Rhodes Jewish deportation
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The Rhodes Jewish deportation is one of two Greek Holocaust episodes John Kiriakou tells to explain what he considers the real history of Greek,Jewish relations, the other being the Zakynthos rescue.

Before

He begins with his grandmother, who "used to talk frequently about um the fact that when she was growing up in Greece on the island of Rhodes, you didn't know who was Jewish, who was Christian, you just didn't know. It never came up. Nobody cared until the Germans came."

The round-up

When the Germans arrived they "rounded all the Jews up within 24 hours and brought them to an area in the medieval city of Rhodes... that is now called the Square of the Jewish Martyrs." From there the route ran by boat to Piraeus, by train to Thessaloniki, and "then another train directly from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz." Kiriakou gives the arithmetic without comment: "Of the 2,000 who were rounded up, 14 survived and seven came back to the island."

His own family

The personal thread is his great-grandfather, his grandmother's father, who "was a chauffeur for a wealthy Jewish Rhodian man. And when the Germans came, he asked them to hide him. And they did. And they moved him from house to house, hut to hut, stable to stable for the three and a half years that the Germans were on the island. And he survived." Afterwards the man gave the family property, which passed to Kiriakou's father and aunt and was later sold to cousins.

The point he draws from it

Kiriakou tells both island stories to make an argument about the present. "Greece as a country, as a society, as a culture, Greece's relations with Jews have nothing to do with Zionism. Nothing. There was no difference between a Greek Jew, a Greek Christian, and a Greek Muslim. It's the Israelis that have drawn these divisions." He continues that it is the Israelis who decided "if we can't take something by force, we're just going to buy it", whole islands, whole villages, their own Zionist high schools, and that the effect is to upset a regional balance "that goes back hundreds of years," which he calls wrong morally and destabilising from an American standpoint.

See also

- Zakynthos Holocaust rescue
- Israeli property acquisition in Greece and Cyprus
- John Kiriakou
