{"id":1078,"date":"2026-04-17T07:50:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T04:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/?p=1078"},"modified":"2026-04-17T07:50:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T04:50:00","slug":"auschwitz-survivor-heinz-kunio-passed-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/?p=1078","title":{"rendered":"Auschwitz survivor Heinz Kunio passed away"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The last <b>Thessaloniki <\/b>man survivor of Auschwitz, Heinz Kunio, has passed away.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;There are no words&#8230; 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,&#8221; the deceased&#8217;s daughter, Hella Matalon, said in a post.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;He dedicated his life with passion to the preservation of memory. He will never leave our hearts. Our hearts are very heavy,&#8221; she stresses. <\/p>\n<p>Heinz Kunio lived through the horrific experience of being transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on March 16, 1943, at the age of just 16. &#8220;<b>I and my family were on the first expedition,<\/b> which started from Thessaloniki. <b>On arriving at the destination, dazed and weakened, we saw a picture reminiscent of Dante&#8217;s &#8220;Hell&#8221;<\/b>Black smoke was coming out of the chimneys, wild voices could be heard from everywhere, dogs were barking and thick darkness covered everything. <b>Then I knew that something bad was going to happen to us,&#8221;<\/b> he said, in an interview with the APPE-MPA in 2009.<\/p>\n<p>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. <b>In his autobiographical book &#8220;I Lived Death,&#8221; Heinz Kunio recorded the grimness of the Holocaust as he experienced it himself.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The last male survivor of Auschwitz, Heinz Kunio, the last man from Thessaloniki, passed away. &#8220;There are no words&#8230; Today our father left us for&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The last of the victims of the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1079,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}