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| Anna
Christake Cornwell |
It is a wonder how a girl who was born in Philadelphia and grew
up in a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania, finds herself trapped
in Greece during WWII. Her father, Costas, came to the US from
Greece as a young man to send money to his widowed mother for
his four sisters’ dowries and his younger brother’s
studies in medical school. A few years later, he returned to
his homeland, married her mother, Merope, and came back to Philadelphia
with his bride in 1928 to raise their family. The depression
and hard times followed and he lost his business and had to
start all over again. Homesick for Greece the couple returned
to their country in 1937 with their daughter Anna and her younger
brother, Christos.
For a few years, the family led a comfortable, middle-class
life in the port city Thessaloniki, the second largest in Greece
after Athens. Within a short time, however, war was looming
on the European horizon. Her father received repeated warnings
from the American Consulate that war was imminent and he should
prepare to leave with his family as soon as possible. He decided
to leave his wife and children in Greece and returned alone
to the US to find work and then send for them. In the meantime,
his wife could collect the debts his credit line business had
accumulated. In May of 1940 he departed and on October 28, 1940
Italy declared war on Greece.
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| A
photo of the author at age one. |
When Anna’s mother tried to secure passage on the last
ocean liner leaving Greece for America with her two children,
she was turned away – the ship was fully booked. ONLY
THE BIRDS ARE FREE is the true story of the following five years,
“of life and struggle on the run” in a country besieged
by German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation armies. Preferring
death by a bullet to death by starvation, the adolescent girl’s
only hope was to join the youth resistance movement, by the
time she was 14, from which she emerged a leader and later served
as its educational and cultural director for villages in Thessaly,
writing and distributing leaflets and speaking out on behalf
of the cause for freedom.
After spending a year in post-war Thessaloniki, she returned
to Philadelphia with her mother and brother in December 1945.
Anna had always loved reading and studying and from an early
age aspired to become a writer, but when she came back to the
US at the age of 16, she felt that her command of the English
language was not sufficiently good to permit her to pursue that
dream. Instead, she followed another of her passions and majored
in psychology.
She graduated from the City College of New York with a B.S.
in comparative psychology in 1952 and a M.A. degree in 1955
in clinical psychology, followed by a Ph.D. in physiological
psychology and studies in neurophysiology from McGill University,
Canada in 1958. Her post-graduate training included a senior
post-doctoral fellowship in neuropharmacology at the Albert
Einstein College of Medicine from 1960-1963.
Perhaps it was the exposure to the extreme hardships of hunger,
disease, and dislocation that motivated Anna to commit her life
to preserving the lives of others. “I didn’t choose
my profession because of my experiences,” she recalls,
“but my heightened sensitivity to the suffering of others
certainly enhanced my work as a clinician.” Dr. Cornwell
is widely acknowledged as a pioneer and research leader in sleep,
the subject of her doctoral dissertation, and apnea in infants
at high risk for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). She is
particularly noted and honored worldwide for her work in searching
for the cause of SIDS and in 1979 published a theory of the
cause of SIDS in the International Journal of Neuroscience,
entitled “SIDS: A testable hypothesis and mechanism.”
She has held teaching and research positions at prestigious
universities and medical institutions and has been invited to
present her findings in SIDS, vision research, and child development
at many distinguished professional conferences in the US, Europe,
and Asia, including the Albert Einstein College of Medicine,
Montefiore and other Hospital Medical Centers, the European
Sleep Research Society, the World Association of Infant Psychiatry,
the Annenberg Center for Health Sciences, the Hellenic Medical
Society, the Greek-American Behavioral Sciences Institute, and
the American Psychological Association, among others.
She has also published extensively
in professional journals, including Neuropediatrics, the
Journal of Sleep Research, Vision Research and the Journal
of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, and in the
Clinical Handbook of Sleep Disorders in Children.
She is the mother of two grown sons and resides in Hastings-on-Hudson,
New York, where she is active in community events promoting
peace and health in the world. She is a member of the
Literature Club of Hastings-on-Hudson, the Rivertown Artists
and the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center.
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| Anna
Christake Cornwell in a recent photo with her two
sons, Alex, left, and Trevor, right. |
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| Anna in her second grade school photo,
1937. |
Anna and her brother in
the U.S. Their ages are seven and one-half and three and
one-half, respectively. |
Anna, her parents and brother before
leaving the U.S. to go to Greece in 1937. |
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| Anna's Nene Theodora |
Anna’s mother at about age 37,
center, and her two widowed sisters in Thessaloniki in
1945. |
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| Anna’s friend Avyoula in postwar
Thessaloniki. |
Anna and her friend Kiki in Thessaloniki
in 1945. |
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| The White Tower of Thessaloniki. |
The Harbor of Thessaloniki. |
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