May 5, 2010, a defining moment in the Greek crisis

Far from the summits, the markets, the polemics and the posturing, the Greek crisis was about ordinary families whose lives were upended. Few more so than the Papathanasopouloses.

I met them on a drizzly day in Patra, southwestern Greece. They had recently lost their daughter Angeliki in the Marfin fire.

May 5, 2010: an infamous date. The Parliament in Athens debated the first memorandum, with which a Europe unprepared for the crisis sent Greece on an impossible mission. The streets around Syntagma Square seethed. Angry crowds marched past a vulnerable bank branch on Stadiou. Behind its glass entrance, a magnet for Molotov cocktails on an alley of steel shutters, Angeliki and colleagues were working because they were expected to.

Angeliki, four months pregnant, reassured her anxious mother by phone that she would leave work early. She had a doctor's appointment...