On Sunday 7 August, the Jewish Holocaust Centre, Return to Anatolia and Child Survivors of the Holocaust presented A Light in the Darkness – the Jewish and Hellenic experience of rescue.
Dr Panagiotis Diamadis, vice-president, Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, gave his talk to the crowd on “The role of the Greek underworld, the Greek Orthodox Church and other Hellenes in the rescue of Polish Romanian and Greek Jews”. Over 150 people listened to Dr Diamadis talk about the Archbishop of Athens and the Metropolitan of Zakynthos, who refused to surrender Jews to the Nazis, and to Greek smugglers hired by Jewish agencies, led by William R Perl, who smuggled Jewish refugees from Romania to Britain and then to Palestine.
Also in attendance were: Pauline Rockman, OAM, president, Jewish Holocaust Centre; Sofia Kotanidis, president, Return to Anatolia; Warren Fineberg, executive director, Jewish Holocaust Centre, Eleni Lianidou, Consul-General of Greece; and Nadav Prawer, Israeli embassy.
