Eleni

by Nicholas Gage

  More praise for Eleni

  “It is impossible to doubt a word of his terrible story … A profoundly imaginative work … He can describe in dazzling detail what happened in one small village…. The separate strands lead to an intensely moving climax, making Eleni one of the rare books in which the power of art recreates the full historical truth.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “A painstaking, loving, and deeply moving narrative … A stirring tribute to a particular woman … But Eleni is at the same time a memorial to all the civilians who suffer in every war.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “This is Greek tragedy in its most poignant sense, a series of adversities that is so overwhelming and appalling that the reader will feel as if his heart is being torn out, page by page.”

  —San Diego Union

  “Her life and death glow with dignity and humanity…. Through Eleni’s love and sacrifices for her children, we glimpse a more profound reality that rises above the shameful record of brutality and inquisition inflicted by men upon other men and women in the name of causes and crusades. All of their legions and philosophies are not worth this woman’s soul.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Part One - Pursuit

  Part Two - War

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Three - Revolution

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Four - Retribution

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Part Five - Discovery

  A Note from the Author

  About the Author

  Copyright

  To the memory of

  ELENI GATZOYIANNIS

  ALEXANDRA GATZOYIANNIS • VASILI NIKOU

  SPIRO MICHOPOULOS • ANDREAS MICHOPOULOS

  But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten.

  But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them.

  Even memory is not necessary for love.

  There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

  —THORNTON WILDER,

  The Bridge of San Luis Rey

  ON AUGUST 28, 1948, at about twelve-thirty on a hot, windless day, some peasant women with firewood on their backs were descending a steep path above the Greek village of Lia, a cluster of gray stone houses on a mountainside just below the Albanian border. As the women came into view of the village below them, they encountered a grim procession.

  At the front and rear, carrying rifles, were several of the Communist guerrillas who had occupied their village for the past nine months of the Greek civil war. They were guarding thirteen prisoners, who were walking barefoot to their execution on legs black and swollen from the torture called falanga. One man, too beaten to walk or even sit up, was tied onto a mule.

  Among the prisoners were five people from Lia: three men and two women. The older woman stumbled along with a fixed stare of madness. She was my aunt, Alexo Gatzoyiannis, fifty-six. The younger woman, with light-chestnut hair, blue eyes and a torn blue dress, caught the gaze of the villagers and shook her head. She was my mother, Eleni Gatzoyiannis, forty-one years old.

  One of the peasant women began to cry, seeing her brother among the condemned. A thirteen-year-old boy who had stopped to drink at a spring watched the prisoners climb the mountain; soon they disappeared over the horizon. A few minutes later there was a burst of rifle fire, then scattered shots as each victim was finished off with a bullet to the head. When the guerrillas passed again on the way down, they were alone. The executed had been left in the ravine where they fell, their bodies covered by rocks.

  Sixteen days later, when it was clear that the guerrillas were losing the war to the Greek nationalist forces, they rounded up every civilian left in the village and herded them at gunpoint over the border into Albania. Lia became a ghost town, the crows descending on the corpses left behind. A village that had been inhabited for more than twenty-five centuries ceased to exist.

  I learned of my mother’s execution twenty-three days later at a refugee camp on the Ionian coast where three of my sisters and I had found shelter after managing to flee our village. Although our mother planned the escape, she was forced to stay behind with my fourth sister at the last moment. Six months after the news reached us, we boarded a ship bound for the United States to join our father, who had been cut off from Greece by World War II and the insurrection that followed it. I was nine when I saw him for the first time.

  My mother was one of 600,000 Greeks who were killed during the years of war that ravaged the country from 1940 to 1949. Like many of the victims, she died because her home lay in the path of the opposing armies, but she would have survived if she hadn’t defied the invaders of her village to save her children.

  I had been her favorite child and the focus of her life, loved with the intensity a Greek peasant woman reserves for an only son. I knew that I was the primary reason she made the choices she did. No one doubted that she died so I could live.

  As a boy growing up in the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, living with my sisters and the stranger who was my father, I couldn’t talk about my mother and her death the way the rest of my family did, although it was with me waking and sleeping. Every Sunday, in the church full of Greek immigrants, I heard the priest recite a trisagion to her memory. My older sisters spoke of her constantly, often reporting dreams in which our mother appeared to them with some message or warning from the land of the dead. In my dreams, she was always alive, engaged in familiar scenes from the past, baking bread, harvesting the fruit of our mulberry tree, laughing at my pranks. My sisters had accepted her death, but each time I awoke it came as a new shock.

  As a nine-year-old boy struggling with the English language, I felt helpless against the fact of my mother’s death. It was not something that I could talk about to anyone. There seemed to be nothing I could do to make up for her sacrifice except to hope that my sisters were right, that God would ultimately punish those who had betrayed, tortured and murdered her.

  Then, in the seventh grade, a teacher assigned me to write about my life in Greece. It was one of the first days of spring. I looked out the school window, remembering our mountainside blazing with purple Judas trees, the Easter kid roasting on a spit outside each house, my mother boiling the eggs in a vat of blood-red dye.

  I wrote how, in the spring of my eighth year, I overheard two guerrillas say they were going to take the village children away from their parents and send them behind the Iron Curtain. I ran to tell my mother what I had heard and she began to plan our escape, setting in motion the events that would end in her execution four months later.

  The essay won a certificate of merit, and I realized that I was not as helpless as I had thought. I would learn to write and eventually describe what was done in that ravine in 1948 and by whom. I didn’t speak of these ambitions to my father and sisters, who were working in factories and diners to keep us alive.

  By the time I finished college I had saved enough money from part-time work on local newspapers to make a return visit to the village which I had left as a refugee fourteen years be
fore. I intended to begin my search for the details of my mother’s death.

  When I walked out of that village as a boy, I knew every tree and rock of my circumscribed world, but as I followed the new dirt road back up our mountain in 1963, I mistook two villages in the distance for my own before I reached Lia. Clearly, my memory was not as accurate as I had believed. When I finally reached it, the village was no longer deserted; many of the civilians who had been taken into Albania and then dispersed throughout Eastern Europe by the retreating Communists had drifted back since 1954. The guerrillas and their collaborators, however, were still not permitted by the Greek government to return.

  I was met by my eighty-three-year-old grandfather, the only male relative I had known as a boy. I remembered him as an aloof, menacing tyrant. He was the one who returned to the empty village to unearth the bodies of my mother and my aunt, then brought the news of their deaths to us children. When he saw me, now twenty-three, my grandfather was the first of many villagers to exclaim over my physical resemblance to my mother. My face seemed to incite the neighbors to pour out details of her torture and suffering. As soon as they began, I discovered that I could not bear to listen. When one man tried to tell me how her feet and legs were swollen to grotesque proportions by beatings, I got up and left the room.

  On that first afternoon, when my grandparents were taking their siesta, I left their house and climbed the path up to our old property, now deserted and shunned by the villagers because it had been used by the guerrillas as a military police station, jail, killing ground and cemetery. I knew that my mother had spent the last days of her life being tortured there, imprisoned in the filthy cellar where we once kept our sheep and goats. I forced myself to enter the front door and look into the room which had served as a kitchen, where my mother, sisters and I used to sleep on the floor around the hearth. The room seemed to have shrunk over the years. There was nothing inside, no sign that I belonged here. I tried to recall happy times, feast days, but all I could think of were the condemned prisoners in the cellar, my mother among them. I didn’t approach the cellar door but left the house, knowing I would not come back.

  That fall, when I returned to America to begin graduate school, I made a tentative assault on the book but barely got past the first few pages. I started by trying to describe the oppressively hot afternoon when my grandfather came to tell us that our mother had been murdered. Just the memory of my sisters’ screams stopped me and I put the pages aside, channeling my energies for the next few years into completing graduate school and finding a job as a reporter. As a boy, I naively thought that I could write the story of my mother’s death from my own memories. Now I knew that those memories were flawed and incomplete. I knew also that I did not have the strength to face the details of her suffering.

  My sisters had neither the desire nor the money to return to Greece until 1969, when two of them resolved to go back to the village and hold a memorial service for our mother. I decided to go with them, although I knew it would be a painful journey. When we reached Lia, I followed them up the path as far as our land, but when my sisters entered the house, I refused to go with them and waited outside until they emerged, in tears.

  The next day the whole village gathered in our neighborhood Church of St. Demetrios for the memorial service. The church was used only on special saints’ days, but the village priest agreed to open it and conduct the liturgy. In a small ossuary, divided from the sanctuary by a wall, lay the bones of my mother and my aunt in a small wooden box, mixed together as they had been when my grandfather disinterred the bodies from the mass grave.

  Sun slanted through the dusty windows of the crowded church as the priest began to chant and the altar boys swung the censers, the heavy perfume mingling with the odor of decay. Unexpectedly, the schoolteacher stood up to speak. He was the only educated man in the village and he wanted to deliver a eulogy. As soon as he said our mother’s name, my sisters began to wail: keening, ululating cries, the Greek expression of sorrow for the dead.

  “This woman’s death was not an ordinary one,” the schoolteacher continued over the commotion. “She was executed alone, with her husband far away, because she tried to save her children. She was a victim of her fellow Greeks. This is not an ordinary memorial service for the dead; she was murdered!”

  As I stood there, trying to wish myself anywhere else, the air pressed in on me and I was aware of my mother’s bones only yards away. Nearly every day of my childhood I had watched her light a candle before this altar. The shrieks of my sisters stripped away the veneer of control I had built up, layer by layer. Even when I was a boy, on the day my mother said goodbye, and again, when I learned she was dead, I had held my grief inside. Now it erupted. Sobs welled up from where they had been hidden for so many years and shook my body like a convulsion. The rush of emotion blurred my vision and then my knees buckled. Two men nearby grabbed my arms and supported me out of the church, setting me on the ground, my back against the trunk of one of the towering cypress trees surrounding the graveyard.

  That outburst was the first and last time I lost control and abandoned myself to my grief, but when it passed, I discovered a new strength within me. At last I was ready to learn what the villagers had to tell me and to look directly at the details of my mother’s death.

  When I began asking questions, I found that many parts of the story were still beyond my reach. The villagers who had betrayed her, who testified against her to curry favor with the guerrillas, were still in exile behind the Iron Curtain. And the witnesses to her last days who were living in Lia gave me contradictory testimony about many incidents, obviously withholding details that might compromise them or their relatives. Those who were willing to talk about the war years openly remembered the guerrillas only by the pseudonyms they had assumed to mask their identities. I spent all the summer of 1969 in Lia, but when I left in the fall to return to America, it was clear that despite my emotional readiness to hear my mother’s story, I did not have access to key people involved or the skills to get the truth out of them.

  On my return to New York I submerged myself in the business of life. I married a girl I had known since graduate school and in rapid succession we had three children, first a son named Christos for my father, then two daughters, the elder one baptized Eleni after my mother.

  I began a job for the New York Times as an investigative reporter, a brand of newspaperman who is as much a detective as a journalist. I learned how to ferret out facts that others wanted hidden and to make witnesses trip themselves up, trapping themselves with their own words. I shadowed subjects and followed up anonymous tips and took care to verify and recheck every scrap of information, spending weeks going through dusty files and government papers. I wrote about corrupt politicians, crooked judges, narcotics traffickers and Mafia chieftains. On occasion I was subpoenaed, once by Vice President Spiro Agnew, but my evidence was always too well documented for anyone to sue me. The seven years that passed after the memorial service for my mother were hectic and distracting ones. Only later did I realize that I was unconsciously honing my skills and training myself for the task I had chosen as a boy: to find out what happened to my mother and who was responsible for her death. My circuitous path was leading inexorably back to the ravine where she was executed.

  In July of 1974 the collapse of the dictatorial right-wing military junta ruling Greece opened the gates for Communist guerrillas living in exile to return to the country. Many of those I wanted to question about my mother’s trial and death would now be accessible to me. In 1977 I persuaded my editors to send me to Athens as the New York Times’ foreign correspondent in the eastern Mediterranean. The conditions necessary for me to begin the search for my mother’s story were all coming together.

  The arrival in Greece in 1977 was a shock to someone who remembered the civil war years. I discovered that the fall of the junta and the establishment of a new civilian government, which legalized the Communist Party in an effort to ensure acceptance
of Greece in the Common Market, had created a renaissance of Communist power in the country. Posters, movies, books, popular songs and the youth organizations in the universities were united in celebrating the guerrillas of the civil war as heroes. It seemed that the best talents of Greece were busy rewriting the history of the war, while everywhere, Communist leaders were denying that such things as the execution of civilians and the abduction of large groups of children from the mountain villages had ever happened.

  As soon as I settled in Athens with my family I hoped to spend every spare moment tracking down and questioning those who had been my mother’s interrogators, jailers, torturers and the judges at her trial, as well as relatives and neighbors who had witnessed her last days. But the volatile political climate in the area left me time for little else but my job. I spent most of my first years in Greece traveling outside the country, covering terrorism in Turkey, battles in the Middle East, a revolution in Iran, and civil war in Afghanistan.

  By 1980 it was clear that I had to give myself up entirely to the investigation of my mother’s story at once or never do it. I learned that some of the guerrilla leaders responsible for her trial and execution had died in exile. Others were likely to die of old age before I could track them down. Furthermore, Greece has a thirty-year statute of limitation on all crimes—including murder. Anyone who had committed any atrocity during the war years could now return to the country without fear of punishment, and the former leaders of the guerrillas were flooding back in.

  In 1980 I was forty-one years old, the same age that my mother had been when she was killed. My son was nine, as I was on the day I learned she was dead. My older daughter, growing out of babyhood, resembled my mother more every day. Seeing my children grow had taught me a lesson that made my mother’s story easier to confront.