of Eleni Vasilakis
The writer Donna-Lilian Capon is the offspring of an old Greek-Jewish family, whose members left a mark on Crete as well.
You see her mother, Mafalda, was born and raised in Chania and her uncle, the demonic and successful businessman, Leon Albert associated his name, even if some tried to keep it in obscurity, with some of the most iconic works on the island, such as the Municipal Market of Chania, the Keritis river bridge, but also the section of the National Road that connects Chania with Rethymno.
Donna-Lillian Capon lived her whole life in Athens, but during the summers she spent a large part of her vacations in Crete, so she kept alive many of the memories of those beautiful times.
She remembers, as she told us, mainly the love and interest she received from her relatives on the island who made her feel like she was the center of the world.
She also remembers the stories she was told, the Cretan delicacies she tasted and the gifts she received from relatives and family friends.
A family with deep commercial roots in both Crete and Athens, hers with her great-grandfather being called the "Venizelos of commerce".
The author as an adult studied French and English Literature and taught as a professor for many years while specializing in the translation of medical texts.
She was also, for a number of years, a member of the administrative boards of the Jewish Community of Athens and the Central Jewish Council of Greece, from the position of general secretary.
In 2018, Donna-Lillian Capon was honored with a special plaque by Greek Jewry, in recognition of her multifaceted work and the support she offered to the creation of the Holocaust Museum of Greece.
In recent years, however, he has been writing books.
Her second book
Her work "Enigma - From Thomas Becket in Athens of the 21st century" was first published, where the author, having discovered an incredible, even for herself, path of her family presents us with her roots with several references to Crete.
Her second book "Nostalgia for an Athens I Loved 1947-1957" completes the mosaics of the historical journey not only of her large family but also of the Jewish community itself, putting us in the climate of life and the images that post-war Athens presented at the time , where he lived.
Through descriptions, oozing with tenderness and love, Donna Lillian Capon in her new book revives an Athens that cannot but awaken nostalgic feelings in those who lived in the Capital during the difficult post-war years.
As Mrs. Capon tells us, this book emerged as an internal need as the previous years, with the brutalities of the Second World War, had marked them and she did not want the memories of her family to be lost.
Her family decimated by Nazism (many of her close relatives were murdered in Auschwitz), and having the image of even more members of the Jewish community, essentially the last Jews of Crete, at the bottom of the sea after the wreck of the ship "TANAIS" , Lillian Capon experienced the period she describes in her book as the "Renaissance."
"We wanted to live, to overcome the difficulties, to overcome the lack of trust that existed at the time towards the Jews", she tells us and confides to us that all these experiences had made her then, although a small child, think and behave like an adult . Sometimes she even wondered with her childlike innocence: "Have we done something bad and they are hunting us?".
Unfortunately, he adds, there will always be a scapegoat and unfortunately there will always be anti-Semitism and in the case of the Jews it will bother some that they are a people who do not erase their past and do not assimilate, in whatever corner of the earth they find themselves.
Mrs. Capon dedicates her new book to her grandfather Isaac Benjamin Capon, a victim of the Nazi atrocity in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps, whom she did not get to embrace.
As she describes it, the proud, imperious market lord was caught in a trap by the Germans and ended up, along with her grandmother, Donna, his daughter Sarina, his son-in-law Isaac Rousseau and his six-year-old grandson Emilio-Samuel, in the Auschwitz extermination camps- Birkenau, "from where it was released in the form of gray smoke through the chimneys of the crematoria that worked day and night to burn millions of victims."
Her grandfather, who was an active and successful businessman, had invested money, before the war, buying a property at 22 Armeni Braila Street, in Athens thus offering a safe haven for his family during the post-war years.
This second book by Lillian Capon revolves around this house and the life of the family when they first settled there.
Beautiful family moments, childhood memories of the house, the neighborhood, its people, the school, the wider area of the Field of Ares, bring to life an Athens different from the Capital of today, more humane, even if it was wounded by the war, as and the souls of its people.
Lillian Capon's father, Benjamin, reports in the book, returned from the Front in 1940 wounded, with severe frostbite, and was forced to have his lower limbs amputated. "Luckily, his hands were spared from amputation, while both of his lower limbs were sacrificed from the metatarsals, in an operation carried out at the Petraki Monastery (it was then transformed into a hospital) by the legendary military surgeon Professor Aesop..." describes Ms. .Capon.
But he succeeded and he and Mafalda's wife were able to continue their lives by giving birth to three children, Roberto, Lilian and later Moses.
Their new home, which had been bought by her grandfather Isaac Benjamin Capon, “It too was like a living organism, wounded by misguided human interventions and the merciless time that had allied itself with them. And yet, it radiated an irresistible charm that did not leave me indifferent..." the author notes in her book.
In fact, as she later discovered, this house was built and lived in by the famous architect, archaeologist and academic, Anastasios Orlandos.
Through the pages of her book and centered on this house, the stories of various people who were either related to the specific building, or to the neighborhood and the circle of friends and acquaintances of the Capon family emerge.
Forgotten professions emerge in post-war Athens and characteristic figures of people, such as the itinerant ice cream seller and greengrocer, the fisherman, the photographer, the yogurt maker, etc.
Also emblematic points of the Capital such as the Field of Areos, the church of Agios Charalambos with the icons designed by Fotis Kontoglou.
All these and even more take on color, aroma, and beauty and come to life in front of the reader who shares the author's nostalgia for that Athens, for her happy childhood life, because of the love she received and gave inside and outside the house on Armeni Street Braila 22.
The way Lillian Capon writes and describes succeeds in a unique way in turning the reader into a partner in her experiences.
At the same time, the rich photographic material that completes the book, like pieces of a puzzle, reinforce the purpose of its writing, i.e. the transition to a period, which was marked by the war with its suffering, but everyone needed to live to the fullest and they are happy, as if their life was beginning then and on its white pages they wanted to have only happy moments flooded with love and tenderness.
SOURCE: website newshub.gr, 21.7.2024
