1. Prologue by Valentini Papadopoulou

http://xanthoulabertwrigley.blogspot.com


I feel I need to write my own Prologue before the commencement of this blog "The War Bride". I have personally known Xanthoula for many years and oh what a wonderful sweet lady she is.  I have attended a couple of talks she has given on this subject and both times she has left me feeling quite emotional as her story really does touch the heart.  I hope you find it as profound as I did.

Xanthoula's sister Valentini Papadopoulou wrote "The War Bride" in November 2009.  I believe it is worthy of publication, so if someone would like to take on the task of publishing "The War Bride", please contact me, Joy Olney via email - joyolney@gmail.com.

In the mean while, the best I can do is publish "The War Bride" as a Blog.  You need to read Numbers 1-14 in order, as you would chapters in a book, to understand the story line.

Xanthoula grew up in the remote village of Ritini in Greece where in 1941 the family sheltered Bert (Slim) Wrigley during WW11.  Xanthoula was only 15 at that time.  Her father Ioannis Papadopoulos was imprisoned and executed by the Germans in 1944.  Her sister Eleni was also imprisoned.  Four years after the war ended, Xanthoula's mother encouraged her to write to Bert in Australia.

I do not want to give away too much detail but there was a happy ending as Xanthoula arrived in Australia on the migrant ship "Cyrenia" on 31 December 1950 and they married just 9 weeks later and spent 45 happy years together.

Unfortunately Valentini and Eleni have now passed away and Xanthoula is well in her 90s.

Xanthoula with her beloved Bert (Slim) Wrigley.

  The War Bride

  by Valentini Papadopoulou

Prologue

Early this morning, it was like an epiphany for me.  The story of my 83-year-old sister Xanthoula and her husband Herbert Wrigley had to be told, simply and from the heart. This is a true story and long overdue. I know it as well as anyone else besides herself, I lived with them for many years when I was a student, and I am living in her house at the moment. I have at my disposal, besides my sister still alive and well, other documents, photos, newspaper clips, letters, recordings of earlier interviews with her and her husband Bert, recordings with my two other siblings, as well as vivid memories and strong feelings of my own.

I must not wait any longer to put this moving story to paper. For my sister and for Bert’s memory, a man who truly cared and whom I loved and admired, for their sons and grandsons, other relatives, friends, and for anyone else who cares to read it.  I can try to follow the events and piece their lives together. I am not writing this for fame or money.  It is a human story that needs to be told, a story of courage, generosity, self-sacrifice, and love.  Not the kind of love you will read about in “best-sellers”, passionate or unrequited love to excite the readers who need a bigger than life tale to live vicariously with powerful feelings not felt in their own lives.  I hope readers will find this to be an out of the ordinary story, and appreciate the fact that it is true, not the figment of a creative imagination.

I will try to begin from the beginning: who are these two people?  Where do they come from, what were their families of origin like, where did they live and what did they do in their lives before they met?

For Bert’s individual story I have gathered the material sources available to me, some of which I will mention here at the outset: recorded interviews, personal letters, and three main books which recount Bert’s WWII experiences, especially during his time in occupied Greece fighting with the Greek guerillas.  As the events come up during the narrative, I will mention other sources such as newspaper clippings, post cards, and photos.

When Bert returned to Australia in February 1944 after more than three years overseas, he no doubt told his family about what he had been through.  But he seems not to have given them many details.  When I came to Australia in 1955 to live with Bert and Xanthoula, there were times when I asked him questions about the war, and he did tell me some isolated stories over the years.  But on the whole he didn’t talk readily about his war experiences.  He was more willing to reminisce about places he saw and people he met than about the battles he had fought and the hardships he had endured.  Many years later, I had considerable difficulty in convincing him to let me record him as he spoke about his war experiences.  Now, I am glad I did. 

That happened in 1992, about fifty years after the actual events in Greece.  I had come from America for a long visit, full of grief following my brother Stefanos’ death in Greece.  I felt Bert agreed to talk only to please me,  probably thinking that it would distract me from my grief, and because I said that this would help me towards my project of writing the story of my family. That project has been on my mind since 1986 and I had been gathering material over the years.  Several important documents had been kept in a file by my brother, and when he died his wife handed the file to me.  Over the years, I have added to it anything else I could find, letters and family photos as well as oral accounts which I had recorded.  However, I only actually started writing in 2008 beginning with my father’s biography.  Having lost my father at the age of seven, I have been trying to grasp the essence of him by piecing together whatever I could find in order to reconstruct his life.  Bert had met my father and was part of that family story.  So, I wanted to record his memories about Greece, about the German occupation, and about his encounter with my family in a remote Greek village near Mount Olympus.

In that 1992 recorded interview, I heard his story directly from him, with considerable details about his own experiences and feelings mingled with his unique sense of humor.  I can’t transcribe everything here, but it is good to listen to his deep and melodic voice now, nearly fifteen years after he passed away.  The feeling is one of sweet sadness.

I had the privilege of having as a brother-in-law this remarkable man, who had lived through so much in his youth but kept it very much to himself.  As a young man Bert chose to live dangerously for five years.  And as his story unfolds, it will be evident that he threw himself into the fight with a passion. 

His memory of the events in Greece was vivid and detailed for some events and more faint for others.  It was after all some fifty years later. In addition, I also have in my hands other documents that help me tell his story, reconstruct his life, and draw a portrait of him.  There are Bert’s letters to his elder sister Emily (“Em”), letters written between 1940-41 from Palestine, Egypt and Libya, before he actually landed in Greece.  They were fortunately kept by his sister. Of course he wrote others too, to his parents, and to whoever else wrote to him.  In one letter he says he has been busy writing because he had received many letters.  But only eight letters to his elder sister “Em” and her husband Tom have survived.  Bert and Xanthoula were very involved in the last ten years of Emily’s life, visiting her regularly and taking care of her affairs.  They cleared up her home when she died in 1993, and these letters were found among her things.  My sister Xanthoula preserved them and she gave them to me for the purpose of writing this story.  

Also fortunately, there is a detailed account of a large part of his time in occupied Greece made in a book by his fighting companion and friend, Bruce Vary.  Bruce was another Australian who was twice captured in Greece and escaped twice jumping off a moving train that was taking him to a prison camp in Germany or Austria.  Like Bert, he found himself cut off trying to survive on his own in a foreign country occupied by the enemy.   When he returned to Australia together with Bert in February 1944, Bruce was anxious to record for posterity his own ordeal and near-death experiences, and he did it as soon as he came back, with memories still fresh.  In a book entitled I lived with Greek Guerrillas (story written by E.B. Burton and published in Melbourne in 1945), Bruce Vary gives a detailed record of his Greek experience and of his special bonding with “Slim”, Herbert Wrigley.  That book reveals a lot about Bert, his bravery, his generosity and his loyalty to a fellow soldier. 

Other books which appeared later, such as Patsy Adam-Smith’s “Prisoners of War: From Gallipoli to Korea” (Penguin Books, 1992), and Hugh Gilchrist’s “Australians and Greeks (Volume III: The Later Years”, Halstead Press, 2004), also give accounts of the footprints that “Slim” left behind in Greece.  Hugh Gilchrist, himself a serviceman during WWII in Australia and New Guinea, later entered the Department of External Affairs and served in official posts in many countries, especially as Ambassador to Greece in the years 1968-72.  He includes in the above-mentioned book a detailed account of events related to these two men.  In Volume III, Chapter V, under the title “Australians in Occupied Greece”, there is a special section on “’Slim’ Wrigley and Bruce Vary” (pp. 65-72). What we read there was obtained directly from the two friends when Gilchrist invited them to visit him in Canberra specifically for the purpose of getting first-hand information about their war experiences.  Volume III finally appeared in 2004, but the interview took place many years before, in the 1970’s, so what we read there can be accepted as an accurate account of what they remembered.

The accounts given in these three books, the personal information from Bert’s letters to his sister, the recorded interviews, my sister Xanthoula’s memories, what my elder sister Eleni in Greece knows and remembers, what his sons can tell me, and my own recollections will all be part of this story.  I actually met Bert (he was then known as ‘Slim’) for the first time when I was nearly 6 years old, during the harsh winter of 1941-42.  He came to my grandfather’s house up in an isolated snowbound village from which one can see the peak of Mount Olympus.  He stayed with us for a while, then left but returned several times, until he joined the Greek partisans and the British Secret Mission in Greece during the Occupation. My subsequent knowledge of this very special man began in 1955 when I immigrated to Australia and continued until he died in 1995. 

I will try to piece everything together like a jigsaw puzzle, and I hope that a fuller portrait of the man will emerge.

Go to the next blog 2. "Herbert ("Bert" or "Slim") - Family roots.