Eleni (79 page)

Shortly after noon on Saturday, August 28, thirteen prisoners including the five from Lia were taken out of the cellar of the Gatzoyiannis house and told that they were being moved to a prison in Mikralexi, a three-hour walk over the tops of the mountains to the northeast. It was an exhausting climb, but all the prisoners set out on foot except one, Spiro Michopoulos, who was entirely out of his senses and could only tremble like a man with the palsy. He was put on a mule and a board was tied upright to the raised back of the wooden saddle, then Michopoulos was bound with rope to the plank so that he would not fall off. Except for the trembling of his limbs, he seemed to be unconscious, his head rolling lifelessly from side to side.

The other barefoot prisoners, their legs black and swollen, walked painfully behind, escorted by several armed guerrillas. One of them was twenty-year-old, gnome-faced Taki Cotees. He knew where the prisoners were actually being taken, and it disturbed him that Andreas Michopoulos, only eighteen years old, who had fought as a guerrilla at his side, was about to die.

As the slow procession set out up the path from the Gatzoyiannis house toward the cleft in the mountaintops, they soon approached the Spring of Siouli near the mill of Tassi Mitros, where Eleni had gone daily to draw water. Coming down from the spring was eleven-year-old Kanta Bollis. She carried a pitcher of water in her hands and a small barrel of water on her back. Frightened, the child stepped aside to let the guerrillas and their prisoners pass. As she did, Eleni recognized her smallest daughter’s friend. Kanta Bollis remembers that Alexo Gatzoyiannis walked by in a daze,
appearing to see nothing, but that Eleni spoke. “A little water, Kanta,” she pleaded. One of the guards nodded and the procession stopped. The child came forward and held out the pitcher toward Eleni.

“I didn’t say a word to her, I was too afraid,” Kanta Bollis recalls. “Her hands were black and blue and they were trembling as she bent down to take the pitcher. She was so thin and pale, like something that came out of a cemetery! After she took a few swallows, she looked at me with terrible eyes and said, Oh, my child, my little Fotini, where is she?’ Then she started crying. When she did that, one of the guards grabbed the pitcher from her hand and shoved it back into mine. ‘Go! Go!’ he said.”

At the spring itself, thirteen-year-old Antoni Makos had stopped to drink. He remembers Spiro Michopoulos tied to a horse, his shirt bloodied in stripes where he had been beaten, a cloud of flies following him. One of the guerrillas came over to the boy, demanded his water flask and drank from it. Then another guerrilla snapped, “Hurry up! Let’s go before the planes see us!” Antoni Makos stared hard. He would remember and recognize the caved-in elfin face of the guerrilla Taki thirty years later.

Above the spring, as the procession struggled up toward the terraced steps called Laspoura just at the entrance to the pass between the two mountain peaks, it encountered a group of village women, brown faces burned the color of a copper skillet under their dark kerchiefs, bent double under the loads of wood they had been gathering for the guerrillas. As the women moved aside for the prisoners to pass, one of them, Fotina Makou, burst into tears at the sight of her brother Vasili among the prisoners. The cooper did not look at his sister.

Once the captives were led over Laspoura—the ancient stone steps made slippery by mud and trickling water—they moved into the narrow pass between the twin peaks, out of sight of the villagers as suddenly as if they had fallen off the earth. They entered an idyllic green, flat area, an Eden no one would expect to find cradled among mountain peaks. It was like the palm of a cupped hand; the fingers were the peaks: Kontra, Skitari, where so many had died during the battle of Pergamos, and Tserovetsi. Rising sharply on their right was the Prophet Elias, the small chapel riding the height like a ship’s figurehead.

After struggling up the slippery steps of Laspoura, it must have been a relief for the prisoners to enter the Agora—the marketplace of the Hellenistic community that lived among the peaks three hundred years before Christ. Just beyond the Agora, the fields in the palm of the hand became slightly more uneven and were gently terraced in three steps, leading down to a musical brook shadowed by spreading plane trees. On the far side of the fields lay the Chapel of St. Nicholas, where, three centuries before, itinerant monks painted glowing frescoes on its walls. Just beside the chapel stood three large grave tumuli studded with anonymous upright boulders sunk deep into the ground. Spirits of the dead have peopled this silent place since long before recorded history.

As the prisoners entered the Agora, they encountered a second group of women from Lia returning from a work detail. Among them was Giorgina Venetis, a garrulous village woman who had once found Eleni weeping while she grazed her flock and invited her in for a cup of tea. As they watched the prisoners pass, then resumed their walk toward Laspoura, the women began to argue about whether the prisoners were being taken to another village or were about to be killed. Giorgina was more curious and daring than the rest. She decided to double back and covertly follow the group to find out their fate. Once the prisoners passed out of sight over a small rise in the distance, she left the other women and began shadowing the procession.

The prisoners walked on, the rustling of naked feet treading over dry leaves of the plane tree, until they passed the rise. They looked down upon the rolling pasture studded with autumn crocuses and saw the mass grave, several meters square, waiting at the bottom of the terraced field next to the brook. The march of the condemned came to a halt as they realized their journey was to end not in Mikralexi but in this ravine, filled with the calls of wild birds and the crystal sound of running water. At the same moment, nearly thirty guerrillas began to descend the side of the hill of the Prophet Elias toward them.

According to the guard, Taki, the members of the execution squad were selected from guerrillas stationed atop the Prophet Elias who came from distant villages and would have no emotional ties to the victims. The lieutenant who was in charge was from Macedonia.

The prisoners were lined up in a row on the edge of the second-lowest step of the terraced field, just above the bottom level where the grave pit had been dug. They were stood at the edge of the field so that when they fell, it would be easy to roll the bodies over the terraced edge of the step into the grave below. Spiro Michopoulos couldn’t stand, so he was propped in a sitting position.

At the back of the line of prisoners rose the height of Prophet Elias topped by its small chapel. To their right a huge plane tree, roots bared by the erosion of the stream, stood like a sentinel. In front of them towered the connected summits of Kontra, Skitari and Tserovetsi, where Eleni had walked on the day she was sent with a message for Spiro Skevis, telling him it was safe to move his guerrillas into the village. This was the last thing she would ever see.

Twenty-six guerrillas were assigned to shoot the thirteen prisoners, two to each one. There was grumbling among those assigned to kill the women. Despite the number of deaths they already had on their souls, it was a task they found distasteful. The lieutenant made it clear that they had no choice. The executioners and the condemned stood a few yards apart. The officer in charge was in a hurry to get the job over with. He wanted his men to return to their sentinel duties atop the Prophet Elias as soon as possible.

Giorgina Venetis tracked the prisoners back across the Agora and was
just climbing the small rise that cut off her view of the terraced fields when she was frozen in her tracks by a scream, a woman’s voice, the most terrible sound she had ever heard. The harsh cry contained all the sorrow and pain of the universe and it formed itself into words: “My children!” Then there was a volley of shots.

The sound paralyzed Giorgina. Suddenly she felt a warm sensation along her legs: in her fear, she had lost control of her bladder. From somewhere she summoned the strength to begin running, and she didn’t stop, sliding and stumbling down the muddy steps of Laspoura, until just above the Perivoli, out of breath, and still shuddering from the terror of that cry, she found Glykeria Gatzoyiannis sitting by Tassi Mitros’ mill in tears. Giorgina spoke a few words to the girl, then hurried on, saying nothing of what she had seen and heard.

Taki, the only person who admits to being an eyewitness to the killings, says that one of the women, the one with the chestnut hair, screamed and fell to the ground in the instant before the guns opened fire. He says that when the lieutenant went from one body to another, administering the
coup de grâce
to the skull, her wound did not bleed.

The execution was over in minutes, the bodies thrown together, face down, into the grave, where they were covered with enough rocks to be hidden from view. Then the guerrillas of the execution party filed back toward the Prophet Elias, leaving the verdant ravine near the Chapel of St. Nicholas to the silence that had reigned there for centuries.

On August 29, 1948, the day after the executions in Lia, Nikos Zachariadis still insisted that with the people of Greece behind them, the Communist guerrillas would soon achieve victory. “Our strength is the people’s trust,” he announced. “And until the rights of the people finally prevail, our slogan will remain: ‘Everyone to arms, all for victory.’”

But that victory was a fantasy to be nourished in blood for another year before it was finally abandoned. By the end of August, after the fall of Grammos, guerrilla bands operating in central and southern Greece were finding it difficult to get arms and supplies. The strongest concentrations of guerrillas were based on two mountain strongholds with their backs to Communist countries—Mourgana in western Epiros and Vitsi in western Macedonia, where the borders of Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece converge.

The main body was on Vitsi, and since it was so dug in that it was clear the nationalist army could not dislodge it before winter, the Greek generals turned their attention to the Epiros Command in the Mourgana mountains. They assigned the whole Eighth Division plus a brigade to the assault and code-named it Operation Taurus to show their determination to capture Mourgana despite two previous failures.

The offensive began on September 10, with five brigades attacking the guerrillas on all fronts. The insurgents held on to their positions with fierce desperation for several days, but a daring maneuver on September 16 put nationalist forces on Mourgana’s summit and forced the guerrillas to abandon their fortress at last. As they retreated, one group moving northwest into Albania and another eastward through enemy lines toward Grammos, they took all the civilians from the occupied villages with them at gunpoint.

After the fall of the Mourgana, the surviving guerrillas scored a few
temporary successes during the autumn and winter, retaking some sections of Grammos and launching surprise raids on important towns in northern Greece which they held for several days before being forced to withdraw. These victories were fleeting, however, and by late spring of 1949 the government troops were ready to deal the death blow to the Communists.

They began by clearing the Peloponnesos, the hand-shaped peninsula in the south, of all guerrilla bands. Then they moved against the insurgents in the mountains of central Greece, forcing them to withdraw northward toward the final showdown on Vitsi and Grammos in the summer of 1949.

The Greek generals prepared carefully for the confrontation, conscripting 30,000 new recruits and bringing in the latest weapons from the United States, including fifty-one Curtiss Helldivers, the most effective ground-support aircraft in operation. They code-named the final campaign Operation Torch and assigned eight divisions, more than 50,000 men, to the assault.

The guerrillas, too, tried to prepare themselves. They had only 5,000 men on Grammos and 8,000 on Vitsi, but they controlled the high ground and were dug into strong defenses. To make up for the losses they had suffered through the winter and spring, they conscripted everyone they could find, including boys and girls as young as fourteen. Among the adolescent conscripts sent to defend Vitsi to the death was the fifteen-year-old daughter of Eleni Gatzoyiannis—Glykeria.