My New World
A TEENAGER’S WWII ODYSSEY
by MK Alexander
Smashwords Edition
as told by
Mary Mackenzie-Cotsis
My New World: A Teenager’s WWII Odyssey
by MK Alexander
As told by Mary Mackenzie-Cotsis
Copyright 2011. All rights reserved.
Smashwords Edition
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Photo Credits:
Cover Photo and others, from the Cotsis / Mackenzie Family Archives
Chapter Frontpiece photos from the public domain except where noted.
Chapter I (Frontpiece):
“Bonzo the Dog”, copyright the George Studdy Estate
Used with permission, Gresham Marketing
Chapter VI (Frontpiece):
“Pedestrians” Howard Hollem or Edward Meyer,
Office of War Information, Public Domain, (from shorpy.com)
Non-Fiction, Biography
ISBN: 9781467500142
Published by KMACK Design, BOX 144, Sea Cliff, NY 11579
Please direct all comments or inquiries to mkalex@optonline.net
Also by MK Alexander:
Random Sacrifice
Jekyll’s Daughter
CHAPTER I
My Life as Bonzo
My middle name is Imarmeni. I was named after the ancient Greek word for “destiny,” and as tradition dictates, my grandmother. As a little girl, my own mother, Penelope, Nella for short, told me that Imarmeni was a minor ancient deity and I thoroughly believed her. Yet a long search through the records of mythology have turned up no such person. Nonetheless, Imarmeni was a very old fashioned name, even back then—an “un-cool” name in today’s parlance—and I was teased mercilessly for it by all the kids at school. Luckily, my friends in the neighborhood knew nothing about it. They were all “Anglos: Brits, Yanks or other Europeans.” To them I was Mary, or “Bonzo.”
Bonzo?
Yes, I was named after a cartoon character. To be specific, I was nicknamed by a cousin of my father after Bonzo the Dog, a popular British cartoon character from the 1920s. The name stuck and I’ve been Bonzo ever since. Never has destiny been so misused! Though, it was perhaps, looking back, the first dose of humility that steered me onto a path towards a fulfilling life.
Imarmeni. Fate. Destiny. Destiny plays a big part in my life, as in anyone’s life. Who can say, had not the fates intervened, what kind of person would I be today? I grew up rich and privileged to be sure. I was an only child and spoiled rotten. I make no apologies; such was my life. I knew only the upper class. The middle class was nonexistent when and where I grew up. I had no experience with it at all. How could I have known that through the many long years of my life I would become the embodiment of the bourgeois, and happily embrace all it has to offer? At present, I am a fairly typical person. My favorite pastime is cooking—but I’ll get to that much later. I’m a voracious reader and I’m a big fan of any kind of mystery: drama or book. I am a notorious bargain hunter. If it’s not on sale, I just won’t buy it! I love spending time with my family, my sons and my grandchildren. I am, I suppose, very typical. But how I got there still remains a mystery. I certainly did not have a typical life! My personal struggle was to become myself in my own right, and not just be defined as my “father’s daughter.” And now, looking back on a long and happy life, as a grandmother to six boys and a girl... I could not have asked any more from the Fates!
But we must ask, what are random events and what is fate? Who can really say? Can they be separated at all? Is it a random event that the man I was to marry and spend most of my life with grew up in the same neighborhood as me, though we never said more than a few words to each other as children? Is it a random event that my father decided to hire a fresh-faced teenager named Aristotle Onassis? Was it fate or some random event that a medical student who helped cut out my appendix aboard a British troopship would turn out to be a major contributor to modern medicine? Who can say?
For me, aside from being named Bonzo, the biggest intervention of destiny was in April 1941. The Nazis swept through northern Greece and were relentlessly marching on Athens. It was time to go.
I grew up in the 1930s, in a tiny suburb a few miles from Athens, less than five miles from the Acropolis. My neighborhood! The would-be King of Greece, Prince Paul, lived up the street. A Greek version of Mussolini, Ioannis Metaxas, dictator of the land, lived a couple of neighborhoods away in Kifisia. He was a pleasant enough roly-poly man who would visit my father on a regular basis, and we would often visit his home. I used to sit on his lap as a child, and his wife made a truly delicious moussaka. I can still smell it to this day, just coming out of the oven on a warm Greek evening. My own father was the deputy finance minister to the government, a towering man of six feet, four inches. And he was a ladies man to be sure; but to me he was strict, stern, and sometimes, a downright mean father. His name could have easily been Zeus, but it was not. He was Andreas.
That’s me at around age three. I can run!
(family archives)
Imarmeni. Destiny. If she was a goddess, even a minor goddess, (as my mother steadfastly insisted) she grew up in the golden age of Greece, or even before that, in Homer’s world—if she did grow up at all—and didn’t spring forth out of some ancient, sacred fountain. No doubt she would have been related to Clotho, Lacheis and Atropos, the three sisters of the fates. I wouldn’t call my children any of these names. To be fair, neither did Zeus. He is said to have been afraid of them, for the Fates ruled even the Gods. Some legends say they were daughters of “Necessity,” the truly ancient Goddess Ananka. Some legends put Zeus as their father (isn’t he always?) Others say not. Some say Aphrodite was the eldest sister of the Fates, though that connection seems tenuous.
My own family history is almost as complicated as all that, like some ancient Greek drama played out on Mount Olympus—but not quite!
CHAPTER II
My Ancient History
First, let’s go back a ways because Greece is an ancient land and we are a proud people. As a legendary land, it has been ravaged by war and occupation for millennia. Yet Greece endures, the soil is spent, arid, and sparsely greened, even though kissed by a blessed sea. There are patches of green in the well-watered valleys; and surprisingly, in winter and spring, Greece is quite lush. It’s the summer and the Sirocco that blows in across the Mediterranean from the Sahara that gives Greece the look it’s famous for in all the travel brochures and postcards. Legend has it that in antiquity there was a crazy king who decided that the only tree worth anything was the olive tree. He ordered all others cut down. He decreed that only olive trees could be planted. That legacy, real or not, endures. Greece is a land of olive trees and for better or worse shimmers with that dry green color set against the dry dusty soil.
The Greek people endure as well, in truth, spirit and legend. From Agamemnon and his Mycenaeans, his daughter Helen, and even later, after 500 years of Dark Ages; from the Spartans, to the Athenians and Macedonians—they all enjoyed a certain freedom in the Classical Age that was short lived in the long scheme of history. Occupiers love this place and racked up long years here. From the Minoans to the Persians, the Romans, the Byzantine Empire, the Venetian Merchant Princes, the Ottoman Turks, and finally, the Nazis of the last century—they all came, conquered, stayed and ultimately... left us alone. My story begins with the last occupiers, and I was extremely fortunate enough to escape that particular terror.
But first you should know something of my roots. According to my Mother, Penelope, her family, the Pervanas can be traced back to somewhere in the early 1800s, in the waning days of the Ottoman occupation. The story goes that two young boys, Vasillis and his brother Angelo, growing up near Nafplion were kidnapped by the Turks. I can almost imagine them playing by the seaside in that tiny port city of the Peloponnesus, along the docks or under the very shadow of the old Venetian fortress called Bourdzi. Nafplion later became the first capital of modern Greece from 1829 to 1834. Vasillis was probably about fifteen and Angelo was close to thirteen. It’s likely they carried the Pervana genetic trait of heavy eyebrows, and I’ve always wondered how much further back in time our family could be traced—perhaps to Spartan days or even before, to the conquering Dorians, or to the dim age of Mycenae, with its famous lion gate which was not much more than a stone’s throw from where the two Pervana boys grew up. Undoubtedly, in antiquity, Nafplion had been a chief port city for the Mycenaean Empire.