taken to a hospital, despite the risk of revealing his identity. Tragically, he died at the facility. Shortly after, an informant cruelly betrayed the Mordechai family, revealing their location.
Dina and her orphaned, impoverished sisters provided the Mordechai family with clothing prior to their departure, and they, along with other relatives, helped them escape, scattering in different directions outside the city. Yanai, the oldest, fled to the woods; another went to the mountains; and the mother of the family set out on foot with her two youngest surviving children in search of a new hiding place.
Miraculously, the family was able to reunite after liberation and, despite many hardships, eventually made their way to Israel, where the children grew up to thrive and establish successful families of their own.
An emotional encounter
Yossi Mor was just an infant when his family was taken in during the Holocaust, but he said he still remembered a few things—like the death of his older brother and the kindness of the Greek rescuers who provided refuge for nearly two years.
“They fed us, gave us medicine, offered protection, everything. They even washed our clothes,” he recalled, gesturing toward Dina. “She loved me very much.” Mor and Yanai had met Dina in Greece years earlier, but the younger generation of their extended family—grade-school children in pigtails and soldiers in uniform—had never before met the woman who had saved their family.
The emotional reunion was arranged by the organization Righteous Among the Nations, which awards Israel’s highest honor to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. More than 27,000 people worldwide, including roughly 355 from Greece, have been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations for helping Greek Jews during the Holocaust.
Here is the full story of how Dina courageously saved the Jewish family so many years ago in Veria.
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