Eleni (81 page)

On the morning of September 12, tense, battle-weary
andartes
roused the village, ordering all civilians to prepare to evacuate. “Just take what you can grab,” they shouted. “Don’t talk and don’t delay. They’re going to blow up every house!” The guerrillas were in a murderous rage. Villagers remember that a young man, a stranger from another village, balked at being evacuated and when he asked a question, they shot him on the spot.

The man put in charge of the evacuation in Lia was Elia Poulos. All during the day of September 12, as the bombs and artillery pounded the mountainside, he ran to every house and hiding place ordering the people to make ready to leave for Albania. Wherever he went he repeated the same refrain: “Don’t take anything. You’ll get plenty of food in Albania. The pots are boiling just over the border.”

As Glykeria sat near the mouth of a cave, Stavroula Yakou pushed through the milling crowd and ordered the girl down to her house, where she began loading all her possessions on Glykeria’s back: blankets, rugs and her best dresses. Bent double under the weight, Glykeria cried, “Please, Stavroula, I can’t carry any more!”

“You have to!” the woman retorted, then began to wheedle, “You don’t have a blanket of your own to carry, and when we get to Albania, I’ll let you share mine.”

By dusk the villagers were gathered by the caves. Vangelina Gatzoyiannis had her sixteen-month-old son tied to her back and her three-year-old daughter on her shoulders. The wounded and elderly who couldn’t walk were packed into large wicker baskets on muleback, balanced by baskets weighted with pots, clothing or children. Dogs and goats followed their owners, barking and bleating. Live chickens were suspended from scythe handles, saddles and packs.

In the bedlam, Elia Poulos frantically tried to make certain that everyone had been accounted for. He realized that Constantina Drouboyiannis, who had been exonerated at the trial, and her friend Sofia Papanikolas were missing. Turning on Sofia’s mother-in-law, he shouted, “If those women
don’t appear in five minutes, I’m having you shot!” The throng fell silent, but as the last light faded, the two missing villagers were seen approaching, struggling under heavy loads of possessions.

One old woman remained behind when the village was evacuated—the ancient, blind crone Sophia Karapanou. As the artillery exploded all around her, Sophia lay down on her pallet to sleep. She had survived the arrival of the Germans when they threw her neighbor Anastasia Haidis into the flames, and if this time her lamp had burned all its oil, she was resigned. Her roots were too deep in the earth of Lia to leave it now. She did not intend to die on the road to a foreign land.

It was midnight of September 12 when the great throng of villagers lurched slowly into motion, driven by the mounted guerrillas and Elia Poulos. A chorus of wails rose toward the heavens as the multitude set out toward the west. They were leaving the fields they had scraped out of the rocky hillsides, the homes they had built stone by stone, the bones of their ancestors. Many of the women and children had never been outside the Mourgana mountains; now they were headed for a future they couldn’t imagine. They staggered forward, the thud of feet on the red earth, carrying their children and invalid parents. “Move along, gypsies!” shouted Elia Poulos, drunk with the importance of his task.

Glykeria walked like a beast of burden beside Stavroula Yakou. She left Lia with nothing but the brown dress she was wearing; no blanket, not even stockings or shoes. She remembers the sound of hundreds of feet shuffling along beside her, the moans of the wounded, the sleepy protests of the children, the frantic cries of the abandoned dogs and goats. She turned around to see the shadows of the village, eerily dead, not a candle shining in a window. Her mother’s body was back there, her sisters and brother were far away and now she was being taken by her mother’s killers into the Communist world.

The guerrillas tried to keep the procession off the road, moving through ravines in order to avoid the government bombers. The Liotes passed through Babouri and found it as desolate under the cold moonlight as their own village. The inhabitants had already been evacuated and were somewhere ahead of them on the way to Tsamanta. They stepped around corpses, including one which Glykeria recognized as the farmer Elia Gatos, who had been shot days before. Made careless by his reputation as a loyal Communist, Gatos had refused to answer Nikos Vetsis, head of the intelligence division under Koliyannis, when he was asked which village houses contained large beams that could be used for fortifications. “I’m not going to become an informer on my own neighbors,” he said. “Find out yourself.” His impudence was punished instantly with a bullet and his body was left unburied.

Soon after she passed the corpse of Elia Gatos, Glykeria nearly stepped
on an eyeless, bearded head grinning up at her, projecting from the earth. A woman nearby heard her yelp of fear and whispered, “That’s a priest who was executed. They like to bury the priests with their heads above ground.”

Tsamanta was three miles to the west of Lia, a mile below the Albanian border in a natural cleft between the mountains. The Liotes arrived there just before dawn and found that many streams of peasants from other villages had come together into a wide river of refugees, their eyes reflecting the flames of battle, their faces grimy and tight with fear. As dawn broke, baring them to the sight of the bomber planes, they were told to hide in a ravine shaded by plane trees. Later in the morning a mist obscured them from the attackers, and Elia Poulos and the guerrillas drove the Liotes up the slopes leading to Albania. At the border itself, they passed before the astonished eyes of Greek-speaking Albanians, gathered to watch the exodus. They hissed at the refugees, “What are you doing here? Why have you left your homes to come here?” But the Greeks only shook their heads and pressed their lips together. Life as they had known it ended that day in September 1948, and none of them would see Greece again for years.

Elia Poulos escorted them a mile over the border to the Albanian town of Leshinitsa, where they were handed over to other guerrillas. There was a distribution of food: small round pellets of bread made from the hard hulls left after wheat had been ground into flour. The rough bread cut their lips and was impossible to chew. There were some water-boiled squash, and as one woman, Athena Haramopoulos, remembers, every family was given one leek. “One leek to a family!” she exclaims. “I asked Elia Poulos, ‘Where are the boiling pots of food you promised us? What am I going to feed my babies?’ As he walked away, Poulos replied, ‘You’re lucky you’re alive, woman!’ I cursed him, ‘May a black bullet find you!’ and it did before another year was out.”

The evacuation of the Mourgana villages left the mountains solely in the hands of the guerrillas, who braced themselves for the main assault, which they expected to come from the south. They thought they could still hold on to the Mourgana heights, turning them into a “Greek Stalingrad” that would be invulnerable. They were counting on the fortifications they had dug on the southern and eastern sides, and on the steady flow of arms they would receive from Albania to the north.

The two brigades of nationalist forces made their way down from the northeast along the frontier and managed to take some outposts. But as they approached the highest peaks, they were stopped by strong fire from the guerrillas as well as from Albanian long-range artillery shooting over the border. General Tsakalotos then decided to take a bold initiative. Ignoring possible international repercussions, he ordered Greek artillery to fire on the Albanian guns. He also sent a crack infantry company inside Albania to approach the key Mourgana height from the rear. At the same time other
units crept along on the Greek side of the border over slopes so steep that the guerrillas had left them thinly protected, thinking them impassible. On Thursday, September 16, the critical highest peak of the Mourgana was seized by nationalist forces. They sent a white flare arcing into the sky between the ghost towns of Lia and Babouri. It was a signal to the two government brigades on the south to press forward and connect with those on the north, cutting off all paths of retreat. It was also notice to the guerrillas that their citadel had fallen.

Guerrilla leader Kostas Koliyiannis ordered an immediate retreat, but because the escape route through Tsamanta was already closing, he pushed his men eastward toward Granitsopoula and the Kalamas River, crossing it and running for the Zagoria mountains.

At the vanguard of the retreat was the battalion of Spiro Skevis, including Rano Athanassiou, the friend and neighbor of the Gatzoyiannis girls who had been taken only three weeks before from testifying at Eleni’s trial and conscripted into Skevis’ fighters. Without learning the outcome of the trial, Rano was plunged into training; the Taurus assault on the Mourgana was her baptism of fire. Eventually she became a seasoned guerrilla, even giving propaganda speeches in occupied villages of northern Greece, but her first encounter with battle terrified her. “As we retreated, we passed through Lia just as the mountains to the north were overflowing with government soldiers,” she says. “We went down to Kostana, and as we pushed eastward, there were dead bodies everywhere—horses, men, young girls. I saw the dead body of an
andartina I
knew from Tsamanta, a beautiful girl named Eleni, her long blond hair all matted with blood.”

Rano and the rest of the Skevis battalion continued to push on toward Zagoria, treading gingerly through the hills above government-held Yannina, close enough to see the lights of the city below. They finally reached the mountains of Zagoria and found remnants of the guerrilla forces who had been driven from Grammos. There the exhausted, starving survivors of the DAG would spend a bitter winter before making the last stand of the war the following year.

The government soldiers entered Lia on the heels of the retreating guerrillas, reaching it on September 18, but there was no one left to be liberated. With the soldiers came some of the men who had fled Lia nearly a year before in the wake of the guerrillas. One of the first to arrive was Foto Gatzoyiannis, who had acted as a guide for nationalist troops approaching from the south. He rang the church bells of Holy Trinity to see if he could coax any villagers out of hiding, but the only answer to his summons was the slow tapping of Sophia Karapanou’s cane as she emerged from her hut. Foto seized her by the shoulders, demanding to know where the villagers had gone. “I don’t know, my boy,” the old woman croaked, turning her sightless eyes to the heavens. “For days now I haven’t heard a human voice,
only the sound of the crows.” Foto looked up and saw that she was right; clouds of black birds were circling over the village.

Soon he heard someone else approaching. It was another village woman, Mihova Christou. Mihova had hidden in a cornfield on the night of the evacuation. She told Foto that she was among the women returning from a work detail on the day of the executions and had seen the condemned being led to the killing ground. Mihova agreed to show him the area where he would find the bodies of his wife, Alexo, and his sister-in-law Eleni.

Foto slept in his empty house that night and the next day was joined by several more village men who had approached slowly behind the soldiers, taking a roundabout route, stepping carefully from stone to stone to avoid the land mines, which were everywhere. The newcomers included Kitso Haidis and young Dimitri Stratis, a son-in-law of Foto and Alexo. Within hours they were joined by Costas Gatzoyiannis, Foto’s seventeen-year-old son, who had also come from Filiates, searching for news of his mother. Foto, his son Costas, Kitso Haidis and Dimitri Stratis decided to set off at once, with Mihova Christou as a guide, to find the mass grave.

As they climbed the path through the Perivoli, they walked through a landscape that seemed to have been stripped of its inhabitants with the suddenness of a thunderclap. Every small cave and ravine was full of pots, blankets, rotting food and piles of clothing. The bloated bodies of dead mules, goats and sheep lay in their path, and packs of stray dogs watched them with yellow eyes.

When they reached the Vrisi, surrounded by caves, they found an open mess hall left by the guerrillas: dozens of pots of coagulated food hanging over burned-out fire pits, carcasses of slaughtered lambs and goats suspended from plane trees and covered with shiny, quivering black coats of flies. Several tables for officers were set with fine china dishes that must have been taken from homes in wealthier towns. Infuriated at the sight, Costas Gatzoyiannis began smashing the fragile plates in a frenzy of anger and grief until his father pulled him away.

Mihova Christou led them up Laspoura and through the Agora. When they reached a spot overlooking the fields below St. Nicholas, they found a pair of leather sandals placed side by side on a rock. Foto Gatzoyiannis identified them as ones he had made for Alexo. There was a choked sound from Costas as the men silently wondered whether Alexo herself had kicked them off and left them there, a sign to those who would come looking for her, or whether someone, guerrilla or passer-by, had placed them there to mark the grave site.

Mihova Christou pointed to the field below and said, “I’m not going any farther. You’ll find them somewhere there at the bottom of the ravine.”

They didn’t have to search. There had been no rain since the execution and trails of dried blood led the way to the grave. They found shell casings at the execution spot and when they came closer to the pile of rocks, the
stench brought them to a halt. The boy Costas turned away. Foto began pulling up the boulders. The first came loose, releasing a cloud of flies which rose like furies from hell. They looked upon the body of the gray-haired cooper, Vasili Nikou, lying face down in his familiar tan jacket. A wire was bound around each wrist. Foto Gatzoyiannis had seen many bodies in his life; he hadn’t even balked at cutting two fingers off a dead Italian soldier to get his gold rings. Now, holding a handkerchief to his nose, he reached down to feel in the pocket of the cooper. He found a pouch still containing some tobacco and an official order for Nikou’s execution, signed by Kostas Koliyiannis.