Konstantinos-Michail Foteinis
University of Ioannina.
This paper examines how Jewish survivors from the communities of Epirus (Arta, Preveza, Ioannina) and Corfu experienced and narrated liberation through their testimonies. Drawing on Tony Judt’s notion of Europe’s “double occupation,” it approaches liberation not as a clear endpoint but as a transitional and contested process shaped by contradictions, uncertainty, and uneven power relations.
While the collapse of Nazi rule marked the end of systematic persecution and extermination, testimonies reveal that liberation often inaugurated new asymmetries and constraints. Survivors’ narratives document the severe physical consequences of camp experiences—illness, malnutrition, forced labour, physical and sexual violence, and death marches—alongside the somatisation of trauma through insomnia, chronic pain, and persistent fear. They also reflect the moral tensions associated with “difficult roles” within the camps, such as participation in the Sonderkommando.
The post-liberation period emerges as a prolonged phase of displacement across a devastated Europe. Testimonies describe inadequate care, continued mobility under precarious conditions, and instances of abuse by liberating forces. For members of the She’erit Hapletah, repatriation represented another demanding transition involving property restitution, hostile or indifferent authorities, disrupted family networks, and tensions within reconstituted Jewish communities.
Different trajectories unfolded: residence in Displaced Persons camps, participation in Hashcara training programmes, migration to Palestine or the United States, or return to postwar Greece, where survivors confronted political instability. Despite the absence of immediate relief, survivors actively reshaped their lives by forming self-administrative committees in DP camps and through a significant rise in marriages and births, both within the camps and in reconstituted communities.
The paper argues that testimony itself functioned as a fragile act of liberation, breaking long silences while exposing the persistence of trauma. Liberation thus appears not as a singular moment but as an extended and ambivalent process in which recovery, displacement, memory formation, and new political horizons coexisted.
Konstantinos-Michail Foteinis is a PhD candidate in Modern and Contemporary Greek and European History at the Department of History and Archaeology, University of Ioannina.
His research focuses on the history and memory of Jewish communities in Epirus, with particular emphasis on survivor testimonies, postwar reconstruction, and the formation of collective memory after the Holocaust.