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.[1]
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.[2][1]
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.[1]