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brothers, standing with their parents outside their home in Greece.
It was dated the 12th of March 1938. The house was silhouetted by
the vast landscape in the background; the ground was crusted with
dirt and rocks and the skyline stretched back into the distance,
meeting the edge of the earth as the rising sun seeped across the
land. Even in black and white the photograph was enchanting, and I
longed to visit the rugged countryside. The photo opposite was of
my grandmother’s arrival in Australia, some six or seven years later.
I had no photos during the time that had elapsed in between; it had
been the time of World War II and the few photos that I had
managed to scrounge up I opted to exclude.
I glanced at my grandmother’s face, expecting to see surprise,
happiness, and appreciation, but instead her expression had grown
sombre and hard. Her mouth was no longer poised in smile and had
flattened into a firm line, as she stared wanly out across the room
with glazed eyes.
‘Don’t you like it, yiayia? There’s more pictures, look you haven’t
even seen them yet…’ I trailed off, realising that something was
amiss. A sense of panic threatened to rise within me. A few minutes
passed in tense silence, before my grandmother began to speak.
She told me about her family. She told me about her life in Greece.
She told me about her father, who worked as a general in the Second
World War. She told me about her brothers, both even younger than
her. She told me of the house that had been ransacked by villagers
driven to the point of desperation by poverty. She told me of her
kidnapping. The two years she had spent walking across Greece to
find her family again. Sleeping in Church orphanages and convents,
picking lice out of children’s skin. The fear, the hunger, the
separation. She told me all of this.
These were not things we spoke of; in all the time I had known
them, my grandparents had never spoken of the war times or their
reasons for leaving Greece. I quickly flicked the album to the middle
and opened a page at random, hoping to dispel the solemn mood
that had descended and return my grandmother to her usual self.
‘
Oxi
, go back and fix the beginning.’ I stared at my grandmother,
confused by her request. Nevertheless, I turned the pages back until
I reached the first two photographs.
‘Remove those,’ she uttered.
I grimaced as I stared down at the album and attempted to quell
Love And
Memory
12