Mordechai Frizis

Origins and early life

Mordechai Frizis was born at Chalcis on the island of Euboea on 1 January 1893, one of twelve children of Jacob and Iopi Frizis, a Romaniote Jewish family — the Greek-speaking Jews who had lived in Greece since antiquity, long before the Sephardim came from Spain — and he remained a practising Jew all his life, keeping the fasts even on campaign.

Work and career

He volunteered in 1916, fought in the Balkan wars, in the First World War and in the Asia Minor campaign of 1919-1922, where he was taken prisoner by the Turks, and rose through the ranks to colonel. When Italy invaded Greece from Albania on 28 October 1940 he commanded a detachment on the Kalamas river; on 19 November, at Hani Delvinaki, his men captured a large body of Italian troops of the Ferrara division, the first substantial prisoners of the war, and the Greek press made him a national figure overnight.

On 5 December 1940, at Premeti in Albania, leading his men forward on horseback under fire because a horse was the only way to be seen and followed on that ground, he was hit by a shell burst and died; he was the first senior Greek officer killed in the war, and the Greek state made him a symbol of the resistance that stopped Mussolini's army. This fiche states plainly what followed for his people: in 1943-1944 some 87 percent of Greek Jewry was deported and murdered, including members of his own family; his widow and children survived in hiding.

Greece has honoured him with statues at Chalcis and Athens and with a street bearing his name, and the Israeli and Greek armies both cite him. His remains were reburied in the Jewish cemetery of Athens in 1946.