Fotini Barron, 77, a taciturn woman who hid two of her nephews from the Nazis in the mountains of Crete then came to America and insisted that her four children get the education she never had, died Thursday, Sept. 28, of a congenital heart disease while visiting her daughter in Redlands, Calif. “She was a noble woman,” said her son-in-law George Zimbrakos. “She was tough.” The former Fotini Kasselakis was born in Crete and raised in the village of Skine, which was burned to the ground by German occupying forces during World War II. While it remained under military curfew, Mrs. Barron and a sister returned to the town under cover of darkness and reburied their slain brother according to Orthodox traditions. For more than two years after that, Mrs. Barron hid two of her nephews in the mountains to keep them from the Nazis. She met her husband, the late Michael Barron, when he returned to his native Crete for a visit in 1947. Her husband fell in love with her after a glimpse, and their wedding was quickly arranged; they returned the next year to Chicago, where Mrs. Barron’s husband had settled several years earlier. The couple had four children, the oldest of whom was 12 when Mrs. Barron’s husband died in 1960. Unemployed, uneducated and speaking sparse English, Mrs. Barron took up housekeeping for the Greek Archdiocese of Chicago. She taught herself English, and in a few years, she got a job in the cafeteria in Marshall Field’s store downtown, working her way up to cooking at the Walnut Room by her retirement in the mid-1980s. Renowned for her cooking–her children were dispatched regularly with generous helpings of dolmades and pastitsio to widows and old men in their neighborhood–Mrs. Barron nonetheless forbade her daughters to learn how to do it themselves. “She didn’t want her kids to go through all the hardships that she went through,” her son-in-law said. Instead, she insisted all her children attend college. One became an attorney, another a surgeon, the third the chairman of a university math department and the youngest a psychiatric social worker. The austere Mrs. Barron referred to them–usually outside of their presence–as her “diamonds.” She is survived by two daughters, Dorothy Zimbrakos and Kathy Coutrakon; two sons, Manuel and Dr. John; and six grandchildren. Services will be held at 10 a.m. Friday in St. Andrew’s Greek Orthodox Church, 5649 N. Sheridan Rd., Chicago.
