The guerrilla leaders decided on an offensive maneuver against the enemy’s left flank which would be launched that night. The key element was surprise. They would send four companies, under the command of the fiery Major Spiro Skevis, to attack Povla, the village on the southern rim of the bowl of mountains which the national forces had captured and secured several days before. Povla was occupied by the government’s 611th battalion, and the slopes on the west of the village were in the hands of a detachment of seasoned irregulars under the command of a notorious Cretan with a bristling mustache named Mitsos Galanis.
Galanis had hand-picked the 250 men in his detachment, who wore distinctive green berets and shoulder patches with the special insignia of an attacking eagle. The Communists called Galanis “the Butcher,” and the tales of his brutality were legion. Decades after the war Galanis himself insisted that the atrocities attributed to him, such as cutting off the genitals of prisoners and stuffing them into their mouths, were groundless. He admitted, however, that he never took prisoners alive. His victims were often decapitated and their heads sent by the sackful with couriers to Yannina, where they were displayed in rows in the courtyard of division headquarters.
To take Povla, Spiro Skevis would have less than half of the enemy’s manpower—only 300 guerrillas against 700 soldiers—but he was eager to launch the attack and could hardly wait for nightfall. After dark he silently led his men through the bitter cold to the very edge of Povla, sending some behind the Albanian border where they circled around to seize the undefended hills south of the village.
The nationalist soldiers, having eaten and drunk well, were asleep at two-thirty when Skevis gave the command: “On them!” The devil’s own host seemed to have fallen out of the sky, guerrillas breaking down every door, fighting hand to hand with knives as well as guns. The soldiers, wrenched from sleep, were thrown into confusion and easily captured, but on the hills outside the village, Galanis and all but thirteen of his men managed to escape.
Several dozen soldiers inside Povla tried to take refuge in the village church and were caught by the company of Harisis Stravos, the convicted murderer who had broken his pistol in a rage. Like Galanis on the government side, Stravos did not believe in taking prisoners. He lined up the soldiers inside the church and stabbed each one in turn until the floor was awash with blood.
Other guerrilla captains took their prisoners alive. When Skevis’ four companies marched away the next morning toward Tsamanta, leaving Povla’s paths and doorways choked with corpses, they were herding 177 bound soldiers in front of them.
In Tsamanta four officers among the prisoners were tried and executed and the rest were given a choice: take up a rifle and join the guerrilla army, or turn in their uniforms for rags and return to their homes. Most of them took the latter course and were led away, but once out of sight, they disappeared and were never seen by their families again. Twenty-three years later a shepherd found a partially buried skeleton on a stream bank near an old lime pit outside of town. The lime pit gave up 120 skeletons, each one with its hands bound with wire and a bullet hole in the skull.
On the morning of March 5 the guerrillas of Lia announced the brilliant success of the attack on Povla with raucous exultation, filling the village with singing, shouting and announcements over the bull horns. But for the next few days, as the civilians moved about in a limbo of uncertainty and rumor, the most interesting news did not come from the bull horns, but from village gossip. It was learned that during the battle one man, a tinker named Elia Poulos, had crossed over from the government soldiers’ side to join the guerrillas in Lia.
While Elia Poulos sneaked into the village, three women who lived in the easternmost part of Lia succeeded where the Gatzoyiannis family had failed and, one by one, crept out during the confusion of the battle and its aftermath. Although the guerrillas said nothing officially about the three women’s escape, the villagers whispered about it for days, many jealous that they had not had the courage or opportunity to do the same. The guerrilla lookouts at observation points around the village were doubled to prevent any further defections, and Eleni knew that her best chance to get her family out of Lia had been lost.
About five days after the battle at Povla, the church bells commanded the Liotes to a compulsory gathering unlike any they had seen before. Instead of dances, songs and skits, there was a real-life drama to entertain them. They assembled in the Alonia to find four men seated on chairs. The three on the left were strangers in fine civilian clothes. On a solitary chair on the right slumped a barefoot soldier, his feet swollen and discolored, his uniform torn, hands tied in front of him.
When all the villagers had gathered, staring in silence, one of the men stood up. Because of his theatrical gestures, neat appearance and stirring speaking voice, he would have been well cast as a cantor in the church. In fact, he was a former justice of the peace from Konitsa who now served the judiciary branch of the guerrillas’ Epiros Command as an investigating magistrate and military judge. He had just come from trying and convicting the four nationalist officers captured at Povla. He was tall, with a pronounced Roman nose, abnormally small ears and receding salt-and-pepper hair. The moment he spoke, in a deep, sonorous voice that reached the farthest corners of the square, everyone fell silent. Even the shackled soldier looked up, startled. It was the first time any of them had heard the voice of “Katis,” an Albanian word meaning “judge.”
When Eleni saw the prisoner’s face, a thrill of fear shot down her back. It was the same boy she had seen in Vasiliki Petsis’ yard, the one who had been lost from his company. She caught Vasiliki’s eye and bit her lower lip, meaning that they were in trouble.
The judge with the remarkable voice announced that the villagers of Lia were to witness the execution of people’s justice. This traitor, apprehended within the boundaries of the village after the abortive attack by the fascists, was to be put to a people’s trial.
No one knew what he was talking about. The Liotes had never seen a trial before and had no idea what role each of the men before them—except for the prisoner—was playing. The tall man who seemed to be in charge read off the defendant’s crimes from a piece of paper. Then he turned to the bound soldier and began to ask questions, which the young man answered hesitantly, like a student trying to pass an examination for which he has not prepared.
The soldier’s first name was Evangelos, Eleni learned—she didn’t catch the rest—and he was charged with betraying Greece and its people over the past five years, first as a member of the forces of the collaborationist Zervas during the occupation and now as a soldier in the monarcho-fascist army.
“Is it true that you fought with Zervas?” Katis asked.
The soldier nodded, staring at the speaker’s lips, unconscious of the crowd around him.
“Did you go with Zervas willingly or by force?” demanded Katis.
“I volunteered,” replied the soldier uncertainly, “but I have a wife and a little boy to support and I needed the money.”
After more questions Katis finally seemed satisfied. He put the paper down and signaled to the other two men, who got up from their chairs and went with him behind the huge plane tree at the edge of the square. While they whispered together, the congregation of villagers studied the prisoner, who was twisted around in his chair staring at the spot where the three men had disappeared. His face was pale as parchment and his hair stuck in clumps to his brow. His eyes had been blackened and there were livid red and purple marks on his face. His breath was coming in audible gasps.
After a few minutes the three men returned and took their seats. Katis stood up. “It is the judgment of the people’s court that this traitor is guilty,” he announced. “The sentence is death.”
There was a crash as the soldier suddenly slid off his chair, knocking it over. Two guerrillas stepped forward and pulled him up, each with a hand under his armpit, while a third righted the chair. But they had to stand behind the prisoner and hold his shoulder
s to keep him from falling off again.
One of the guerrillas, trying to calm him, produced a cigarette and stuck it between the man’s lips, then reached for a match, but the cigarette fell to the ground. The guerrilla put it to the prisoner’s mouth again, but it fell once more and, disgusted, he wiped the saliva off and put it back in his own pocket.
Everyone watched silently, waiting to see what the next act in the drama would be. “Haven’t there been enough deaths?” said an old man’s voice. It was the farmer Sioli Skevis, the father of Spiro and Prokopi Skevis.
Katis, the judge, turned on the grizzled old man. “Just because you have a son in command doesn’t mean you can meddle with justice,” he snapped. “What we’re carrying out here is the will of the people, who will not tolerate traitors. Ask your neighbors what they want. Their decision will be respected. Four men from Lia died during the occupation, killed by Zervas’ bullets, perhaps from this man’s gun. Should he be allowed to live?”
Katis searched the crowd, choosing his jury carefully. He found Calliope Bardaka, the plump, pretty young widow whose husband had disappeared carrying a message to ELAS troops during the occupation. “Your husband died at the hands of Zervas’ mercenaries,” Katis thundered, “leaving you alone with starving babies. What do you say we should do to him?”
“Kill him!” Calliope replied without hesitation.
“And you?” Katis asked, turning to Elia Poulos, the tinker who had returned to Lia during the battle as the nationalist troops were retreating. “What do you say?”
“Kill him!” exclaimed Elia Poulos.
Katis’ eyes ranged around the crowd. Eleni shrank back, willing him not to look at her. His gaze came to rest on Spiro Michopoulos, the tubercular coffeehouse owner who had been appointed president of the village by the guerrillas. Michopoulos looked confused.
“You, Mr. President,” Katis persisted. “what do you say is this man’s proper fate?”
“Why, ah—whatever the people’s court decides,” stammered Michopoulos, looking around for help.
“That’s not good enough, Comrade!” snapped Katis. “Should we execute him or not?”
There was a long pause, then the villagers heard Michopoulos answer faintly, “Yes.”
Katis repeated his question several times more, selecting his witnesses. Each time he received the same answer.
As the polling went on, the prisoner searched the respondents’ faces earnestly, as if he expected someone to speak for him, but his hopes faded with each reply. Eleni was perspiring, trying to think what she would say if the judge called on her.
Katis’ small bright eyes came closer as he studied each face in turn. Then he stopped. He was pointing at Stavroula Yakou, who was standing only inches away from her. “Your sister is fighting as an andartina for the Democratic Army,” Katis shouted at Stavroula, “and this man was one of those who came here to kill her. What do you say his fate should be?”
Stavroula blushed, the sun reflecting on her wheat-colored hair, partly hidden by the cornflower-blue kerchief. She had never looked more beautiful, like an image of the Virgin on an icon. The soldier in the chair stared at the apparition, filled with sudden hope. Stavroula looked straight back at the judge and raised her chin.
“Kill him,” she said.
Pedomasoma is a compound word that literally means “the gathering up of children.” It entered the Greek vocabulary in March of 1948, when the Communist Provisional Government announced a new policy over its radio: all children between the ages of three and fourteen in the occupied regions of northern Greece would be collected and sent to “people’s democracies” behind the Iron Curtain that had offered to take them in. According to the announcement, this decision was made in order to protect the children in the war zones from cruelties perpetrated by the attacking fascist soldiers: hunger due to crop destruction, bombings and lootings.
This newest move of the “government” of Markos Vafiadis was intended to be a brilliant propaganda coup. It would dramatize to the world the dangers imposed on civilians by the Greek armed forces and win international sympathy for the guerrillas. Furthermore, having their children held hostage in Communist bloc countries would ensure the loyalty of parents left behind in the mountain villages. And finally, the children would be indoctrinated in the party’s philosophy and grow to provide future Greek Communist cadres of young militants.
It was a propaganda move that backfired prodigiously. At first the foreign correspondents of the international press, many of whom covered the war from the bar of the Grande-Bretagne Hotel in Athens, portrayed the pedomasoma as an authentically humanitarian move and dismissed reports that the children were being abducted. But as more and younger children were taken from their mothers, the United Nations condemned the pedomasoma, and the Athens government effectively used the program to help turn international opinion against the insurgents. Domestically, the abduction of the children to Eastern Europe added credibility to the government’s charge that the guerrillas were betraying Greece to Slavic interests.
The abduction of their children was the final straw that turned the people of the occupied villages against the guerrillas and eroded the wide base of popular support that they had once enjoyed in northern Greece. Growing incidences of violence by the guerrillas added to the disenchantment of the civilians.
By the end of 1948 more than 28,000 Greek children had been taken away from their parents to camps throughout the Communist bloc. From the Mourgana villages, 300 children were sent to Albania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Ten years would pass before the first children were allowed back into Greece. Many never returned. A dozen former children taken from Lia are still scattered in Communist countries from Poland to Rumania to Tashkent. Nevertheless, many Greek Communists insist today that there was never such a thing as the pedomasoma, and that no children were removed against their parents’ will.
The program was, in fact, voluntary at first, but after a month, only 1,100 children from Greece were sent willingly by their parents to the Iron Curtain camps. The guerrillas hadn’t reckoned on the deep-rooted Greek tradition of family solidarity. Even after eight years of war and famine the women of the mountain villages could not be induced to hand over their children to strangers in foreign lands. Finally the guerrillas decided that more stringent measures of collecting the children had to be initiated.
IN LATE MARCH OF 1948, as the villagers of Lia began planting the early beans, onions and corn, they saw the guerrillas at the village boundaries and down in the foothills planting another sort of crop: land mines, designed to blossom instantaneously under the weight of a human body into the red flower of death.
The nearly successful attack on the Mourgana earlier in the month and the escape of three village women had taught Lia’s occupiers a lesson. They were determined to plug up the Mourgana villages like a corked wine jug so that no one could get in or out. It seemed certain that the attack of Operation Pergamos would be repeated, so all likely paths of approach throughout the foothills and up the ravines were heavily mined. The twenty-four-hour guards posted at lookout points throughout the village were strengthened to prevent any more embarrassments like the three escapes.
Eleni forbade her children to leave the yard for fear that a careless step would trigger a mine. Throughout the Mourgana the peasants became very careful where they put their feet down. But the inevitable happened in the neighboring village of Babouri. A group of local boys had been ordered to drive a herd of mules to Tsamanta for the guerrillas. Their leader, a slow-witted young man, stepped off the road to answer a call of nature and both his legs were blown off. The smaller boys managed to carry him back to the house of Eleni’s cousin Antonova Paroussis, on the western edge of Babouri, but he died there, cursing and gushing his life’s blood all over the floor while her small children watched.
The political commissar of the Mourgana, Kostas Koliyiannis, felt that land mines and more lookouts were not enough to guarantee the complete “cooperation”
of the villagers of Lia. He decided to establish a security police station in the village like the one that existed in Babouri. He needed to find a house large enough to contain the police office, interrogation rooms and a secure cellar for a jail. The only house in Lia of adequate size belonged to the Amerikana.
One morning in mid-March, Eleni opened her gate to find Sotiris Drapetis standing there. The sight of the reptilian eyes in the lean, handsome face made her throat tighten, remembering the day he had torn her home apart searching for guns.
Sotiris informed Eleni that the Democratic Army required her house for its new police station. For security reasons, no civilians could be allowed to remain living in it. She would have twenty-four hours to find another dwelling for her family.
She knew there was only one place left for them to go; the two-room house of her parents, which had been empty ever since Megali was beaten up by Sotiris’ henchmen and came to live with her daughter.
Overnight the Gatzoyiannis family prepared to move out of the Perivoli into the lower village. Besides the fourteen goats, their sleeping blankets, clothes and some corn, there was not much to salvage. Sotiris ordered Eleni to leave the sewing machine and the gramophone behind; they were needed by the Democratic Army. She wrapped the photograph of Christos and the golden pitcher from Constantinople in some clothing, then silently began to take leave of the house where she had spent the twenty-two years of her marriage. She had given birth to her children and watched her mother-in-law die in these rooms. It was like leaving part of her body behind.
Eleni stood for a while before the corner iconostasis, where she crossed herself first thing every morning and last thing every night. She walked around, touching the luxuries which had made her house the finest in the village: the brass bed, the built-in shoe rack, the ingenious water supply of hanging barrels outside the kitchen, the huge gate with its brass handles and doorbell, the carved fireplace with her husband’s name on it. She looked for the last time out the window at the view of the valleys and mountains to the south. She would never see the horizon from this perspective again. It was only a fifteen-minute walk down the mountain to where she was going, but it seemed half the world away.
Eleni Page 35
