Lena Goren

Prepared by the Witnesses of War team

Lena Casuto Goren was born in 1930 in Salonika, now Thessaloniki, Greece. Her family moved to Larissa when she was a baby, after her father, Rabbi Isaac Casuto, became the city’s chief rabbi. She grew up with a younger sister and brother, enjoying a happy childhood before war brought bombing, occupation and persecution.

During the occupation, German authorities arrested her father and demanded information about Larissa’s Jewish population. He refused and was eventually released. When the mayor warned him that Jews would soon be rounded up for deportation, Rabbi Casuto went from house to house alerting other families. Lena, her parents and siblings escaped with approximately eighty other Jews, fleeing into the mountains under cover of darkness.

The group found refuge in an isolated monastery in Tzouma, where Lena spent approximately eighteen months in hiding. Her father had brought a small Torah scroll from their synagogue. Without running water or adequate facilities, the refugees endured hunger, illness and confinement. Members of the Greek underground helped obtain medicine, while her mother worked as a seamstress to help feed the family.

After the war, Lena returned to Larissa with her parents and siblings, but learned that many relatives—including grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins—had been murdered. In 1948, shortly before her eighteenth birthday, she immigrated to the United States, sponsored by an aunt in Ohio. She moved to New York the following year.

Despite her interrupted education, Lena later earned a high-school diploma and worked as a seamstress, hairdresser and Greek and Spanish court interpreter. She raised a family and shared her wartime experiences with younger generations, preserving the story of Greek Jews who survived through escape, concealment and the help of others.