January 24, 1954
TELEPHONE SERVICE: The relevant service in the Transport Undersecretariat has drafted a plan providing for telephone links between villages and the capital of the prefecture to which they belong. The five-year program includes all villages which had telephone services before the war and which were destroyed during the occupation and the war against the outlaws. During this, the first year of the program, telephone services will be restored to 620 villages which the the Hellenic Telecommunications Organization (OTE), in cooperation with the Transport Undersecretariat, has included in its budget for the current year. GREEK JEWS’ PROPERTY: Rhodes, 23 – At 2 p.m. today a closed safe was found in the offices of the local administration archives. In the safe, which had been closed since the Italian occupation, a large box containing jewels worth billions of drachmas was found. (…) It is believed that the jewels belong to the 3,000 Jewish residents of the island who were taken to Germany. The jewels were probably collected by two German officers, by order of Himmler and Goering, and had been left behind when the Germans abandoned the island.
