FEMALE_1: This is Athens,
the capital and largest city in Greece.
Bounded by mountains and the Aegean Sea,
Athens is one of the oldest cities in the world
and considered the cradle of Western civilization.
For thousands of years,
Jews and Christians lived peacefully
side by side in harmony.
Together they formed one nation,
proud to call themselves Greek.
For hundreds of years,
Athens was home to the Ackos family,
a Jewish family torn apart and
sent into hiding in the war
between Greece and Nazi Germany.
Menachem Ackos, his wife, Rosa,
and their five children,
Sam, Esther, Mary, Evelyn, and Bertini,
lived in a comfortable yellow house
within walking distance of the Parthenon.
Germany defeats the Greek army,
and Germany grabs Athens for itself.
On a spring morning in April of 1941,
Nazi soldiers march into Athens.
As Germans raised their flag
on the steps of the Parthenon,
the Ackos decide to go into hiding.
For over three years,
Nazis unleashed waves of barbarity,
murder, and destruction on the nation.
Esther's father,
along with the rest of her large extended family,
are deported in trucks and box cars to Auschwitz
where they were exterminated.
This is the story the Voice Division Team
set out to capture in art.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: When the war started,
and I remember that very distinctly,
I think I recorded it a million times,
the German planes were going over Athens,
and everybody started yelling,
"The Germans are coming. The Germans are coming."
I was playing on the street with other kids.
Everybody had heard what was going on in Poland,
so right away then,
there was a decision to go into hiding.
My mother had a sister who was a widow,
and she had a widow friend that lived in Kifisia,
so she called Mrs. Sayanou and said,
"We need a place to stay."
Mrs. Sayanou said, "Fine,"
so we just packed whatever we could pack on our cart
and walked from our house to her house.
FEMALE_1: Hariklia Sayanou opened her home
to the Ackos family.
While Mrs. Sayanou didn't know them personally,
she understood what would happen if she did nothing.
While in hiding, Rosa tends to the children,
only leaving them briefly to shop for food.
Menachem leaves the family for longer periods of time
to fight with the Greek resistance.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: The things that's always on my mind
is the fact that
my mother used to leave our hiding place
because the places of business
near the house we lived in,
she had to go shopping,
and she would go and get food and bread.
Because they knew her, they didn't report her.
They just gave her the food, and she came back.
When she left to go to get the food,
it was a long way for her to walk.
I would go and sit on the sidewalk and wait for her,
thinking that she might never come back.
I would look for her, and when I saw her,
I would be relieved.
We were in hiding two times.
The first time, nothing was happening,
so we came back home for a while.
Then when this happened,
then we went back into hiding.
She was made a righteous Gentile.
A couple of years ago,
when there was a memorial built in Salonika,
there was a commemoration,
and they invited all these big dignitaries.
They also invited our family to come because
they gave Mrs. Sayanou's granddaughter
the honor.
David Feinberg: This is made arbitrarily.
Tessa and I started it,
and then two other students and I worked on it
for about a week building this.
Everything's arbitrary, but as we hear your story,
we put stuff in. It's not arbitrary.
You made it. You made that.
We can turn it this way, put it this way,
and we can turn it this way.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: I like the way you got it
to begin with.
David Feinberg: To begin with?
Esther Ackos Winthrop: Yeah, just like
the sky is up there.
David Feinberg: This is where we'll put the stars.
Right on here.
We can paint some of this black real quick.
I think black would be good.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: You want me to do it?
David Feinberg: Yeah.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: [inaudible]
David Feinberg: Not right now.
Michelle Englund: Yes, she can.
David Feinberg: Then after the paint dries,
of course, it's acrylic paint,
we're going to have both you and Harvey
make little white dots on it all over the place.
Michelle Englund: You can do the dots.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: Yeah, I can do the dots.
David Feinberg: Yeah. That's where we all start.
That'll break the ice, and that's all we'll do today
in terms of art I'll say it directly.
Then we're going to paint some of the beaches on here,
like copies of the beaches.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: Here is my father
in his taxi,1939.
Sam Ackos: Daddy had a taxicab.
It was very unique that time,
but we cannot use it because
the Nazis were confiscating
anything that had wheels on it,
so my father had taken the wheels out of the cab
and gave it to a friend to put it in a basement,
and he hide the whole entire torso of the cab,
and he had covered it with straw and bamboo,
things like that, so nobody would see it.
Right after the war, when father was gone,
my mother and I, we took the cab out,
and we put it back together.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: I don't know who wrote this.
It says,
"You cannot escape what is written in your fate."
I don't know who wrote that. Yeah, that's right.
David Feinberg: That's your father's [inaudible],
so we placed it on the outside,
and it didn't work on the outside,
but when we put it behind the curve,
then it related to the storage.
We attached this, and we had this already pasted on,
and we were going to attach
a slightly larger one that fit this.
We were going to continue pasting this.
This one would be whole,
and then we got the idea of the 3D one,
and we found it behind here,
then we decided to place it between
the two pieces and also hide it because
everybody talked about taking off the wheels
and throwing stuff over it so they couldn't see it.
It could be used after the war.
Did he actually get to use it after the war?
Esther Ackos Winthrop: Yeah, of course.
That's how we survived.
David Feinberg: Yeah, the taxi driver.
Harvey Winthrop: Was Sam the driver?
Esther Ackos Winthrop: No, we hired drivers.
What happened is that
the Jewish heads of household
had to report to the Germans,
and the Germans had set up
their headquarters in our synagogue.
In this way arrived the fateful Friday, March 24, 1944.
It was a sunny day,
and slowly many of us gathered in the little street
before the synagogue.
All of a sudden,
someone shouted that we should all
get into the synagogue because
flour was going to be distributed
for the Jewish Easter Passover.
Since the crowd was large,
some people remained outside,
but a German told them that everyone had to get inside,
and then suddenly the big door closed,
and the Germans who had been hidden
stood in front of it, armed to the teeth.
They stood facing the crowd with their machine guns.
That is how we got caught like mice in a trap.
My mother had two brothers.
When the deportation took place,
when they put people on the trucks to take them away,
he was on one of those trucks.
This is his wife, and she had two children.
One was three, and one was one.
She didn't know what to do.
She called my mother and said,
"Can I come and stay with you?"
Mrs. Sayanou said, "No, we don't have enough room."
So she put her two kids in a cart and
surrendered to the Germans,
and the two kids died the first night.
She took one child,
and my mother's sister took another child,
and anybody that had a child in their arms
went to the crematoriums.
David Feinberg: We definitely want to
get this into the picture.
This is getting hot and cold,
and I want you to tell me whether
it's more meaningful big or small
and where I'll put it.
We can put it down here like that.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: I think you should use it small.
David Feinberg: Right there? That's a good.
I think it was great there.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: Yes.
David Feinberg: That's good there.
Can you draw us a [inaudible] ?
Esther Ackos Winthrop: Helen was my best friend.
If I missed anything about Greece was Helen.
I used to look up at the sky and see the stars and say,
"Helen is looking at the same stars as I am."
David Feinberg: I think we got our first image
for our picture.
I like what you said about
your friend and the idea of you saw the stars,
and when you look at the stars,
you're looking at the same stars.
We're going to put stars on top of that picture.
Beth Andrews: One of the things you miss most is her.
David Feinberg: When you look at the stars,
we're looking at the same stars.
I think that might be the title of the film.
Beth Andrews: She wants to see
what kind of marks she's going to make.
Harvey Winthrop: I don't know what this means.
I'm going in a straight line,
and you're going up and down.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: [inaudible] like stars.
Peter Lommen: When they made them,
and that has a lot of importance to it.
David Feinberg: The truth is,
the idea that it was touched
by their visual signature,
you don't mess with that
Peter Lommen: Yeah, no, it has to have
their thing on there.
What I'm doing with these things is
tying them together, like weaving.
You're just weaving ideas together in a structured form.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: This is my brother
walking on one the street of Athens.
MALE_1: Anybody who can think,
the thing that you hated then,
it was sabotage right there itself.
Everybody did something to damage
the great German machine.
FEMALE_1: This is what was left of
the Ackos family home.
This picture was taken by Esther's son
sometime in the 1980s.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: There was a fig tree over here.
It was a big deal because
it was a fig tree and a berry tree.
This is the fig tree, and it really had real figs,
and then there was a blueberry tree.
Not blueberries, blackberries.
Blackberries drawn trees.
You went through the door,
and here was the house with a basement.
I don't know how to depict the basement.
Where was the kitchen?
That's what we used to eat.
Then there was a hallway here
and two rooms in front and two rooms in the back.
David Feinberg: Can you tell us who was your maternals?
Esther Ackos Winthrop: Maki and Toula.
Toula was here, and we lived here,
the Ackos family.
Beth Andrews: Maki was your uncle.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: Right. I'll tell you,
are you going to give me credit?
Beth Andrews: I'm going to give you a star.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: I think the whole thing
would fit beautifully there.
David Feinberg: Even with the drawing of it?
We can just cut that one out and paste it up there,
use it right from there.
Beth Andrews: Or we could trace it on there
and paint it white.
David Feinberg: Yeah. I think it will be good
to make it white,
but anyway, if we do that,
then we have to put the lyre up here.
Beth Andrews: I think the lyre is really cool too.
The lyre, as far as the constellation,
that's this one.
David Feinberg: Let's see.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: Are you going to keep
all the other stars?
David Feinberg: Some of them, and we got to put more in
and take some out.
Which ones are your favorites?
Esther Ackos Winthrop: I'm just thinking
that you should put the lyre
right in the middle right here
and then take a lot of stuff out.
I like the idea of the lyre because it plays music,
but you would have to reduce it to fit it
in the first spot.
David Feinberg: We could also have it drawn on this plane.
Beth Andrews: That's a good idea.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: I wonder if you should put
the Acropolis up there and put the lyre here.
You're going to have a different [inaudible] ,
but then you put the lyre here and the dolphin here.
David Feinberg: That would work.
Beth Andrews: I like that.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: I don't think it matters.
I want the lyre here and the dolphin there.
My son, Mark, went back to spend the summer there
in the '80s after he graduated,
and he looked for the place where we were hiding.
He thought he found it.
He's pointing to the window
that he thinks we went in and out from.
FEMALE_1: October 14, 1944,
British soldiers liberate Greece.
It is the day Esther and her family can go home.
Athens is filled with refugees, soldiers,
and broken families.
When the Ackos return,
they find others living in their home,
so they moved into the basement.
Esther Ackos Winthrop: We came back from hiding.
American Jewish Committee opened up an orphanage
for children that had lost both parents
and one parent who take care of all their kids.
My mother had five kids,
and we had one bedroom and the kitchen,
and she decided to put two of us in the orphanage.
It was me and my sister Mary.
Now what happened was
she put the first two girls, me and Evelyn,
Evelyn was the second one,
but Evelyn kept running away,
and they just couldn't deal with it anymore,
so my mother took her back
and brought Mary to the orphanage.
David Feinberg: How often did your mom visit you?
Esther Ackos Winthrop: Every week she cooked,
came with a picnic,
and we would have a picnic
either by the stream or by olive groves.
I still remember the watermelon.
FEMALE_1: In 1951,
Rosa and her children emigrate to America,
settling in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Eventually Esther goes to college
and then graduate school,
becoming a nurse practitioner.
She meets and marries Harvey Winthrop,
moves to Duluth, and together they raise a family.