by Jill Huber
NJJN Bureau Chief/Monmouth

May 26, 2009

More than 67,000 Greek Jews were among the six million who perished during the Holocaust, but theirs remains an “under-told story,” according to Isaac Dostis, actor, filmmaker, author, and educator.

“Many don’t think of Greece or the Balkans as part of Europe,” Dostis told NJ Jewish News before addressing an audience at Monmouth Museum in Lincroft on May 11. “The Greek war statistics aren’t clear, and the Greek-Jewish community doesn’t have a lot of resources.”

Dostis, who was raised in New York City, lost 52 members of his extended Greek-Jewish family in the Shoa; most were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. But 16 were saved by Christian Greeks, three of whom have been named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.

Dostis and his wife, Diana Sunrise Dostis, use Act 1 Presentations, their theater group, to promote themes of hope and moral courage. They also produce and narrate films that focus on the plight of Greek Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis, conduct related workshops and lectures at schools and other venues in the greater New Jersey area, and use their projects as learning tools to foster nonviolence and tolerance.

“It’s our life’s work,” Dostis said. “Before the Nazi occupation in 1941, there were 80,000 Jews in Greece, and 70,000 were taken. But many were saved by the rescuers, those with moral courage, and we owe them recognition and gratitude. They saved countless lives by providing safe houses, disguises, and false papers, but they always say they didn’t do enough.”

‘That was that’

Greek families hid some of his relatives in storerooms. Another was pulled from a march headed toward the deportation trains by a policeman who recalled the relative from childhood. In another instance, a police sergeant tossed his uncle in jail to protect him from the roundups.

Help was provided by ordinary citizens, partisans, lawyers, and doctors, including Dr. Costas Nikolaou, who was proclaimed Righteous Among the Nations for helping Olympic champion Isaac Cohen, Dostis’ uncle.

The courage of the rescuers is a common theme in many Dostis projects, as a way to ensure the wartime sacrifices of Greek Jews — and Christians — become more widely known, he said.

Dostis is a Romaniote Jew (Greek-speaking Jews with roots in the Byzantine Empire); they were protected by the Greek government until the Nazi invasion in 1941, when more than 80 percent of the country’s Jews, including the Romaniotes, were deported to Auschwitz or simply disappeared.

Dostis’ parents, Sam and Molly, moved to the United States before the war, but family members in Greece saved photographs and documents that helped Dostis trace his relatives during the 1980s. He also learned of their fates from what surviving members said — or didn’t say.

“I combed the Greek archives, and I began counting family members who were supposed to be in or near Corfu and Athens,” Dostis told NJJN. “And they weren’t there. It was clear what happened. There were also whispers: ‘They died in the war,’ and that was that.”

Dostis learned some of the family was in hiding by 1943, including Cohen, who was an Olympian athlete during the 1920s and 1930s. As Cohen and his family made their way to Palestine with the help of non-Jewish rescuers, he sold or gave away his 10 gold medals; each of the “gift medals” went to someone who had helped the family, Dostis said. Several years ago, he wrote the story as a children’s book, Ten Gold Medals: Glory or Freedom.

Dostis, who now splits his time between West Long Branch and Ioannina — where 2,000 Greek Jews were deported in 1944 — did attempt to find out about his family as a child.

“I saw photos of relatives on my mother’s bureau and I asked about them,” he said. “She said, ‘They were killed during war. Don’t talk about it.’ Maybe she didn’t know what really happened. Or maybe she just didn’t want to tell the truth to a nine-year-old boy.”

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