For Tel Aviv resident Yaron Enosh, who frequently visits Greece, the wonder of Zakynthos hasn’t dimmed from his first trip to the island thirty-plus years ago through his most recent one in 2022.
Its natural beauty isn’t all that grabs Enosh, a longtime radio broadcaster who often features Greek music on his programs. It’s the courage that Zakynthos’s residents and their leaders exhibited during Germany’s occupation of the island from September 1943 to September 1944.
While approximately ninety percent of Greece’s Jews were murdered during the Shoah, the highest percentage of any Nazi-occupied country, all 275 Jewish residents of Zakynthos survived World War II. None were murdered, deported to concentration camps (most Greek Jews were sent to Auschwitz) or even arrested.
Eighty years later, the example of Zakynthos remains worthy of retelling. It was the subject of a documentary in 2002, The Song of Life, by Greek director Tony Lykouresis; another documentary in 2017, Life Will Smile; several books and chapters of books; and even a children’s book in Hebrew published in 2018 by Israeli educator Sheila Cohen Albala Matza, The Heroes From the Island of Zakynthos.
“It’s a special, exciting story,” said Enosh.
The heroes of the episode were Loukas Karrer, the mayor of Zakynthos on the Ionian Sea island of the same name, and its bishop, Metropolitan Dimitrios Chrysostomos — but so were average residents.
Karrer and Chrysostomos avoided providing the German military governor of the island, Alfred Luth, with a registry of Jewish residents which he demanded. Luth intended for the Jews to serve as slaves on building projects. The men enlisted Christians as replacement workers, burned their list of local Jews, bribed Luth and ultimately gave him a piece of paper listing themselves as the island’s only two Jews (Karrer and Chrysostomos were not Jewish.)
The legend of Zakynthos is such that it spawned embellishments. Chrysostomos claimed to know Hitler from when they were university students in Munich in the 1920s, and was said to have sent the German dictator a telegram asking for the Jews of Zakynthos to be spared — and to have received Hitler’s telegrammed response acceding to the request.
Such an exchange with Hitler is far-fetched, and the story of the paper with the men’s names likely is, too, but “that was their narrative,” Yitzchak Kerem, an academic who researched Zakynthos’s World War II history for a 1989 paper, said in a telephone interview in April.
What’s not in doubt is that Karrer, Chrysostomos and anyone else on Zakynthos could have been executed for their obstinance.
That they weren’t, and the fact of all Zakynthos’s Jews surviving the occupation, is “a miracle,” said Kerem, a Holocaust researcher at Bar-Ilan University.
Most Jews were hidden in the homes of Christian families throughout Zakynthos and surrounding villages, with many later immigrating to Israel, and even establishing a synagogue in Tel Aviv. Yad Vashem in 1978 honored Karrer and Chrysostomos with the designation of Righteous Among the Nations. A memorial to the two men stands at the site of a synagogue that, like many buildings in Zakynthos, was destroyed in an earthquake in 1953.
Another hero of the Zakynthos story, Kerem wrote in his paper, was Dimitri Katevatis. The local head of a Greek nationalist movement, Katevatis intervened with Luth in mid-1944 to prevent the island’s Jews from being deported.
“Katevatis had great admiration and respect” for the Jews of Zakynthos, Kerem wrote in the article, which was published by the World Congress of Jewish Studies, an institute based at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “He was well esteemed by many local Jews and looked upon by many of them as their protector.”
Following the deportation by boat of Jews from the nearby Greek island of Corfu, the Nazis had a final opportunity to deport Zakynthos’s Jews in August 1944. It again failed, the last step in what Kerem termed the “invisible deliberate effort” on the island “to either stall the expulsion of the Jews or to avoid it altogether.”
Today’s residents of Zakynthos remain immensely proud of the townsfolk’s roles in the rescue of Jews. Enosh related that on one visit, a man invited him to his home, where he moved a living room table and a rug to reveal a shaft descending to a secret room. That was where his grandparents had hidden a Jewish family of five people.
Hearing the man’s story and seeing the hiding space “was very exciting for me,” said Enosh, whose parents endured the Shoah in other countries and survived.
Cohen Albala Matza, the teacher, said that the Israeli hostages now being held in Gaza make it “hard to believe in mankind now,” but that “the Zakynthian leadership and civil population have proved otherwise.”
“Let’s strongly cling to their message,” she said, “that every human’s life should be honored.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at [email protected].
Further Reading:
Yitzchak Kerem, “The Survival of the Jews of Zakynthos in the Holocaust“, Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies, Vol. 1989, Division B, Volume II: The History of the Jewish People, pp. 387-394 (8 pages)
