Nadjary (Nadjari, Nadjar, Nadzari) was born in Thessaloniki, (Salonika), Greece. He fought for the communist resistance in 1943 and was wounded. Seeking medical help, he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz in April 1944. Nadjary's mother, farther and sister Nelly died in Auschwitz. He was assigned to work as a member of the Sonderkommando — a group of Jewish prisoners forced to assist Nazis in their mass extermination program. At Auschwitz, the Jewish Virtual Library explains, Sonderkommandos greeted prisoners upon their arrival to the camp, telling them that they were being sent to shower, when they were in fact headed to gas chambers. Sonderkommandos removed bodies from the gas chambers, extracted gold teeth from the corpses, removed any valuables, brought corpses to the camp’s crematoria, and threw the ashes into a nearby river. Nadjary wrote then buried a letter documenting the atrocities in a forest near the camp before it was liberated in 1945. The document was discovered in 1980, but as Dagmar Breitenbach of Deutsche Welle reports, experts only recently succeeded in deciphering Nadjari’s vital account of Nazi atrocities. He moved back to Greece after the war, and then immigrated to the United States in 1951 working as a tailor. Nadjary wrote his memoirs, "Hroniki 1941-1945," April 14, 1947. The book was published in Greek in 1991. Nadjary married Roza Saltiel in Greece. Together they had a son, Alberto, born in Greece in 1950, and a daughter, Nelly, born in New York in 1957. Nadjary died at the age of 54 in New York.
Nadjary (Nadjari, Nadjar, Nadzari) was born in Thessaloniki, (Salonika), Greece. He fought for the communist resistance in 1943 and was wounded. Seeking medical help, he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz in April 1944. Nadjary's mother, farther and sister Nelly died in Auschwitz. He was assigned to work as a member of the Sonderkommando — a group of Jewish prisoners forced to assist Nazis in their mass extermination program. At Auschwitz, the Jewish Virtual Library explains, Sonderkommandos greeted prisoners upon their arrival to the camp, telling them that they were being sent to shower, when they were in fact headed to gas chambers. Sonderkommandos removed bodies from the gas chambers, extracted gold teeth from the corpses, removed any valuables, brought corpses to the camp’s crematoria, and threw the ashes into a nearby river. Nadjary wrote then buried a letter documenting the atrocities in a forest near the camp before it was liberated in 1945. The document was discovered in 1980, but as Dagmar Breitenbach of Deutsche Welle reports, experts only recently succeeded in deciphering Nadjari’s vital account of Nazi atrocities. He moved back to Greece after the war, and then immigrated to the United States in 1951 working as a tailor. Nadjary wrote his memoirs, "Hroniki 1941-1945," April 14, 1947. The book was published in Greek in 1991. Nadjary married Roza Saltiel in Greece. Together they had a son, Alberto, born in Greece in 1950, and a daughter, Nelly, born in New York in 1957. Nadjary died at the age of 54 in New York.
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
Records on Ancestry
Advertisement
