Eleni (18 page)

The person in Lia who benefited most from this purge was Costa Haidis, Eleni Gatzoyiannis’ cousin, who, as the local Communist Party commissar, became the most powerful man in the area. Spiro Skevis returned from Preveza, where as an ELAS lieutenant he had fought more successfully than his brother. Because he supported the party’s decisions, he was given command of a company in the 15th Regiment made up mostly of men from Lia.

Surprised by the takeover of the local ELAS group, the Mourgana villagers began to understand that the movement begun locally by the Skevis brothers was being controlled by mysterious forces and extended far beyond their own local horizons. Every day new
andartes
passed through the village, sometimes staying overnight in the schoolhouse or demanding lodgings in village homes. Many wore unfamiliar uniforms and spoke in strange regional accents.

Near the end of the summer of 1943, Prokopi Skevis reappeared in Lia, thoroughly chastened by his exile in the Yannina valley. Eleni noticed that he seemed hardened, more distant from the local people and that he rarely spoke anymore about the common struggle of the Allies and
andartes
against the Germans. Instead, in his speeches he concentrated on denouncing “monarcho-fascists,” which meant Zervas; imperialists, which meant admirers of the king, like her father; and bloodsucking exploiters of the masses. As a reward for his new ideological orthodoxy, Prokopi was named secretary of the Communist Party committee for the entire prefecture of Thesprotia. Most of the Liotes were glad to see the local resistance founder back and took pride in the promotion of their native son in ELAS’ ranks.

The endless warring of ELAS and EDES guerrillas had hamstrung the whole resistance effort so much that in July, under prodding from the British Military Mission, an agreement was negotiated between the guerrilla groups to cease hostilities against one another and put themselves under the orders of a joint general headquarters based in Pertouli, Thessaly, made up of representatives from each resistance band and the British commandos.

In the Mourgana area, EDES was well dug in at Keramitsa, and ELAS had a firm hold on the upper villages: Lia, Babouri and Tsamanta.

Hoping to keep the two sides from erupting into battle with each other and to make them concentrate on the real enemy—the Germans—the British Military Mission to Greece decided to send representatives to the Mourgana mountains, which were assuming increasing strategic importance. In case of an Allied invasion on the Greek west coast, opposite Corfu, a strong resistance army in the Mourgana could block the route of German reinforcements to the landing site both from Albania in the north and Yannina in the east. The region also contained one of the two evacuation routes the Germans could take out of Greece—through Albania to the Adriatic Sea. The Germans preferred this route because it avoided going through Tito’s strong partisan army in Yugoslavia, and the Allies wanted it closed.

The British Empire arrived in Lia in the unlikely person of a tall, nervous, fair-haired Scot of about thirty-five named Lieutenant John Anderson. The villagers soon came to call him “Captain Ian.” He was accompanied by another subject of His Majesty, Corporal Kenneth Smith, a large, lusty, dark-haired Geordie from the north of England with a wireless radio on his back. Most extraordinary of all was their interpreter, a shy, coffee-colored man named Peter Saramantis, who had a Greek sailor for a father and a black South African for a mother. He told the villagers that the British were setting up an Allied mission right in Lia and that they had rented the two-room Fafoutis house in back of the police station for the purpose.

Nearly everyone in the village felt proud and a little more secure with the arrival of British commandos in their midst. There was no way to foresee that the British presence would heighten the tensions between ELAS and EDES and bring civil war right to their doorsteps.

On September 9, 1943, Italy capitulated to the Allies. Its surrender destroyed the tenuous equilibrium which the British had been trying so hard to maintain between the Greek resistance groups.

The 100,000 Italian soldiers in Greece were suddenly faced with the dilemma of giving themselves up to the Germans or to the
andartes
. Their morale broken, most surrendered to whichever side reached them first. On the island of Rhodes, 40,000 Italian soldiers surrendered to only 5,000 Germans.

When the Nazis in other parts of Greece encountered resistance from their former allies, they were merciless. In Cephalonia some Italian soldiers tried to defend themselves and the German commandant told his men, “Hunters! The next twenty-four are yours!” Overnight, 4,000 Italians were shot.

The Germans and the guerrilla resistance groups throughout Greece raced one another to capture the precious Italian weapons. The plum was the Italian Pinerolo Division in central Thessaly, led by General Alberto Infante, which controlled about 12,000 men and all their arms.

ELAS was the predominant guerrilla group in that area. Knowing that the
andartes
were nearly as dangerous as the Germans, Infante contacted the British and asked them to oversee his surrender to the guerrilla leaders. At the same moment the Germans were rushing a convoy of armored units and an SS regiment toward the spot to prevent such a prize from falling into ELAS hands.

The chief of the British mission knew that Infante’s thousands of weapons would give ELAS such an advantage that it would threaten the fragile truce with the other resistance groups, but there was nothing he could do. He nervously initialed the treaty signed by Infante and
Kapetan
Aris of ELAS. As soon as they surrendered, the Italians joined the ELAS guerrillas in fighting off the German onslaught.

To render the Italians powerless, ELAS divided them into small detachments, sent them to separate localities, then disarmed and dispatched them to work camps in the mountains, where about 1,000 died that winter.

The sudden windfall of Italian weapons—10,000 rifles, 20 pieces of artillery, 2 armored cars, 100 trucks and more than 50 smaller vehicles—made ELAS so superior to EDES in firepower that it began to seem inevitable they would attack EDES, setting off a civil war.

General Infante and his staff were taken for their protection to the headquarters of the British commandos that had been established at Pertouli, Thessaly, where British officers began making plans to spirit them out of Greece. Infante would be evacuated overland to Albania and the sea, where a submarine would carry him to Italy. The evacuation of Infante was assigned to a new Allied commando post which had just been set up by the British near the Albanian border in the village of Lia.

J
UST AS THE
ELAS skits had enlivened the tedium of life in Lia, the establishment of a British commando post there provided an exciting diversion for the villagers.

No foreigner had ever lived among them, and the peasants studied these three Englishmen as if they were rare and fascinating zoological specimens. It was hard to believe that the mighty British Empire, which the Greeks had long held in awe, would manifest itself in the persons of the tall, nervous Scottish captain, the husky, loud-voiced radio operator and the mulatto interpreter. They had many peccadilloes. For one thing, they wore short pants like children. They also ran up and down the mountain paths for exercise. The first time that happened, all the villagers who saw them took to their heels running in the same direction, certain that the Germans were in hot pursuit. They were astonished to learn that the English were running for recreation. The villagers associated the mountainsides with toil and fatigue and would no more walk or run about for amusement than fishermen would relax by swimming in the sea.

Nevertheless, however strange the habits of the English, the Liotes considered it an honor to have them there and shouted “Long live England!” when they passed the officers and pressed gifts of fruit and vegetables into their hands. Dimitri Stratis, a second cousin of Eleni Gatzoyiannis, told her that by their patronage, the British had saved his
cafenion
near their headquarters. He had been about to close down for lack of goods to sell when the Scot offered to pay him gold sovereigns to get Italian beer on the Albanian black market, along with such luxuries as marmalade and candles. Captain Ian, confided Dimitri, drank a prodigious amount of beer.

From another distant cousin—Nikola Paroussis in Babouri—a young guerrilla who happened to be in charge of the makeshift landing field on the night of September 17, Eleni learned how the last member of the mission, a dashing young captain named Philip Nind, was dropped from an airplane near the monastery of St. Athanassios along with twenty-four parachutes
bearing boxes of supplies. Paroussis had tracked down four boxes that got lost in the bushes and carried them up to the British headquarters, hoping to be rewarded with a new pair of boots at least. “But as you can see, I’m still wearing sandals,” he told Eleni ruefully. His only reward was a strange English phrase: “Thank you.”

The villagers watched with interest as the British set up housekeeping. The officers hired a cook from the village of Faneromeri, nicknamed him “Henry” and installed him in the separate shack which served as a kitchen. They used one room of the Fafoutis house for a bedroom and the other for the wireless radio. They bought a mule and christened it “Edda,” for Mussolini’s daughter. It was even rumored that they pinned pictures of naked women to the walls of their bedroom.

Father Zisis was as eager as everyone else to welcome the English and offered his services, but he was stumped by the assignment they gave him: to find two village women to be their housekeepers. No respectable village women would work in the British mission, the priest knew. Women did not go into the living quarters of nonrelatives without tarnishing their reputation beyond repair, but it was impossible to make the British understand this. After all, they were offering to pay the housekeepers each a British gold sovereign a month, plus their meals during working hours. Finally Father Zisis thought of the two surviving daughters of the widow Botsaris, with their bobbed hair and Athenian manners. They brazenly greeted village men whom they passed on the road. They desperately needed money for food, and their mother was too distracted by grief over her dead children to interfere.

That was how Angeliki Botsaris and her sister Constantina became housekeepers for the English mission in Lia, which had been grandly named the Bovington Mission by Allied Headquarters in Cairo. Because Angeliki was a neighbor of the Gatzoyiannis family, she would often drop by Eleni’s house for a visit and relate the mysterious activities going on there. She described the English officers’ strange eating habits; instead of fresh food they preferred powdered eggs, canned meat and something called cocoa, and refused to put olive oil on their salad, saying it was only fit for fueling lamps. But they were almost excessively clean and disconcertingly polite to their housekeepers despite the language barrier.

Angeliki described with awe how the radio crackled day and night, bringing messages from distant countries for Ken, the radio operator, to transcribe. She whispered that she often saw the two commanding officers, Ian and Philip, arguing with each other over these messages. The mulatto interpreter explained to her that the two men came from different classes of society in England. Philip was well-educated and rich. Although he was a dozen years younger than Ian, Philip had been made a captain first; then Ian was promoted for this mission. Ian was a dour, suspicious man, Angeliki reported, who resented his fellow officer, but she found the radio operator good-natured, easygoing and funny, even though she couldn’t
understand a word he said. The Gatzoyiannis family listened enthralled to her gossip, imagining that they were learning inside secrets of great significance to the Allied war effort instead of a housekeeper’s view of an isolated outpost of lonely men.

I remember my first close view of the English one afternoon when I accompanied my mother and sisters to the village square, where the foreigners sat, looking strange and comical in their short pants, receiving the homage of the villagers. They appeared exceptionally tall, cleaner and blonder than the men of our village, and as they sat with their interpreter at a table drinking beer, the Liotes bowed to them as if they were kings. Like all the children, I was a bit afraid of the dusky interpreter, but I listened as he translated their polite words of greeting. It was clear that these were men of great power, and in my mind I associated them with my father, who also lived in a distant land, wore extraordinary clothes and bathed often. I wanted to ask the strangers if they knew my father, but my mother refused to let me bother them with my questions. Looking back on the memory, I couldn’t help wondering what they made of our isolated village and their role there.