When our country is freed from the Germans, I too – for the second time – leave my village. I now understand that I am an extra mouth in a family where food isn’t enough for even half its members. In a family where love, in the face of survival anxiety, has skulked in mouseholes, keeping company to dying mice. My family is not the only one to understand and deal with things like that. However, my consolation is not that there are others in the same situation as we are, it’s not that other parents sell their young children as servants to our wealthy countrymen. My consolation and hope are that in Greece, there are families who feel differently – even if they have nothing to eat. I say to myself, “the need for survival cannot have destroyed it all. Maternal and paternal love cannot have disa
