Auschwitz is the destination of the deportation trains that carried more than fifty thousand people from Thessaloniki, most of the city’s Jewish population, during the Holocaust. The narrative also places Max Jacob’s death on the route there: the Jewish poet and painter died in March 1944 while being transported toward Auschwitz. The place thus enters the book both through the scale of a community’s forced removal and through the fate of an individual who never arrived.

Destination of the Thessaloniki deportations

The account emphasizes the enormity of the city’s loss: more than fifty thousand people were forcibly deported by train to Auschwitz, and very few escaped. The number is given against Thessaloniki’s broader wartime devastation, whose full hardship the narrator says is difficult to imagine on a sunny spring day, even though its memories remain. Auschwitz anchors that history to a specific destination, making the deportations part of the city’s continuing memory rather than a distant abstraction.

Max Jacob’s unfinished journey

The narrator looks up Max Jacob and learns that he was a Jewish poet and painter, a friend of Apollinaire and Picasso, who died in March 1944 en route to Auschwitz. The distinction matters: Jacob’s death occurred on the way, not at the destination. The narrator imagines that Evangelia may also have learned this fact, extending the knowledge across the book’s different lives and periods without claiming certainty about what she knew.

Historical memory and narrative significance

Auschwitz connects the mass deportation of Thessaloniki’s Jews with Jacob’s individual fate, setting collective history beside a particular interrupted journey. Its mention also shapes the narrator’s perception of Thessaloniki: the city’s present-day spring brightness and lively public life coexist with memories of a destruction that remains difficult to comprehend. The place functions as a historical reference point through which the narrative registers both the scale of the Holocaust and the persistence of its aftermath in memory.