The transcript of Dialogos Radio’s interview with Paul Ioannidis, the honorary vice-president of the Onassis Foundation and author of “Destiny Prevails,” follows below. This interview aired on April 3-4, 2014. Find the podcast of this interview here.
MN: With us here on Dialogos Radio and the Dialogos Interview Series today is Paul Ioannides, the Honorary Vice-President of the Onassis Foundation’s Board of Directors and author of “Destiny Prevails” an autobiography chronicling his life and experiences fighting the Nazis during World War II as a rebel fighter in the Greek mountains. His later distinguished career as a pilot and executive for Olympic Airways, and his long relationship with the Onassis group and the Onassis family for over five decades. Paul, thank you for joining us today.
You were actually born in Germany in the interwar period but your family soon came back to Greece and you grew up in Athens. Ironically, though, it was your German birth certificate that got you out of trouble on a few occasions during war, I believe. Tell us about your early years.
PI: My father was born in Cyprus. He studied Medicine in France and attended post-graduate studies in Berlin where I was born. My mother died six months after I was born. I was in love with the sea ever since I could remember. I wanted to attend the Naval Academy in order to become an officer. I would not hear of anything else. By the end of 1942, seeing that the German troops were still on my home soil, I felt like I could not contain my anger and I decided that it was not time for studying but only for fighting. So I left home to take to the mountains and joined the Resistance the first days of 1943 with the Greek People’s Liberation Army, known as ELAS.