Chapter One

The battle had begun quicker than I expected, and the chaos was a surprise. We knew our lives might be at an end as soon as haphazard cannon shots fired by members of the Andartes—Greek Communist guerilla fighters—began to rain down near our home in the early morning's darkness on September 22, 1944.

Though I was only eleven years old, I was well aware that others, certainly many more worthy, wealthy, and able than us, had not made it. I also knew that whether we would survive this dark day was no sure thing. In fact, the odds were heavily against us.

When a shell, luckily a dud, crashed through our neighbors' home and slammed into its kitchen, Mother grabbed my younger brother Stathi.

"We are leaving," Father said and directed the four of us through a maze of narrow streets to my uncle's home several blocks away.

There, along with a number of other traumatized, war-weary people, we huddled in a storage room, temporarily safe from the random and sloppily aimed explosions.

From that bunker, we trusted that our side—the Royalists and their "Protective Forces"—was winning, that the invaders would not take our town, and that we would be able to continue our lives in the same rhythms that we had always lived them. But these notions were promptly dashed when we saw a soldier, one of ours and dressed in his street clothes, walking away from the fight. Father asked him how we were doing and if Gargaliani had been able to defend itself against the Communist attack. The man scoffed at us and declared that the battle had ended