Nina Angelo is sitting at her dining table, listening to her father speaking about his experience as a prisoner of the Nazis during World War Two.
"It was snowing. There was this young girl totally naked walking in the snow. She died there. I saw it with my own eyes."
Albert Yacoel was among 60,000 Jews forcibly deported on Holocaust trains from the Greek port city of Thessaloniki.
Like Yacoel, most ended up in Auschwitz-Birkenau, a Nazi concentration and extermination camp.
Nina's father Albert Yacoel in Greece, prior to World War II. Source: Supplied / Nina Angelo
The group was tasked with gathering possessions from Holocaust trains after Jewish prisoners disembarked.
Kommandos also traded some goods for food.
"We were better nourished than the others. We were healthier, so we did not die," Yacoel recalled in his memoirs.
Auschwitz was a notorious Nazi prison camp.
"Before World War Two, Thessaloniki's Jewish community numbered around 60,000 people," said Greece's ambassador to Australia, Stavros Venizelos.
"Then in 1943, the occupying Nazis rounded up the Jews and sent them mainly to Auschwitz where 94 per cent perished — with only 2,000 surviving," he said.
The museum, built on the site of the old railway station, is due to open in 2026 and will operate as an education hub and human rights centre.
Greece's ambassador in Australia, Stavros Venizelos. Source: Supplied / Greek Embassy
"So for these reasons, the new museum is very important to commemorate these tragic and brutal events of the 20th century," he said.
Growing up, Nina knew few details of her father’s suffering.
"I knew only that he was in Auschwitz because I saw the numbers (tattooed) on his arm. And I knew that he lost most of his family during World War Two," she said.
Nina Angelo as a child with her father Albert Yacoel. Source: Supplied / Nina Angelo
"I just could not believe the things that I was hearing on the tapes. It was a big, big shock to me. And I had to disassociate myself from the pain of it, from the horror," she said.
Even so, Nina treasures her father's memoirs of Auschwitz. Some are in English and others were recorded in Australia decades ago in French.
They were discovered decades later in America.
“In the Holocaust Museum in Washington, there were seven hours of interviews. It was like the gift that I needed to put my family story together," she said.
"So, I contacted the museum and they sent them to me."
Nina painstakingly translated the French interviews into English, turning the material into a book — Don't Cry, Dance — and then an audiobook, with her father’s part read by the late Australian actor Lex Marinos.
"The horrors that he'd seen and experienced, I would never have imagined, and it drew me to try and understand this man who was my father," she said.
Albert Yacoel worked as a Kanada Kommando at Auschwitz. Source: Supplied / Nina Angelo
"His mother was sent to a separate line. And this young boy kept running back across to her. My father knew that she was going to the gas chambers," Nina said.
"So, he grabbed this boy and he threw him over to the other line. But the boy ran back again. And then my father gave him a really big hit.
"He said [looking back] 'I was a bad man then, but I had to do something really dramatic'. That blow stopped the boy."
"Years later, in 1960, my mum and dad were walking down the streets in Paris. And this same young man was walking towards them. He ran up to my dad and threw his arms around him and thanked him. That was the young boy that he'd saved," she said.
For decades, families of Sephardic Jews from Thessaloniki felt more should be done to honour the loss of life in Auschwitz, Nina said.
Many of the Ladino-speaking families traced their heritage back to Jews expelled from Spain in the 15th century.
Now their stories will be shared publicly at the new museum, thanks in part to funding from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).
In a statement, SNF said the museum would ‘illuminate the multidimensional culture of the Jews of Thessaloniki and their multifaceted contribution to the development of the city, as well as Thessaloniki itself.’
The German government has also contributed millions to the project.
Greece's ambassador to Australia Stavros Venizelos said the museum would pay tribute to the near-extermination of Greece’s Sephardic Jews.
Nina Angelo's parents Janka and Albert met in Auschwitz. Source: Supplied / Nina Angelo
"It will also give voice to the survivors and their families to raise awareness through history."
Nina is proud to recount the love story between her parents, who met by chance in Auschwitz.
Yacoel was working with the Kanada Kommandos, and bartered food was sometimes offered to female prisoners.
“The [Kommandos] would entice the women in [to a safe space] with food for a bit of loving, a bit of kissing. And [one day] he saw my mum, who was 16 years younger than him,” she said.
Nina's mum Janina 'Janka' Yacoel. Source: Supplied / Nina Angelo
The couple would reconnect later in Paris.
Albert Yacoel was among the very few to survive Auschwitz. But as the war drew to a close, he faced a new ordeal.
As Allied and Soviet forces advanced, Auschwitz prisoners were force-marched long distances and ended up at another camp in Austria.
Yacoel was among the prisoners remaining in the overcrowded camp as the Nazi SS began to eradicate evidence of the thousands who had died of starvation and disease.
Nina Angelo looking at photos of her dad. Source: SBS / Spencer Austad
"The Americans came in and saw all these people, the bodies and the ones who were nearly bodies, and they brought them food," Nina said, recounting her father’s memoir.
"Those survivors were so hungry, they got into the food and ate and ate, although they were told not to eat too fast.
"Then many died because their bodies could not take the food. And I find that so sad, to have gone through all that and to then die from eating too much."
Nina as a small child with her mother Janka and father Albert. Source: Supplied / Nina Angelo
The family later migrated to Australia. Arriving as a child, Nina made front-page news.
"I was sitting on the suitcases at Sydney Airport while they were going through immigration," she said.
"And a photographer from the paper was walking by. I was sitting holding my two little Greek dolls and he took a photo.
"And the next thing, I was in the front page of the paper!"
Nina Angelo (right) on the front page of Sydney's Daily Mirror in 1949. Source: Supplied / Nina Angelo
Since uncovering his story, Nina has worked tirelessly to share it.
"It is important to me because I want to honour my relatives and my ancestors that were taken in such a horrid way," she said.
She hopes the new Holocaust Museum in Greece will help ensure future generations understand what happened in Thessaloniki more than 80 years ago.
Nina Angelo with her daughter Cassie (left) and son Adam (front) and grand daughter Zayla. Source: Supplied / Nina Angelo
"So, I really hope that I can be there for the opening of this [museum] to share my dad's story, too.
"My father influenced me to speak up for what is right and to treat people with respect and to honour them. And I will speak up about what happened, forever."
