Dora Bourla grew up with her parents and five siblings in the Greek city of Thessaloniki.
The city was occupied by German troops in 1941, and the occupiers began to persecute Jews. The Jewish Bourla family had to move into a ghetto in 1943. From March 1943 the ghetto’s inmates were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. With the aid of leftist resistance groups, Dora Bourla and some members of her family managed to escape the ghetto. They reached Dora’s birthplace of Naoussa, where they were safe since the area was controlled by partisans. All her other relatives were deported and murdered.
In Naoussa, Dora Bourla joined the National Liberation Front and became a partisan in the National People’s Liberation Army ELAS. Aged 15, she fought under the nickname of Tarzan, mainly in the region around the Vermio Mountains.
After the end of the occupation, the Bourla family returned to Thessaloniki. They had to find new accommodation, since strangers were now living in their home. Dora met her later husband Albertos Handalis during the post-war years. The couple emigrated to Israel in 1950.
Dora Bourla as a teenager, undated. Source: Archiv „Erinnerungen an die Okkupation in Griechenland“, Freie Universität Berlin
Dora Bourla (right) at her sister’s wedding, with the bride and groom Yolanda Bourla (left) and Solomon Eliakim (center), Thessaloniki, 1948. Source: Archiv „Erinnerungen an die Okkupation in Griechenland“, Freie Universität Berlin
Dora Bourla and Albertos Handalis’ engagement photo, Thessaloniki, late-1940s. Source: Archiv „Erinnerungen an die Okkupation in Griechenland“, Freie Universität Berlin
