from
Reinhard J. Brembeck and Christiane Schlötzer
In the end, his voice failed him, which was always rough and short of breath and could descend so deeply, as if Mikis Theodorakis were measuring the depths of his life with this voice, the years in which the Greek composer of the century was banished, forbidden and on the prisoner island of Makronisos, the Greek Golgotha, was tortured. The few confidants whom the 96-year-old let in his narrow house at the foot of the Acropolis saw a man severely affected by illness who could no longer live without an oxygen device. He is said to have wished for death for a long time, to which he was several times closer than life as a leftist resistance fighter against the German occupiers in his home country and in the civil war that followed.