What is your opinion about Greece and Greek people?

Hello!

Since there is no such a post, I decided to ask your opinion about Greece and the Greeks.

Could you share your experience?

I would also like to share with you a touching experience of a German author. The source of the text is written in the end.

I would also be happy to read your opinion about the translation; I have made some changes, since I found mistakes in the original text. Have a good time!

?rhart Kästner :

“Only in Greece Such an Answer Could Have Been Given”

The famous German writer Erhart Kästner acknowledged the following:

“In 1952 I visited Athens for the first time after the war. In the German Embassy, when they heard that I intended to go to Crete, they suggested to me that I pretend to be a Swiss, because it had only been a short time since the German Occupation and the wounds were still unhealed. But I knew the Cretans. From the very first moment I said I was a German and not only did I have a good time, but wherever I went, I experienced the legendary Cretan hospitality.

An afternoon, at sunset, I visited the German Cemetery in Maleme. It seemed like it was empty; only the last sun rays fell on it. But I was wrong. There was a living creature there. It was a Cretan woman dressed in black. To my greatest surprise I saw her lighting candles to the graves of the German soldiers, who died during the battle of Crete, and she was going methodically from the one grave to the other. I approached her... and I asked her:

- “Do you come from here?”

- “'Yes...” she replied.

- “And why are you doing this? Those men killed so many Cretans during the war...!”

The woman replied:

- “Son, your accent proves you to be a foreigner, therefore you probably do not know what happened here from 1941 to 1944. My husband was killed in the battle of Crete and I was left alone with my only son. Germans took him as a hostage in 1943 and he died in a concentration camp (KZ) in Sachsenhauzen. I do not know where my son has been buried. But I know that each of these men was son of a mother like me. And I light candles to their memory, because their mothers cannot come down here. I am sure that another mother lights the candle in memory of my son.”

And the German finished surprised: “Only in Greece such an answer could have been given!”

The end of the war found Kästner in Rhodes and the British captivity brought him to a camp in Egypt. After he was liberated, he returned to Germany. He cleaned his book out of the flagitious passages and republished it in 1953 with the title: “Olive Groves and Vine Yards.” In his second edition, for instance, the scene at the foothill of Olympus has been retouched, while in the first edition German sunburned soldiers in a stopped train were presented as the ‘blond Achaeans of Homer’.

In the second edition has been totally erased the propagandistic tone of the book that suggested to the German soldiers that they had occupied a country that some time ago had created a big civilisation, and now its inhabitants had degenerated and their fate was to continually be revived by the superior north tribes. Kästner made a tour in the Greek islands and the material he collected was published without Nazi colour after the war: The book about Crete in 1946, the book with his notes from Dilos in 1964 titled: “The School of the Larks” and his book “Greek Islands” after his death in 1975.

Source: http://www.ipernity.com/blog/evangrek63/424561