Arguing the case about the whole truth

Vetta Mioni, a Greek Jew whose father perished at Auschwitz, explains why she wants to attend the hearing in the appeals court

By Takis Kambylis - Kathimerini

The new court hearing centering on Costas Plevris’s book “The Jews and the Whole Truth” at the Appeals Court on Alexandras Avenue will be different from September’s that was adjourned. The author will have his son, Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS) deputy Athanasios Plevris, by his side. Opposing them will be Greek Jews who have stepped out of the shadows.

Things have changed since the first trial. The Central Jewish Council of Greece (KIS) had tried to keep the trial low profile. That has been a regular tactic in recent years, and it is one that has raised doubts about some of KIS’s policies.

Facing the defendants, Plevris, Dimitrios Zafeioropoulos, Theodoros Hatzigiorgos and Michail Georgilas, will be people who survived what Plevris senior describes as a misfortune due to Nazi inefficiency, the Holocaust.

KIS doesn’t know who they are or how many there will be. One who will certainly be among them is Vetta Mioni. A war child, she had the extraordinary experience of seeing on the list of people invited to her wedding many years later the name of the person who informed on her father and sent him to Auschwitz.

Her father perished there, in the place which Plevris comments in his book “is rightly maintained in good condition,” to which the president of the judges at the first trial, Efrosyni Tselehovitou remarked, “Why don’t they just build new ones?”

Mioni doesn’t want to speak at the trial. She doesn’t want be treated as a victim. But she wants to be there, as a face against anti-Semitic hysteria, and as a part of history, because anti-Semitism has a history on this continent. Many observers believe it is coming back, in a different form. That comes out when new acquaintances say to Mioni: “Really? Are you Jewish? You don’t look it.” “And I think,” said Mioni, “first, that they’re saying that as a compliment, and second, what do they think Jews are like?’