Argyris Sfountouris is a survivor of the massacre of the village of Distomo. On June 10, 1944, a company of the I / 7 Battalion of the 4th SS Police Division was ordered to “cleanse” the partisan area. They brutally massacred 218 villagers without warning and regardless of age or gender.

Argyris Sfountouris, who was four years old at the time, survived with his sisters Shryssoula (born in 1932), Astero (1934), and Kondylia (born in 1938), as well as his maternal grandparents Panagiotis and Kondylia Tzatha.

Like many other survivors from the village, they found shelter in small houses and shepherds’ huts in the area around Distomo on the Gulf of Corinth. 34 members of the Sfountouris family were killed by the Germans on this day.

The massacre fundamentally changed Argyris Sfountouris’s life. After the war, the eight-year-old was sent to a children’s village in Switzerland with other Greek war orphans.

In the story of his life, he speaks about his memories of the massacre and connects them to the findings from his lifelong independent research about the occurrences. For some 20 years, he has worked as a mediator between Greece and Germany to draw attention in both countries to the atrocities of the German troops in occupied Greece.