Μιχαήλ Ιωάννης Σαββάκης / Michael Ioannis Savvakis 1889 - 1944

Born 10.2.1889 in Krousona
Died 4.7.1944 in Hartheim

Biography

Michael John Savvakis was born 10 February 1889 in Krousona, Crete, Greece. In 1917 at age 27, he embarked on a journey to the United States settling in Pennsylvania. During this period, he worked for the Allegheny Steel Co. and enlisted in the US Army. After eight years, he returned to his hometown where he built a thriving butchery business and took up farming. It was 1924 when he married Aphrodite Siganakis and had seven children, four of which died during WW2.

In July of 1942, Michael Savvakis was seized by Nazis and confined in Chania. In his absence, looters ransacked his properties, leaving nothing untouched.

Stricken with despair, Aphrodite left her three children with relatives and week after week, undertook the 150 kilometre walk to provide her husband food, comfort and hope. She made this arduous journey for sixteen months, until the day he was torn away once more, this time to Mauthausen Concentration Camp.

Michael Savvakis arrived at Mauthausen on November 4, 1943, and was allocated the prisoner number 38339. He was categorised as a “Schutzhäftling” (a protective custody prisoner).

Four days after arriving at Mauthausen, he was transferred to the Redl-Zipf (“Schlier”) subcamp, where he endured eight months of brutal living and working conditions. Housed in brewery cellars, the camp produced liquid oxygen for the Nazi rocket program. Prisoners were forced to expand the cellars into a functioning facility.

Meanwhile in Crete, Aphrodite’s strength had worn down by hardship and malnutrition passing away in February 1944, aged 44. Three months later on July 4, 1944, her husband Michael Savvakis was transported to the killing facility Schloss Hartheim. Transfers to Hartheim marked the fate of prisoners selected under Operation”14f13”, the secret program that targeted those deemed unfit for labour or classified as “undesirable” for political or racial reasons. At Hartheim, he was led into a gas chamber which was disguised as a shower and killed within hours of arrival. He was 55 years old.

Husband and wife, bound in love, departed this life never knowing the other’s final tragic end.

Their three surviving children, Stella, John and Haralambos now orphaned, were taken in by relatives. Stella and Haralambos remained in Crete while John migrated to Sydney, Australia. Stella passed away in 2000 and in the years that followed, Parkinson’s Disease cast its shadow over her brothers. John and Haralambos passing in 2019 and 2023, were slowly stripped of memory, clarity and conscious thought.

When, at last, the fragments of their father’s fate were unearthed – the place, the time, the merciless truth of his extermination at Hartheim Castle, it was too late as their minds had already slipped beyond reach. They were alive, yet unable to comprehend the cruel answer they had waited their whole lives to know.

They were denied the final knowing, the chance to hold that bitter truth in the light of their consciousness.

Michael John Savvakis was one of many souls erased in the machinery of systematic annihilation.

 

Poppy Savvakis, granddaughter

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