We became so weak that we could not walk. If it had not been for the Witnesses from the Athens and Piraeus areas who provided us food from their depleted means, we would have died. He was again sentenced in 1947 and in 1949, when he was exiled to the notorious prison island of Makronisos. He was among 40 Jehovah's Witnesses in a prison housing 14,000. The soldiers, like members of the Inquisition, would interrogate each inmate from morning till evening.
Words fail to describe the tortures they inflicted.
During those terrible nights while we heard the cries of those being tortured, we would pray as a group. After surviving the hardships of Makronisos, Kokkinakis was arrested ten more times in the 1950s and 1960s for proselytism, one of hundreds of Jehovah's Witnesses to be imprisoned on such charges. The case that was eventually ruled on by the European Court in 1993 dated back to March 1986, when Kokkinakis and his wife Elissavet visited a home in Sitia on Crete, where they apparently tried to convert a woman whose husband was the cantor at a local Orthodox church. He informed the police who arrested the couple. They were charged with proselytism and sentenced in the criminal court of Lasithi to four months' imprisonment.