How a Greek banknote connected the families of a Second World War aircrew
Written by : Darron Kloster – Times Colonist
It’s a strange story, one that involves a Greek banknote, a teenage currency collector, a North Saanich historian — and a Second World War aircrew who made it home alive.
A five-man crew from Royal Canadian Air Force 437 Squadron — including pilot Reginald Barnhouse and flight officer Wilfred Louis Karp — were celebrating their return to Canada at a pub in a Montreal suburb.
Nobody’s sure about how they got their hands on a 100 drachma Greek bill, but several of the aircrew signed it that night on Jan. 28, 1946, with the inscription “Lachine: Our First Bar in Canada.”
Fast forward 78 years to last May, when 16-year-old Karolis Zegunis of Maple Ridge, a keen collector of currencies, walked into a local coin shop and bought a box of foreign bank notes for $400.
“There was a whole bunch of random stuff in there from all over the world,” Zegunis said in an interview. “Soviet notes, Germany, Africa — even some from the Sandwich Islands.”
But the one with ink signatures and a Second World War story caught his eye. “The ones with signatures can have a lot of value,” the teenager said.
And he was right, though not just in a monetary sense.
Zegunis posted a photo of the Greek bank note to a Reddit forum devoted to the transcription of handwritten documents.
That caught the attention of Second World War historian and former school teacher Peter Brand in North Saanich, who is well-versed in researching Commonwealth airmen, and had only signed up to Reddit a few days before.
Inspired, Brand set out to not only transcribe the signatures on the bank note, but to identify them and possibly locate their descendants.
