Rhodes Jewish deportation and family rescue story
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John Kiriakou, whose family is from Rhodes, recounts both the island's wartime deportation of its Jewish community and his own great-grandfather's role in hiding a Jewish neighbor from the Nazis.

The deportation

When the Nazis came for the roughly 2,000 Jewish residents of Rhodes, they were rounded up in the medieval city, in what is today called the Square of the Jewish Martyrs. From there they were taken by boat to Athens, by train to Thessaloniki, and by another train directly to Auschwitz. Of the 2,000 Rhodian Jews taken that day, only 14 survived, and just seven ever returned to the island.

Kiriakou's great-grandfather

Kiriakou's great-grandfather, his father's mother's father, worked as a chauffeur for a wealthy Greek Jewish man on Rhodes. When the Nazis came for the man, he ran for his life and arrived at the door of Kiriakou's great-grandparents, who lived in a small three-room hut and were themselves very poor. He asked if they would hide him, and they did, moving him from family member to family member, sometimes for weeks at a stretch, at one point keeping him in a plot of land halfway up a mountain where the family kept its pigs. He survived the war.

Kiriakou's grandmother later told him that growing up, no one thought about who was Jewish and who wasn't, everyone lived as brothers and sisters, until the Germans arrived and began sorting the island's residents by who was "okay" and who was not.

The island and the border

Kiriakou has described Rhodes as a border island in the literal sense: standing on it, "you can hear the Turks playing their music at night. That's how close it is." Visiting with his son in January, he found his cousin Chris keeping a machine gun in the family house, a house that has been in the family for 175 years. Asked why, the cousin, a former Greek special forces soldier, answered that the Turks "could swim here by the time I get to the gun."

He offers that as the exception rather than the rule, and pairs it with a story running the other way. Lunching in Washington with a Greek diplomat, he watched her greet a passing Turk with kisses on both cheeks, and asked afterwards what that had been about. Her answer, "Only you Greek Americans have that position on the Turks. We have to live with them", and her account that after centuries of fighting "we just decided it's better to be nice" is one he cites as evidence that entrenched hatreds are negotiable. Leaders, services and militaries have problems, he says; "on the people-to-people level, they really don't have any problems", and on the Greek mainland "they don't really care so much."

He uses both stories to argue that an Israeli-Palestinian settlement is achievable, adding a second example: a militant Lithuanian classmate at George Washington University whose insistence that Lithuania would one day be free struck his friends as delusional, and who was proved right within about six years. "When an issue is ripe, there's nothing you can do to stop it."

His own account of the Ottoman period is not conciliatory. Told that Christians could practise freely under the Ottomans provided they paid their taxes, he rejects the framing outright, "What country are you from where they were so kind to you that if you paid your taxes, you could do your thing?", and cites the Ottoman execution of a priest in his own family for teaching children Greek as one more reason for the grudge.

See also

- Greek death rituals
- Zakynthos Holocaust rescue
- John Kiriakou
