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On July 23, 2018, in Mati, Greece, Zoe Holohan and her husband, Brian Westropp O’Callaghan, watched their dream honeymoon turn into a living nightmare when wildfires swept through the region.
The tragedy killed 102 people in the area, including Zoe’s new husband, Brian.
Zoe and Brian fled the villa they were staying in, chased by flames, running for their lives.
Zoe was one of the few survivors in the area, having been rescued from the trunk of a burning car.
‘As The Smoke Clears’ is his book detailing his incredible journey since the tragedy.
Speaking on The Late Late Show, Zoe said she uses the happy memories of the beginning of her honeymoon to keep her spirits up when the magnitude of what happened brings her down.
“My happy place is when I envision Brian on the morning of our honeymoon, and right now we’ve just arrived in Greece, we’re only in the country for a couple of days and we’re splashing like a couple of idiots in the pool and it’s Awesome.
“I think Brian will forgive me for saying that he is the worst gossip in the world, that he is in the pool and we are talking about all the shenanigans that happened at the wedding, since all weddings have shenanigans, and it was a really happy time. . It’s a place I go to often when things go wrong or when I remember all the terrible things that happened from then on.
“I don’t want to remember the end of Brian, I want to remember it in that moment,” he said.
The brave Dubliner recounted the fateful afternoon in which Brian lost his life and left her with burns all over her body.
“I woke up and was no longer in bed next to me. He was urgently calling me to come down … there was an urgency in his tone.
“I saw Brian looking across the patio, he was paralyzed, and then I noticed there was a heat that had just hit when I came down the stairs.
“The entire side of the garden by the pool was on fire, I mean, visibly on fire.
“It was like a horror movie where everyone starts out happy and then you get into this horrible situation,” he said.
What felt like an hour was probably seconds for Zoe as she quickly dressed and fled the villa.
Zoe described the terrifying moment when she and Brian were being surrounded by flames and the remote control for the villa’s door would not open because the electricity was cut off in the area.
“There were miniature tornadoes out of debris floating in the air, and they’re right outside the car. Every breath was agonizing, as it is as if you were swallowing acid. It burns to the lungs, making it even hesitant to breathe. And Brian is trying to open the door. When we realized that the door was not going to open, flames had surrounded the car.
Brian and Zoe knew they would have to flee on foot, and even though her kneecap was dislocated, Zoe said she “didn’t check in.”
“I made him promise that we would be safe. He never let me down, so when he told me we’d be fine, I believed him. Holding hands we ran. It’s hard to describe how dark it was in the early afternoon. There is only a thick haze of hot smoke ”.
Zoe then said that she felt pain for the first time and looked down to find her dress on fire. Brian then put out the fire with his bare hands.
“So if my legs hurt, you can imagine how his hands felt,” Zoe said.
Zoe said five children appeared from the smog and then a car, which she believed would be her rescue vehicle.
“When we had the five children in the car and the three adults, we realized that there was no room for us. We asked them to open the trunk and the man opened the trunk and we got on ”.
As the car tried to escape the forest fire, Zoe realized that her hair and dress had caught fire once more.
“Brian was trying to remove my dress and I was trying to remove my face when my hair had started to melt on my face. It smelled of burning wax.
“The next thing I remember is that the car crashed into a tree and Brian fell onto the road. I tried to grab it back but couldn’t reach it.
“He just fell into flames right in front of me and screamed ‘why?’ Which is the last thing Brian said. And that was it, he left, he just disappeared ”.
Zoe didn’t think she would survive as she was “in her own little oven, and my hand was melting, I can’t describe the excruciating pain.
“I kept calling out Brian’s name because I thought the last thing I’d hear is the person who loved him more than anything in the world calling him by name.
“The moment they found me, I think they rescued me because I was calling out Brian’s name.
When she was rescued by a man, Zoe said she thought she was dead and only realized she had survived when one of her eyes blinked. “The other side of my face was totally melted.”
Zoe said it took “a lot of therapy” to overcome the sound of the wind, which reminded her of being in the trunk of the car.
“When the weather suddenly changed, that was it for me,” said Zoe.
Zoe admitted that she was still haunted by the fact that she was rescued and Brian wasn’t despite being only yards away.
“Now it’s less disturbing but more of a constant question of why am I still here and the ones I love are gone.”
Zoe said she tried to “erase” the image of Brian dying in front of her from her mind as a way of trying to rationalize what she experienced.
Just three weeks after her husband’s death, Zoe’s father also passed away.
Zoe faced a grueling recovery that included learning to walk again and regaining the use of all her limbs, facing “major surgery” every two to three days.
Zoe said that although she was “totally receptive” upon leaving the hospital in Greece, she entered a “feverish state of delirium” as it turned out that she had acquired a rare form of sepsis that “one in a million people in Europe have”.
Zoe’s family was told that she might not survive.
“Thank goodness I was in a coma and I didn’t realize this at the time,” Zoe said.
She said she has “come by leaps and bounds” since then and attributed her resistance to being “damn stubborn.”
“When you read the book and see how much effort went into keeping me alive; I felt like I would let them down if I let them go. “
Zoe said that she is doing “well” and that getting the book out is a strange experience as she has “been living under a rock for the last two years”.
The tattoos have helped Zoe regain “ownership of her body and skin” when she said, “I can put my clothes back on and I don’t have to dress like a nun. Before the fire, Zoe would not be dressed as a nun. “
As the Smoke Clears by Zoe Holohan is published by Gill Books, priced at € 16
Online editors
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