Author Stelios Karagiannopoulos joined “Faraway Words” by phone from his home in Brussels to discuss his book Survival: Refugees and Workers in the 20th Century. Told in the style of a novel, the book grew out of extensive research that took him through archives, family memories, and the places where his grandfather lived.
Karagiannopoulos visited every place his grandfather Panagiotis had lived. He traced his journey from Constantinople, where he was born and raised, to Kavala, where he worked in the tobacco industry. He also traveled to Bulgaria, where Panagiotis was held hostage, and to Germany, where he worked as a laborer under the Nazi regime.
As Karagiannopoulos writes on the back cover of the book:
This is also the story of Panagiotis’s family. Of the people who came before him and those who came after. Of the people he touched, the people he looked at, the people he ate with at the same table. From the same plate. The people he let down and who hurt him in return. The people he scolded and who turned their backs on him. The people who stood by him when the earth shook. It is the story of people who lived another day when survival could never be taken for granted.
Produced and presented by Natasa Vissarionos