With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Teenage Rescuer, Now 92, Meets Family She Saved From Nazis

Sarah Yanai, an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor, clutched the handle of her wheelchair as she closed her eyes, and then opened her arms to embrace the woman who helped save her and most of her family from the Nazis more than 75 years ago.

“How are you, how are you Melpo?” Ms. Yanai asked in Greek while stroking the cheek and silver hair of Melpomeni Dina, the 92-year-old Greek woman who, along with her two sisters, provided a hiding place for Ms. Yanai’s family in Veroia, a town in northern Greece, during the German occupation of the country in World War II.

The two women and Yossi Mor, Ms. Yanai’s brother, were reunited at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial center, in Jerusalem on Sunday.

The meeting, which was set up by the center and by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, a charity that assists those who risked their lives to save Jews, might be the last of its kind, Stanlee J. Stahl, the executive vice president of the foundation, said by phone on Tuesday.

“I believe this will be the very last reunion,” Ms. Stahl told reporters on Sunday, noting that most survivors and the people who had helped them were either unable to travel or had died.

Ms. Dina, who was accompanied to Jerusalem by her daughter, was introduced to 40 descendants of the Jewish family she had helped to shelter in a bedroom in Veroia in the 1940s, according to a statement by the center and the foundation.

Read entire article at NY Times