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Dario Modiano worked for a German who was an agent of Deutsche Debarque line. He was an employee, but he was getting paid quite a lot of money. They sacked him because he was a Jew, and he left for Athens. There he opened a shop with his brother. The bad thing was that he gambled; he played cards. He used to go to the Club of Thessaloniki [23] then. He lost a lot of money. The fact that he was gambling always caused problems. My aunt would cry and get very upset. He would go to the Loutraki Casino [Loutraki: city in north Peloponnesus, 600 km from Thessaloniki]. He was supposedly going to the hot springs, but instead he would go to the casino. He never took his wife with him. She would sit with the children at home and he would go and have baths at the hot springs, drink fresh water and then go to the casino to gamble.
I used to hear these things from the elder ones when they talked about it. They were talking about this in front of us, in order to protect us. During the war Modiano served in the army as a pilot of the Italian air force. We had a picture that his daughter still has; with the pilot's uniform on, but what a pilot! He ruined an airplane once. How he managed to ruin a plane due to an emergency landing without getting himself killed, is a mystery.
I used to hear these things from the elder ones when they talked about it. They were talking about this in front of us, in order to protect us. During the war Modiano served in the army as a pilot of the Italian air force. We had a picture that his daughter still has; with the pilot's uniform on, but what a pilot! He ruined an airplane once. How he managed to ruin a plane due to an emergency landing without getting himself killed, is a mystery.
Period
Interview
Mico Alvo