Co-founder, Istorima; Workshop Moderator
ABOUT THIS SESSION
Sofia Papaioannou opens the workshop with an introduction to the two organizations behind the day: Istorima and Memory Makers.
Istorima is Greece’s largest oral history archive, with over 18,000 recorded stories spanning more than a century of Greek life — from 1890 to the present day — across 49 thematic categories and 700+ researchers. Its archive is hosted by the National Library of Greece and its content has been broadcasted on ERT, ERTNEWS, and ERTflix. The core of what it does is straightforward: collect history through the eyes of the people who lived it, preserving voices and experiences that would otherwise disappear.
Memory Makers is a European educational initiative funded under the EU CERV programme and led by the European Committee for Human Rights. Its focus is on engaging young people with historical memory — with particular attention to the communities whose stories have been systematically overlooked: the Roma and Sinti, LGBTQ+ individuals, people with disabilities. The project runs across 10 events and 20 months, reaching 800+ participants from across Europe. Today’s workshop is Event 7 of 10, led by Istorima.
Papaioannou also serves as moderator for the full workshop, guiding the session through the speakers across two hours.
WHAT YOU WILL FIND HERE
Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
ABOUT THIS SESSION
Collective memory depends on transmission and transmission can be interrupted. Giorgos Antoniou opens the workshop by examining the forces that break the chain between generations: violence, displacement, shame, assimilation, and time. The break, he argues, is a structural vulnerability that every community faces, independent of any particular history.
Oral history is one response to that vulnerability. It recovers what documents cannot: the texture of lived experience, the subjectivity of individual accounts, the emotional register that official records strip away. Antoniou is equally rigorous about its limits, however memory reconstructs rather than reproduces, and every act of recollection is shaped by the present as much as the past.
The session closes with a direct challenge to educators. Presenting testimony as unmediated truth is as misleading as dismissing it as merely subjective. The task is to help students hold both positions at once: critical distance and genuine empathy, applied to the same source.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
Chair (2022), Committee on the Genocide of the Roma, International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)
ABOUT THIS SESSION
Between 220,000 and 500,000 Roma and Sinti were killed during World War II, making it one of the least documented genocides in European history. Paul Isaac Hagouel’s session is a systematic account of how the persecution developed and why so much of it went unrecorded.
He traces the persecution from its pre-war legal foundations: the surveillance legislation in France that predated 1939, the racial classification decrees in Germany, and the bureaucratic infrastructure that made mass internment possible before a single camp was built. From there, the session moves through the internment camps of Vichy France — operated largely by French authorities without direct German orders — to the systematic deportations across occupied Europe and the Auschwitz-Birkenau gypsy camp, where nearly 3,000 people were murdered in a single night in August 1944.
The session also addresses the particular situation of Roma in Greece, where the dynamics of persecution differed significantly from other territories. It closes with the present: how the genocide known as the Porajmos, or Samudaripen, is entering formal historical memory, and what antigypsyism looks like across Europe today.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
Journalist, Editor-in-Chief, Istorima
ABOUT THIS SESSION
Interviewing a WWII or Holocaust survivor requires the ability to enter someone else’s past carefully enough that they feel safe enough to take you there. Maya Filippopoulou has guided hundreds of oral history interviews at Istorima, and this session is a detailed account of how she does it.
She walks through each stage of the process: finding narrators and making first contact, conducting a preliminary interview that builds trust without exhausting the story, and structuring questions around a narrative arc rather than a topic checklist. The session then moves into the interview itself — how to listen without filling silence, how to ask the hardest questions simply and without buildup, and how to stay present when the account is devastating. If an interviewer reveals their own discomfort, she notes, the narrator will start managing the interviewer’s feelings instead of answering honestly.
The session includes portrait profiles of three Istorima narrators — Morris Gormezano, Antonis Mavroyannis, and Rina Barzilai-Revach.
It closes with a live workshop interview, in which participants apply the methodology in real time with actual narrators.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
Assistant Professor, Hellenic Open University; Chief Editor, International Journal of Human Rights and Constitutional Studies
ABOUT THIS SESSION
Collecting personal testimony carries ethical and legal responsibilities that apply from the moment of first contact. Christina Akrivopoulou’s session covers the framework that anyone working with human subjects needs to know.
Drawing on human rights law and professional standards, she addresses what interviewees are entitled to at every stage of the process: privacy, informed consent, protection from coercion, and treatment that preserves their dignity. She also covers the interviewer’s obligations — how to structure questions in ways that reduce unconscious bias, how to handle sensitive data within applicable legal requirements, and how to recognize and navigate ethical conflicts when organizational goals come into tension with individual rights.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
Sound Engineer, Istorima
ABOUT THIS SESSION
A high-quality microphone in a bad room will still give you bad audio. Spyros Lymperopoulos, sound engineer at Istorima, makes the case that the most consequential recording decisions happen before you press record — and that most of them require no equipment at all.
The session covers room selection and preparation, noise reduction, speaker positioning, and correct lavalier mic placement. It is practical and specific: the kind of guidance that prevents the most common field recording errors, which tend to be environmental rather than technical.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
Lawyer, Historian, Teacher, Evening Vocational Upper Secondary School of Evosmos, Thessaloniki
Students of the Evening Vocational Upper Secondary School of Evosmos
Students, Researchers, #StolenMemory project
ABOUT THIS SESSION
The #StolenMemory project is an international initiative coordinated by the Arolsen Archives — the international center on Nazi persecution, based in Germany — and supported by the German Federal Foreign Office. In Greece, it was launched at the start of 2025 through a call by the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education, inviting schools across the country to participate in tracing the families of Greek victims of Nazi persecution whose personal belongings are still held in the Archives.
Sixteen schools responded. Among them was the Evening Vocational Upper Secondary School of Evosmos in Thessaloniki, where a group of students, guided by their teacher Angelos Chotzidis, took on the case of Georgios Chanas.
In this session, the students present the research directly: how they searched the archive records, cross-referenced documentation, located graves, and tracked down surviving family members. The case of Georgios Chanas — a Greek refugee from Asia Minor arrested in Kokkinia in April 1944 and sent to Neuengamme — runs through the session as the primary example, illustrating each stage of the process from the first archival search to the moment of physical restitution.
Chotzidis provides the historical framing: the context of Greek civilian prisoners under Nazi occupation, who was targeted, under what pretexts, and what happened to them in the German camp system between 1941 and 1945.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
Great-grand niece of Yorgos Chanas, victim of the Neuengamme concentration camp
ABOUT THIS SESSION
In April 1944, Georgios Chanas was arrested during a night raid at his home in Kokkinia, Piraeus. He was 29 years old, a Greek refugee from Asia Minor who had fought at the Albanian front in 1940. The raid was intended for members of his family who were active in the resistance. Chanas himself had no such affiliation — but his captors did not stop to inquire. He was sent to Neuengamme and died there later that year. His family received only a generic notification of death by dysentery. His mother made repeated appeals to the Red Cross. They led nowhere.
Renia Kontogiorgi is his great-grand niece. For most of her life, she knew only half the story. In June 2025, she received a phone call from Angelos Chotzidis’s research team: they had found him. They had located the grave. They had found his ring.
In this session, Kontogiorgi speaks in her own voice about what followed: the journey to Hamburg with her daughter, the water they carried from the sea of Piraeus to wash his grave — to wash away the sorrows, as she puts it — and the ceremony at the Acropolis Museum in Athens in November 2025 where the ring was returned to her family, eighty years after he disappeared.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
