Mario Modiano in the army

This is a photograph of me taken when I was serving the army, either in Kalamata or Tripoli, in 1945. Here I look rather relaxed. In the early days of January 1945, after the end of the uprising, there was a call for interpreters in the Greek Army. I falsified my birth date on my German identity card and pretended I was old enough for the army as an interpreter. But I was still only seventeen. I was accepted and given the rank of second lieutenant. I served first in Kalamata and then in Tripoli in the Peloponnesus. At that time there were still clusters of communist guerrillas on the mountains. I worked as an interpreter with the British military mission, which was instructing the newly recruited Greek army in all military drills. I was translating some of the manuals of the British army for the use by the Greek army, and I was demobilized about two years later.