Austrian MP finds POW dad
A 62-year-old Austrian parliamentarian has been united with his Greek father, a prisoner of war in Vienna during World War II, for the first time after over a decade of searching, it was revealed yesterday. «I have achieved my life’s goal in finding him,» Volkmar Harvaneng told the Athens News Agency after meeting Giorgos Pitenis in the 87-year-old’s native village of Samarina in Grevena, western Macedonia, this summer. Pitenis returned to Greece in 1945 after serving in a hard-labor camp in Vienna but he had been unable to find his Austrian wife and son. The young Harvaneng started his search for his father in 1950 but found no trail until last July, when his mother died and he discovered an envelope with Pitenis’s name on it and an address in Kozani, northern Greece. With the help of the Greek Consulate in Vienna, he tracked down his father.
