My name is Marios Sousis. I was born in Athens on February 9, 1938. I had a good childhood. My father was quite wealthy. I had four siblings. I was the youngest.
We sometimes went on trips to around the Acropolis. I used to hug the statues of gods in the Theatre of Dionysus below the Acropolis and think of them as my friends.
The years of the war went quickly for me. When I was four or five years old, the war had already started. My mother and father were wondering where to hide; they were being looked for. I asked my parents if my grandfather was a Jew. When they asked me why I asked this, I said we should go hide with him, because as a child I felt very safe with my grandfather.
My parents acquired fake identification cards. Where our name had been Sousis, we went by Giorgopoulos. We hid in different villages around Attica. One of my uncles didn't leave - he hid in Athens at the house of a seamstress. But his wife carried many valuables with her, and when the seamstress found out, she called the Germans and they were arrested on November 17, 1944.
There was a law that if Jews were registered and were attending service every Saturday, they weren't going to be bothered. My father and his brothers tried to raise the funds to bail them out.
Many Greeks collaborated with the Germans. They got into contact with some of them who offered to bail the family members out. Two of the collaborators were the Rekanati brothers and they were convicted after the war, as traitors to the country. One was executed, and the other exiled to Brazil. Worst of all, it turns out they were also Jews. Anyway, they negotiated with our family, that if the family members were registered as Jewish, they would set them free.
So my grandfather and other relatives were declared. On March 25, 1944, they went to the synagogue and they were arrested by the Germans, and imprisoned in the building. On this day, several hundred Jews were arrested and locked in with them. It was all the same people who had declared their identities. After that, the Germans were arresting their families and going through their homes.
My parents were attending that day. When my mother saw they were arresting people, she got word to the lady whose home the children were hiding in. My mother told her to take the children and leave because the Germans were looking for us. We hid at another house and the Germans arrived at the first house with our father and didn't find us. As they were leaving, a young girl named Daisy, also Jewish and in the house, approached them and asked, 'What did we do to you?' One of the Germans asked her questions, but she couldn't understand and shook her head. When my father saw her, he turned his back, pretending he didn't know her.
That night, my mother showed up and took us to another house. I remember this night - my mother and grandmother walking behind a driver, and one of my brothers carrying me on his shoulders. We walked all night. When we arrived where we were going, my mother and I stayed at one home, and my brothers and Daisy stayed at a different home. We were resting by the fireplace and the old woman that lived there tried to console my mother. But she stared at the flames, crying the whole time.
When I woke up the following day, I went outside and the sky was bright. This was the end of March, 1944. I saw everything outside, the sun and animals. Having been born and raised in the city - seeing nature this way was wonderful.
Soon we found another home to stay in, which was just a room in the middle of a forest. We worked at a farm, taking on many of the duties. I remember being asked what I'd do when I grew up. I used to say I wanted to be a shepherd and raise animals. And that's because everyday the shepherd would get a big plate of food. I would work where they raised the cows. I used to clean the manure. And once a week I'd brush the cows for lice. I would also collect chamomile from the fields with my grandmother. She was teaching me how to pick it for tea. I asked her why we picked it. She said that when my father returned, he would be sick. We would fix him some chamomile to make him better. This made me very dedicated and focused on picking the flowers. There were other things I learned. How to capture birds with nets and other techniques. I learned everything about the fields.
When my father was taken away by train, he gave a note to a member of the Red Cross to give to my mother. It said: 'Today, April 2, 1944, we left by train.' Listing the names of everyone with him. 'Kiss to the children. . .' The man from the Red Cross gave it to the doorkeeper of the building we had lived in, and that man got it to my mother. We heard nothing from my father after that.
We were hiding in Halandri, and in October that year, we saw planes in the sky. And they were dropping what looked like silver papers. We were terrified, not knowing what these things were. We later learned they were messages of the liberation of Greece. People were coming out of their homes and cheering.
We soon gathered our things and returned to Athens. But when we tried to get into our house, we couldn't - it was emptied of our possessions and belonged to the state. Luckily, a neighbor had kept all of our things and later returned them. The government had seized the building because of vagrancy. When a home was unoccupied, especially if it had belonged to Jews, the government would take it over and let others live there.
There was the question of what had happened to my father. We asked a man who had returned from Auschwitz, but when he told us of the atrocities there, we thought he was mad. It was unbelievable. Then others returned and repeated the same things, and this was when we learned it was true. We never believed that my father died and we awaited his return. If you don't see a body, it's difficult to believe a person is gone. We were always expecting that someday the front door would open and he'd be there. But this never happened.
After the occupation ended, civil war broke out. We stayed inside and rarely went out, mostly when my mother left to get supplies. There was a food shortage then. We had brought a pet rabbit back with us from Halandri. It was a beautiful rabbit. White with red eyes. When there was little money for food, my mother asked a police officer to kill it. We just couldn't. So the office picked it up by the feet and hit it.
I attended school, and there I would be around children whose fathers were still around. I felt different. I used to cry all the time. My father's shop had been destroyed. Everything looted. So my family started to make undergarments to sell. And when the children finished school, we started to work for them. It turned into a big business. We exported throughout Europe. The company employed 270 people. But in 1986, there was a financial crisis and we went out of business.
And I kept searching for my father. I continued looking for information on him. How he might have died. But when the Germans fled Auschwitz, they destroyed the records. So there's no way of knowing the full story. In 2007, I sent emails to Mauthausen, Austria, where they had marched prisoners. I got word back, finally, that my father died of pneumonia on February 17, 1945. This is because during the Death March, they made the prisoners shower with cold water, and they made them stand nude with their clothes at their feet.
One day, I was at the Jewish Museum of Greece, searching through documents. I found one that mentioned my father, along with other names. It was a list of people who had revolted in Auschwitz on October 7, 1944. I felt very proud. And despite the attempts to exterminate us, in a way, we won by creating families. I'd met a beautiful woman at the business school I'd attended. I married her and we had three children. They went on to good schools, and they now have their own beautiful families. I have six grandchildren now, between two and fourteen years old.
