Moshe Ha-Elion
He is the author of a memoir, מיצרי שאול (Meizarey Sheol), originally written in Hebrew and translated into English as The Straits of Hell: The chronicle of a Salonikan Jew in the Nazi extermination camps Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Melk, Ebensee.
[2] Moshe studied at the Primary School "Talmud Torá" of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki.
[5] On 11 July 1942, all Jewish men between the ages of 18 and 45 were ordered to concentrate in the Independence Square of Thessaloniki for "registration".
In the square, the Jews suffered their first humiliations: the Germans forced them to do gymnastics in the hot weather and did not allow them to drink water.
[2][5] Moshe and the rest of the Jewish community of Thessaloniki were informed by German Nazi officials that they would all be relocated to Poland.
[6] Then, Jews were ordered to wear the Yellow Star of David and forced into two ghettos, one in the east of Thessaloniki and one in the western, called Baron Hirsch, adjacent to the rail lines.
Every three days, freight cars crammed with an average of 2,000 Thessaloniki Jews headed toward Auschwitz-Birkenau.
[6] They packed their bags which included warm clothing they bought especially for settling in Poland, left their keys with their non-Jewish neighbors and moved to the Baron Hirsch ghetto.
[6] In the morning of 7 April 1943 Moshe and his family were transported in freight wagons packed with people.
Moshe's maternal grandparents, his uncle's wife and his one-year-old son were also gassed upon arrival.
He describes the death march in his poem "En marcha de la muerte".
[3] When the Allies were approaching the camps, the Germans took the prisoners through the Danube in small boats to the city of Linz and then, after four days by foot, to Ebensee.
[12] In his poem "Komo komian el pan",[13] Moshe writes that during his years as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps his stomach was always crying.
On 6 May 1945, one week after Hitler's death, the American army liberated all the sub-camps of Mauthausen, including Ebensee, where Moshe Ha-Elion was a prisoner.
[3] After the liberation, Moshe Ha-Elion decided not to come back to Thessaloniki, and illegally emigrated to Palestine on board the Wedgewood boat in June 1946, after being in the south of Italy for one year.
Moshe worked in the Israeli Ministry of Defense and was first an assistant and then head of an operational unit.
Moshe Ha-Elion returned to Auschwitz several times in order to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust.
[15] In 1992 Moshe Ha-Elion published an autobiography called מיצרי שאול (Meizarey Sheol) written in Hebrew and translated into English in 2005 with the title The Straits of Hell.
The chronicle of a Salonikan Jew in the Nazi extermination camps Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Melk, Ebensee.
In 2000 Moshe Ha-Elion published En los Kampos de la Muerte, a poetic and autobiographical text written in Ladino and formed of three very large poems: "La djovenika al lager" (dedicated to his sister); "Komo komian el pan"; and "En marcha de la muerte" (poem that describes his death march).
[16] En los Kampos de la Muerte has been adapted to a theater-music-poetic show by the baroque ensemble Rubato Appassionato and actor Gary Shochat.
