You may know her as Cece, Cecilia, or by her birth name, Tzilli. She was many things to many people—a friend, an ally, a neighbor…

 

Cecilia was born in Dresden Germany on January 4^th 1933, just at the beginning of the Hitler era. Her father was a Catholic German. Her mother was of Italian descent, living in France.

 

When Cecilia was a year and a half old, her oldest brother (19 years old) was murdered by members of the Nazi party. Her mother was so distraught that she struggled to take care of her other children.

 

When she was 7 years old, Cecilia's father realized he had no option but to send her alone on a train to the “Catholic home for kids” in Bavaria. There, she discovered she had an older sister also living in this orphanage. The nuns treated the children poorly, beat them regularly, and sometimes the children went hungry. As the Red Army was about to defeat Nazi Germany, the British and American air forces ferociously bombed Dresden for three nights shortly after Cecilia's 12^th birthday. By sheer fate, Cecilia and her sister and father were on the outskirts of town that day attending church. However, her mother was back at home and sought shelter in the basement of her apartment house but was killed in the British bombings.

 

After the war, Cecilia was reunited with her father. With her sister, they immigrated to the U.S. Soon after, her father returned to Germany and Cecilia settled in New York City, where she found work as a waitress. While waitressing, she met a man named Noah Thomas Greene. She eventually married Mr. Greene and they moved to Tennessee with their two children and went on to have a third child.

 

The Greenes were a politically active family; Mr. Greene descended from an Indigenous mother and a Black father who was a sharecropper. Noah had a strong sense of ecological justice and was an early environmental and civil rights activist. Cecilia and Noah faced many challenges as an interracial couple at a time when it was not only unfashionable, but very dangerous, especially in the American South. These challenges included FBI intimidation, neighborhood segregation, and disparate treatment for their “mixed-race” children. Cecilia and her family spent many summers in a camp in New Hampshire called World Fellowship, where she served as a beloved member of the staff as a cook. In the late 1980s, Cecilia and her children moved back to New York City and she eventually became a resident of the illustrious Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx.

 

Following her husband’s death in the early 2000s, Cecilia experienced the added pain of betrayal by her daughter, who maneuvered to usurp Cecilia and Noah’s estate, cutting Cecilia and Cecilia's two sons out of the picture. Most painful was that this caused her beloved granddaughters to become estranged from her. Despite this injustice, Cecilia remained active in social movements, and could frequently be found at anti-war rallies and labor rights protests around the city. She was a regular attendee of the “Hot Topics” dialogues at her local senior center, and for many years she joined a Freedom Socialist Party contingent at the annual Pride March. From the anti-Iraq war movement, to supporting the striking Stella D’oro workers, to her support of the Palestinian people in their fight to retain their homeland, she was always on the side of working people. She had grown up in a world of fascist dictators and was adamant about speaking truth to power wherever and however fascism showed up.

 

She occasionally returned to her homeland of Germany, where she would spend time with her niece and other close friends.

 

On January 23^rd, just three weeks after her 91^st birthday, Cecilia experienced a likely cardiac event and passed away. She was especially close with her son Malcolm and her grandson Tanasi, and with her friends and neighbors in and around the co-op. Until the day she died, she was fiercely independent—she went for walks every day, cooked and shared meals with friends, and handled all of her affairs on her own. She truly taught us the art of living life on your own terms, doing it her way!