In 1942, in the middle of the German occupation of Greece, Isaac Eliezer was only 21 years old, when his father Victor, a director in the Jewish Community of Athens, informed of the imminent arrival of the Germans in the capital and refused to hand over the records that existed in the Community to them. , took his wife Hanoula and their seven children and they left together for Agrinio, where his sister Kari lived who was married to Nissim Mionis.

In less than a year, however, in 1943, the Eliezer family, which had settled in 1933 in Athens from Corfu before finally finding themselves in Agrinio, was faced with the threat of restrictive measures for the Jews. A threat that was to mark the beginning of the end for the most heinous crime in human history, the Holocaust.

As, however, Victor’s grandson (namesake) and Isaac Eliezer’s son tells APE-MPE, on the occasion of today’s Memorial Day for the victims of the Holocaust, for good luck for the Eliezers, the family of Takis Hatzopoulos, with whom they were close ties and which had a printing office in Agrinio, with the help of the resistance organization EAM, printed them fake IDs with the last name Lazaridis. After that, as explained by Victor Eliezer, secretary general of the Central Jewish Council of Greece, the whole family was moved to Patras, where under their new name they rented a house, in which they remained hidden until the liberation.

Isaac Eliezer, who was born in Arta on 21/4/1921 and was the second child of Viktor and Hanula Eliezer, along with his older brother Lazarus, worked as spinners in order to provide the family with a living while at the same time joining to the EAM providing information on the movements of the German troops in Etoloakarnania.

On January 2, 1944, Isaac Eliezer was arrested by the Germans in Messolonghi, after the betrayal of his girlfriend. He was arrested, however, not as a Jew but with the fake identity that bore the name Spyros Lazaridis. He was transferred to the prisons of Agrinio and from that moment a tangle of circumstances begins to unfold, which led to his rescue by the heroine of the Resistance Maria Dimadi. “This is a rare case of the rescue of a Greek Jew, precisely because he was a Jew” his son Victor tells APE-MBE, pointing out that “in this case, his rescue was due to the fact that some of his friends informed Maria Dimadi that he is a Jew and that if the Germans discover him he will be deported to Auschwitz”.

Takis Hatzopoulos often visited Isaac Eliezer in prison, where he was in the same cell as Abraham Anastasiadis, Panos Soulos, Christos Salakos and Maria Hajara, to give him cigarettes and above all to make sure he was alive.

At the same time, Maria Dimadi, an executive of the National Resistance and a member of the EAM organization (she had set up “Center 3”, the information network of the EAM), was working in the German Administration as a secretary and translator of the German guard Colonel Torman, of the prison governor. Takis Hatzopoulos rushed to it, on March 25, 1944, when he was informed that the Jews of all Greece – except Macedonia and Thrace, where the deportations had already started in 1943 – began to be arrested. Together with his brother Theofanis, they met the Dimadis and informed her that the prisoner Spyros Lazaridis is a Jew asking her to intercede with the German guard so that he is released before it is revealed that he is a Jew and he is deported to Auschwitz together with his family who resided in Patras.

“Maria Dimadi eliminated all the incriminating evidence from my father’s file and convinced the German guard that Spyros Lazaridis is innocent and should be released, despite the fact that in the meantime my father had suffered horrible torture in order to hand over his comrades” Victor Eliezer narrates. The horror of torture is described by Isaac Eliezer himself in his story included in the book “Maria Dimadi – Heroine of the National Resistance” by Philip Geladopoulos: “She suffered horrible torture. They beat me with clubs until I was unconscious. Then with electric shocks, in my legs, channeling of continuous and intermittent current until complete exhaustion, to confess known fighters of the rebel groups. My body was all sores from the wood and the scab.”

With the intervention of Maria Dimadi, on April 8, 1944, Isaac Eliezer was released from prison and returned by train to Patras, where his family lived. Just one day later, on April 9, EAM rebels blow up a train full of German soldiers and munitions, provoking the anger of the Germans, who on April 14, 1944, execute 120 of Isaac Eliezer’s fellow prisoners in retaliation. He was saved thanks to the timely intervention of Maria Dimadi, who was born on 07/05/1907 and was executed by the Greek security forces who were collaborating with the Nazis, on 31/08/1944, just 14 days before the withdrawal of the Germans from Agrinio. “According to all the testimonies recorded in the relevant literature, Maria Dimadi was devoted to the service of her country, fighting for its liberation from the Nazis,” emphasizes Victor Eliezer, expressing his gratitude for what this brave woman did for the salvation of his father.

Returning to Patras, Isaac Eliezer was reunited with his family, who had rented a house near the temple of Pantokrator under the false identity of Lazaridis. The vicar of the church Fr. Nikolaos Galatis, as well as the families of the neighborhood, Dimitrios Koukos, Polyvios Panoutsopoulos and General Georgios Dre knew that the Lazaridis family was the Jewish Eliezer family and for this reason they made sure to include them in all Christian ceremonies and to observe Christian morals and customs, so as not to be targeted by the Germans.

Isaac Eliezer, who passed away in 2011, did not forget his comrades after the war and was always present, every year, at the memorial services held in Agrinio for the 120 of his comrades who were executed in retaliation of the action of the EAM. “He didn’t miss any memorial service. There he met the relatives of his comrades but also the people of Agrini, whom he loved and who loved him” his son tells APE-MBE and remembers that he always heard from the various events about what had happened in the war, however the personal rescue stories of both his father and mother were slow to unfold. “Around the mid-80s, they started talking publicly about exactly what they experienced during the Occupation,” says Mr. Eliezer.

A due value and a random (electronic) coincidence

Victor Eliezer, together with his brother Mario and their mother Kaden, wanted to pay Maria Dimadi a due honor and submitted an application to the Yad Vashem Foundation of Israel, for the award of the title “Righteous Among the Nations”. A request that, however, was not satisfied since the testimony of the rescuer was missing, in this case the Resistance fighter who so unjustly passed away just a few days before Agrinio was liberated.

In their application they wrote: “So we have the feeling, but also the certainty from the result, that Maria Dimadi could not remain indifferent to the possible death of a person because he was born Jewish. For this reason she acted promptly and effectively, without any reward, and risking her own life, to eliminate all incriminating evidence from the file of “Spyros Lazaridis”, whose real name was Isaac Eliezer, saving him from certain death”.

Isaac Eliezer while he was alive tried to find descendants of Maria Dimadi, however this was not possible. It was finally a fortuitous “electronic” coincidence, as Victor Eliezer explains, that led him, his mother and brother to meet the granddaughters of Maria Dimadi, Sofia-Maria and Georgianna Moraitou.

“A friend on Facebook, Giorgos Kilaiditis, on 3/10/2016 asked me if I am related to a certain Isaac Eliezer, who was released by Maria Dimadi from the German prisons of Agrinio. So I told him it was about my father. Kilaiditis’s close friend, Deborah Boukogianni, who had read this story, is a first cousin of Maria Dimadi’s grandchildren, so I met Sofia-Maria and Georgiana Moraitou for the first time on Friday 10/14/16 in Athens, while the meeting of our families took place on 5/11/16 outside the synagogue in Athens and in front of the monument of the Righteous Among the Nations” recalls Mr. Eliezer with emotion, explaining that Maria Dimadi had a daughter, Chariklia (Haris), who then he was already of advanced age.

He chooses as an epilogue to his interview with APE-MPE about this special story of his father’s rescue by Maria Dimadi, a phrase of Isaac Eliezer himself, that “in a darkness we must definitely look to find the light” but also a reminder that “the greatest enemy of memory is ignorance and when ignorance prevails, forgetfulness very easily invades”…