Sites of memory
Memorial plaque, Chaidari camp: „Memorial site for the victims and the suffering of the fighters in the national resistance. Bastion in the fight for freedom“. Photo: Anna Maria Droumpouki
About the German concentration camps in Greece only little statistic data and no scientific studies exist. For research there is almost exclusively autobiographical literature or oral and public history available. There were presumable 36 concentration camps created by the Germans with more than 100.000 detainees and 48.000 executed people. Those in Pavlos Melas, Chaidari and Chadzikostadie were considered the most terrible camps.
At sites of memory it becomes clear, that history isn´t reduced to what happened, but it also includes what is still happening. The Greek attitude towards its own past can be easily measured by its dealing with its own sites of memory, either by sustaining them, by non-sustaining them, or as usually by neglecting them.
The sites of memory in Greece are strikingly attached to little significance. At the former shooting range of Kaisariani e.g. the Rifle Club Athens has its training pitch and the former SD headquarters in Merlin Street in the center of Athens had to give way for a cosmetics shopping center.
Links:
Sites of memory in Europe (1939–1945)
Information Portal to European Sites of Remembrance
Sites of memory: