Report from Kefalonia: Lessons to be learned from the Holocaust of Greek Jews | Dan Perry

This summer, the news from Greece is about signs reading "Fuck Israel," giant fires, and traffic jams in the sky as millions of tourists flood the islands. I am writing these lines from Kefalonia, a beautiful island on the western, Ionian side, from which the name Greece probably originates. But my thoughts are wandering elsewhere. Beneath the beaches, the tavernas, and the calm of the Greek summer hides a much darker history — one that, precisely now, has something important to say to Israel in a time of trouble and a time of choice.

The Holocaust in Greece has always strangely occupied a small place in the broader memory of the Second World War. This is despite the fact that Greece lost about 80 to 90 percent of its pre-war Jewish population — one of the highest rates in occupied Europe — and despite the fact that Thessaloniki was one of the largest Jewish cities on the continent. The destruction was so absolute that even today one can visit Greece, even repeatedly, without fully understanding what exactly disappeared.

I was reminded of this in Kefalonia, an island in the Ionian Sea where we spent this summer. We try to reach a Greek island almost every year, but this journey led us unexpectedly to a history that tied together the collapse of fascist Italy, a largely forgotten German massacre of Italian soldiers, and the final destruction of a large part of Greek Jewry.

In September 1943, two months after Italy ousted Benito Mussolini — and subsequently abandoned the alliance with Hitler and signed an armistice with the Allies — German forces in Kefalonia turned against their former partners. About 12,000 soldiers of the Italian Acqui Division resisted the German demand to surrender their weapons. After defeating them, the Germans executed thousands of Italian prisoners in one of the largest massacres of prisoners of war in the Second World War.

But Italy's defeat had another consequence, which ultimately was even more significant for Greece. Large parts of the country had been under Italian occupation since 1941, and the Italian authorities, although they were fascist occupiers, generally resisted German efforts to deport Jews from the territories under their control. Thus, a strange situation arose where Jews could sometimes find relative security by moving from areas in Greece that were under German control to territories under Italian control.

On September 8, 1943, this protection effectively disappeared.

As German forces moved to disarm their former Italian allies — and in Kefalonia also to massacre them — they also took control of the Italian occupation zones. Jewish communities that had survived the first years of the war were suddenly exposed to the extermination mechanism of the Holocaust. The German takeover of the Italian occupation zones in Greece thus links two histories that are usually remembered separately: the massacre of the Acqui Division and the destruction of the remnants of Greek Jewry.

The Ionian islands illustrate with extraordinary clarity what happened next.

In Corfu, north of Kefalonia, a Jewish community had existed for centuries. In June 1944, the Germans rounded up almost all of the approximately 1,800 Jews of the island and deported them, mainly to Auschwitz. Few survived. In Zakynthos, south of Kefalonia, the Germans also demanded the surrender of the Jews. There, Metropolitan Chrysostomos and Mayor Loukas Karrer refused to hand over the list that was demanded of them, and local residents hid their Jewish neighbors. All 275 Jews were saved.

In Kefalonia, too, a Jewish community had existed in the past, but most of its members left even before the war, so when the Germans took over the island, there was no longer a significant Jewish population left that could be compared to that on the other islands. And so, at a short distance from each other, three Ionian islands presented three different Jewish fates: a community destroyed in Corfu, an entire community saved in Zakynthos, and a community in Kefalonia whose members had mostly left even before the arrival of the Germans.

The implications of Germany's intervention in Greece went far beyond the borders of the Balkans. The campaign contributed to the delay of the opening of Operation Barbarossa — Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union — until the end of June 1941, although historians are still divided on the question of how much this delay was a decisive factor in Germany's final failure on the Eastern Front. This failure had consequences that reached far beyond Russia. While German forces advanced north toward the Caucasus, Rommel's Afrika Korps advanced from the west through North Africa toward Egypt, raising the terrifying possibility that both German forces would eventually meet in the Middle East. In their way stood British-controlled Eretz Yisrael, with about half a million Jews. The Nazis had already established an SS Einsatzkommando unit, intended to accompany a German occupation of Egypt and Eretz Yisrael and to extend the extermination mechanism of the Holocaust there as well. The Germans never arrived: they were stopped in the Soviet Union, and in 1942 were defeated at El Alamein. Thus, Greece occupied an exceptional place in the broader geography of the war — a battlefield at the connection point between Hitler's war campaigns in Europe, Russia, and the Mediterranean, and the Jewish Yishuv in Eretz Yisrael, which had dangerously approached the range of Nazi Germany's expansion.

Behind the stories of the islands stood the much greater catastrophe of Thessaloniki, the large city in northern Greece. Before the war, about 50,000 Jews lived there, most of them descendants of the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. They helped make Thessaloniki one of the largest Jewish centers in Europe — a city whose Jewish identity was deeply intertwined with its commercial and cultural life. Starting in 1943, the Germans deported the vast majority to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most of them were murdered.

The author at the Jewish cemetery in Argostoli, the capital of Kefalonia. Photo: Dan Perry

This is part of what makes the Holocaust in Greece so shattering. Jews lived in the Greek world for more than 2,000 years. The Romaniote communities were among the oldest Jewish communities in Europe, and existed hundreds of years before the arrival of the Sephardim. Within a few years, most of this world was destroyed. Out of about 72,000 to 77,000 Jews who lived in Greece before the war, only a small part survived.

In Kefalonia, the memory of the massacre of the Italians is still preserved to some extent. Kosmas Theodoratos, 30, a resident of the island, told me a story that was passed down to him through a friend's grandmother. According to him, older residents in the villages used to say that after the massacre, one could "smell the blood as far as the village."

How far was the village? "A few kilometers," he said. Even he himself doubted the story. "It sounds unreal, to be honest," said Theodoratos. "But that's what my friend's grandmother would tell us when we were younger." The witnesses are almost all gone. "The older generation, who were a bit closer to it," used to talk about the massacre, he said. "There aren't many of them left today."

The same, of course, is increasingly true for the generation that still remembers the Jewish communities of Greece as they were before their destruction.

Therefore, it is perhaps appropriate to look back at Kefalonia not only because of what happened here to the Italians, as exceptional as that story may be. September 1943 was a turning point in the occupation of Greece. Italians who were occupiers became victims of the Germans; Jews who found fragile shelter under Italian rule lost it; and communities that had existed for centuries suddenly found themselves facing the danger of deportation and extermination.

For Israelis today, there is a temptation to draw the familiar conclusion from this history: that in the end, Jews can only rely on themselves. There is truth in this, but the story of the Ionian islands offers a more complex picture. The Jews of Corfu were almost completely destroyed. The 275 Jews of Zakynthos survived because a bishop, a mayor, and ordinary Greek residents decided that the fate of their Jewish neighbors was also their business.

It is worth remembering this at a moment when Israel is increasingly aware of the fragility of its alliances, and Jews around the world are again wondering how safe their place really is. The ability of Jews to defend themselves is essential. But allies are also essential. So are institutions, political courage, and the willingness of non-Jews to refuse the demands of those who seek to persecute their Jewish neighbors. History can change direction with amazing speed; in Greece, such a turn occurred on September 8, 1943.

Its results can still be seen from island to island: Kefalonia, Corfu, Zakynthos. And beyond them stands Thessaloniki, where an entire Jewish civilization was almost erased. Europe looks peaceful today. But the lesson of these islands is not only that disaster can arrive quickly. It is also that in moments of testing, the choices people make — who resists, who collaborates, who looks away, and who offers shelter — can determine who will remain there when the storm passes.

A bartender asked me where I was from. I told her, and she replied: "I support the other side." I asked why. "Genocide," she said. I replied: "You have strong opinions about a conflict you probably know very little about. Do you really think that of all the wars in the world, this is the only one that is a genocide — like the Armenian genocide, like the Holocaust, like Rwanda?" She did not answer. I said to her: "There is someone in front of you who comes from there. Do you want to hear?" She said yes. We talked for ten minutes, and I explained my point of view to her. In the end, she offered me a shot of vodka.