Jewish Resistance in Wartime Greece (review)

Ninety percent of Greece's prewar Jewish population of 75,000 to 80,000 perished in the Nazi Holocaust. Steven Bowman argues in his recent monograph that public memory of Greek Jews as victims has overshadowed the memory of Greek Jewish armed resistance in occupied Greece. The history of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and of partisan resistance in Eastern Europe has received wide attention but, as Bowman states, the story of the Greek Jewish armed resistance is "virtually unknown" (p. xiii). His purpose is "to shed light on the fate of one Jewry" in a country that welcomed Jews into the fight against the Axis invasion and occupation (p. xvii). This careful and precise study achieves that goal and makes a valuable contribution to the history of the wartime Greek resistance and to genocide studies more generally.

The book is based on broad, in-depth research in private and public Israeli, Greek, British, Italian, and American archives, as well as on extensive participant interviews. Bowman's book is a distinguished contribution to the growing body of recent scholarship on wartime Greece. John Iatrides refers to the work in his foreword as "history from the bottom up" (p. vii)—an examination of the history of the Jewish resistance through the lives of ordinary individual participants. Bowman estimates that 1,000 Greek Jews served in the armed resistance. He has cross-checked oral and written records to verify their identities and to authenticate their experiences in the resistance. Bowman tells their story by weaving biographical profiles of participants into the broader historical context of the wartime period in Greece.

Chapters One through Five focus on armed resistance in the mountains. Bowman estimates that 13,000 Greek Jews served in the Greek armed forces during the 1940–1941 war with Italy. For those veterans who later joined the armed resistance, the conflict provided valuable experience in the use of weapons, munitions, and logistics. The decision to fight was shaped by the general conditions of the times, and the individual's specific situation, beliefs, and abilities. Ideology and contingency were important in this process, but survival was the common critical motive.

Yitzhak Mosheh (Issac Moissis) had been an active antifascist in prewar Salonika. On his long trek home from the Albanian front in 1941, he found his return blocked by German units. Mosheh decided to take his chances in the mountains. He was among the first to take up armed resistance against the Axis before resistance was formally organized in 1942. Later, he joined ELAS (Popular Army of Greek Liberation—the armed partisan army of EAM, the National Liberation Front) and eventually became Kapetan ( partisan leader) "Kitsos"—the political commander of an ELAS company. In 1943 Moshe Bourlas, a prewar Communist Party activist, was warned by a Greek Christian friend who worked for the police of the imminent deportation of Salonikan Jews. Like Mosheh, Bourlas fled to the mountains and joined ELAS. In 1942, Ido Shimshi was caught in a Nazi forced labor draft and condemned to slave labor and certain death. He escaped, but was recaptured and sent back to slave labor in a chromium mine. He escaped again in 1943, the day before the Nazis deported the Jews of his work force. This time he fled to the mountains, arriving in a village where an ELAS unit happened to be forming. Since he could type, Shimshi was made secretary of the new unit, and he gradually rose through the ranks to become Kapetan "Makkabaios." Kapetanissa "Sarika," Sara Yehoshua, was a niece of the Greek Jewish national hero of the Italian war, Col. Mordechai Frizis. Forced to flee her home in Evvoia under threat of deportation, Yehoshua joined the resistance while still a teenager and ended the war as commander of an armed ELAS women's unit.

Bowman has identified Greek Jews from every region of the country who participated in the armed resistance. With few exceptions, the Greek Jews joined EAM/ELAS rather...