In Memoriam: Heinz Kounio (1927–2026) - One of the Last Survivors of Jewish Salonika
It is with tremendously heavy hearts that we mourn the passing of Heinz Kounio, one of the last Holocaust survivors of Salonika (Thessaloniki) and one of the most important witnesses to the destruction of a Sephardic Jewish civilization that had flourished for centuries.
Kounio passed away in Thessaloniki in April 2026 at the age of 98, leaving behind not only children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, but an extraordinary legacy of testimony, remembrance, and determination that the Jews of Salonika and their fate would never be forgotten.
Heinz Dario Salvator Kounio was born on June 19, 1927, in Karlovy Vary, then Czechoslovakia, and grew up in Thessaloniki, where his father, Salvator, operated a successful photography business. His family belonged to the great Sephardic community that had made Salonika one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the world.
That world was shattered during the Nazi occupation.
In 1943, the Jews of Thessaloniki were confined to ghettos and systematically deported. On March 15, 1943, 15-year-old Heinz, together with his parents and sister, was forced aboard the first transport from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Thousands were crowded onto that train for the nearly weeklong journey to occupied Poland.
Upon arrival, Kounio became prisoner 109565.
In an extraordinary twist of fate, language helped save his family. Unlike many of the overwhelmingly Ladino-speaking Salonikan Jews arriving with the transport, Heinz and his family spoke German. When the SS demanded interpreters, they stepped forward. Kounio would later remember simply: “Language was something miraculous. This is how we were saved.”
But survival was never assured. Kounio endured Auschwitz and the unimaginable brutality, hunger, forced labor, and constant proximity to death that defined the camps. As the Soviet army approached in 1945, he was transferred westward, eventually reaching Mauthausen and Ebensee. By the time American forces liberated Ebensee in May 1945, he was so emaciated that he weighed only about 34 kilograms.
He returned home to Thessaloniki, but the city to which he returned was profoundly changed. The great Jewish metropolis of his childhood had been almost completely destroyed. Of the tens of thousands of Salonikan Jews deported by the Nazis, only a small fraction survived. Families, synagogues, schools, institutions, businesses, traditions, and entire networks of communal life had vanished.
Kounio nevertheless chose to rebuild.
He reestablished his life in Thessaloniki, continued his family's photography business, married, raised a family, and became a familiar and respected figure in the Jewish community and the wider city. Yet he also understood that survival carried with it a responsibility: to testify.
Only weeks after liberation, while still recovering, he began recording what he had experienced. In 1981, he published his memoir, I Lived Through Death, becoming one of the earliest Greek Jewish survivors to put his testimony into print.
For the remainder of his life, Holocaust remembrance became a sacred mission. He spoke to students and the public, participated in commemorations and educational initiatives, gave testimony, and worked tirelessly to document the Jews of Thessaloniki who had been murdered. Over decades, Kounio compiled approximately 37,000 names of the roughly 48,000 Salonikan Jewish victims, helping restore identities to men, women, and children whom the Nazis had sought not only to murder, but to erase from history.
Year after year, he could be seen at Thessaloniki's Holocaust commemorations, laying a wreath and proclaiming the words that defined his life's work: “Never again.”
His message was not one of hatred. It was a demand for memory, education, and moral responsibility. As Kounio himself wrote, survivor testimony must help humanity overcome “ignorance and prejudice” so that the world would never again stand aside while an entire people was exterminated.
With Heinz Kounio's passing, another living link to the vanished Jewish Salonika of before the Holocaust has left us. But the memory he spent a lifetime preserving remains.
He survived when an entire regime sought his death. He returned to the city the Nazis had tried to empty of Jews. He rebuilt a family there. And he ensured that tens of thousands who could no longer speak for themselves would have their names remembered.
His daughter Hella Matalon recalled one of her father's favorite reflections when surrounded by the generations that came after him: “Where are you, Hitler, to see us now? This is my revenge.”
May we honor Heinz Kounio by accepting the responsibility he carried for more than eight decades: to remember the Jews of Salonika, to tell their stories, to speak their names, and to ensure that the world they built—and the crime that destroyed it—is never forgotten.
Ke Su Alma Repoze en Gan Eden.
May his soul rest in the Garden of Eden.
Yehi Zikhro Barukh — May his memory be a blessing.
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