Video editor makes a doc to learn Greek Holocaust history
TORONTO — As he chatted with friends in a coffee shop on the
Danforth one day in 1999, George Gedeon, a Toronto news video
editor of Christian Greek descent, suddenly realized that his
knowledge of a troubling facet of modern Greek history was
abysmally lacking. When a friend mentioned that 62,000 Jews in
Nazi-occupied Greece were murdered during the Holocaust, he was
not only dumbfounded but embarrassed by his ignorance. “I didn’t
know that,” he said, adding that his schoolteachers never
bothered to mention the Holocaust in their Greek history
lessons. Eager to educate himself, Gedeon, now 63, contacted the
Jewish community in Thessaloniki, where 46,000 Jews were rounded
up and deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp
between March and August 1943. “That was the beginning of my
introduction to Greek Jews,” said Gedeon, who freely admits he
was exposed to anti-Jewish stereotypes and tropes at home during
his youth. In 2000, video camera in