The Salvator Kounio family of four was one of the few to survive in Auschwitz. The reasons for this rare luck were on the one hand that they spoke fluent German and on the other hand that they were among the first Jews deported from Thessaloniki. Thus, the executioners of the camp needed the translation services of the family. Returning to Thessaloniki was painful, as the store had been looted by the Germans and their associates. It was not until 1946 that Salvator Kounio was re-enrolled in the Chamber of Commerce and Industry. In 1959 he testified as a key prosecution witness in the trial of Max Merten, a German official in Thessaloniki during the Occupation. The family’s children, Erica and Heinz, contributed their work to the study of the chronicle of the extermination of the Jews. In 2002, Erika Kounio-Amarillio published her book Oral Testimonies of the Jews of Thessaloniki on the Holocaust, which included interviews with survivors collected by herself and Albert Nar. Heinz Kounio was released in May 1945. He looked like a skeleton and could not walk alone, and describes living in a concentration camp in his book I Lived Death: The Diary of No. 109565.