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Zakynthos: A Jewish shelter from the Nazi storm

In the face of the abominable Nazi death machine during WW2, the Greeks of Zakynthos provided shelter to the entire Jewish population of the island in villages, houses, ravines, caves and old chapels.

By Desolation Road

August 26^th, 2020

Within a few weeks of the relegation of Zakynthos island from the Italian to the German Occupation zone, in September 1943, the Jewish quarter of the city was transformed to a ghost neighborhood with locked doors and lowered shutters.

After the German WW2 invasion in Greece in April 1941, the country was occupied and separated to German, Italian and Bulgarian zones of control. Since March 1943, the Nazi forces had already started to implement in Greece the Final Solution; the persecution and expulsion of Greek Jews to the concentration and extermination camps of northern Europe.

During the spring and summer of 1943, the Italians did not succumb to German pressure to deport the Greek Jews living in their zones of control. But when Italy surrendered to the Allies, in September 1943, the shield provided by the Italian occupation forces to the Greek Jews of Zakynthos collapsed. Thus, the vast majority of the 275 Jews living in the city sought refuge at villagers’ houses or in huts or chapels of the isolated mountainous Zakynthos hinterland.

TerraMagma Pictures / Nomadic Films

For the Wehrmacht soldiers nothing was easy in the mountains, despite the superiority of their armor. The Greek partisans had the upper hand, there: they were well aware of the passages through the ravines and were accustomed to the heat, while the Germans had never been trained for guerrilla warfare, they did not have detailed maps or translators or navigators, and were always advancing with the constant fear of a possible ambush. A partisan seemed to be hiding behind every bush.

When, however, they managed to invade the villages, they tried various tactics. One was storming into the village houses after kicking the door with the boot and shouting Juden, Juden, threatening the villagers with a gun to hand over the Jews. Another was to offer food in exchange for information about the places that the Juden were hiding.

In addition to the persuasion that a weapon usually imposes, the horrible German exemplary atrocities would surely have reached the ears of the villagers, by then. For example, the public hanging on an olive tree in Zakynthos city’s town square of a Greek who was accused of providing food to a Jewish family.

And as for the other option, for the Greeks who were already in the third year of Occupation, having all of their resources plundered by the foreign armies, the promise of food had almost the same weight as the threat of a weapon. The lure was, in many cases, the survival of themselves and their families. Especially when news came that Allied bombers had sunk a ship with Swiss Red Cross or Swedish supplies in the Aegean sea - as the British did not have time to discriminate which ship to bomb in trying to cut off the Germans from their supplies.

The German raids on the houses of the Zakynthian hinterland were usually in vain. Most of the time, the partisans were giving early warning to the villagers when they saw a German squad approaching the village, and the Jews hiding in the houses immediately fled to seek refuge elsewhere.

Sometimes they found it in a mountain chapel, inside a sanctuary, "where they tried to get used to the static and intense gaze of the iconic Byzantine saints", according to the author Deno Seder. Other times, they escaped when the partisans ambushed the Wehrmacht squads. But, each time, they relied on the fact that none of the 35 thousand Greeks in Zakynthos betrayed a single Jew.

In the WW2 chronicles of occupied Europe, there are few local communities that did not show the slightest rift in the face of a higher humanitarian ideal, and under the threat of the horrendous Nazi arsenal. A similar case occurred in the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in a society of fewer inhabitants, but of a larger number of rescued Jews.

This page of Greek history, a persistent burning coal buried in the ashes of the turbulent post-war political scene of Greece, was brought to light in 2002 by the director Toni Lykouresis, creator of the historical documentary entitled "The Song of Life".

In 2013, the Greek filmmaker Steven Priovolos, co-owner of the American company TerraMagma Pictures, driving on a highway outside of Los Angeles, heard this story of Zakynthos from his co-driver and stopped on the side of the road. It was the first time he thought of creating the acclaimed documentary "Life Will Smile", which screened in 2017.

Zakynthos: A Jewish shelter from the Nazi storm

Zakynthos: Greek Christians and Jews as “indivisible unity”

In Zakynthos the assimilation of the Romaniote Jews -who had settled in Greece since the first century AD- was such that they spoke the Greek language, lived in a neighborhood (pictured above) completely open even for Christians to live in, were not isolated in their own professions and created a Greek-Jewish tradition. No act of anti-Semitism was ever reported on the island.

During the Jewish holiday of the Sabbath and because of its restrictions, in fact, Christians offered to cook the food of the Jews, and at the afternoons they shared with them their cheese, bread or wine on a seaside bench. The lack of discrimination was such that Jewish musicians, members of a different religion, even participated in the program celebrating the patron saint of the Zakynthos, St. Dionysios.

A key event for this was the blessing of the Greek Orthodox Church on the harmonious coexistence of Greek Christians and Jews - contrary to the directions of many churches in Europe.

Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens and all Greece (pictured left), and consequently the Bishops and priests throughout the land who looked up to him as a model and source of inspiration, preached fervently a common "national consciousness" of Greeks and Jews, even by the time of the first German indications of their intentions against the Jewish population of the country.

In his sermon he was preaching that "all children of mother Greece are an indivisible unity, equal members of the society, independent of their religion" and "with their common destiny in times of glory and times of tragedy they have formed inseparable bonds without exceptions and regardless of race".

This attitude of Archbishop Damaskinos angered the Germans, who responded by threatening to execute him - only to receive his famous answer that "according to the traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church, its hierarchs are hanged, not shot."

While in Thessaloniki (which was in the German occupation zone) the Nazi oppression against the Jews was transforming to terrorism by the summer of 1942, the Jewish population in Zakynthos were still protected by the Italian rulers of the island, and the Judenverfolgung (persecution of the Jews) was nowhere to be seen on the horizon.

The Nazi leadership believed that the Italians were protecting Jews in their own territories of control in exchange for financial compensation - that they could not react to the atrocities solely out of humanity in the face of racial discrimination.

Zakynthos: A Jewish shelter from the Nazi storm

But, according to Historian Mark Mazower, "the Italians and the Greeks were disgusted by the discrimination of the Nazi policies against the Jews, and even tried to oppose it."

In these circumstances, the Bishop of Zakynthos, Chrysostomos, was experiencing the realization of his vision: the social role of the church, directly related to the normal problems of normal people. A vision much deeper than the vague sermons given inside a nebula of incense, about the salvation of sinless souls in a life that would occur after the end of the physical existence.

Bishop Chrysostomos' stance by the first weeks of the fascist invasion confirmed this vision: as the Italians tried to find their fascist foothold in Zakynthos in the summer of 1941, they imposed occupation taxes, food confiscations and looting of houses and stores. Chrysostomos organized a resistance network to supply the people of the island with the necessary goods - always receiving immediate threats of arrest from the Italian governor of Zakynthos, Luigi Gianni.

During the celebration of the New Year of 1942, in the Church of St. Dionysios, he gave a fiery speech of faith in the victory of the Greeks and expulsion of the conquerors. To the new threats from the Italians, Chrysostomos (pictured right) replied that he would stop talking only when his voice was silenced - and when the conquerors had the cunning to lure him with a package full of bread, the Bishop sent it back. thanking them and saying that he would suffer the hunger with his flock.

Thus, following the example of their religious leader, the priests in the small mountain chapels of Zakynthos -those who, after all, did not follow the instructions of Chrysostomos on duty alone-, when after almost two years people of different faith would find refuge there, "looking at the inactive and intense gaze of the iconic Byzantine saints", would have already rooted the belief that "the direct human relationship with your neighbor" during situations of danger is more important than the moral consequences of violating religious law or the blind faith in the dogma.

And the people of Zakynthos would act accordingly. As one Holocaust survivor observed, the most common reasons behind one person's risk and self-sacrifice to save another are "religious beliefs and the duty of one person to save another who is in danger, obeying his conscience, or the shame [he would feel] if he did not help his neighbor." The Greek Church, precisely because it managed to tune its sounds to the innate but fragile strings of humanity of the majority of what it calls the "flock", at that time and place, had achieved a victory.

Zakynthos: A Jewish shelter from the Nazi storm

Zakynthos Jews under immediate threat

In Zakynthos, the day after the occupation of the island by the German troops in September 1943, the new German commander Alfredo Litt immediately imposed a curfew of Jews from 5:00 pm to 7:00 am, ordered the placement of the Start of David on the doors of Jewish homes, and set up machine guns at the exits of the city.

Ruling with an iron fist, he left for 24 hours on the city street the corpse of a villager, who did not know about the curfew and was shot by a German soldier. Litt had no problem showing his inhuman nature, allowing drunken German soldiers to humiliate the Zakynthians publicly and indiscriminately - for example, ordering a man to walk with his son in a minefield to satisfy their alcoholic hallucinatory sick fantasies.

Hertsel Matsa, then 19, recalls that "German soldiers kicked in our door and started beating me. I managed to escape and hide behind some straw balls. I heard them shout ‘where is the Jew? We will kill him.’ I learned later that day that they had beaten our Christian neighbors because they thought they had helped us escape." Konstantinos Raphael adds: "My father and I made tin cups. The Germans lived above my house. One day, the commander came and pointed the gun at my head, because the cups were not ready. He did not know that we were Jews, and the Greeks did not tell him."

During the first month of the German Occupation of Zakynthos, the Nazi troops recruited men from the island to build fortifications for their artillery in the area of Kalamaki, and any Jew who was found among the men was humiliated or tortured. Then Zakynthos Mayor Lucas Carrer intervened, and with his low-key negotiating skills managed to persuade the Germans to allow him to choose the men who would be sent to the works - and of course no Jew would work in Kalamaki anymore.

In Thessaloniki, the Final Solution had already started. On March 15, 1943, the first train with 2,600 Jews left the city headed to Poland. By August 2, 1943, totally 48,974 Greek Jews were sent from Thessaloniki to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

In the autumn of 1943, Alfredo Litt decided that it was time to put the Final Solution mechanism into operation in Zakynthos, and agreed with the head of the German guard, Paoul Berens, that Bishop Chrysostomos (whom the Italians had managed to silence by handcuffing him and sending him to a prison in Athens a few months earlier), would be rather useful to them, in recognizing and persecuting the Jews of the island. Thus, with a festive tone and a misleading attitude of good will, on November 23, 1943, they welcomed Chrysostomos to the port of Zakynthos.

As soon as he set foot on the island, Chrysostomos met with Litt and Berens, and in that first meeting the Jewish matter was reportedly left undiscussed. The Bishop maganed to achieve a relative familiarity with the German governors of the island when they were surprised by his ability to speak their language, thanks to his studies at the University of Munich in the 1920s.

This intimacy, as well as his intelligence in handling the German psyche and the relative respect that Litt allegedly had for him, allowed Chrysostomos to persuade the Germans to suspend the execution of a Greek villager who they arrested when they found dynamite in his possession. And then, the execution of 50 Greeks (in retaliation for the discovery of a stolen German telephone hidden in a village on the island), and of several others who were accused of being communists. But, as Seder observes, "Chrysostomos would soon learn that rescuing Greek Christians was much easier than rescuing Greek Jews."

The order to assemble the island's Jews within 72 hours was delivered one morning in December 1943, in the office of the the head of the German guard Paoul Berens, from Berens to Mayor Carrer. It was an unexpected move by the Germans, who usually delivered the order to chief rabbi of each community.

When Carrer tried to convince Berens that the island's Jews were completely peaceful, he received the latter’s violent threats. He left the office to urgently meet with Bishop Chrysostomos. "I knew Chrysostomos was brave, and with a high sense of patriotism", said Carrer. "I went to him to seek shelter, and I told him the story". The Bishop answer was courageous: "You will not give the list to the Germans. I will arrange it myself. "

Chrysostomos went to meet Berens, and then Litt. But the two German officers stood firm against his attempts to persuade them to suspend the Jewish persecution, saying that they had clear orders from the higher echelons of the Reich. Adopting a more conciliatory tone, the Bishop then tried to gain at least a little time. Time was crucial, so that the priests of Zakynthos could issue fake papers showing the Jews as Christians, and until the Resistance could organize their transport to the mountains.

The Jewish population of the island was immediately alerted about the deadly threat by the Mayor, the priests and the leader of the Jewish community, Moses Ganis. They were eagerly encouraged to take refuge in mountain hideouts. In the case of unconvinced Jews, especially those who had not yet been informed of what was taking place in the concentration camps, and who were still living on hope rather than terror, Chrysostomos (the religious leader of another faith, but for whom the Jews had great respect) tried to convince them with his presence.

As the 72-hour deadline was expiring, the partisans helped small groups of Jews to flee to the mountains, to farmhouses or chapels, carrying small bags and some valuables and jewelry. The valuables could be used in case of great need, a case in which their survival would get to be judged by something in return: for example, in front of a traitor of an informer of the Germans (who usually proceeded to inform the Nazis about the hide-outs of the Jews, even if he had already received his payment). But, anyway, the partisans took care to rid the mountains of the presence of such elements, usually with night ambushes.

TerraMagma Pictures / Nomadic Films

The rescue of the 275 Jews of Zakynthos

While Greece’s two main Resistance groups, ELAS and EDES, agreed to cooperate in Zakynthos to free the Jews in case they were arrested, back at Zakynthos town Bishop Chrysostomos and Mayor Carrer (pictured above / a scene from "Life Will Smile" documentary) insisted on their diplomatic efforts.

When the 72-hours deadline had passed, the two went to Alfredo Litt's office to present him with the list of the island's Jews. But the list consisted of only two names: Chrysostomos Demetriou and Lucas Carrer. "Here are your Jews," Chrysostomos reportedly told Litt, who was well aware that the list should be including 275 names.

At that particular moment, Bishop Chrysostomos and Mayor Lucas Carrer were under the barrels of the armored German guards of the room, and fully aware of the firing squad awaiting everyone who tried to hide Jews. Especially for Carrer, this moment was happening at a time when his wife was in an advanced stage of pregnancy for their first and only child. For Carrer, the chances of meeting his newborn seemed now to be overwhelmingly against him.

According to the book by Dionysios Stravolaimos, husband of Chrysostomos’ sister, the Bishop then told Litt that "following your orders, you can arrest me and not them, and if that does not satisfy you, then I will prove to you how close I am to these innocent Jewish families. I will follow them in their dramatic path, and I will enter the gas chambers and the crematoriums."

Unlike the irritable Berens, Litt miraculously seemed condescending; maybe he had a cunning thought, or maybe he was just feeling an intimate admiration for the courage of the two Greeks to face him in such a manner. Anyway, he responded saying that he understood their efforts to save the island's Jews, and promised to raise the issue with the upper echelons of the Nazi administration.

Chrysostomos and Carrer (pictured left) of course suspected that this could very well be a lie, and so after a few "anxious, desperate days" and "the most difficult and nightmarish moments of their lives", as Stravolaimos put it, the Bishop took an even more outrageous initiative: to send a personal letter to Adolf Hitler.

He reminded the dictator of their meeting in 1924 -when he was a student in Munich- and the views they exchanged, and begged him not to proceed with the arrest of the Jews of Zakynthos. Of course, Chrysostomos was accused by his fellow citizens of high-risk acrobatics that could provoke German retaliation. But the Bishop considered that failure to act could lead the Jews of the island to certain death.

As the Jews had fled to the mountains, and of course there was no one to carry out the German order heard from the city loudspeakers to gather at the City Hall, the Wehrmacht soldiers began raiding and burning the houses of the Christian Greeks in the city of Zakynthos.

Then they escalated their military operations in the mountains. And everyone knew what effect these operations had on the villages of mainland Greece: massacres during the raid, followed by mass executions with brief procedures, and finally setting fire to the whole village. To those hidden, and those hiding them, the news that German motorized squads appeared on the distant dirt roads fell like lightning in the air.

Zakynthos: A Jewish shelter from the Nazi storm

The first ones had heard what deportation meant: being stacked in wagons of 70-75 people, their small windows closed with wooden covers, with a barrel of water and one for their natural needs for a journey of unknown duration, without food, not knowing where is the final destination and with a nightmarish certainty about the fate that awaits you there.

Very few may have heard from Greeks returning from Germany, such as pharmacy student Erkanas Cesana, about the concentration camps, the crematoria, the human ashes floating in the air, or the horrific medical experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele. Or they may have heard about Auschwitz-Birkenau, a monstrous edifice of 3 camps, 36 sub-camps, industrial facilities and 160,000 inmates.

Mavina Messina, who was christened Barbara Stavridou overnight, recalls: "We were like refugees in the mountains. We managed to stay alive because we were constantly moving from village to village, we were always hiding, mainly in basements or fruit warehouses. We felt like criminals who had escaped from prison. It was a very bad experience. We lived in constant fear. "

And for those who hid the Jews, the fear for punishment wasn’t different; for the Greek Christians the offense led to arrest, imprisonment and execution (immediately, or later in retaliation), or the burning of their house just on the suspicion that a Jew had found refuge there, even temporarily. As for the priests, they faced being hanged on an olive tree.

Back in the city, Chrysostomos, after the letter to Hitler, could easily have imagined that even if the Führer answered, his answer might have been false or misleading. And when the answer from the Supreme Administration of the Third Reich came, stating that the Jews of Zakynthos would remain under the personal responsibility of the Bishop and the Mayor, Chrysostomos was not carried away by the wave of public enthusiasm; he remained extremely cautious, fearing that this was nothing but a German plot to get the Jews out of hiding.

Thus, the entire Jewish population of Zakynthos remained at their hide-outs in the mountains of the island. It was a wise move. A few months later, in August 1944, Litt was replaced by a bloodthirsty assassin, who would rush to finish what Litt had left in the middle, concerning the Jewish issue. When the new Commander called the Bishop and asked him, Chrysostomos replied that the city has no Jews because everyone is hiding in the mountains, while Carrer escaped from the island.

In any case, the presence of the new commander would be short-lived. The Germans lost the war, and this was the only Greek Jewish population that survived in its entirety. Behind the plunder, the arson, the unbearable terrorism and the massive destruction done by the Germans on the island, as they were leaving Zakynthos on 4-10 September '44, they couldn’t destroy the satisfaction of an unthinkable victory.

Zakynthos: A Jewish shelter from the Nazi storm

Zakynthos: A Jewish shelter from the Nazi storm

Zakynthos: A Jewish shelter from the Nazi storm

The Jewish legacy of Zakynthos island

After the war, the stories of Zakynthos began to reveal and spread: the story of Moses, an infant who was held in the village of Giuleika by a Christian mother as his family was forced to flee; the stories of how the villagers hadn’t surrendered a single Jew in the mountains, or of how the citizens of Zakynthos denied to accept any Jewish property as bribery from the Germans.

Samolino Fortes, in an interview in Deno Seder's book, says: "We went to a place called Giuleika and found the Rapsomaniki family. I still cry for them, I love them so much. They were the ones who saved us. Until today, every year, I visit them and hug them. I kiss them and they kiss me too."

Hasman newspaper wrote that "the Jewish community all over the world heard with the greatest satisfaction these acts of the heroic children of Greece, whose spiritual values continue to set the example of culture and humanity." Dionysios Stravolaimos wrote: "The legacy left by this event to the future generations of Zakynthos is sacred."

Zakynthos: A Jewish shelter from the Nazi storm

After the historical documentary "The Song of Life" by Toni Lykouresis in 2002, the American documentary "Life Will Smile" had its first screening in Zakynthos island in 2017. Steven Priovolos, producer and documentary filmmaker, chose to structure the work on the experience of Haim Constantini (pictured below), a young Jew who was 10 years old in 1943 in the events of the island.

"I would be very sorry, as a human being, is someone like Haim Constantini wasn’t alive because the Nazis decided to exterminate the entire Jewish population. When you meet him up close, you feel that people like him are gifts for our planet", says Priovolos. A few months before he passed away, Jaim Constantini was present at the premiere of the documentary, along with 12 members of his family - a family that was created against the odds of '43.

"Our story took place in Zakynthos in 1943, but it is a story that people need to hear today," Priovolos continues. "If you saw in Zakynthos five Christians and five Jews at that time, you would not know who is a Christian and who is a Jew. This did not matter at all. It was a society that lived in harmony, on the same rock for centuries. They did not care who went to the Synagogue and who to the Church. This is very important today, when there is such a division between religion and opinions."

TerraMagma Pictures / Nomadic Films

"A ten-year-old kid does not see a difference between a Christian, a Jew, or a black and white - they are all human. And they all have the same needs. A large part of the human population has forgotten this today. In America, the racism displayed mainly by white Americans has to do with their own inward fears, which they place on the shoulders of minorities, believing that is the problem."

"I think something like that happened in Germany before World War II, where the Germans were in big financial trouble. Hitler told the Germans that it was the Jews who were to blame. Of course that wasn’t true - after all, the Jews were running healthy businesses which were helping the German economy in the interwar period."

"In Zakynthos it was different: the island’s people believed that they were all the same. Christians also lived in the ghetto, as the Italians had called the Jewish quarter. This is education, and Zakynthos had it."

"Carrer and Chrysostomos, while they apparently showed tremendous courage by giving a list of just two names to the Germans, they also inspired all the other 35 thousand Zakynthians to do what they did. For me this is very much missing from our world today. The responsibility of the political leaders today is enormous, and I do not think they have taken it seriously."

According to Dr. Nechama Tec, Holocaust Survivor and Sociologist, the courageous, altruistic behavior of people is the result of the refusal -even is he faces marginalization- of the individual to succumb to mass directed behaviors, of his autonomy to act according to his beliefs and regardless of pressure, of his constant devotion to help the weak and of the perception of rescue as a necessary reaction to external circumstances and not as an act of heroism.

Perhaps the necessity of all this is as important today as it was in the occupied Europe of World War II. But Edmund Burke's phrase that "all that is needed for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing" is certainly, as important.

"From the babies to the elderly, two are the most important needs" Priovolos concludes. "To feel loved and to feel safe. With these two in place for everyone, everything else takes a back step. I hope this message comes out of the documentary. By staying united, the island community achieved something unprecedented throughout occupied Europe. All of Europe was on its knees. The fact that in the darkest period of Europe this happened in little Greece and on the island of Zakynthos, it is a magical, huge message. People were feeling loved and safe in Zakynthos."

Zakynthos: A Jewish shelter from the Nazi storm

Zakynthos: A Jewish shelter from the Nazi storm

Zakynthos: A Jewish shelter from the Nazi storm

Zakynthos: A Jewish shelter from the Nazi storm

Zakynthos: A Jewish shelter from the Nazi storm

Zakynthos: A Jewish shelter from the Nazi storm

Zakynthos: A Jewish shelter from the Nazi storm

Zakynthos: A Jewish shelter from the Nazi storm

Zakynthos: A Jewish shelter from the Nazi storm

[Sources]

-Mark Mazower, «Inside Hitler’s Greece. The experience of Occupation, 1941-‘44 » (Alexandreia publications, 1994)

-Deno Seder, «Miracle at Zakynthos» (Philos Press, 2014)

-Dionysios Stravolemos, An Act of Heroism - A Justification; The Saving of the Jews of Zakynthos During the Occupation (Athenai, Zakynthos, 1988)

-Tonis Likouresis, «The Song of Lige» (Documentary, 2002)

-Jewish Museum of Greece (www.jewishmuseum.gr)

-Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center (www.yadvashem.org)

-Yitzchak Kerem, «The Role of Greek Righteous Gentiles in the Rescue of Greek Jews in the Holocaust», Gesher, Bridge, The Official Journal of The Council of Christians & Jews, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Οκτώβριος 1994).

-Steven Priovolos / TerraMagma Pictures (Interview, September 2017 & Pictures)

© 2026 Desolation Road

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