Eleni (26 page)

The Germans had come, and despite the tragedies, her family had survived. Every scrap of news from the outside world said that Hitler’s troops were being defeated. The rumors were that he would soon pull his divisions out of Greece.

Eleni longed for the war to end so that they could start rebuilding their lives. But the
andartes
who had become as omnipresent as swallows in the village were also talking about a new beginning. The way they whispered about a “second round” made her fear that they were preparing not for peace but for more war.

By the autumn of 1944, the end was clear. The Germans had lost Italy and Rumania as allies, and when even Turkey severed its ties with the Third Reich, Hitler’s forces in Greece began to withdraw. The last disheartened Germans limped out of Athens on October 12, the same day British forces landed in Piraeus, expecting to find Athens a scorched shell. Instead they found the city intact, the population emaciated but exultant. “For three days and nights,” said an observer, “hungry, sick people spitting blood marched without sleeping, kept going by a collective delirium, the joy of new-found freedom.”

The withdrawal of the Germans left the Communist-controlled ELAS the most powerful military force in the country. In late September its chief
kapetanios
, the black-bearded Aris Velouchiotis, was sent to secure the Peloponnesian peninsula by wiping out the last remnants of the Security Battalions appointed by the collaborationist government. With his hand-picked personal guard (the “Black Bonnets,” in their black sheepskin caps), Aris launched unprecedented massacres throughout Peloponnesos to terrorize the population into total submission to ELAS. On September 12 they executed 1,450 men, women and children in the town of Meligalas and threw them all in a well.

The British arrived to find ELAS in control of all Greece except for a corner of Epiros held by EDES under Napoleon Zervas. With almost the entire country in their grip, the ELAS fighters were furious that the previous spring their leaders had signed an agreement in Lebanon with the ministers of the exiled King George II, giving ELAS only four seats in the Parliament that would now rule Greece.

Convinced that they had been cheated of their rightful victory, ELAS troops decided to stage a coup. On the night of December 3, 1944, they attacked British and Greek troops in Athens, following a demonstration
in which ELAS supporters were fired on by police, and according to various accounts, seven to twenty-eight were killed. At the height of the battle, ELAS had its enemies pinned into a few pockets near the city center. Throughout Athens the Communist Party’s secret police, OPLA, fanned out, knocking on doors, executing thousands of real and imaginary enemies of the party. By Christmas Day, OPLA had executed 13,500 Greeks, in three weeks eliminating twice as many of their own countrymen as the number of Germans killed in Greece during three years of occupation.

The ELAS leaders made an even more serious blunder than the Lebanon agreement when they decided to send their best divisions not to join the battle of Athens but to launch a simultaneous attack on the army of Napoleon Zervas in Epiros. While they succeeded in driving Zervas off the mainland to the island of Corfu, the British, sent to Athens to prevent a Communist takeover of the country, inspired by a surprise Christmas Day visit by Winston Churchill, beat back ELAS and won control of the city.

Humbled, the defeated Communist Party signed an agreement in Varkiza, a suburb of Athens, on February 12, 1945, that would disarm ELAS in exchange for being allowed to remain a legal political entity in Greece.

In the four months of bloody civil war, 25,000 Greeks perished, joining the half million who had died during the occupation. But the deaths counted for nothing. Four months earlier, during a meeting in Moscow on October 9, 1944, between Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, the two men had already divided up the Balkans. “How would it do for you to have 90 percent predominance in Rumania, for us to have 90 percent of the say in Greece, and go 50-50 about Yugoslavia?” Churchill asked Stalin, pushing the paper on which he had written the figures toward the Soviet leader. Stalin “took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it,” Churchill wrote later, “and the post-war fate of millions was sealed.”

A
T THE BEGINNING OF
1945 when the Communist-dominated ELAS guerrillas drove the EDES forces of Napoleon Zervas into the sea, the rising sun of ELAS seemed to have finally dawned on the new tomorrow that Prokopi Skevis had promised so often. But the Varkiza agreement of February 12 burst that sun like a helium balloon and sent the ELAS guerrillas limping home to their villages, stripped of their weapons, which they were required to surrender.

If the Varkiza agreement meant defeat and betrayal to the ELAS fighters, to the villagers like Eleni Gatzoyiannis and her family it meant the end of war and the beginning of a period of hope. For the first time in four years they could pick up the pieces of their lives, plant the fields and wait for letters from the outside world.

With Athens no longer embroiled in civil war, Eleni knew the mails would soon begin functioning, bringing envelopes from America filled with news of Christos, money to buy much-needed seed for the spring planting, and perhaps before long, the precious papers that would allow them to emigrate to America. Although their stomachs were still empty, they could feed on dreams.

“All the people are fat in America,” Eleni would say in her storytelling voice. “Everyone has shoes. Every time you buy something, they give you a free paper bag to carry it home in. There are machines to do everything, even machines to eat up the dirt in the house. Hot and cold water comes out of a pipe instead of carrying it from a spring. There are toilets right inside the house, washed clean by running water like a waterfall. People can take a bath every day if they want to.” The children would hang on her words, making her tell every detail over and over.

Olga was now seventeen, and Eleni saw how the village women had begun paying visits to the house, measuring the girl with appraising eyes as a potential daughter-in-law. As soon as the mails opened up, there would be enough money to buy Olga a dowry as grand as the daydreams she was always spinning.

Every day Eleni found an excuse to walk to the Alonia, to ask the coffeehouse owner Spiro Michopoulos if by chance the postman had left a letter for her from America. The whole village was suffused with a new energy as they prepared for the first planting in four years that they could harvest without fear of the Germans confiscating their crops and burning their homes.

Only in the houses of the half-dozen ELAS stalwarts was the prospect of spring a bitter one. Prokopi Skevis was inconsolable. “If we’d concentrated all our strength in Athens instead of wasting three divisions on Zervas, the British couldn’t have held out and today we’d be running the country instead of the puppets who spent the war sunbathing in Cairo!” he mourned. The Skevis brothers both agreed, however, that the important thing was for the Communist Party to survive despite its mistakes, even if it meant destroying ELAS to do it. Although unarmed, they still had an important role in the struggle. When the ELAS regiments were dispersed, their officers ordered them to go back to their villages and maintain a tight grip on the loyalty of the inhabitants.

To that end, Spiro Skevis organized all the adolescent boys and young men of Lia into a theatrical troupe. They performed an instructive skit entitled “Homes in Ruins,” a dramatic melodrama about a brave ELAS
andarte
who returns after the war to find his house burned and his starving sister preyed upon by an evil-minded black marketeer. Most of the food and supplies available in Greece after the war had found their way into the thriving black market, to be sold at exorbitant prices, and the sneering, capitalist black marketeer, played by Christos Bartozokis with a penciledon mustache, was a natural villain.

The unfortunate girl was played by Yianni Kepas, an ideal choice, Spiro thought. Of course, no respectable maiden would be allowed to act in a public skit or even sit in the audience, so Yianni, who was a handsome, fair-haired young fellow, floured his face for the play to hide his stubble, tied a scarf around his head and wore a dress with an embroidered apron. In all, there were seventeen men and boys in the cast. They rehearsed for a month, built a small raised stage in the village square, and brought benches out of the half-burned schoolhouse to make a horseshoe of seats for the audience.

The drama, performed on a Sunday afternoon before a crowd that overflowed the square, lasted for two hours, climaxing in the bloody killing of the black marketeer by the wronged maiden. The audience sat spellbound until the part where the villain placed his hands on the breasts of the weeping girl and demanded that she pay for food in a coin dearer than gold. In the hush, a voice could be heard from the back of the crowd, saying in a stage whisper, “Kepas looks so pretty in a dress, he’d better watch out they don’t send him off to Aris!”

The audience froze, and the “leading lady” forgot his lines at this outrage. EDES forces had widely circulated rumors that Aris, the revered ELAS
hero, was a pederast. All eyes, including those of the actors, moved to the Skevis brothers in the front row. Spiro, the author of the play, turned to survey the men at the back, who returned his stare innocently. When the silence became oppressive, Spiro turned back to the stage and nodded to the performers. Kepas managed to recall his next line and the end of the play was greeted with a thunderous applause.

After it died away, Spiro got up and elaborated on the moral. “Under our brave leaders, including
Kapetan
Aris,” he began with pointed emphasis, “we drove the German invaders out of our beloved country. Now some false friends are trying to bring back the capitalist bloodsuckers and the cowardly Glücksburg king. As this play shows us, these forces will exploit, torment and humiliate all of us and”—he paused and scanned the crowd—“they have lackeys even in this village! But if we stand united behind the Communist Party of Greece, the party of the poor and oppressed, we will triumph!”

Someone in the audience interrupted. He sounded more respectful than the heckler who had mentioned Aris. “Everyone has heard of the courage your men showed, Comrade Spiro,” Kitso Haidis said. “When the Germans came here, you challenged their whole battalion with only six men and one machine gun from atop the Prophet Elias. But I have one question: When you provoked the Germans enough to burn down half our village, couldn’t you at least have hit a German ass instead of poor old Anastasia’s goat?”

There were several involuntary snorts of laughter and the crowd turned back to Spiro, whose face was the color of his shirt. Before his brother could react, Prokopi stepped up from the front row. “You were lucky one time, old man!” Prokopi snapped. “Don’t think you’re going to be lucky next time!”

On the way home the villagers whispered among themselves about the remarkable events of the afternoon. Two rightists had been rash enough to jeer at the ELAS propaganda (of course, you could expect something like that from Kitso Haidis!) but more astonishing, none of the
andartes
had raised a hand against the hecklers. The British must really have cut off their balls.

The ELAS guerrillas had been sent home from the battlefield with the warning that government “security forces” might come on a witch hunt looking for them. Even though the Varkiza agreement provided amnesty for all political crimes, and, in Athens, required warrants for arrest, it did not pardon violent crimes such as murder. Former ELAS
andartes
soon discovered that in the countryside the many local rightist-dominated security forces used this loophole to avenge old grudges, arresting leftists for killings they had allegedly committed while serving in the resistance. As they swooped down, often without warning, the jails quickly filled to overflowing. Less than a month after the propaganda skit, a company of Greek army soldiers passed through the village, and the news of their approach sent the
local ELAS guerrillas running for cover into the mountains, where they camped in the gullies and crevices, moving every day.