“Maria & Lola” book launch

Thessaloniki Association “The White Tower” proudly organised a book launch for the publication titled “Maria & Lola – Stories of Survival” by Carol Gordon and Gregoria Boursinos. The function was held at the Association premises on Sunday 29th March 2026.

The organisers were extremely happy for the crowd that flocked to the event to hear Holocaust survivor Lola Seror, a Thessalonian Greek-Jew who lost all her family except her sister Maria at the concentration camps. She was lucky to survive and we are better for it, because she can discuss her stories, teary eyed, but with full support from our community.

In a few words the Newspaper “Neos Kosmos” and Dr Fotis Kapetopoulos wrote about Lola’s words:

“I have no one left to speak Greek with’: Holocaust survivor Lola Seror finds home” provides a moving profile of a woman whose life was defined by both immense tragedy and an enduring cultural connection. A survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, Lola was the only member of her immediate family to survive the Holocaust in Thessaloniki. The piece highlights a poignant irony: while she survived the systematic attempt to erase her people, she lived much of her later life in Australia feeling a different kind of loss—the dwindling of her native Judeo-Greek tongue.

The precis centers on her transition to Melbourne, where she eventually found a sense of “home” not just in a physical location, but through the community at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum and her interactions with fellow Greek-speakers. The narrative emphasizes that for survivors like Lola, “home” is a linguistic and cultural landscape as much as a geographical one. Her story serves as a vital reminder of the Sephardic Jewish experience in Greece, a community almost entirely decimated during the war. Ultimately, the article portrays Lola not merely as a victim of history, but as a resilient guardian of a vanishing heritage, finally finding peace in a community that honors her past.”

We’re indebted to her story and can draw many parallels to the way Greeks of Asia Minor were treated during the Greek Genocide years of 1908 – 1923. The Death marches to nowhere, the shootings for no apparent reason, the separation of children from their mothers, the mistreatment of the elderly and members of the Christian faith, only but a few parallels. And we ask, when will the world learn?

Here is an exerpt from the Foreword of the book…

This book recounts the stories of two Jewish Sephardic Greek sisters –
Maria and Lola Seror – sole Survivors of the Holocaust of their entire
family. Maria was born on the 21st March 1923 and Lola was born on the
16th May 1926. They lived in Salonica (later known as Thessaloniki).
Maria’s name was Rachel until she went into hiding during the Nazi
occupation of Greece and the persecution of the Jews. Maria decided to
keep her new name as she transitioned into her new life after the war.
Maria survived in hiding and Lola survived incarceration in concentration
camps and death marches. The two sisters were joyfully reunited in
Melbourne, Australia some years after the war.
Their remarkable journeys of survival were told to Gregoria Boursinos and
were written by Carol Freeman Gordon and Gregoria Boursinos.
Memory is very personal and circumstantial and this is evidenced by the
recollections of the two sisters. Their stories were recorded more than
seventy years after the fact and therefore it is not surprising that small
details may differ in their memory of certain events.
What can never be forgotten is the horror and trauma of their experiences
during the Holocaust.

Here are some of the photos we took on the day.