# Rhodes Jewish deportation and family rescue story

> **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou.
>
> Cite as: "Rhodes Jewish deportation and family rescue story," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/rhodes-jewish-deportation-family-story/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia.

*John Kiriakou's account of the 1944 Nazi roundup and deportation of roughly 2,000 Jewish residents of the island of Rhodes to Auschwitz, of whom only 14 survived, and of his own great-grandfather, a chauffeur, hiding his Jewish employer from the Nazis until the war's end.*

- **Location:** Rhodes, Greece (Italian-occupied, then German-occupied)
- **Jewish residents deported:** About 2,000
- **Survivors:** 14 (7 returned to Rhodes)
- **Kiriakou family role:** Great-grandfather hid his Jewish employer

[John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou), whose family is from [Rhodes](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/rhodes-jewish-deportation-family-story), 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 rounded them up within 24 hours in the medieval city, in what is today called the Square of the Jewish Martyrs.[1] From there they were taken by boat to the port of Piraeus, 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.[2][3]

## 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.[4][2]

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.[2]

## 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."*[5][6][7]

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."*[8][9][7]

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."*[7][10][11]

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.[12][13]

## See also

- [Greek death rituals](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/greek-death-rituals)
- [Zakynthos Holocaust rescue](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/zakynthos-holocaust-rescue)
- [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou)

## Sources

1. John Kiriakou: The CIA Whistleblower Who Went to Prison for Telling the Truth (2026-06-08), at 41:03. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr1NKUPsP-g&t=2463s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-06-08-ddgeopolitics-prison-for-truth/
2. John Kiriakou Answers the Questions Everyone Wants to Ask (2026-07-06), at 1:13:27. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH5nEr0MkI&t=4407s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-07-06-the-jason-jones-show/
3. John Kiriakou: The CIA Whistleblower Who Went to Prison for Telling the Truth (2026-06-08), at 41:35. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr1NKUPsP-g&t=2495s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-06-08-ddgeopolitics-prison-for-truth/
4. John Kiriakou Answers the Questions Everyone Wants to Ask (2026-07-06), at 1:12:23. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH5nEr0MkI&t=4343s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-07-06-the-jason-jones-show/
5. #356 — Nuclear War, Vault 7, Mossad in Iran (2025-11-18), at 49:35. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3MFGJFh4Ps&t=2975s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-11-18-nuclear-war-vault-7-mossad-in-iran/
6. #356 — Nuclear War, Vault 7, Mossad in Iran (2025-11-18), at 50:06. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3MFGJFh4Ps&t=3006s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-11-18-nuclear-war-vault-7-mossad-in-iran/
7. #356 — Nuclear War, Vault 7, Mossad in Iran (2025-11-18), at 50:38. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3MFGJFh4Ps&t=3038s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-11-18-nuclear-war-vault-7-mossad-in-iran/
8. #356 — Nuclear War, Vault 7, Mossad in Iran (2025-11-18), at 48:32. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3MFGJFh4Ps&t=2912s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-11-18-nuclear-war-vault-7-mossad-in-iran/
9. #356 — Nuclear War, Vault 7, Mossad in Iran (2025-11-18), at 49:05. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3MFGJFh4Ps&t=2945s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-11-18-nuclear-war-vault-7-mossad-in-iran/
10. #356 — Nuclear War, Vault 7, Mossad in Iran (2025-11-18), at 51:08. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3MFGJFh4Ps&t=3068s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-11-18-nuclear-war-vault-7-mossad-in-iran/
11. #356 — Nuclear War, Vault 7, Mossad in Iran (2025-11-18), at 51:41. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3MFGJFh4Ps&t=3101s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-11-18-nuclear-war-vault-7-mossad-in-iran/
12. #356 — Nuclear War, Vault 7, Mossad in Iran (2025-11-18), at 1:37:20. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3MFGJFh4Ps&t=5840s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-11-18-nuclear-war-vault-7-mossad-in-iran/
13. #356 — Nuclear War, Vault 7, Mossad in Iran (2025-11-18), at 1:37:51. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3MFGJFh4Ps&t=5871s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-11-18-nuclear-war-vault-7-mossad-in-iran/

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From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/rhodes-jewish-deportation-family-story/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt