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鈥淭his story was submitted to the people鈥檚 War site by Sam Bailey a volunteer from CSV on behalf of Mary Agrafiotou and has been added to the site with her permission. Mary fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions鈥�

The war in Greece broke out on the 28th of October 1940 when Italy invaded Greece from Albania. I was ten years of age living in Thessaloniki in northern Greece with my Father, Mother and sister.
At four o鈥檆lock on a Monday morning there was a loud knock on our door, two Greek officers had come to our house to take my Father away, who had been a Sergeant in the Greek Army during the First World War, then later a Major. He鈥檇 actually had a heart attack at ten o鈥檆lock the previous night but he had to get up and go with them to be part of the war effort and we lost sight of him for some time.
The following Friday at 11 o鈥檆lock in the morning we heard noises, banging and the sound of our window panes breaking. That was the Blitz. Bombs fell very near to where we lived. I was terrified I didn鈥檛 know what to do my Mother told me go under the table. It was Italian planes that had come disguised and they hadn鈥檛 been recognised and they started bombing Thessaloniki. A lot of people got killed whom didn鈥檛 have time to get to the shelters and after that the centre of the city had to be evacuated, we didn鈥檛 know where to go. Fortunately a kind Uncle was able to take us to stay with him in the outskirts of the city. We took what precious possession鈥檚 we could in the back of a cart. Another Aunt also joined us who had a shop but it had been destroyed and she had lost everything. That鈥檚 how the war started for us, a lot of our friends were killed in the blitz.
The daughter of a Jewish family Soulika living next door to us who was about 15 almost the age of my sister said to my mother 鈥淢rs Athena now that the War has started the Germans will come and we are going to be taken away and we won鈥檛 come back again鈥�. And that was how the Jewish community started thinking.
The War went on and the Greek Army advanced against the Italians forcing them back into Albania. Day after day we had lots of victories to celebrate during the night and during the day. The papers were writing a lot in our favour with cartoons of Mussolini and his son in law, Tiano, he was the ambassador in Greece who gave the ultimatum to the Prime Minister Mr john Metaxas for Mussolini's request to take a walk to Greece and enjoy his cup of coffee at a cafe in the central square in Athens- "Constitution Square" the following day the Greek Prime Minister John Metaxas answered "OXI" (ohi) "NO". After the war was over and to this day the 28th of October is named as our "Ohi Day" and has been celebrated as our national day holiday.
My father in the meantime had to come back to Thessaloniki because of his heart condition, he had had three heart attacks. Between going back and fourth to the Albanian front. When the German invasion began my father was in hospital.
On the 6th April 1941 the Germans attacked Greece and Yugoslavia and by that time 50,000 British and commonwealth troops arrived in Greece to assist the defending forces. While the German invasion was held back on the western Bulgarian front my Father left the city with the Greek army to go South to Athens to join the British forces on the front at mount Olympus. The Greek army stopped the Germans for a week on the Eastern side of the country and then the Germans broke through and came to Thessaloniki, I was there I saw them coming in and all the doors and all the windows were closed, hardly anyone went out then, but I did go out, I was very curious because I was a child. I saw them coming looking very cheeky and very arrogant. I saw a lady who was a neighbour of ours clapping her hands, she was the only one to applaud. After the war when the Germans went away she was killed, she was a traitor.
A month later the remaining uncaptured allied troops withdrew from Greece from Piraeus at Athens while the remaining troops held back the Germans at Mount Olympus to give them time to leave safely.
We didn't know whether my Father was alive or dead but thankfully he returned home on the 30th of May soon after the Greek and allied forces had withdrawn.He was asked to go with them and go to Egypt but he returned to Thassaloniki because of his family.
Soon after Thessaloniki was captured the Germans started the requisition of the most imposing buildings and houses of the most central and posh areas in the city throwing out the landlords and tenants. I remember on day passing by a requisitioned block with the german guards outside, I burst out crying while I was whispering a prayer. I just couldn't bear their existence in my country.
During the occupation of Greece the Germans occupied Thessaloniki, but Bulgaria was on their side and they always had their eyes on eastern Greece, as it was very close to them. For their allegiance to the Germans, the north eastern part of Greece went under Bulgarian occupation, they did an awful lot of atrocities, burnt houses and raped women, a lot of people had to come to Thessaloniki as refugees to escape what was happening.
During the beginning of the occupation I was taking french lessons and after visiting my french teacher and returning home I passed the central square of Thessaloniki, liberty square. I saw a lot of people in there being shouted at and beaten relentlessly by the Germans soldiers, I didn't know what was going on. Then I heard two people talking and discovered it was the Jewish men from the age of eighteen to forty five, this was in july when it was incredibly hot and they were kept in there all day under the burning sun. This was part of the process of segregation to start establishing the Jewish ghetto in the eastern part of the city where they were isolated and marked with yellow stars. Our neighbours were a Jewish family. Madame Perla, her daughter Margarette and two sons. We were very close and they cared for me as a child playing games together and making me toys. The two sons were asked if they wanted to go to the mountains to join the resistance but they refused to go because they wanted to stay with their sister and their elderly parents. The Jewish community were generally very wealthy, the economy of Thesaloniki was in their hands. Its an old story why, Thessaloniki was liberated from the Turks on 26th of October 1912 by the Greek Army and the majority of the population was Jewish, it was a multi cultural city, Bulgarians, Turks, Yugoslavians and Greeks but it was the Jewish community who established and dominated a lot of the trade in the city.
In the spring of 1942 the Jewish population was forced to leave Greece to go to the concentration camps. I saw them being taken away and being treated like cattle, thats how they were leaving the city, taken to the railway station and put on these dreadful wagons, the one that were used for animals we didn't see any of our friends coming back. We had a very strong Jewish community in Thessaloniki. 50,000 Jews were there and they were all taken to Auswitsch and other camps, we had friends who we missed a lot, and only 1800 came back.
But it was not just the jewish community who suffered atrocities and persecution from the Germans many other Greeks also lost their lives. There's a village very close to Thessaloniki below the mountains called Hortiates. One german was killed in a confrontation there and the following morning at dawn the Germans went to the village and asked for all the men to go to the village square from the age of 15 upwards. They were all shot dead by machine gun and they didn't stop there, they went to every house and asked the women to heat their ovens and make fires in their yards, when they were all heated they forced the children into them and burnt them and then the women and elderly people. Finally they burnt the village to the ground and this was not the only one many more villages and Greeks had similar fates. My father who was a lawyer unfortunately had clients in that village, none had escaped and we learnt of there deaths from their relatives in a neighbouring village. Another village Asvestohorion, close by, something similar happened there on Christmas day. The Germans summoned again all the men into the square and shot them. One of them was a client of my Fathers, a pharmacist who was a close friend and regular visitor to our house.He was very unfortunate he had got married on Christmas eve and he was killed on Christmas day. His sister Hiranya came to my Fathers office, at our house, in mourning clothes crying for the loss of her brother.
There was a lot of death around us, one morning when i opened the front door of the house to go to school I saw a dead man in his pyjamas and slippers right in front of our door.I was horrified trying to call my mother without the words coming out of my mouth, then i left for school without saying a word to anybody i was numbed and in full horror.
Another client of ours who was living in a Village very far from Thessaloniki was captured and taken to a concentration camp in Thessaloniki, Pavlos Melas was the name of the camp, in the west of the city and it was me at my twelve years of age who took food to him.I saw very young girls and boys inside the camp as prisoners because they must have belonged to the resistance and they were singing and I was surprised to see them in such good spirits though they knew they were either going to be taken outside the camp to be killed or taken to Germany as labourers and as they were saying never come back, but they were still singing. One day when i handed the bag with the food and the name of the prisoner to the German guard I was told that the previous morning with one hundred and seven other men he was taken outside the camp and the man was killed.I was in tears on my way home trying to think of what words to use to tell my parents of his murder and I was also thinking of his daughter Athena who was my age and friend, and the time we had spent playing together one summer vacation in their house in their Village. His only crime was that in being the head of the village committee he had refused to give up the names of those involved in the greek resistance to the Germans.
Another day on leaving school and going by the Cathedral of Saint Gregorios Palamas and close to a cafe which only men went to.I saw a military vehicle stop and soldiers blocked the cafe and captured every man that was in there I saw their ashen faces and some trying to escape in vein. They were put onto the vehicle as the soldiers beat and pushed them with their guns.
On a different day i saw a large military truck carrying a load of bread and a boy about my age at the time, twelve , jump onto the back of the vehicle and start throwing loafs onto the street and people were running after the truck and picking them up. People starved during the war there wasn't enough food and I saw people falling in the street to get the food in the bitter cold. A lot of people died of cold and hunger during the War. One time I went into a neighbours house and found them dead and their bodies distended.
One day my sister Elpida , who was five years older than me, asked me to keep my afternoon sandwich and she and I left without telling our Mother where we were going, we went to the Hospital "Kentrikon" quite a way from our house. There we climbed up on to a small hillock at the backside of the hospital and looking down to the yard. I saw a lot of British and Yugoslavian war prisoners as I was told later. We threw our sandwiches and ran away. We did that every day, secretly, until one day when we reached our spot and looking down to the yard we saw no one was there. They must have been taken away. God knows where! We were very sad.
When the war was over it became apparent to me that my Father had been in the resistance, not the communist one but on the British side. He spoke very good English because he had studied law in the United states. When the first World War broke out in 1912 during the Greek Turkish War he came back as a volunteer then to serve the country and stayed in Greece afterwards and his english was so good he had been used then.I overheard him after the war saying that he had helped the British officers who came to Greece to organize sabotage and helped them to escape and get away and i remember once my mother saying that she understood and was quite aware that sometimes at night the door of the house was left unlocked and someone had crept in during the night for a couple of hours to have rest and then go but she hadn't said anything to him, she didn't want to embarrass him.I overheard them laughing about it.
One evening during the war it was late and we were sitting around the table just finishing our supper when we heard a bang at the door. Someone had to go and answer the door and it was me. I opened the door and I saw in front of me a big German Gustappo officer and a greek policeman.I was terrified. They said "wheres your Father?" "well in the house" i said and we walked in to the house. I saw my Father,you know when your young,a child,you think your father is a god. and i saw my Fathers face turn pale.He must have thought that the German had come to arrest him. Anyway what happened the German looked around, all the windows had been covered with blankets and things like that for the black out and the greek policeman turned around and said "you have a light somewhere in your house that can be seen from the road Egnatia" to my Fathers relief. We didn't have electricity all the time then as it would be cut off a lot so we used oil lamps and my mother had a very little lamp in the kitchen which could be seen from the road through a small side window. Thankfully we didn't have anyone else at home at that time and they left, we were very lucky. I can remember during the occupation every body was trembling. They were marvelous people and during the war we were just a family otherwise we wouldn't have won the war if we had been divided. My Father was also a great admirer of winston churchill he loved him and after the war he had a big picture of him hanging on the wall of his office and he said to me once "Mary, look at this man you ought to be grateful to him because if that man had not been there god know what we would have happened to us"
I remember in June 1941 he came home saying "thank god" and i asked what had happened and he explained that Russia had come into the war and he said"that man in england wont be on his own". He must have meant churchill and then the Americans joined in December.
In 1945 when you had the elections here(U.K.) and churchill was voted out of office I remember my Father coming back home furious .He said "this ungrateful nation".I now have two pictures of Winston Churchill in my lounge.
That is why I loved to learn english and why i wanted to come to this country to live here and am so grateful and so pleased that i am here.Im British and Im a member of the conservative party. I am the chairman my local women's branch.
The Germans left Greece and Thessaloniki on the 30th of October 1944 followed by a lot of communist propaganda and the civil war.
Churchill came to greece on Christmas day 1944 when we had the civil war to Athens to establish the democracy and as I've heard now the government, the house of commons was against him coming to Greece but he didn't take any notice and came anyway. Thank god for that!

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