Rena Greenup was born in May 1936 in Thessaloniki, Greece of Jewish parents. Her father was a Greek Sephardic Jew and an aristocrat and her mother was an Austrian Ashkenazi Jew and a piano teacher and performer. As a young child, she lived a privileged life in a villa, and never knew anything about anti-Semitism. At the beginning of the war, her extended family would use her family's basement as an air raid shelter, because it was modern and built of reinforced concrete. In 1941 the family fled to Athens where they took Christian names, and were hidden by her some of her mother's German friends. But her father, who had served in the British Army in the Great War [Annotator's Note: World War 1], was communicating with his old army sergeant over an illegal radio, causing their host concern, so they had to move to another location. She started in school in Athens under the name Rena Tsolaki.

Among the few childhood memories Rena Greenup has of her life in Athens was food rationing. Supplies were meager and of poor quality. Her young cousins joined the Liberation Youth or the guerillas, and ended badly. Greenup didn't really know what was going on, but was aware that things had changed, and that everyone in her family was afraid of the Germans. She enjoyed school, and visiting members of her mother's family who lived in and around Athens. Greenup thinks her father continued getting information from Britain, and doesn't know if he was part of a spy group, but she knows he was somehow "involved." She thinks it was in 1943 that her father decided they could no longer stay in Athens, and he took the family to a southern fishing village called Lavrion, where he collaborated with other people who were determined to leave the country. They hired a boat with the intention of fleeing to Turkey, and traveling to Palestine. Other members of her family had taken that route and perished, but some survived.

In Lavrion, Rena Greenup's family, two Christians and a few crewmembers boarded their hired boat. It was December 1943 and the Aegean Sea was cold and stormy, and the boat's engine was not working properly. They were lost at sea, and when they eventually neared land, they were apprehended by a German crew, landed on the island of Lemnos and taken to the town of Moudros where they were imprisoned individually, except for Greenup's father who was taken to the capital, then called Kasto. Greenup was eight years old, and had among her toys a Viewmaster that that displayed pictures of European capitals, and the Germans accused her group of being spies because of that toy. All of Greenup's toys were confiscated, and she does not remember whether it was one or two days she spent alone and crying in her cell, but her mother put up such a tirade that Greenup was finally allowed to rejoin her mother. Her mother kept her occupied with simple games and a doll she made from her handkerchief. Greenup's mother continued to harangue the German guards until they moved Greenup out of the prison to live with a family named Karpousis. Greenup said the villagers were terribly exploited by the German occupiers. She went with members of the Karpousis family to the forced labor area and stole potatoes to bring to her mother in the prison.

In addition to what Rena Greenup could provide her mother, who knew how to tell fortunes, traded her services from her prison cell window with village women for scraps of food. For her birthday in 1944, Greenup's mother made her a representation of a birthday cake with chamomile daisies on a tin pan with sticks for candles, and Greenup will never forget it. One day, Greenup saw her father in the street when he was being taken for interrogation, and she ran up to him and hugged him. The prisoners were being guarded by Greek policemen, and one of them struck Greenup, knocking her away from her father and onto the ground. The policeman recognized her father, and betrayed him to the authorities. Conversely, when her mother was interrogated by an Austrian Gestapo [Annotator's Note: secret state police] leader, and found to be a woman of substance, he determined to keep her from being transported to a death camp if she gave him everything she had. She stayed, without seeing Greenup's father again, under the protection of that Gestapo leader until he was reassigned. The war ended before he was replaced.

Rena Greenup remembers that while living with her foster family in Moudros, she could tell that they were sympathizers, and that one of the older daughters would ask her leading questions that about her life before the war. Greenup knew instinctively that she should avoid giving away information that could be incriminating. Greenup was the best student in her class, and admits that her youthful pride caused her to be too boastful. Other than school, her life on the island was "nothing spectacular." When the war ended, the Germans told the villagers that they were going to destroy everything, and that they should flee if they didn't want to risk their lives. Her foster family was headed for the mountains, and Greenup thought it would be fun to go up into the mountains with them, ignoring her mother's instructions that if anything happened they would meet at the beach. The next morning the town was in flames, and the ship bringing the Germans back to the mainland had set sail, so the villagers went back to see what remained. The Germans had left behind things that were desirable, but booby-trapped, and the islanders were losing their hands or fingers trying to grab the abandoned goods. Greenup said that by that time she was inured to screams of pain and loss, and didn't make much of the tragedies played out before her. She finally remembered her mother's directive, and headed to the beach. There she was reunited with her mother, father and uncle. They stayed in Lemnos for a while, renting a small apartment, and living among the natives.

Rena Greenup didn't initially know why they stayed on Lemnos, but she said that when the Germans left Greece, the army ousted the returning king and took over the government, and after some altercation with the Communists, established a democratic state. Greenup thinks her father knew about the upheaval, and waited until things settled down to return to Saloniki. The Germans had used their home as a headquarters, and after the war someone else had moved in, but agreed to give them two rooms in which to stay. Neighbors brought back things they had saved from the house. After a lengthy legal battle, and continued delays, her father faced off with the interloper in his home, and threatened to kill him. The family got their house back. Greenup went back to school, and found it a little difficult to catch up. At that time, she was the only Jew who had returned to class. She did not feel the anti-Semitism except at home around Easter when kids would chant outside their home, "you crucified Christ!" Greenup said her father's "noblesse oblige" prompted him to start a center for displaced Jewish children, so they could be among their own, and have some instruction in their faith. He took a job at the British YMCA, then through his connections there he borrowed tents from the British Army, and built a camp for these children. An evolved version of that camp for Jewish children still exists in Saloniki.

When Rena Greenup was high school age, she attended Anatolia College, a girl's high school in Salonika, and did well. Nobody talked about what happened in the war, and she didn't feel her schoolmates were anti-Semitic, per se. She reached college age, and tested to attend school in the United States, and life moved on. She did not talk about her experiences in the war until after she was in the United States, long married and her children were grown. Through an organization that had a program called "Facing History and Ourselves" for survivors of every holocaust all over the world, Greenup began to acknowledge that she was a World War 2 Holocaust survivor and found it a liberating experience. She feels she needs to speak to make people aware of holocausts that are happening today, that there are people who prey on others, and what happened to her and people of her faith should never be allowed to happen again.