“This year, the person we received to select the award is Princess Alice,” Washington OXI Day Foundation Andy Manatos said, regarding the Foundation’s Metropolitan Chrysostomos Award, the Daily Express reported.

The OXI Day Foundation recognizes bravery personifying Greek courage against the Germans, commemorating Oxi Day, October 28, 1940, when Greek leader Ioannis Metaxas said “OXI- No!” to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s request to move troops into Greece to solidify the Axis powers’ strategic position during World War II.

Subsequently, the Greeks fought the Nazis valiantly for months, delaying Adolf Hitler’s planned invasion of the Soviet Union, causing his armies to succumb to the harsh Russian winter conditions. The Greeks’ bravery, some contend, was the turning point of the war.

Princess Alice, recognized 46 years after her death, was married to Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and lived in Greece, across the street from Gestapo headquarters in Nazi-occupied Athens, the Express wrote.

Each day, Gestapo agents searched her home, but she cleverly kept an entire Jewish family hidden. “She conducted herself with extraordinary courage risking her life during the Holocaust to hide a Jewish family in Nazi occupied Athens. She showed extraordinary courage and bravery,” Manatos said, the Express reported.
Alice’s son, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, accepted the award posthumously for his mother.

Princess Alice, the Express wrote, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, returned to England in 1967 and lived at Buckingham Palace, where she died in 1969 at age 84.