‘We won’t be the same after this’ Young Irish woman tells of ‘panic, screaming and crying’
As Zoe Holohan recovers after the death of her husband on their Greek honeymoon, the heroes who saved her tell of the pain they have endured
MANOS Tsaloagos holds up one of two phones he deliberately smashed on the ground since at least 85 people were killed in a forest fire on Monday.
He is smiling and smoking at the Rafina firehouse, but inside, he says, he is frustrated and confused, and so he smashes his phones to release tension.
‘His nerves are not good and so he throws down his phone,’ says his colleague and English translator, Helen Antopoulou.
The phone he holds up has a heavy smashed screen, his other one is completely destroyed.
Helen and Manos both smile at the absurdity of his actions, and yet, after the violent deaths they have witnessed in the last four days, it makes sense to them.
‘This is why I am smoking too much, drinking too much coffee,’ says Manos. ‘We live only on nerves now.’ It was Manos who opened the boot of a BMW on Monday, as fire engulfed the whole street, and found Irish woman Zoe Holohan inside.
There were three Greek adults in the front of the car and six crying children in the back.
The only room left was in the boot – the driver had been picking up anyone they could find as fire fell on them from every direction.
Zoe’s long dress was smouldering and her arms were badly burned.
Manos poured water all over her to cool her down then lifted her unconscious body inside his fire truck.
The car had smashed into a wall outside a mansion in Kokkino Lamanaki (Little Red Harbour), a tree-lined neighbourhood situated by the sea.
Usually, it’s a pretty walk for tourists staying in the local resorts; now, it is a death zone.
Zoe and her group, all of them Greeks she had never met before, were just feet away from a stairs down to the beach, but both sides of the stairs was lit up with burning trees and thick smoke, making it impossible to pass through.
Other fire trucks picked up the others in the car.
‘It was so hot that I could not even stand there,’ Manos said.
‘Everyone in the car would have died in minutes if we hadn’t found them.
‘There were 15 cars in a row, all on fire.’
He ran to the back of the fire truck after putting Zoe in the front passenger seat.
He could barely hold on the grip bar, as it was burning hot.
Another fireman hung on the mirror on the front of the truck as they took off at speed through the burning trees.
The fireman hanging at the front took a photo of the mirror as they drove – it shows a car on fire behind them, one of dozens along the road.
A few hundred metres further, they found a sobbing woman and her dog, surrounded by fire.
‘She was running the wrong way, towards Kokkino,’ says Helen. ‘She and the dog would have died.’
The fire truck stopped, and Manos took her and the dog and put them in the passenger seat with Zoe, before they took off again.
They arrived a few minutes later at Rafina fire station, where Zoe was laid out on the ground.
Irini Chatzmathiou, a nurse and part-time firewoman, gave her first aid treatment.
Helen could see how badly injured she was.
‘Her clothes were burned, everything was burned – her arms, legs and chest,’ she said.
Zoe spoke for the first time, telling them that her husband, Brian O’Callaghan-Westropp, was back there somewhere on the short road between Mati and Kokkino.
Irini told her they would do what they could to find him and she was taken by ambulance to a hospital.
Manos and Helen’s faces both light up when they are told that Zoe is still alive and recovering in hospital.
Manos says something in Greek and we wait for Helen to translate.
‘He says he would really like to see her, we would both like to see her,’ says Helen.
She asks who can connect them to Zoe when she is well enough for visits.
In the middle of all this tragedy, in which the firefighters are finding charred bodies every day, they are hungry for good news, to know they have saved lives, and to reconnect to their own humanity.
‘I am a graphic design technician,’ says Helen.
‘I am only a firefighter during the summer. Irini is a nurse when she is not doing this.
‘None of us will ever be the same after this.
‘This whole area will never be the same again. We live here, we know people who have died.
‘We will need therapists, for the firefighters and for people.’
She points out to the sea, and says: ‘Now the search is out there.’
Jets of fire have moved downhill at 125 kilometres an hour, she says, as the burning hot air rushes to the cold of the sea.
Anyone who stood in way of the fireballs combusted in flames.
Tourists ran into the sea, screaming. Some jumped off the nearby cliffs, unable to open their eyes. Their clothes, glasses and keys lay at the rocks below four days later.
Those who made it the to the beach jumped under water to escape the huge clouds of toxic smoke rolling down the hill behind them, dropping burning pine ash onto the sea.
At least 20 of them are reported to be still missing, but police privately say it’s more likely the number is around 40.
‘Do you see, over there?’ asks Helen. ‘That is the island of Euboia. Three bodies washed up there, and there will be more.’
As she speaks, a Greek navy ship searches the narrow Euripus Strait, looking for the dead.
At a house near the station, firefighters and police found another body yesterday, bringing the death toll to 83, which includes children, pensioners and, like Zoe’s husband Brian, who died in the tragedy, honeymooners enjoying the pine forest walks and unspoilt beaches of the area.
‘Even when we find the bodies, they are so badly burned it will take DNA to identify them – it will take 40 days to get each DNA result,’ says Manos. ‘In the meantime, there is more stress, and more bodies.’
‘We live only on nerves now’ ‘We will need therapists’
A YOUNG Kerry woman has told the Irish Daily Mail how she and her boyfriend had been relaxing in the Greek resort when terror ripped through the area as the flames approached.
Chloe Sugrue, 19, said she and 21-year-old Seán Davis did not initially realise the danger they were in, believing at the time that the blaze would be confined to higher ground.
‘We noticed smoke in the sky, way up in the mountains, so we didn’t really think anything of it,’ she said.
However, after emerging from a local restaurant the pair found people ‘panicking, screaming, crying’, and they decided to return to Hotel Mati, where the hotel manager told them locals were frightened because they had family members living up in the mountains.
‘She said you’ll be safe in here so just stay here,’ Ms Sugrue said.
However, ‘in the matter of ten, 15 minutes it was: “Get out of here and get onto the beach!”,’ she said, and added: ‘The fire has come down tremendously fast.’
She said: ‘We heard a big bang and looked up and the fire had come right next to the hotel – and an apartment block next to our hotel was completely levelled. It was a matter of “run for your life” down to the water front’, she said.
The couple first found sheltering under a concrete wall at the beach but were forced closer to the water as the blaze spread at a speed locals said was like that of a flamethrower.
The pair waited from around 6pm until 1am until the coast guard arrived – but they discovered that they were evacuating people to a nearby area which had also been affected by the flames.
The teenager explained that they did not want to go ‘from one fire to another’ and decided to stay where they were, until fire fighters told them they could return to the hotel an hour later.
They were moved to Athens and are flying home to Ireland this morning.
‘I just want to get home now’, Ms Sugrue said.
The pair had been staying in the area for just one night before flames engulfed the region, claiming over 80 lives and destroying homes, with locals now asking how the fires began.
As Ms Sugrue and her boyfriend were waiting to be rescued at the shoreline beside their hotel, she told RTÉ News At One: ‘The fire was just everywhere.’