During the german occupation of Greece, 1940 to 1944, there was fierce resistance by the hotblooded youth and the not so young.The underground supplied arms and ammunition to the willing, even down to the tender age of sixteen. Every now and then a german soldier would be killed, and the retribution of the occupation army was to block off some main streets and pick up all the males up to the number of one hundred to be sent to concentration camps or to be immediatly executed. That was the ratio, for one german a hundred greeks.

My father worked all his life in a mill factory in Piraeus, a flour mill, starting as a clerk at eighteen and ending as sales manager. A fortunate post since we never starved during the great famine of those years where hundreds of thousands died from hunger. I must have been almost three years old, when one winter day my father decided to take me to work with him; there was a new baby in the house and it was a way of helping a bit my mother cope, or maybe my mother was ill from her periodic ulcer attacks. I loved riding on his shoulders and that is the way we started on the three or more mile walk to the train station, when we fell on a blockade.

There were greek security men helping the germans gather up the men. One of them saw my father with me on his shoulders and took pity on us. He quietly let us go away from a side street. My father took me back to the corner of our house and let me return alone, while he started on a run to catch the train, because he was already late. I was wearing a gray overcoat and a knitted pink hood, and I still remember the melting snowflakes on my cheek as I struggled to open the big iron gate.