A Hidden Child in Greece: Rescue in the Holocaust

By Yolanda Avram Willis

“Your story deserves to be widely heard.”
—Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize–winning author and Holocaust survivor

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Six-year-old Yolanda Avram is rescued by righteous strangers during the Holocaust in Greece. This is her story of courage and survival in the context of dozens of other rescues and shows Jews saving themselves and others in audacious and often heroic ways. Her story is uplifting and focuses on those flickers of light in the vast darkness of evil, known in Greece as the Persecution. This little-known saga of the common folk outwitting the Third Reich is a powerful and important story, told simply and movingly in cinematic episodes. The book is incandescent with empathy and gratitude.

“What a powerful and moving story it is.”
—Sir Martin Gilbert, official biographer of Winston Churchill, knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and author of eighty-eight historical books

“A Hidden Child in Greece is a monumental story that documents her family’s miraculous survival in a unique and moving way. It gives life to the principle of human dignity and courage as a universal precept . . . this book is a true light unto the nations.”
—Yaffa Eliach, author and creator of the first university-level Holocaust curriculum and the Tower of Life, a 1,500-photograph permanent display at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC

“Willis is Anne Frank, if Anne Frank had lived.”
—Diana Hume George, author and educator

“For me, the heart of this book is the family story—the real power lays in the intimate story you are able to describe very simply and movingly.”
—Mark Mazower, director, modern European history, Columbia University

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524601782

Yolanda Avram Willis

Yolanda Avram Willis was born in Greece in 1934. She was six years old when World War II began in Greece. During the war, she and her family were hidden in Crete and in several locations in Athens. When she was eight, her family was forced to disperse. Two different Greek Orthodox families hid her until she was ten at liberation. The first family to hide her became fugitives, just like her own Jewish family. She came to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship, graduated with honor and earned an MA degree in chemistry. After her third child was born, she received an MA and a PhD in sociology and worked in industry as a researcher, manager, educator, and management consultant for twenty-two years. In 1994, she began collecting oral histories from Greek Holocaust survivors and rescuers. Dr. Willis lectures nationally, speaking of righteous Greeks from personal experience. In 1996, she was the associate producer of a documentary film, It Was Nothing, It Was Everything, focusing on ten Greek rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, including one of her own in Crete. Her writing has been published in several collections, including Flares of Memory, an anthology published by Oxford University Press in 2001. In addition to serving as speaker, panelist, and board member, she was an interviewer for Steven Spielberg’s Visual History Foundation. She has taught courses on Rescuers and Hidden Children at Carnegie Mellon’s Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning and at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. Yolanda is proudest of her three adult children and seven granddaughters, several of whom accompanied her on return trips to Greece, where they visited her rescuing places and met Yolanda’s rescuing families. Eight of her rescuers were recognized by Yad Vashem (Israel) as Righteous among the Nations.

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© 2017 Yolanda Avram Willis. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 05/30/2017

ISBN: 978-1-5246-0179-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-0180-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-0178-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016905437

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Dedication

For my parents, Karolla and Salvator Avram, who were my primary rescuers and taught me gratitude.

For my brother, Yannis (Moïssis) Avram, a hidden child, who never quite found his way back home.

And for all those who saved our lives. Most of all:

In Crete:

Stylianos, Damaskini, Antonis, Marika, Athena, Stratis, and Manolis Xirouhakis, all of them Righteous Among the Nations.

In Kallithea:

Manolis Païtakis and Athena Xirouhakis Païtakis, who hid Aunt Stella, both Righteous Among the Nations.

In Athens:

My godparents, Manolis and Aphrodite Papanastassiou, and their daughter, Emi, who became fugitives, just like us—for us.

Aunt Vasso Fassoula and her family.

Uncle Vanghelis and Aunt Koula Vandalis, my brother’s rescuers, and their children, Yiorgos and Anny, whose lives were risked for Yannis.

Yiorgos Panayiotopoulos, his wife Thalia, and their small daughter, Kiki, who hid my maternal grandmother, Seniorou Bensousan.

Table of Contents

Dedication

Foreword by Yaffa Eliach, Ph.D.

A Turning Point: How this Book Came to Be

Mother, You Are a Survivor

Overview

My Family Before the War:A Photographic Essay

Part 1

My Family’s Rescue

We Are at War

Who Saved Your Life?

Pack the Suitcases, Karolla

The German Invasion

Hitchhikers

During the Battle of Crete

The Invasion

Rescue in Crete

The Trek from Tilifos

The Dinner Invitation

For Food and Safety

Athens–Larisa–Athens

In Hiding

The Family Must Disperse

The Extortion

Reunions and Separations

The Raid

Reciprocity

Looking out the Window

Fugitives Just Like Us

Watching the Watchers

A Secret Encounter

The SS Bloko

Fugitives in Maroussi

A Self-Made Man

The Trauma

My Brother’s Rescue

Your Name Is Yannis

The Operation

The Stranger

Mardi Gras

The Italians Withdraw

Another Hiding Place

At Aunt Vasso’s

In My Cave—A Child’s Musings

How Mussolini Saved Our Lives—More Musings

Being Tailed

Mass Arrests on Independence Day

Stella’s Losses

Alegra’s Decision

Liberation and the Civil War

The Reunion

Selling Honey Door to Door

The Aftermath: Unspoken Losses

The Liberator

A Grand Gesture

To Trust Not…And to Trust

Father Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

Hitler Did Not Win

Early Decisions

Israel Declares Her Independence

The Mosquito Netting Goes to College

Breaking Away: College and Beyond

The Doll

How Did You Get to the Greenbrier?

The Ring

Searching for the Past

Messengers

Reunions in Crete

Amazing Connections

Gifts of the Heart

Return to Tilifos

Unto the Third Generation

My Inheritance

Unto the Fourth Generation

A Fourth Generation Postscript

Righteous Among the Nations

Intermezzo

The Deportations Begin

Jewish Population of Greece Before and After the Holocaust

An Antihero Story:

The Chief Rabbi Of Salonika

Part 2

Other Rescues, Other Rescuers

Tell Me, Yayaka

Heroes from Katerini

Who Saved the Jews of Katerini?

The Telegrapher’s Warning

The Rescue of an Army Buddy

On Mount Olympus

Smuggling Operations

Checkpoint

Heroes from Athens

Archbishop Damaskinos

The Abduction of the Rabbi of Athens

The Role of the Resistance

The Psaltis (Church Chorister)

The Master Forger

Joseph’s Coffee Break

The Flight From

Larisa, Our Home

Madre de Israel

The Shoemaker’s Summer Vacation

The Climate in Larisa

Fishermen Who Could Not Swim

The Raid in Stomion

The Rabbi at the Monastery

Yannina

Lessons Learned, Lessons Not Heeded

Seven Fugitive Jewish Children

Rescue in Volos

Conspiracies of Goodness

The Rabbi on the Bishop’s Throne

Barba’lias

Two Widows in Upper Volos

Taking Stock

Postscript

Miracle in Zakynthos

Myths, Legends, and Fairy Tales

The Jews of Zakynthos

A Natural Disaster

Enduring Bonds of Gratitude

Afterword

Documentation

Historical Note

Yolanda Avram’s Chronology

Dramatis Personae

Yolanda’s Family

Yolanda’s Family Rescuers

An Informal Glossary

References Cited

About this Book

About the Author

Foreword by Yaffa Eliach, Ph.D.

Upon opening Dr. Yolanda Avram Willis’ book: A Hidden Child in Greece, we expect to learn about the terrible destruction of Greek Jewry. Instead, we are introduced to a new world: That of the brave resistance that the Greek nation mustered against the princes of darkness, the Nazi kingdom. Yolanda skillfully documents the lives of her family and others in their quest for survival in various areas of Greece while fleeing Nazi capture.

In Yolanda’s story is documented her family’s miraculous survival and with it the beauty of those who worked together to stand up to the Nazi foe, heretofore undocumented in such a unique and moving way.

In every country that the Germans occupied, they preyed upon the primitive anti-Semitic feelings of the local population cultivated by the Church for a millennium previous, to bring about complete cultural genocide. In Greece, the invaders found that the local population had in fact quite positive feelings about the Jews and even if they didn’t, their hatred of the Germans made anyone the Germans hated, their friend.

Being a child survivor of the war, I can appreciate the unique Greek opposition. I personally experienced the intense illogical hatred of the Polish people for Jews, which exceeded even the wildest expectations of their Nazi overlords in their cruelty, carnage and lust for Jewish blood.

Later as a trained historian, I dedicated my professional life to introducing Holocaust studies in the United States and Israel, bringing to life my hometown of Eishyshok in Lithuania, and to encourage others to present their unique experiences.

My aim was to make the subject relevant to American Jews, for whom the life of the Shtetl and the life of Jews in Europe was (and still is for the most part) culturally a completely foreign subject. I also wanted to build a model that other documenters of the Holocaust could use.

Here, Dr. Willis brings to life the Greek Jewish experience, a little-documented area, especially in English, as compared to the vast funding and literature on the other European Jewish travails during the war.

Most Holocaust survivors, by now, are gone. Soon, it will be hard for our young people to relate to someone who lived through that terrible time. A Hidden Child in Greece gives life to the principle of human dignity and courage as a universal precept.

This book, then, shows the success of our Mission—being a true Light Unto the Nations.

Yaffa Eliach

New York City

A Turning Point:

How this Book Came to Be

November 1992

Mother, You Are a Survivor

My fascination with stories of rescue, starting with my own survival, began with readings provided to me by my daughter, Carla, in her effort to help me deal with my brother’s death in June 1992. She started by sending me books on rescuers and followed them with books on child survivors and children of survivors. She suggested I might seek the support of other survivors at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh.

But I am not a survivor, I protested, I was never in a camp. Our experience, by comparison, was as if we had attended the Queen’s garden party.

You are not only a survivor by current definition, but also the child of survivors, Carla said, smiling, "and we are under special disadvantages."

She and I began reading about second generation children and patterns of role reversal with their parents. The children tended to protect their parents, and this echoed very clearly in our family for three generations. Several writers recounted that survivors were so wounded by loss that they were chronically immersed in mourning their dead. They were anxious, depleted, and often angry. These accounts made us even prouder that my own parents, despite their losses, were able to focus less on mourning and more on our relationships to our rescuers.

Eventually, I did go to the Holocaust Center, and there I discovered warm mentorship beyond my own daughter, especially from survivor Dora Zuer Iwler. I learned to write short stories in workshops offered to survivors there in mid-1994. We read Yaffa Eliach’s Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust,¹ which greatly influenced my own writing. The workshops, along with other survivors’ contributions, yielded enough stories for the Holocaust Center to publish an impressive volume, Flares of Memory: Childhood Stories Written By Holocaust Survivors, in 1998. Anita Brostoff, the primary workshop instructor, became the editor of our anthology.

A couple of years later, the book attracted the attention of Oxford University Press, which published it in 2001, as Flares of Memory: Stories of Childhood During the Holocaust. Both editions included parts of my wartime story, and yet I never thought to write a book of my own.

Carla continued to support me in my writing, and she cheered me on to a new career of lecturing, volunteering for Holocaust-related projects, and teaching informal courses on hidden children and rescuers. I taught at the Pittsburgh Holocaust Center and also at the Osher Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. I took early retirement from my management consulting business and followed those interests. The scope of my lectures expanded. There were many trips back to Greece on which I brought my children—and eventually grandchildren—to meet our rescuers’ families and visit some of the places of refuge.

Thus, it was almost 50 years after liberation when I first embarked on a journey to learn more about my family’s survival and reclaim my memories. I returned to Greece in 1996 as an associate producer of a documentary film, It Was Nothing, It Was Everything,²

on 10 Greek rescuers during the Holocaust. My search into the past expanded to Crete where I was at last reunited with our rescuers from that island. There, I reclaimed parts of my life I had neither understood nor even known before.

Later, I branched out to discover how other Greek survivors avoided that almost total destruction of the Jews in the land of my birth. For more than a dozen years, I gathered stories of hiding and surviving in the Italian zone of occupation after the Italians left. I discovered that ours was not an isolated instance of rescue. What was unusual was that my family tended to flee well before danger occurred, moving just ahead of the Nazi onslaught with accompanying famine, registration mandates, and roundups.

Yolanda%20Filming%20Documentary%20BW.jpg

Yolanda filming documentary in 1996

Unplanned was an inner journey of understanding myself, my childhood strategies for living within my family, and how these strategies helped during the war. But most of all, very slowly and reluctantly, I discovered the price that my parents, my brother, I, and even my children paid for our survival. Ours was a positive story relative to those who were captured and who lost most of their loved ones in the hands of the Nazis. And yet, we too, were scarred.

As this book took shape over some ten years, I felt a fervent need to bring to light the stories of these heroic Christian Greeks who risked so much to help Jews—often total strangers. I came to believe this was my sacred duty.

Overview

³

This is a book about my personal experience as a hidden child in Greece, my family’s struggles during the Holocaust, and in Part 2, stories of rescue and survival of other Jews. These are uplifting, inspiring stories, set in the midst of the unspeakable tragedy of the murder of some 87% of Greece’s Jews. The manner in which Jews helped in their own rescue and the way Greek Orthodox Christians helped them varied, but the spirit of inclusiveness in these stories reveals the culture in which survival against formidable odds nonetheless occurred.

Greece entered World War II more than a year after the war began with Germany’s invasion of Poland. On October 28, 1940, Greece refused to capitulate to Italy, which was then a member of the Axis Powers. My narrative begins with my family’s flight from our home on the day Italy attacked Greece, continues with our experiences during The Battle of Crete, and then focuses on the period of the Jewish Persecution—as we called the Holocaust during the occupation and for many years thereafter. I was six at the war’s start, eight when I went into hiding in Athens without my family, and ten when we were liberated.

For four years, we constantly relocated to avoid bombings, famine, and capture. For almost five years, due to the Civil War that followed liberation, I knew nothing for sure. Certainty and clarity had vanished along with our Larisa home, our peaceful life, my friends, and my school. My family stayed just one step ahead of capture by devising elaborate plans of escape. For me, those years were characterized by a fog of confusion, new plans, and guesswork. My parents were navigating on quicksand, desperately struggling to save us from ever-present yet ever-changing dangers.

What I do know is that my parents and our rescuers showed miraculous and unfailing courage, foresight, resourcefulness, and wisdom. I write to honor the grownups in my childhood who saved our lives and to bear witness to other rescues achieved during the Holocaust in Greece. I wrote the early stories in an attempt to reclaim myself as a child whose recollections are, by nature, incomplete. However, I was able to fill in some of the gaps years later by revisiting places and people from my childhood.

My narrative includes details gathered from many hours of interviews with our rescuers and their families, family friends, and relatives during several trips to Greece beginning in 1994. It was then that I discovered that the first family who hid me in Athens had become fugitives just like us—for us.

I also began to wonder if my family was unique in some way. How did other Jewish families avoid capture? Who helped them survive? I investigated, and based on the oral histories I have been collecting since the mid-1990s, I can now include accounts of other rescues and rescuers.

My narrative is naturally presented in discrete episodes. They are based first on a small child’s incomplete recollection of emblazoned or imprinted events, and then they are also based on interviews and oral histories of others who reported turning points and highlights of their wartime experiences. This work is not meant to be a scholarly study, but to preserve and present priceless testimony.

The accounts I include weave a rich tapestry of Greek Orthodox heroes who risked their own lives to save Jews. The incidents, which occurred in different parts of the country, form the backdrop to our family’s story while depicting the cultural milieu that made our own survival possible. The phenomenon of rescue occurred concurrently and spontaneously over a widespread area and under various conditions. All the while, Jews assisted in their own rescue in adaptive, ingenious, and sometimes heroic ways.

Some characters in my writing are unrelated to my family, but their stories are no less valid to this book. Greek rescuers included the partisans (freedom or resistance fighters), many Greek Orthodox churchmen (from simple parish priests to the Primate of the Church of Greece, Archbishop Damaskinos), civilian authorities who supplied false documents, and countless ordinary Greeks who showed remarkable generosity of spirit towards their Jewish countrymen.

I have asked myself what made these rescues possible. I believe that under their common enemy, Christians and Jews in Greece came together as never before or since. In parts of the country, assisting Jewish fugitives became both an act of patriotism for Greece and an act of resistance against the German invaders. Covert defiance of Nazi orders was a unifying imperative—a superordinate goal. During that time of peril, there emerged remarkable leaders who led entire communities to rescue their Jews and thus upheld our homeland’s honor.

As Professor Alexander Orbach (retired director of Jewish Studies at the University of Pittsburgh) commented, This…is much more than the story of a hidden child. It is…repayment of a debt to those who put themselves on the line to save your life as well as that of your immediate family. [It is] then extended to demonstrate that your family’s experience was not an isolated phenomenon and was part of a larger pattern that can be discerned in a country where statistically over 80% of the local Jewish population was fatally caught up in the Nazi assault.

I feel compelled to bring these accounts of rescue to audiences unfamiliar with wartime events in Greece and the Holocaust there. Our extraordinary stories of survival and rescue form a mosaic of remarkable heroism, mostly of ordinary people. Their stories must be told and treasured, for they kept alive our faith in human decency, even during the darkest hours of the Holocaust.

The stories in this book offer dozens of instances of amazing valor and ingenuity among common folk. What these heroic Greeks, both Christian and Jewish, did—individually and collectively—is the substance of history and the subject of legend.

My Family Before the War:

A Photographic Essay

Some of these pictures were damaged, just like their subjects.

Parents%20Engagement%20Photo%20BW.jpg

My parents’ engagement picture

My%20Mother%20At%20Age%2016%20BW.jpg

My mother at age 16

My%20Mother%20and%20Father%20BW.jpg

Salvator and Karolla Avram,

my parents

With%20My%20Father%20BW.jpg

At 8 months old with my father

With%20My%20Mother%20BW.jpg

With my mother

Yolanda%20Showing%20Off%20BW.jpg

Showing off

Yolanda%20in%20Tyrolean%20Costume%20BW.jpg

Yolanda in Tyrolean costume

Yolanda%20in%20Duchess%20Costume%20BW.jpg

I loved Mardi Gras

My%20Brother%20in%20His%20Pram%20BW.jpg

My brother in his pram

With%20My%20Brother%20in%20Portaria%20BW.jpg

With my brother in Portaria,

where we summered before the war

Part 1

My Family’s Rescue

October 28, 1940 to April 6, 1941

We Are at War

Who Saved Your Life?

How did you survive the Holocaust in Greece, when seventy thousand Greek Jews were murdered?

Tell me, Grandmother, how many people did it take to save your life?

The Larisa forger who gave us Christian documents when my family fled to Crete,

— He saved our lives.

The family who took us to the mountains during the German invasion,

Their relatives who hid us in the village oven and in caves,

The German’s interpreter—himself a Jew in disguise—who warned us that we were suspected of the crime of being Jewish,

—They saved our lives.

The owner of the pasta factory who found us a flower farm to hide in,

The baker who moonlighted in the pasta factory and told my father he would hide me and pretend I was his baptismal daughter,

The baker’s brother, the tailor, who took in my family, after the raid in the flower farm,

—They saved our lives.

The two young men who worked at the bakery and every night convoyed my parents to a safer house,

The army officer who warned the baker that my father was suspected of being Jewish,

The neighbor woman who warned my father of the SS trap at the bakery,

The baker’s brother—the tailor—who took in my family,

—They saved our lives.

The 15-year-old boy who warned the baker’s brother to whisk me away before the SS came to get me,

The baker’s sister-in-law, who used her kiosk to transmit our messages during the long months of separation,

The women who lent us their home for secret meetings when the longing got unbearable and my mother had to see me,

—They saved our lives.

The Athens Police who kept giving my parents Christian IDs.

All those who saved my parents—my parents who planned every one of my own rescues

—They saved our lives.

My brother’s rescuer who asked a widow if she would hide me,

The widow who pretended I was her dead husband’s niece from Farsala,

The widow’s sister and their old mother who cooked for me and kept me safe,

The widow’s brother and his communist wife, who kept my secret,

—They saved my life.

The widow’s other sister, who took me to her summer home, because a child must have fresh air,

The widow’s 9-year-old nephew who was told I was Jewish and kept my secret even from me,

—They saved my life.

Tell me, Grandmother, how many people did it take to

save your life? Have you kept count? Did you miss anybody?

I was very little. I lost count of how many people saved my life.

October 28, 1940

Pack the Suitcases, Karolla

It was barely light outside when Father called to Mother, as he ran out the door, Pack the suitcases, Karolla. This became the refrain that would punctuate our lives for the next four years, and precede many an evacuation and attempt to run away from danger. Father returned right after breakfast with a horse-drawn cab, into which our suitcases were loaded. We all piled in, and soon we were at the big central square, boarding the bus for Lamia. I carried a small bag and my doll. Father settled the luggage and us on