THESSALONIKI, GREECE - Syrian and Iraqi war refugees are sleeping by railroad tracks in northern Greece hoping to be allowed to travel onward to Germany and other northern EU countries. Seventy-three years ago, these tracks were traversed by another group heading to Germany for a completely different future: the Nazi death camps.
North was not a direction the Jews wanted to be heading. Packed into death trains by the SS, their journey ended in the gas chambers of the Third Reich, where 98 percent of the total Jewish population of Thessaloniki died.
Europeans escaping Nazi tyranny in the Balkans and parts of Central Europe, were heading in opposite directions from Thessaloniki’s Jews, some southeast for Turkey, the country contemporary Syrians and Iraqis are traveling through to flee the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and the jihadists of the Islamic State and al Qaida affiliate Jabhat al Nusra.
Poignant, cruel historical ironies and injustices abound in the turmoil of the current refugee crisis roiling Europe and the Middle East — ghostly echoes of a past Europeans thought they had long ago exorcised that is panicking their politicians.
Located at a major crossroads between mainland Europe and the Mideast, Greece and its Balkan neighbors - now throwing up coils of razor-sharp wire on their frontiers and militarizing their borders to stop asylum-seekers - are no strangers to huge flows of war refugees searching for a firm footing nor to forcible displacements.
The turmoil that has come in the wake of these mass migrations has shaken countries to their roots and foreshadowed era-changing politics.
It is almost as if the European continent is built on political tectonic plates. With each chafing and grinding, the lives of hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, are shattered. Individuals, rich and poor alike, are caught up in consequences beyond their control.
From the 19th century until the end of the 20th century, an estimated 10 million ethnic Turks, Albanians, Bosniaks, Circassians, Tatars and Pomaks trudged towards Turkey, emigrating to the heartland of the Ottoman Empire, Anatolia.
Most did so during the Balkan War of 1912-13 and the Great War - World War I - as the Ottomans saw their territory shrink and independence grabbed by vassal states. In 1915 those refugees passed Armenians coming the other way when about 80,000 survivors of the Armenian Genocide fled to Greece.
There was more to come with the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922, the Greek occupation of the port of Smyrna, now known as Izmir, the launching point for many fleeing Syrians and Iraqis today. The war was concluded with a forcible mass exchange of populations that saw the expulsions of Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece and of Muslims from Greece to Turkey.
The Aegean Sea, now being passaged by Syrians and Iraqis desperate to reach safety, figured prominently then as well.
The population exchange — “the great uprooting” — involved more than two million people.
“Can’t we go back to Syria now,” is a plea many Syrian parents at Idomeni have heard from their children. The same look of bewilderment, the same faux courage is on the faces of Syrian and Iraqi kids as they are captured for posterity in the faces of Greek and Turkish children in black-and-white photographs taken during the great uprooting.
“My mother only took a few spare clothes because she thought she would be coming back. And then the boat came and took us away,” an aged Despoina Christopulou, a Greek Christian survivor, recalled in a 2012 BBC documentary exploring the devastating consequences of the Greek invasion of Turkey and the refugee crisis it created on both sides of the Aegean.
Remembering how life was before, Christopulou says: “There would be a Greek house and then a Turkish house — they would all live well together. They ate and drank together. They would come to yours; you would go to theirs.” War put a finish to that. When the Greek army retreated, Greek Christians fled in its wake pursued by vengeful Turks determined to punish the terrible devastation wrought on their towns by the Greek military. Christopulou talks in the documentary about the disappearance of her father, wiping tears away as though it were yesterday.
Today, Sunni Muslims, Kurds, Yezidis and Christians are flooding out of the Mideast in the biggest mass movement of people Europe has seen since the Second World War. And their oral histories, what they are struggling with emotionally, what they are enduring now, are, for all of the technological differences, the same.