Zakynthos Holocaust rescue
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The Zakynthos Holocaust rescue is John Kiriakou's account of how the Greek Ionian island of Zakynthos saved its entire Jewish population during the Nazi occupation of Greece. He prefaces the story by noting that Greece as a whole lost a higher percentage of its Jewish population, per capita, than any other country in the world during World War II, including Poland.

The list of two names

When the Nazis occupied Greece in late 1940, they installed a German major as occupation governor of Zakynthos. His first act was to summon the mayor of Zakynthos and the island's Greek Orthodox bishop to his office and demand that within 24 hours they produce a list of every Jew on the island along with their addresses. The mayor and bishop went back to confer, and returned the next day with a list containing only their own two names and addresses, telling the governor, "We're the only Jews on this island." In the meantime, they had quietly enlisted families across the island to hide every Jewish resident in caves, stables, and barns.

Aftermath

Kiriakou says the Germans withdrew from Greece in 1944 having never deported or killed a single Jewish resident of Zakynthos, the only place in the country where the Jewish community survived entirely intact. By contrast, on the nearby island of Rhodes, where Kiriakou's own family is from, roughly 2,000 Jewish residents were rounded up and deported, and only 14 survived.

Kiriakou's telling

Kiriakou recounts the episode as the counterpart to what happened on his own island, see Rhodes Jewish deportation. The Germans took the whole of Greece except Crete, which took longer; on Zakynthos "the German major who was the occupation governor of the island called the bishop of Zakynthos and the mayor of Zakynthos to his office and told them they had 24 hours to give to him a list of every Jew on the island and their address."

The two men conferred at the mayor's office and returned the next day with a list: "it had only their two names and addresses and they said, 'We're the only Jews on this island.' This is the bishop, the Greek Orthodox bishop of Zakynthos and the mayor of Zakynthos." The major warned them plainly, "Stop and think what you're doing. If you don't respond to this request, I'm going to have to kill you both." They handed him instead a letter they had written to Hitler. Kiriakou says he went to the Holocaust Museum to research it and found that the letter was sent but no evidence that Hitler ever read it.

While the German officer worked out what to do about the insubordination, the islanders hid every Jew on the island "in caves or barns, stables, people's houses," so that when the Germans went to the addresses they held they found nobody. The Germans left in 1944, and Zakynthos "was literally the only place in the whole of Greece that never lost a single Jew. Not one."

See also

- Rhodes Jewish deportation and family rescue story
- John Kiriakou
