The Greek island that hid its Jews from the Nazis

 Chaim Constantinidis tells the extraordinary story of Zakynthos’s Jewish community, the subject of two upcoming productions

By Tassoula Eptakili *

In the late spring of 1944, Nazi ships of death were making stops in the ports of the Ionian Islands. They had stowed 2,000 Jews from Corfu in their holds and another 400 from Cephalonia, and were heading for Zakynthos. The mission of the SS squads was to round up all of the members of the Jewish community in the region and sail them to the western port city of Patra, where they would be transferred onto trains for Auschwitz.

A couple of days before they arrived at Zakynthos, the commandant called Metropolitan Bishop Chrysostomos and Mayor Lucas Carrer to his office and told them they had 24 hours to submit a list with the names of all the Jews that lived on the island, together with details of their assets.

Indeed, they returned with an envelope before the deadline expired. The commandant opened the envelope but the paper within contained just two names: the bishop’s and the mayor’s.

“If you harm these people,” Chrysostomos said in reference to the island’s Jewish residents, “I will go with them and share their fate.”

The Nazi commander was stunned. He sent an urgent message to Berlin requesting new orders. Meanwhile, the bishop and the mayor had informed the leader of the Jewish community, Moses Ganis, of the German plans, prompting a massive operation to hide the island’s Jews in villages, farms and the homes of Christians.

In the months that followed and until the departure of the German troops, no one betrayed them, no one confessed to knowing where they were hiding, and as a consequence not one single Jew of the 275 that lived on Zakynthos...