The younger kids were running up and down the square, twirling around as the speakers played a squeaky military march. Everybody was waiting for the flag bearers to come out of the church and lead the parade.

Enjoying my ice cream, I noticed an old man turned completely the other way, away from the crowd, staring at a plaque on the church’s wall. I neared. He was weeping behind his big specs. The plaque was a list of the soldiers who had died in 1940. He turned to me, patted me on the shoulder and said, “You won’t find anyone here. They’re all dead, years now. I should be dead, too. Men must not live how we lived back then.” Then, we both turned toward the people, the balloons and the Greek flag. The parade had started.

He wouldn’t follow the parade, so I asked him if he wanted to drink a coffee with me. We went to a nearby café. I bet that some people thought I was his grandson. Looking at him closely, I saw that he was much older than I first thought. He had very little hair and a big moustache. His skin was carved with deep wrinkles and his specs made his blue eyes more evident.

He asked my name and lit up his cigarette. He introduced himself and looked at his watch. Stratos Kourakis was born in Athens in 1922, to a Jewish mother and a Greek father. In 1940, the recruiting office called him to serve and he had no choice. His mother begged him not to go, but all of his closest relations, including his father and brother had gone; he couldn’t stay behind.

“During those days my mind was far away from what war really means,” he recalled. “I didn’t know anything about death and disaster. Many considered it a great opportunity to honor your family, your people.” He said that when people heard about the war with Italy on the radio, they ran out into the streets yelling and screaming as if they were in a delirium.

Kourakis joined the Greek Army and was sent to the Albanian front. The day before he left, he got together with his close friends and everybody promised to meet again someday. After the Italians lost the war in the mountains of Albania, the Germans came in April 1941 and he got caught. The Germans found out about his Jewish mother and, in 1942, sent him to Germany and threw him in Dachau, the concentration camp just outside of Munich. “Those were the most horrible years of my life. Time had stopped counting for me,” he said, raising his sleeve to show me a six-digit number branded into his arm. In the concentration camps, Nazis marked their victims with the numbers to identify them.

After so many years, the mark on Kourakis’s arm has faded, but his memories are still freshly imprinted in his mind. He spent three years in Dachau, each day a living hell haunted by the fear of death. “I lived each day as if it was the last. To survive you need hope - I didn’t.” The last year, 1945, was even outrageous. As Allied forces were advancing toward Germany, Germans began to move prisoners to more centrally located camps. Transports from the evacuated camps arrived continuously at Dachau, with prisoners weak and exhausted, often near death. “We were 32,000 prisoners in the last year in Dachau and typhus had spread, so each day they executed as many as they could.”    

With the Allied forces close, liberation day was finally coming. Kourakis faced death as few men have in their life. To strengthen their slipping control, the Nazis started executing two men each day from his barracks. They were executing them in an alphabetical order, and Kourakis figured out that he had only five more days to live. They’d put him next to a wall and drill a bullet into his forehead. “The most horrible thing to know is when you are going to die,” he said.

The night before his execution, the Allied forces were very close and when morning came, a white flag was hoisted over Dachau. It was the end of terror and Kourakis’s rebirth. “How can I face life the same after this? That day I felt as if God had put his hand on me,” he said.

When Kourakis returned to Athens, everyone had taken him for dead. At least those who had survived. He found only his father, his brother and a friend. His mother didn’t survive Auschwitz.

In the aftermath, Kourakis tried to pull himself together and rebuild his life. His brother helped him wake up from war’s nightmare by finding him a job. But, although four years had passed, he still had nightmares. During the day he was afraid to leave his home.

Now, he is 86 years old, a father and a grandfather, and says that in several days he will also have another grandson, from his daughter. He and his wife are still involved in their family business, a traditional coffee shop, and he says he is happy.

I wanted five more minutes, but his son came to pick him up. I helped him to stand and he smiled. We walked out together and said goodbye. Walking to the car, I noticed something had changed about how I viewed the parade. People were clapping for almost a minute after the parade finished. Now I knew what it was all about.