ALSO BY EFROSSINI AKA FRAN KISSER
SOON TO BE PUBLISHED:
MY MEMOIRS
TRUE AMAZING ANIMAL STORIES
THE GUT MICROBIOME HEALTHY COOK BOOK
FORGIVENESS
ACHILLEA
In loving memory of my father and mother
Achillea and Malama Hatzi
With my deep appreciation for the care and love
They had given my first thirteen years of life
PROLOGUE
I am compelled to write this book at this time in my life. I have the time now. I just turned seventy one years old. I started writing almost five years ago for several reasons. First I wanted to write my father’s story since I was thirteen years old. The second reason is because I wanted to live. Concentrating in sixty seven years worth of memories would distract me from my endless daily fears of dying. With a disconnected neck and an almost constant heart arrhythmia I took up the challenge of sitting in this chair and typing at only half an hour at a time. The last year sitting with four therapeutic ice packs (arthritic hip joints, sciatica and a herniated bulging disk.)That is all the time my physical disabilities would allow me.
When I was thirteen I found out the fairy tales my father told us when we were little, were real true stories of his own life. I was told this by my mother. I had told myself then, one day I will write my father’s story. Little did I know then; my own life story would be almost as powerful.
My story must be told.
I was able to go on after every ordeal because I just turned the page into my next life, my next reinvention. My life has been filled with so many challenges. I believe God gave me the strength to endure my tragedies.
I am amazed, I can sit here at the computer and remember the details of my life of so many years ago, up to sixty-seven years ago.
I can remember everything, even though I survived all these years by blocking things out of my mind, by compartmentalizing things that happened to me when I thought I could not endure, but I did, by blocking things out.
This is the right time to tell my story. My parents have long been gone and where they are in heaven now will not be upset with my words. Most of my siblings are also gone and we are only three left, spread over three continents.
I was born in an extremely large family of nine living children, so large in fact, there were two generations of us. Yet since I was thirteen I have lived without the love and support of a brother or a sister or my family.
I am authoring this book to warn parents that trust their precious children to relatives or friends. No one will care for them like you would.
The final reason for authoring this book is to try and reach inside someone’s aching soul. Whether it is physical pain or emotional, I want to tell that person to make God your shadow and you will never, ever walk alone.
CHAPTER 1
ACHILLEA - EFROSSINI’S FATHER
Listening to the pounding of his heart, fearing for his life, he was waiting for things to calm down before he came out of his hiding place. He was only six years old. As soon as it was quiet, he came out from under all the fallen debris. Amazingly, he was not injured! It seemed he was buried alive under the wall that exploded for maybe an hour or so. He could tell time. He was wearing the Longine watch his father gave him, for his sixth birthday, back in Graz, Austria.
It was 1912. Over 107 years ago and this little boy wore a wrist watch. I wonder how many people even knew what a wrist watch was, back then, in war torn Greece, at the beginning of the twentieth century. They came out with the wrist watch because it was faster for the soldiers to check the time on their wrist instead of reaching in their pocket, taking out the pocket watch, opening the pocket watch and then reading the time.
The little boy was coughing and choking from all that dust that was kicked up all around him. What he remembered was the bomb that had exploded, his father was killed, and his mother held him by the hand ever so tightly.
As they were on the platform being pushed onto the train, being loaded like cattle, he was separated from his mother. The more he tried to get on the train the more the people shoved him away. He was calling his mother as loud as he could, crying, frightened from the bedlam all around him.
Everyone wanted to get away in any way they could. They were hoping the train would take them away from there, to take them anywhere but where a war had just started.
The whole scene was surreal and scrambled. The train was leaving, and he saw his mother getting pushed around, shoved and separated from him and swept up by the madness of the 1stwar of the Balkans that just broke out. The more he tried to get on that train the more he was pushed away and finally knocked down unto the ground. People were screaming for their loved ones. The train was over packed, and then, it started moving.
He ended up under part of the wall that had collapsed, from the bomb. He was lucky he was alive. He was all alone, terrified yes, but he was alive. He was dressed in a nice suit of clothes, he remembered, green, dark velvet, along with brown leather shoes and white socks. There was one thing wrong with this picture. He was filthy dirty, and his nice clothes were covered in dust. This little boy was from a well to do family that lived in Austria, suddenly, he is dirt poor, literally, plus he is all alone, orphaned instantly. He started to cry uncontrollably. He sat in a dirty corner out of people’s way and held his head in both hands and he just cried.
Only just a couple of hours before, he was with his Austrian born mother Carollina who was a music teacher, and his Greek father Stefanos who was a doctor in Austria. His father also owned a medical clinic.
Since the little boy had never met his paternal grandmother, Achillea was traveling with his parents to meet his yiayia, as they say it in Greek, for the very first time.
Achillea was born in 1906 in Graz, the same town where a Californian governor was born, the body builder, the actor.
Achillea never got to meet his yiayia. His grandmother came to the station to welcome her son, daughter in law and grandson. His grandmother was also killed in the madness at that station. Achillea found this out, many, many years later. Only a couple of hours ago his family had reached Greece. Within minutes the bomb fell, his father was killed, and his mother was shoved into the train. His mother was being sent back to Austria now, he thought, on the overcrowded train. Achillea thought maybe this was a very bad dream, a nightmare! Maybe this whole thing will be over soon, when he wakes up, he thought.
It was no dream, he found out. He was all alone, orphaned, dirty, hungry and frightened. Achillea spoke only Austrian which is German at this point. He is in a strange land, he does not speak their language and he doesn’t know where he could get help. He remembers dusting himself off, to make himself look presentable, trying to make himself likeable to these strange people, speaking this strange language, Greek.
Bravely he starts on his 11-year journey where he had to endure hunger, cold, pain, loneliness, all the while being frightened because he is unloved,
