My first encounter with Jehovah’s Witnesses in the early 1930’s is still vivid in my memory. Emmanuel Lionoudakis had been preaching in all the towns and villages of Crete. I accepted several booklets from him, but it was the one entitled Where Are the Dead? that really caught my eye. I had such a morbid fear of death that I would not even enter the room in which my father had died. As I read this booklet over and over again and learned what the Bible teaches about the condition of the dead, I felt my superstitious fear disappear.

My baptism is an event that I shall never forget. One night in 1938, two of my Bible students and I were taken by Brother Lionoudakis in pitch darkness to the beach. After saying a prayer, he plunged us into the water.