Rescue of the Jews of Zakynthos

During the Holocaust in Greece, the entire community of Jews of Zakynthos, numbering 275 people, was not deported after Mayor Loukas Karrer and Bishop Chrysostomos (1890–1958) refused Nazi orders to turn in a list of the town's Jewish community for deportation to the death camps.

Instead they secretly hid the town's Jews in various rural villages and turned in a list that included only their own two names.

[1] Statues of the Bishop and the Mayor commemorate their heroism on the site of the town's historic synagogue, destroyed in the earthquake of 1953.

[2] Unlike the Jewish communities in larger population centers, such as Salonika, Athens, and Corfu, the German round-up orders on Zakynthos were informal, rather than by means of public decrees.

The military governor of Zakynthos, Alfred Lüth, demanded that Karrer provide a list of the Jews of the island under pain of death.