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Out of the Balkans

Part 2: Jason's Journey, Recollections and Celebrations

Chapter 3, continued:
The War

High wood fences installed along the bay made it difficult to see ships. (One could see what they wanted from the roofs of the apartment houses along Shore Road.) Convoys of men and war materials left at night to make their way to the battlefronts of Europe. Sometimes in the east we saw a bright red glow in the night sky from fire and explosions on a ship torpedoed by waiting German U-boats (submarines).

Each month, my consciousness of the war grew. Motion pictures made to spur the will of the American people sensitized me as I watched John Wayne and other movie idols fight the evils of Japan and Germany.

Dad took me to the Newsreel Theater in Manhattan with my Nouno and Uncle Louie. This was the CNN of the 1940s that provided extensive war coverage. I listened to the radio to hear about the war and remember being excited about news of a massive bombing raid over Germany while I sat safely in my bed, eating grapes on a hot summer night.

Nitsa and I helped Mom and Dad pack War Relief packages to send to Mavrovo and Kastoria. Preparing these made me conscious for the first time of relatives who lived far away. Dad started to tell me stories about his childhood and Mavrovo. We filled boxes with rice, pasta, wool socks, sweaters, and other necessities. No one knew how many of the packages arrived to help our relatives in Greece. They suffered greatly during the Nazi occupation and the Greek Civil War. It was a constant worry for Dad.

V-E Day (Victory in Europe) in May of 1945 did not leave any impression on me. I do not know why. V-J Day (Victory over Japan) was memorable. Mom, Nitsa, and I were at Carelas' farm in the Catskill Mountains. A few days before Japan's surrender, the headlines and photographs on the front page of The New York Daily News were about the atomic bomb and its enormous power: "Equal to Twenty Thousand Tons of TNT." That summer, the government first released photographs of the B-29, a plane whose size was beyond our comprehension.

Cheering and loud car horns at Carelas' greeted news of the war's end. That night, Mom took Nitsa and me with a group of her friends and their children to the Blue Mountain Inn, a restaurant and bar that was strictly off-limits for us until that night. I remember the band playing, streamers flying, and people laughing, drinking, and dancing.

In 1944, immediately after the Nazi occupation ended, Greece entered into a dark period of civil war. Armed guerrilla groups representing communist, monarchist, and republican factions battled over control of the future of Greece. Our relatives in Macedonia fought the communists in the mountains surrounding Kastoria. Fifty thousand or more Greeks killed each other in the horror that Nicholas Gage documented in his novel Eleni.(1) In it he tells the story of fratricide in Greece and of his mother's murder.

At the end of the Second World War, Russian troops occupied Bulgaria, installed a communist government, and secured the country as part of the Russian bloc. Sozopol was behind the Iron Curtain.

Mom had her first heart attack late in the summer of 1945, just a few days after we returned home to Brooklyn from the Catskills. Our lives changed.



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