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.[1]
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.[2]
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.[3] 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.