Time's Betrayal by David Adams Cleveland

Author:David Adams Cleveland [Cleveland, David Adams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-944388-15-7
Publisher: Fomite

* * *

Nestor had been true to his word. Two days after my father escaped from occupied Greece, into the arms of his Calypso in the Guilford rehabilitation hospital, one of Nestor’s men accompanied Joanna on her trip north by way of Patras to Athens and the home of her uncle, Spiros, her father’s brother. She had escaped the massacre of her family for another impending massacre in the making. Her uncle was Jewish, part of an old Athenian Jewish community, the Romaniote, with roots in Greece going back thousands of years. By the spring of 1944, the Jews of Thessalonica had already been deported and gassed at Auschwitz and Treblinka. The SS had turned their attention to the Jews of Athens. When Joanna slipped in through the back door of her uncle’s home, she found the family in hiding, terrified, barely able to get enough food. Distraught as they were to learn of the fate of Joanna’s parents and sister, they were preoccupied with their own survival. They knew in detail about the fate of Thessalonica’s Jews. Joanna was a new face on their street, without a proper identity card, and another mouth to feed. Spiro’s devoted wife, Anna, was a tough and resourceful Greek woman of peasant stock; she found a hiding place for Joanna in an upstairs room. Joanna was warned not to put a foot outside the house. Anna’s family was from a small village in northern Greece, near the border with Albania. Her father was a miller and prominent landowner, and her marriage to Spiros, an esteemed Athenian doctor—even if a Jew—had been considered a coup among the people in her home village. As the SS circled ever closer to the Jews of Athens, Anna made the decision to try to escape with her daughter and Joanna to her father’s village, where they thought they would be safe, where the Communist Resistance was strong. Spiros would stay behind and tend to his many patients, who were suffering horribly from malnutrition and lack of the most basic medicines. Spiros was close to the chief rabbi of Athens, Elias Barzilai, who tipped him off about the closing net: the SS had come to him and demanded the records of Athens’s Romaniote community. Instead of turning over the records, Barzilai burned them and escaped Athens to the Communist Resistance. A day later, Spiros arranged for Anna, his daughter, Olga, and Joanna, renamed Nausicaa, to leave the city and make their way to Anna’s village.

As Joanna put it to us, “From one burning pot into another fire.” For a time, after months of being hunted by the Wehrmacht near Pylos and hiding from the hungry eyes of the SS in Athens, Joanna found life in the village of Babouri, high in the Mourgana Mountains, to be idyllic. She was reminded of the mountains north of Pylos, but these mountains were more lush and green, and there was food and shelter in the mill of Anna’s father, Vasilo. Vasilo was proud to provide sanctuary for his daughter and the two adolescent girls.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.