Meet George
I was born in a small village in Greece named Vresthena, located 20 miles north of Sparta, in a poor but loving family, with two other siblings: my brother, and my sister, all working the farms to grow enough food to survive.
When I was five years old playing soccer with my friends in the Platia (the square), I will never forget what happened that day that changed my life forever.
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We saw a convoy of many huge military trucks, one after another as far as we could see through the rising thick black dust and smoke (we could not count the number of trucks coming). Some of us were too terrified and ran home crying to tell their mothers what they saw; some were frozen in their places crying and didn't know what to do.
My friend, Taki, and I stood there when two Nazis with their machine guns pointing in our face shouted in broken Greek “Pou ene o paterasas”, where are your fathers? We both said, “Den xeroume”, we don't know --that's what our parents had taught us to always say. Then one soldier raised his machine gun and fired a burst of shots in the air that made us jump with fear of our lives and shouted in broken Greek “figete Tora e tha sas skotsoume”, Get out now or we will kill you! We turned around and ran as fast as we could.
We were too young to realize that this was the first day of 1,500 days of hell on earth of what was in store for us and our families by the cruel Nazi barbarians. Many millions and I lived through the daily fear of death, hunger, famine, and sickness before the Nazi occupiers were defeated and left Greece.
The aftermath of the Nazi occupation left the Greek people in such a bitter and catastrophic plight that they began blaming and fighting among themselves. Then another war began--a civil war. Greeks were killing Greeks and brothers killing brothers that went on for five more long and devastating years and the country was getting closer and closer to the grip of communist Russia.
Fortunately for the Greek people, a courageous American President, Harry S.Truman, came to save Greece, the world's first democracy, from becoming another communist country in the eastern communist bloc.
My American Accomplishments
After a few years of hard work, I attended college. After graduation, I was drafted into the US Army. Instead, I decided to join the US Airforce and proudly served my new country traveling around the US and overseas. It was most monumental for me to go back to my old country as a US citizen and service man-- a high point in my new life.
When I finished my service, I met the love of my life, Katie, and soon we got married.
After working for a small high-tech company as a field service engineer, traveling the world for a second time, and gaining an extensive amount of experience of the marketplace, I decided to start my own high-tech company to manufacture automation equipment. With my past vast experience with wirewrapping systems, our first product was a semi-automatic rewrapping machine while my wife, Katie, raised two children at the same time.
I traveled the world for a third time, this time as founder and president of a small, high technology company, manufacturing wirewrapping equipment used in most all the telecommunications corporations around the world.
As the company grew with new engineering talent, we developed and marketed many other automaton systems for such industries as printed circuit boards, die-cutting, and microelectronics industries.
This was our first automation system of drilling and inserting test pins in a test board.
When Katie and I retired, we moved to Florida, and I found time to start writing the story that I wanted to write the first day I came to America in 1956. This was a project I thought I could start and finish like any other project I did in business, but being a writer was not in my blood, but what was in my heart … I wanted to tell the world a story of a young child growing up under the most horrific life events of daily fear for his life, hunger and sickness with no doctors or medicine available during his young and tender years.
After many unexpected life events and many challenges to my writing ability, I finally published my life story in May of 2020 (five years later), with the help of my wife Katie and others.
