Robert (Reuven) Bonfil was born in 1937 in Karditsa, in the Thessaly region of Greece, the only son of David and Efthymia Allegra (Simcha).
In 1941, Italy occupied Thessaly. Robert fell ill, so his parents took him to Athens under a false identity in order to undergo surgery. At the time, Athens was under German occupation. On the way back to Karditsa, at the train station in Domokos, the Bonfil family saw Jewish forced laborers under the guard of German soldiers. One of the Jewish workers asked them for bread. Robert's father threw him a loaf of bread from the train window, but a German soldier beat the Jew to death with a rifle butt. A German officer then got into the wagon and asked: "Who threw the bread?" Robert was frozen with fear and his mother turned pale, but David replied in broken German: "No one threw bread from this wagon." The officer left.
At the end of 1943, the Germans arrived in Karditsa. Robert and his mother hid in a coal bunker under the house. His father was at the home of the town's bishop, Ezekiel, whom he taught French. When German soldiers arrived at the bishop's house, the bishop took off his cross pendant, hung it around David's neck, and introduced him to the Germans as his beadle.
Robert and his parents escaped in a donkey cart in torrential rain, crossed raging streams before arriving at the mountain village of Dafnospilia (today Velessi). When the Germans approached the village, members of the communist underground smuggled the family to Apidea.
In Apidea, the Greek Orthodox Goulas family took the family in, settling them in a room in their house and sharing their food with them. David taught the children of the village arithmetic, and his mother taught them to read and write in Greek.
When German planes bombed Apidea and German troops approached the village, Konstantinos and Vassiliki Goulas led Robert and his parents to the thicket of the forest up the mountain and hid them in a cabin. They stayed there with a goat and survived only with the help of the Goulas family. They gathered berries under the snow and drank the goat's milk.
When the Germans retreated, Robert and his parents returned to Karditsa, where they discovered that members of Efthymia's family had been deported to Auschwitz and murdered.
Robert married Eva, a Holocaust survivor from Germany, and immigrated with his family to Israel in 1968. He is Professor Emeritus of Medieval and Renaissance Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Robert and Eva have three children, eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Konstantinos and Vassiliki Goulas were posthumously recognized in 2018 as Righteous Among the Nations. Their children received the medals and certificates on their behalf at a ceremony in Karditsa, with the participation of Robert's extended family.
