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Greek Resistance during World War II involved Greeks, both Christians and Jews, along with American, British, and Palestinian Jewish forces. This chapter, which examines the complexity of the Greek Resistance in terms of their effect on the Jewish communities in Greece, looks at the separate elements that participated in the Resistance and their respective attitudes toward the Jews in Greece, along with the role of the Greek Jews in the Resistance. The Greek Resistance to the Axis began when Ioannis Metaxas refused to surrender to Italian demands in the pre-dawn ultimatum of October 28, 1940. In saying “No!” to the Axis, the Greeks stood shoulder to shoulder with a beleaguered Great Britain, but were eventually overrun by Nazi forces in April 1941. The Greek Resistance was fought on a number of levels according to the locale. Crete, for example, opted for the so-called “Freedom or Death.” There was also resistance in the mountains, led by free Greeks, and in the cities, led by EAM (Ethniko Apeleftherotiko Metopo) and its fighting arm ELAS (Ethniko Laikos Apeleftherotikos Stratos).

The Jews in Greece had suffered economically since World War I, and the situation only got worse during World War II. Germany's occupation of Greece and Britain's interdiction of Palestine prevented Jewish refugees from a possible emigration to Western countries. Relief and rescue for the beleaguared Jews became a reality only in 1944 under the auspices of the War Refugee Board established by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Prior to that, only three entities had the ability to rescue or save Jews in occupied Greece: the Italian army, the Greek Resistance, and the British army. The first two were the most effective, while the British failed to exercise any initiative or action to assist the imperiled Jews.

In the fall of 1944, Germany began to retreat from Greece as World War II was coming to an end. Britain then took over, lending support to the forces fighting the EAM (Ethniko Apeleftherotiko Metopo) and its army ELAS (Ethniko Laikos Apeleftherotikos Stratos). The British forces' arrival on the mainland made it possible for Palestinian Jews to organize rescue in Greece itself. This chapter, which describes the efforts of Palestinian Jews to help survivors and organize them to immigrate to Palestine, also looks at the fate of Jews who survived the concentration and death camps, along with their various post-liberation struggles to return home to Greece or relocate in the West or Palestine. Finally, it examines the vicissitudes of Jews who took refuge in the mountains, and the fate of those who fought with the Greek Resistance, as part of the transitional period between the liberation of Greece and the formal end of World War II.

This book investigates the history of Jews and the Holocaust in Greece. It examines the emergence of modern Greece, its chronological and territorial complexities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the major political themes of Greek history. The book explores the story of the Jews in Greece from antiquity and how they adjusted to the realities in the Balkans after World War I as well their response to World War II. It also discusses the Jewish response to the occupation of separate areas of Greece by Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria; how the Jews structured their communities in diaspora; the deaths of Jews on their way to Treblinka and Auschwitz during the war; the Jewish contribution to the Greek Resistance against Axis Occupation; the potential and the actual assistance that was proffered to the Greek Jews during the Axis Occupation and its aftermath; and local problems which affected Greek Jewry during the last year of World War II and the beginning of the Greek civil war.