Tag #121823 - Interview #92872 (Moshe Burla)

I first visited Athens on the days of the occupation. Then father and I, or rather Father worked for a German firm that was buying metal, that is, cases, old iron and such stuff, and he used to collect metal and sell it to the Germans. He used to send me to the villages of Gravia, to the mountain villages where there was fighting going on, and I would pick up the cases in a truck and then bring them to Athens. There, he would take them and sell them to the Germans. That was my experience from Athens. In Athens I was staying for one or two days, the exchange would take place and I would be sent back to the villages again.


Until the last visits, which I wrote about in my book, I met a group of partisans on the mountain and while we where picking up the cases, they told us that what we do is against the people because the iron that we are collecting we could have picked for Greece instead, for the ELAS [6] and not for the Germans. And when I saw it his way, I went to my father and I told him, ‘Listen, I’ll stop doing this work. I don’t want to be involved not only because what I am doing is wrong but I could also get hurt by the partisans because they don’t kid around, and they told me: be careful, don’t carry on with this work, because something bad will happen to you.’ So I quit and went back home. That was all my life in Athens.