One Rock at a Time
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the Winter 2025 Issue of the Jewish Journal.
The Greek countryside flashed by as we drove to Karya that summer morning in August, when Jerome, Tammy, and Philip Cohen, Willie and Aliza Cantu and I headed up the mountain in a motor caravan. We’d landed in Greece only two days earlier, ready to support the Cohen family as they explored this significant, but painful, part of their father Sam’s history. With Athens in our rear-view mirror and highway signs showing our direction was north towards Thessaloniki, I noticed there were no signs for Karya.
Except for those who lived in the adjoining town, Karya was not on anyone’s map. Even the train station housed there was lost to history.
I didn’t understand why we needed four-wheel drive vehicles till we arrived at the site of the Karya forced labor camp. To reach the train station, we traversed the mountain in a series of switchbacks, zig-zagging up the steep terrain. When I opened the car door at the top, the stifling heat hit me like a thermal blower. Led by author Andreas Assael, we traveled back in time to Karya in 1943. With every step through the thorny overbrush and tall weeds on the way to the train station, the reality of the cruelness of this location became ever more evident. It was like Mother Nature was trying to hide the sins of men.
In 1943, Organisation Todt, the civil and paramilitary engineering division of the Nazi Germany war machine, planned a large-scale extension of the Greek railway network. For the Nazis, Greece was a rich and vital resource for raw materials and forced laborers. As part of this project, 500 Jewish men were sadistically rounded up in Thessaloniki and scheduled to work in 12-hour shifts, given only one liter of water a day and minimal sustenance. Their options were to either work or die. Either choice was acceptable to the Nazis.
Their job was to cut an opening in the mountainside to a depth of approximately 65 feet and a length of 328 feet, one rock at a time, for the installation of a new rail track. With picks, shovels and their bare hands, they toiled in the heat, taking down the mountain piece by piece one rock at a time . The bodies of those who died from the grueling work, or from a Nazi bullet, were mixed in the mine carts with the rubble and dumped, unceremoniously, into the gorge.
As I stood in the cutting, I could almost hear their painful wailing and feel their confusion, as they knew they were sentenced to torture and death – just for being Jewish. I had no answer except to recite the Kaddish. When I finished, there was the silence, no birds, no crickets, no wind. It was the same silence I heard in Auschwitz, in Chelmo, in Treblinka, and at other killing sites — the silence that endures after unholy deaths.
I came down the mountain through the same switchbacks, forever changed and committed to the mission to never forget.