The next morning the Gatzoyiannis family and the rest of Lia awoke to discover that ELAS had reoccupied the village, the Skevis company being reinforced by several hundred more ELAS fighters whom they had never seen. There was an outburst of joy that the local guerrillas were back, but it quickly turned to apprehension as word spread that the guerrillas were rounding up all persons suspected of sympathizing with EDES.
The first one arrested was eighteen-year-old Vasili Stratis, the younger brother of the schoolteacher Minas. His mother wept as the second son she had lost in the past twenty-four hours was taken from her house.
Kitso Haidis was setting out for his mill when two unfamiliar ELAS andartes arrived on his front step. When they seized him, he shouted that it was a mistake: they must want someone else. “I’ve done nothing and my nephew is Costa Haidis, the commissar here!” he ranted. But when they marched him out before Megali’s frightened eyes, Kitso silently cursed himself for attending the EDES memorial service in Babouri.
The village square was a sea of guerrillas, some in unfamiliar uniforms, all wearing the two-pointed caps and carrying guns. Kitso looked in vain for a familiar face as he was dragged toward the schoolhouse.
Inside were two classrooms and two small offices, painted a muddy gray-green. Kitso was shoved into one of the small cubicles, which was crowded with two dozen prisoners. There were three other men from Lia: Vasili Stratis, the cooper Vasili Nikou, and Yiorgos Boukouvalas, an owlish old man who walked with two canes because he was born with malformed feet. Like Kitso, they were all considered royalists. He also recognized at least a dozen men from Babouri who had been at the memorial service, and as the afternoon wore on, more prisoners brought from Tsamanta, three miles to the west, were thrown into the room, filling it until they could scarcely find a place to stand, much less sit.
As soon as Kitso was arrested, Megali ran up the mountainside to tell Eleni. The sight of her mother’s distraught face forced Eleni to remain calm. She knew there was no one else in the family with enough presence of mind to help her father except herself. While she assured her mother it must be a mistake she tried to think what to do. Her only hope was her cousin Costa Haidis. Despite what Eleni thought of the political commissar, he could hardly allow his uncle to be imprisoned, or worse, by ELAS.
Telling Megali to go home and wait, Eleni hurried off to the village square, where Costa had requisitioned one of the houses as his office. She was prepared to humble herself and to plead, but when she gave a guard outside the door the message that she wanted to speak with her cousin, he returned to say that Comrade Haidis was much too busy to see Kyria Eleni. She felt angry blood rising to her face, but she said nothing. She walked over to the schoolhouse at the southern edge of the square, where a crowd of weeping women and children had gathered, pleading for news of the prisoners inside.
The sound of their lamentations unsettled Eleni more than she admitted. She tried to reason with herself: the guerrillas were local people, after all, not Germans. They were only trying to frighten the village by making an example of those who had been friendly to EDES. To escape the frantic crowd, Eleni began to walk around the school building, searching for a clue to what was going on inside. At the eastern wall, where the slope dropped abruptly, she paused under one of the high windows where she saw a shadow. Then she made out a familiar shock of white hair. “Patera!” she called softly.
His face appeared at the window. She could see at once that he was terrified. Her father had always been such a formidable presence to Eleni that she never imagined him looking so old and so vulnerable. She cupped her hands around her mouth and hissed, “Don’t be afraid! We’ll get you out.”
Kitso regarded her in silence. Perhaps he, too, was aware that for the first time he was helpless and dependent on one of his daughters to save him. Suddenly he disappeared from the window, then something white fluttered to Eleni’s feet. She bent over and picked it up. It was a handkerchief with a knot tied in the corner. She loosened it and found a pair of gold hoop earrings. She looked up at her father in confusion.
“I was going to give them to Olga when she married,” Kitso said in a hoarse whisper. “See that she gets them.” Then he was gone. Eleni stood holding the two golden circles in her hand and realized that her cheeks were wet. She closed her fingers over the earrings and turned away.
The prisoners in the tiny room sat silent as the guards called them out, one at a time. They could hear the screams from where they were, a rising and falling wail like a death song, punctuated by the dull sound of wood striking flesh. Every time a prisoner was taken from the room, the remaining captives drew closer into themselves, avoiding the eyes of the others.
Eleni ran straight through the ravine down to the house of her uncle Yiorgos Haidis, father of Commissar Costa. She found him feeding his chickens. When she told him that the ELAS guerrillas had arrested her father, the old man spat in the mud. “Damn Costa!” he exclaimed. “He talks about a new Greece, but I warned him it would come to this. ‘You will dig with pick for water,’ I said, ‘and blood will gush forth!’ ”
Together, Eleni and her uncle hurried back up the mountain toward the village square.
The sun was slanting through the fly-specked windows of the school office when the guards came in and motioned to Vasili Stratis. Every other man in the room breathed an involuntary sigh of relief. Vasili discovered that his legs wouldn’t support him.
They dragged him through a dark hall to the tiny office at the western end. The guards pushed the door open. The first thing the boy saw was the cripple Boukouvalas lying in a fetal position on the floor. His clublike feet were bare, but Vasili could see they were unscarred; the stumps were too twisted to provide a grip for falanga, and in frustration the guerrillas had beaten every inch of the old man’s body. Now he was curled on his side, moaning wordlessly.
The odor of blood and shit hit Vasili’s nostrils. This was his brother’s office, where Minas tended to his duties as secretary of the village and helped illiterate Liotes fill out official papers. The pencil-marked desk and filing cabinets were familiar, but the two guerrilla officers who stood silhouetted against the dirty windows were not. There was a pile of clubs and switches in one corner.
Vasili squinted into the light and the features of the two ELAS officers came into focus. The short one was paunchy, with the intelligent face of a fox. Vasili recognized him with surprise as a teacher from Zitsa named Polychronis Vayis, who had gone to the teachers academy with Minas Stratis and later became notorious fighting for ELAS under the name of Kapetan Petritis. A veneer of civilized erudition masked his brutal nature. Later the Gatzoyiannis family would come to know Petritis well.
Vasili Stratis was careful not to indicate that he recognized the officer, for he knew it could cost him his life. Petritis began by asking questions in a conversational tone, his smile revealing a gold tooth. He asked for the names of EDES sympathizers and especially the whereabouts of Vasili’s brother Minas, never referring to and totally ignoring the moaning body of Boukouvalas on the floor. When Vasili mumbled that he had no idea where Minas was hiding, Petritis motioned to the other man, who stepped forward. They grabbed his hair and bent him over, beating him on the back and flanks with a piece of wood as thick as his wrist. Vasili instinctively put his hand behind him and the club opened a three-inch gash, which began to drip blood onto the floor. The blows fell in a relentless rhythm as Vasili felt his bones snap.
After the clubbing it was time for falanga. Two armed guards came in to hold his feet flexed between the strap and barrel of a rifle as the officers smashed their clubs against his soles. When Vasili squirmed on the floor, Petritis stepped on his face, filling his mouth with dirt, teeth and blood.
The boy was still conscious when the officers told him that they would give him another chance to remember where his brother was hiding and kicked him into a corner next to Boukouvalas. He saw the door open, revealing Kitso Haidis standing there, held firmly by two guards. Petriti
s let Kitso get a good look, then motioned to the guards to drag out the two inert bodies.
They were slung into one of the large classrooms and as they fell among others who had been beaten, Vasili saw next to him a young man named Dimitrios Kyratsis whose father owned the general store in Tsamanta. His face was gray and blood was trickling from his nostrils. Vasili could see a puncture wound, as if made by a nail, over his left eyebrow. That night the body of young Kyratsis disappeared from the schoolhouse and his family never learned what became of it.
• • •
Eleni and Yiorgos Haidis pushed their way through the crowd outside Costa Haidis’ office. Yiorgos insisted so loudly on seeing his son that the guards finally let him pass, but they forced Eleni to wait outside. When he came back out the old man was leaning heavily on his cane, his head bowed. “I talked to Costa,” he said harshly. “I told him that if anything happens to my brother, I will no longer recognize him as my son. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He said he would do what he could, but the matter wasn’t within his authority.”
Seeing Eleni’s face, he put his arm around her and told her she had to at least act hopeful so that her mother and children wouldn’t despair.
In the inquisition room Kitso Haidis stood facing the two officers. He blocked out the smell and the way Boukouvalas and Vasili Stratis had looked, trying to think clearly. His cleverness had always saved him until now. He stared around the room and gazed upward at the smoky patches over the hanging kerosene lamps. Then, walking past the uniformed officers, Kitso casually pulled out the only chair and sat down, crossing his legs comfortably and gazing raptly at a fly that was treading its way across the ceiling. Petritis and the other man watched him in surprise.
Petritis glanced at a piece of paper and spoke sternly. “You are the miller Kitso Haidis,” he said. “Your fascist sympathies are well known. You have been seen repeatedly fraternizing with the EDES mercenaries and with the traitor Sarantis. The only way to save yourself is to tell us where he’s hiding.”
Kitso began to giggle as the officers looked at each other in alarm. The miller pointed at the ceiling. “He’s right up there,” Kitso chortled, “watching everything you’re doing!”
There was a moment of startled silence, then Petritis reached for a club. “Maybe we can pound your brains back into place,” he said. They were interrupted by a knock at the door. A man in civilian clothes passed a folded note to Petritis.
The next morning a heavy fog lay on the mountainside when Minas Stratis’ wife opened her door to find her husband standing there. “What are you doing?” she gasped, pulling him inside. “They’ve already taken Vasili! Do you want to see our house shuttered in mourning?”
Under cover of the fog, Minas had come home because there was no place else to go. He had been cut off at the Great Ridge by the battle between ELAS and EDES and had spent two nights in a haystack.
Even though she was distracted with worry for her younger son, Minas’ mother managed to convince a trusted neighbor to hide the schoolteacher in the tiny storage space under his kitchen floor. “I’m putting my son’s life in your hands and the hands of God,” she told him. Minas huddled in the tiny space for the next forty days and often heard the sound of his own two children playing overhead, never suspecting where their father had gone.
As the sun burned off the mist, a crowd of villagers began to gather outside the schoolhouse. By noontime nearly everyone in Lia was assembled. Their numbers and their silence unnerved the armed andartes standing in front of the door. The villagers and the guerrillas returned one another’s stares, their breath rising like smoke in the frigid air, until suddenly an appalling chorus of pain burst from the western classroom of the school where the officers had waded into the group of prisoners and were clubbing them, flailing at the writhing mass of heads, arms and legs like threshers harvesting wheat. A shudder passed through the crowd outside.
As the great cry rose from the schoolhouse, the armed andartes outside began to sing at a signal from their leader. At first their voices were tuneless and uncertain, but with the defiant words they gained conviction until they were shouting out the verses and stamping their feet to the rhythm.
With my rifle on my shoulder
In town, on mountainside and field
I’m clearing a path for liberty
Strewing palms for her advancing feet.
Forward, ELAS, for Greece!
Justice and Liberty!
The villagers watched as one guerrilla began to dance, slow emphatic steps, his arms outstretched, now and then slapping his palm against the side of his shoe. The voices became louder as the song began again, brave words that the peasants had heard many times before at the propaganda gatherings. Until today, their own voices had joined in, united with the guerrillas in their longing for freedom and hatred of the enemy. Now there was a new undertone to the words. The wails of the prisoners created a terrible cacophony. The silent peasants stared at the guerrillas with disbelief, wondering how the fine speeches of Prokopi Skevis had given birth to this ghastly chorus.
Among the frightened faces turned toward the guerrillas, who were grinning now as they shouted out the words, was that of Eleni Gatzoyiannis. She felt her skin crawl as she heard the wails, a hellish antiphon to the martial music. The cries from within the schoolhouse ceased abruptly and the guerrillas’ song trailed off. Everyone held his breath. The door opened slowly and the guards stepped aside. The four prisoners from Lia stood there, blinking in the light. There was a groan as the villagers saw what had been done to them.
Vasili Stratis was first, holding his shoes in his hand because his feet were swollen to twice their normal size. He staggered, then fell down the four steps to the ground. No one moved to catch him. The only sound was the thud of his body hitting each step. As he lay there, the crowd drew back in horror. Then two boys, former classmates of Vasili’s, pushed forward and carried him home. At the sight of him, his mother slaughtered one of the goats and wrapped the boy inside the raw hide to draw the black blood from his bruises. She could see that he would never walk upright again. She did not tell Vasili where Minas was hiding, nor did she tell Minas what the andartes had done to his younger brother.
Kitso Haidis came out the door next, walking by himself, apparently unhurt. Eleni covered her mouth with her hand, as if to stifle a cry, then she pushed forward and embraced her father, but he pulled away, refusing to be helped. She led him out of the crowd as her children trailed behind, staring at their grandfather curiously.
“Did they beat you?” she whispered.
Kitso winked at her and tapped his temple with his index finger. “They didn’t touch me,” he said. “I outfoxed them. I convinced them I was crazy!”
Eleni said nothing, but wondered if Costa Haidis had intervened on behalf of his uncle. She later put the question to her cousin directly, but he changed the subject and refused to answer. When her father repeated and embellished the story of how he had fooled the guerrillas, Eleni never contradicted him.
Only the four prisoners from Lia were released. Another twenty-one men from nearby villages were held in the school for a week longer, then led off on an eight-day march to a town in western Macedonia where they were put in prison camps. Two of them, a Greek army officer who had been fighting for EDES, and a schoolteacher from Yeromeri, were held back and shot just outside of Lia.
The dream of revolution and freedom painted by the Skevis brothers had turned into a nightmare, and fear settled over the village. The British commandos felt it as much as the Greeks. Eleni learned from Angeliki that the officers, barricaded inside their house and informed of the beatings and executions by their domestic staff, were beginning to crumble under Spiro Skevis’ psychological warfare against them. Skevis was convinced that the British were supplying food, sovereigns and arms to Zervas’ EDES forces. He came to the mission nearly every day demanding the same compensation for his own men. Each time, the officers told him that none of the guerrilla group
s would receive British aid until they stopped fighting among themselves.
Angeliki described the claustrophobic atmosphere of the headquarters. Skevis’ men prowled the edges of the house day and night, making noises to intimidate those inside. The cold December weather and heavy rains increased the gloom. Captain Ian contracted influenza and a high fever, and Angeliki was sent to bring a Greek doctor, who bled him with leeches.
The Skevis guerrillas stepped up their harassment of the mission, and wouldn’t let Angeliki and her sister go as far as the spring to draw water. No one wanted to venture to the outhouse. The interpreter had told her that one night Captain Philip took advantage of an open window to relieve himself and was rewarded with a string of Greek oaths and the sight of a drenched Mitsi Bollis scrambling into the bushes.
Captain Ian was “coming a bit unglued,” Angeliki whispered to Eleni. He imagined enemies everywhere and even accused her and the others of trying to poison him by putting olive oil on the salad greens. Eleni shook her head, wondering what protection there would be for the villagers themselves if the British commandos could be so intimidated by the local Skevis guerrillas.
On Christmas Day of 1943, the Liotes were alarmed to see the ELAS andartes gathering in the square in battle formation. They soon learned that Zervas’ EDES army had crossed the barrier of the Kalamas River and was moving toward Pogoni, where ELAS was going to try to stop them. Skevis ordered all the reservists to prepare for battle. Before the day was over, the guerrillas and the reserves marched off, leaving Lia nearly empty of men. Within twenty-four hours a small detachment of EDES guerrillas arrived in the village, and to everyone’s astonishment Minas Stratis emerged from below his neighbor’s kitchen floor, nearly unrecognizable with a forty-days’ growth of beard.
A few days later Lia received the most illustrious visitor it had ever seen: the dapper little Italian General Alberto Infante, commander of the ill-fated Pinerolo Division, which had been disarmed by ELAS two months before. He was brought to the Bovington Mission so that the British could evacuate him and the several Italian officers with him north over the mountains to Albania where they would escape by sea to Italy. On January 2, 1944, Captain Philip set out to lead the Italians to safety. In the nine days he was gone, the seesaw of power in the village changed once again. Zervas was being driven southward, and the EDES forces pulled out of Lia, taking Minas Stratis with them. A decisive ELAS victory on the night of January 4 left most of the Mourgana mountains, including Lia, in ELAS hands, where it would remain for the rest of the war.
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