The last Thessaloniki man survivor of Auschwitz, Heinz Kunio, has passed away.
“There are no words… Today our father left today for the great journey, leaving a great legacy to all of us, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and society.The last male survivor of Auschwitz from Thessaloniki,” the deceased’s daughter, Hella Matalon, said in a post.
“He dedicated his life with passion to the preservation of memory. He will never leave our hearts. Our hearts are very heavy,” she stresses.
Heinz Kunio lived through the horrific experience of being transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on March 16, 1943, at the age of just 16. “I and my family were on the first expedition, which started from Thessaloniki. On arriving at the destination, dazed and weakened, we saw a picture reminiscent of Dante’s “Hell”Black smoke was coming out of the chimneys, wild voices could be heard from everywhere, dogs were barking and thick darkness covered everything. Then I knew that something bad was going to happen to us,” he said, in an interview with the APPE-MPA in 2009.
He managed to save himself mainly thanks to his fluency in the German language, enduring for two years the suffering of the inhuman Nazi death machine. In his autobiographical book “I Lived Death,” Heinz Kunio recorded the grimness of the Holocaust as he experienced it himself.
