САРКОЗИ- ГРЦИТЕ МИ НАПИШАА КНИГА.....

Sarkozy, 52, is the son of a minor Hungarian aristocrat and his maternal grandfather was a Jewish doctor from the Greek city of Salonica.

The Mallah family in Salonika

Sarkozy’s mother is from the Mallah family, which originally came from Spain like all Jews of Salonika, northern Greece, with the expulsion of the Jews by King Ferdinand. They settled initially in France. About 100 years later the family immigrated to Salonika. Sarkozy’s great grandfather, was a well known jeweler in Salonika. His business was destroyed when a fire in 1917 destroyed almost the entire city of Salonika, especially the Jewish center of the town. In 32 hours 9500 houses were destroyed.which left more than 70000 people homeless [1]. One consequence of the fire saw close to half the city's Jewish population, their homes and livelihoods destroyed, they emigrated. Many went to Turkey or Palestine. Some took the Orient Express to Paris. Still others found their way to America.[2]

The grave of Mordohai Mallah exists till today at Stavroupoli where it was transferred from the old cemetery just before the Germans during WWII destroyed the Jewish cemetery. Nicolas’s grand father, Benedict's, real name was Aaron but the family called him Benico. At the age of 14 Benico and his mother left for France where he studied medicine and served in the French army as a doctor during WWI, where he met his future wife Adel Bouvieux a pretty nurse. In order to marry her he was baptized Catholic and took the name Benedict. The couple had two daughters Suzanne and Andrée, the mother of Nicolas, who married in the 50’s an Hungarian immigrant Paul Sarkozy, the father of Nicolas.

In July 2006, while on a visit to Greece, Nicolas Sarkozy was honored at the French embassy in Athens by the Jewish Community of Salonika. At the event the wife of the president of the Jewish community of Salonika David Saltiel, Lucy, who was born from the same Mallah family, was also present. Most of the members of the Mallah family perished in the Holocaust. Today the remaining members are living mainly in Switzerland, France and England.

[1] Prime Minister Venizelos forbade the reconstruction of the town center until a full modern city plan was prepared. This was accomplished a few years later by the French architect and archeologist Ernest Hebrard. The Hebrard plan swept away the Ottoman features of Thessaloníki.
[2] Their numbers were quickly replaced by refugees from another disaster a few years after the war, the ethnic Greeks from Turkey following the 1922 Greco-Turkish War.