World War II (continued from WW I) German Occupation Page 3

During the German occupation, the Jews of Greece had some protection in the areas of Greece assigned to the Italians, but after the Italians surrendered in 1943, they were taken en masse to concentration camps. The largest Jewish population in Greece was in Thessaloniki, where the Sephardic Jewish population was a majority, with 68,000 of the 80,000 (85%) taken away on trains to the camps over a period of months.. Other old Jewish communities were in Rhodes, Kos, Crete, Kerkyra (Corfu), Volos, Evviia, and Zakynthos, though in the last three places the church or municipal authorities, in cooperation with the resistance, saved most of them. In Zakynthos island the mayor and bishop, risked themselves the save the local Jews, ordering Christian citizens to hide and feed them, as did the bishop of the city of Halkidha (the capital of the large island of Evvia); in Athens, the archbishop and police chief arranged for false identity cards to be issued, as well as certificates of baptism, which saved many Jews.

Romaniot Jews (those who had been in Greece since Roman times), were easier to hide than the Sephardhic Jews (who had come to Greece mostly in the 15th century from Spain where non-Christians had been expelled) because the latter spoke a dialect of Spanish called Ladino, had surnames that identified them, as well as different customs.

It has also been asserted by some that the huge Sephardic community of Thessaloniki (more than half of the population of that city at the time) could have been alerted to the fate awaiting them at the hands of the Nazis by the British news agency, the BBC, but that anti-semitism in Britain prevented this.

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