Eleni (61 page)

The soldiers told the refugees to climb into the open back of the truck and sit on the two benches which ran along the sides. Nikola held tight to Kanta’s hand. When the truck suddenly came alive with an angry growl, pulsating beneath him, he clutched one of the metal thwarts with the other hand. The sound reminded him of the approach of the bomber planes and he was terrified of the thing that had him in its belly.

With a gut-wrenching lurch, the truck flung itself into motion. To the children and to many of the adults as well, it seemed that the earth had begun to move, an apocalyptic upheaval as everything fell away. Despite the slow speed of the lumbering vehicle, the grass, trees, sky and staring townspeople of Aghies Pantes seemed to be whizzing into a chasm.

Everyone in the truck screamed when it began to move, but Fotini became hysterical and tried to leap out to save her life. Olga had to hold her to keep her from throwing herself off. “The trees are moving, the earth is moving!” cried Fotini in a voice that carried far beyond the village. “Please, God, somebody make it stop! Let me out!”

Olga held on tight and tried to calm her, but once Fotini began, her cries rose and fell like a siren and by the time they reached the town of Filiates, a half hour later, all that was left of her voice was a ragged sound like something not human.

The sound of my sister’s scream, caught in her throat as if choking her, trailed behind us all the way to Filiates like a streamer in the wind. It was the music that accompanied me on my journey into the future as we hurtled between two immense walls of limestone that funneled us toward the unknown with the swiftness of an arrow. I looked back and saw the tunnel closing on the circle of mountains that had been my universe. As the truck rattled our teeth, I imagined my mother trapped inside that great bowl like a fly struggling to get out. I was overwhelmed by the immensity of the journey we had already made and the impossibility of her finding us under a new sky with only the thread of Fotini’s cry to guide her.

On Tuesday, June 22, Rano Athanassiou worked on the flat threshing floor at Granitsopoula as the other women, including Eleni, cut the wheat in the fields up on the hillsides. A guerrilla led a team of horses in blinders around in endless circles, trampling the wheat, while Rano and several other women tossed great armloads of it in huge round sieves of tin, punctured
by metal nailholes to separate the grains from the chaff. As they bent and scooped and tossed and bent again until their arms ached from the neck to the fingertips, Rano heard the guerrillas around her talking excitedly. She moved closer and managed to overhear enough to understand what had disturbed them so: a group of twenty villagers from Lia had disappeared, including the family of the Amerikana.

As soon as a break was called, Rano put on her cape, for the wind had turned chill, and began to walk up the slope to the wheat fields, searching among the bent figures of the threshers for Eleni. She found her at the end of a row. “Aunt Eleni,” she whispered urgently, “your family has fled the village! I heard the guerrillas talking.”

Eleni put down the scythe and stood up, crossing herself as she looked toward the southeast where the Kalamas glimmered. “Thanks to Christ and His Holy Mother, my family got away!” she exclaimed.

Rano stared at her. “As soon as you get the chance, when the guerrillas aren’t looking and you’re at the end of a row, you’ve got to run,” she hissed. “If you don’t, they may kill you.”

Seeing the guard’s eyes on them, Eleni picked up her scythe and began to swing it in a smooth rhythm. “I can’t run away and leave Glykeria,” she said. “Now go on back to the threshing floor before they wonder what you’re talking to me about.”

That night as the women prepared to sleep on the floor of the largest house in Granitsopoula, a guerrilla came in and said, “You, you, and you! You’re not to go to the fields tomorrow with the others.” He was pointing to Eleni, Marianthe Ziaras and Alexo Gatzoyiannis. They looked at each other, knowing that they were going to pay for the freedom of their loved ones. They didn’t speak to each other that night about what awaited them, but none of them slept.

Early the next morning Eleni, Marianthe and Alexo left Granitsopoula under the guard of three guerrillas and quickly covered the five miles to the mountain village of Lista, which lay halfway between the threshing fields and Lia. On the two-hour walk the guards said nothing about why they were being taken and the women pretended ignorance, asking if they were going to harvest somewhere else. But when they were thrust into the main room of the police station and found themselves confronted by two scowling officers seated behind a desk, it was hard to hide their fear.

One of the men stood up and shouted, “Why didn’t you leave with the others?”

“What others?” the women chorused.

“You know very well!” he snapped. He pointed at Eleni. “Sunday night your mother, your sister and your children left the village without permission.” He turned swiftly on Marianthe. “And your father led them, with all your family.” Then he looked at Alexo. “And your daughter!”

The women had been holding in their panic since the night before. Now it was easy to let it spill over into tears. They began to weep, as if horrified
at what he had told them. “What right did Lukas Ziaras have to take my children?” Eleni cried.

The sounds of the women’s sobbing irritated the officer. “You knew that they were leaving, Amerikana,” he said. “You told them to go.”

Eleni wiped her eyes. “How could I know? Haven’t we all been at the harvest for days, doing your work? If I had been home with my children, that fool Lukas Ziaras would never have been able to take them from me.”

“He certainly
was
foolish,” smiled the guerrilla, “but he’s paid for his stupidity. We intercepted them in the foothills. They’ve all been shot. You’ll see their bodies as soon as you get to Lia.”

The guerrilla’s bearded face began to swim before Eleni’s eyes and she felt her knees give way, but she was unconscious by the time her head hit the wooden floor.

On the day the twenty fugitives set out from Lia, representatives of every Communist Party in the world were convening in Bucharest, Rumania, to consider the growing feud between Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito. This feud would shake the Communist world to its foundations and ultimately have a critical impact on the rebellion in Greece.

Irked by the independent course Marshal Tito was setting for Yugoslavia, and jealous of his international fame, Stalin had begun trying early in 1948 to bend Tito to his will. He brought economic pressure on Yugoslavia, used Soviet agents to undermine Tito’s power at home and even delivered an implied threat to the resistance hero’s life. “We consider that the political career of Trotsky is a good enough lesson,” he wrote Tito, referring to the Soviet rival whom Stalin first had expelled from the party, then exiled and finally ordered assassinated. Tito refused to yield, and, realizing that Stalin might try to topple him, he isolated Russian advisers in Yugoslavia and jailed die-hard Moscow supporters in his own party.

Stalin then called on the Cominform, the international organization of Communist parties, to judge Tito. Aware that the body was the tool of the Soviet dictator, Tito refused to participate. The Cominform met in Bucharest on June 20, and eight days later its delegates passed a unanimous resolution condemning Titoism.

The Yugoslav leader and his top aides were accused of every crime in the Communist calendar: abandoning Marxism-Leninism, slandering the Soviet Union, persecuting good Communists, making concessions to the imperialists. The resolution called upon loyal Yugoslav Communists to pressure their leaders to correct their errors, and if they refused, to replace them.

The Tito-Stalin split put the Greek Communists in an awkward
position. They knew they could not risk Moscow’s displeasure because only Russia could give them the massive support they needed to win the war. At the moment, however, Yugoslavia was giving the insurgents the most help of any Communist country, and the Greeks couldn’t afford to anger Belgrade, either.

A few days after the Cominform decision, Greek Communists held their fourth plenum on Grammos while the losing battle for the mountain range seethed around them. They decided to take a middle road in the dispute, secretly supporting the Cominform decision but not criticizing Yugoslavia publicly. This attempt at fence-sitting satisfied neither Moscow nor Belgrade, and in time Yugoslavia would deal a mortal blow to the guerrillas by cutting off all aid to them and sealing their border with Greece.

The growing Stalin-Tito split was just one of several ominous clouds gathering over the embattled insurgents, who were fighting desperately to protect their shrinking mountain stronghold. Guerrillas in the front lines and the civilians in the occupied territories could read the omens as well as the military leadership, and there were increasing calls for a negotiated settlement.

Hearing such pleas sent the obstinate Zachariadis into a fury. “Such fighters show that they have been broken,” he wrote to one of his commissars, Nikos Belloyiannis. “Those who are guilty of such treachery must be arrested, condemned by public outcry, and executed in the presence of their comrades.”

L
UKAS ZIARAS GOT HIS WISH
; his name became a part of the folklore of the Mourgana villages. Even the outwitted guerrillas eventually composed a mocking ditty about the great escape, which came to enjoy considerable local popularity:

But on the morning of June 21, when twenty civilians were discovered missing from the village, none of the guerrillas was smiling. The news of the escape exploded throughout the Mourgana, reverberations reaching all the way to the pinnacle of the Democratic Army’s Epiros Command. It was inconceivable that so many men, women and children could walk out in a group under the very noses of the guerrilla lookouts. Even worse, these were some of the most influential families of Lia. Tassi Mitros and Lukas Ziaras were among the few men who had stayed to welcome the guerrillas on their arrival; they had in turn been rewarded with places on civilian committees set up by the occupiers to give the impression of local participation in the running of the village. Lukas, living just below the lookout station, was considered not only a sympathizer by the guerrillas, but a sort of fellow sentry as well. And with them had gone the family—the children, sister and mother—of the Amerikana, the most respected woman in the village. It was
impossible that the crowd of fugitives could have blundered safely through the guerrilla patrols and minefields on their own, the DAG officers reasoned. They must have had help—from the inside, perhaps among the guerrillas themselves, or from the outside—some fascist who had come to the edge of the village to lead them out.

The escape dramatized not only the widespread discontent in the occupied villages, but also the failure of the security police, who had been brought to Lia to prevent just such an act of apostasy. All the secret information Sotiris Drapetis and the police had been collecting had given them no warning. On the morning the disappearance was confirmed, Sotiris and the three police officers hysterically issued and countermanded orders. First they let it be known that the twenty fugitives had been captured, were being interrogated and would soon be brought to public trial. Then they pulled in every guerrilla who had been on duty that night and began interrogating them. Among those under suspicion was Andreas Michopoulos, who had been on duty at the Church of the Virgin on the evening of the escape.

While insisting that the fugitives had been apprehended, the guerrillas ran frantically through the village trying to unearth clues as to how they had gotten away. The Mitros house, the Ziaras house and the Haidis house, where the Gatzoyiannis family had lived, were searched with such ferocity that built-in wooden alcoves were ripped out of the walls and sleeping pallets were slashed to shreds. The guerrillas found the letter that Olga had left for her mother in the wall niche, and at the Mitros house they discovered the twenty-four gold sovereigns that Tassi Mitros had been forced to abandon.