Testimony - Iossif VENTOURAS (GREECE)
Joseph (Sifis) Ventouras is perhaps the only Jew born in Chania today. His family – his parents Raphael and Bianca, and his older sister – lived outside the Jewish quarter, in the area of Kum Kapi. The Ventouras were listed on the first list requested from the rabbi by the occupation administration in 1941, but not on the updated second list of 1943.
The Ventura family was a well-to-do family in Chania. Rafael, Joseph's father, was a merchant, following the family tradition.
His father and his uncles had a chain of stores, Frere Ventoura, in Chania, Thessaloniki, Cairo, Manchester. This was a family with lively relationships outside the island and outside Greece.
Bianca, Joseph's mother, was from the Konstantini family. Her father was also a merchant in Chania and they also had Italian citizenship and a European-oriented education. Bianca was a graduate of the French School of Nuns in Chania and a qualified pianist.
The connections of this family, their social networks in the city, seem to have been the reason why they were spared the displacement of the Jewish community of Crete. Raphael Ventouras was warned, in the midst of the Occupation, by a Christian friend of his to leave the island and seek refuge in mainland Greece.
There, of course, things were just as difficult. The family, after leaving Crete, had to move to different places to find hiding places. Joseph, after all, had a story that today counts him among the "hidden children of the Occupation." Hand in hand with Athena Varvataki, the family's housekeeper, Joseph separated from his parents and sister and stayed with Athena in the house of the friendly Petrochilos family, in Ekali (near Athens), for the rest of the time until the Liberation.
Short biography of Mr Iossif VENTOURAS
Joseph (Sifis) Ventouras is perhaps the only Jew born in Chania today. His family – his parents Raphael and Bianca, and his older sister – lived outside the Jewish quarter, in the area of Kum Kapi. The Ventouras were listed on the first list requested from the rabbi by the occupation administration in 1941, but not on the updated second list of 1943.
The Ventura family was a well-to-do family in Chania. Rafael, Joseph's father, was a merchant, following the family tradition.
His father and his uncles had a chain of stores, Frere Ventoura, in Chania, Thessaloniki, Cairo, Manchester. This was a family with lively relationships outside the island and outside Greece.
Bianca, Joseph's mother, was from the Konstantini family. Her father was also a merchant in Chania and they also had Italian citizenship and a European-oriented education. Bianca was a graduate of the French School of Nuns in Chania and a qualified pianist.
The connections of this family, their social networks in the city, seem to have been the reason why they were spared the displacement of the Jewish community of Crete. Raphael Ventouras was warned, in the midst of the Occupation, by a Christian friend of his to leave the island and seek refuge in mainland Greece.
There, of course, things were just as difficult. The family, after leaving Crete, had to move to different places to find hiding places. Joseph, after all, had a story that today counts him among the "hidden children of the Occupation." Hand in hand with Athena Varvataki, the family's housekeeper, Joseph separated from his parents and sister and stayed with Athena in the house of the friendly Petrochilos family, in Ekali (near Athens), for the rest of the time until the Liberation.