It was while watching Andreas’ punishment that Eleni first came to the realization that death could be a solace, to be embraced like a lover. At the beginning, she had passed every hour starved for the love of her children, a love which had unceasingly nourished her soul. For days now she had forced herself to put the thought of the children away from her and to prepare for the journey into the other world. She felt the presence of her long-dead mother-in-law, Fotini, drawing near to her, brushing her eyelids as she slept, and tried to draw comfort from that. But now a new fear seized her, creeping out of the shadows below. Eleni whispered a prayer that her own death would be swift. She had always been so careful to conduct her life with decorum and self-control, and she prayed to die the same way, like a human being, not an animal.
The prisoners in the cellar expected their treatment to deteriorate in retaliation for the escape of Marianthe and Andreas, but to their surprise, in the days that followed it became marginally better than it had been before. The change was infinitesimal, but to captives with nothing to do but analyze every gesture and word of their jailers, it seemed profoundly significant.
After twenty-four hours Andreas was taken down from the spit. A few days later he was returned to the cellar, and the other prisoners saw that he had been dressed in fresh clothing and his wounds had been tended. He slumped in a corner, silent and in a stupor, but he was alive.
The regular beatings of prisoners stopped except for an occasional kick or blow from a guard. Relatives were permitted to bring food to the captives. Although no adults were allowed inside the cellar to see them, some days after the escape Niki Gatzoyiannis, Alexo’s young daughter, was allowed to speak to her mother.
Niki had come to the prison many times with food for Alexo and each time the guards had taken the plate away from her, torn any bread into small pieces to make sure nothing was concealed inside, and told her to come back for the empty dish the next morning. But one day in mid-August the guards told Niki she could see her mother. They led Alexo out the cellar door into the yard, where she blinked in the sunlight. Niki ran forward to embrace her, but Alexo made a sign for her to stay some distance away. “Don’t come near me, sweetheart!” she said. “I’m covered with lice.” Niki stopped, suspecting that her mother didn’t want her to see how badly she had been beaten. Under the eyes of the guards they exchanged a few lame words about the house and the flocks, trying to stay calm, then Alexo tearfully thanked her daughter for the food and was led back into the darkness of the cellar. Niki saw no sign of her aunt Eleni.
From her vantage point in the kitchen window, Eleni watched the encounter between Niki and Alexo, and it set her to worrying about what had happened to Glykeria. She began to wonder if the girl had been arrested in the threshing fields, and beaten to elicit information about her mother’s complicity in the mass escape.
The food fed to the prisoners began to improve and they were permitted to receive changes of clothing brought by relatives. For several nights after the punishment of Andreas, no one was taken out to the garden to be executed. The captives’ hands were inexplicably untied.
On the fourth day after Marianthe’s disappearance, Sotiris appeared in the cellar early in the morning and called the names of the prisoners from Lia: Dina Venetis, Alexo Gatzoyiannis, Andreas Michopoulos, Spiro Michopoulos and Vasili Nikou. As they stared at each other in terror, he ordered them brought upstairs. No prisoners had ever been taken up for execution in the morning, they thought. If they were to be interrogated and beaten again, surely they wouldn’t all be taken together.
Sotiris and the guards led the five up the stairs into the police office. The brass bed gleamed, the icon hung in the eastern corner and the gramophone was in its accustomed place. Waiting for them in the room were two more fellow villagers: Eleni Gatzoyiannis and Constantina Drouboyiannis. Relieved at seeing that Eleni was all right, Alexo ran to embrace her.
At an order from Sotiris, the guerrillas began to tie the prisoners together in pairs. Eleni and Alexo were bound hand to hand. Spiro Michopoulos was tied to his nephew Andreas, who could barely stand up. Vasili Nikou was tied to Dina Venetis. The only prisoner left unfettered was Constantina Drouboyiannis.
When all the prisoners were tied together, Sotiris cleared his throat. “Today your fate will be put in the hands of the people’s justice,” he said. “You will have the benefit of a public trial before all your fellow villagers. Evidence will be given against you, witnesses will be called, and you will be allowed to defend yourselves against the charges. You will see that the Democratic Army does not punish the innocent, only the guilty.”
He signaled to the guards, then said tensely, “Come along now, the judges have arrived.”
By mid-August it was clear even to Communist Party leader Nikos Zachariadis that Grammos was lost. The guerrilla fighters had tried everything: rolling improvised mines down the slopes onto the enemy, leaving booby-trapped mules to wander the hillsides, starting landslides of rocks, but by August 17, the 9,000 surviving guerrillas were trapped on the very top of Grammos with 90,000 government soldiers surrounding them. After eight weeks of savage fighting, with a loss of life on both sides that horrified the foreign correspondents covering the battle, the guerrillas had no choice but to retreat.
At the headquarters of the exhausted survivors, Nikos Zachariadis and Markos Vafiadis were once again at loggerheads, arguing over the method of retreat. General Markos urged that they break through the enemy encirclement to the north and disperse their units to harass government forces throughout the region. Zachariadis was advocating a push eastward to the Vitsi range, where the guerrillas could entrench themselves along the Yugoslav border. If they did so, he knew, and were ultimately defeated, he could always blame the loss of the war on lack of support from Tito.
Zachariadis got his way as usual. Before dawn on August 21, the guerrillas managed to break through the enemy lines and slip off, carrying their wounded, toward Vitsi.
Zachariadis refused to admit that the loss of Grammos was the result of his misguided strategy. Instead, he laid the blame on the performance of Markos’ officers, who, he said, had been derelict in their duty. Among the most tempting scapegoats for Zachariadis to name was Colonel Yiorgios Yannoulis, a tall, ascetic-looking young lawyer who had fought bravely throughout the German occupation, with a skill that made him rise swiftly in the Communist ranks. When the attack on Grammos was begun, he led his men to infiltrate the enemy lines with exceptional mobility and daring, and cut the government troops’ supply and communication arteries. Later Yannoulis was given the heights of Batras to defend on the western slope of Grammos and was ordered to hold it to the death. He complied until his brigade had been whittled down to only fifty survivors, then he led them in an expert withdrawal.
But Zachariadis badly needed villains on whom to blame the Grammos defeat, and Yannoulis served his purpose well. He was closely associated with Markos, having worked with him from the outbreak of the civil war, organizing units in Macedonia. If the young colonel was labeled a traitor, it would impugn Markos and his supporters as well.
Yannoulis was arrested, charged with treason and even accused of harboring rightist sympathies because he had briefly joined a resistance movement at the beginning of the occupation that was not Communist-controlled. After a parody of a trial, the officer’s execution was personally ordered by Lieutenant General Yiorgos Goussias, a former cobbler and a lackey of Zachariadis.
“Confirmation of the sentence is on the way from headquarters,” Goussias announced shortly after the trial. “No point in waiting; shoot him now.”
AS THE SEVEN DEFENDANTS from the village of Lia were led, tied together in pairs, down the path from the Perivoli, across the ravine and into the town square, they were wrapped in their own thoughts. At Sotiris’ statement that they were going to have a trial, hope, mankind’s last solace in misfortune, had been rekindled in each prisoner.
Dina Venetis walked toward the square, her dark, heavy-lashed eyes
lowered, tied hand to hand with Vasili Nikou. She searched her mind for some promising sign, some indication that the guerrillas did not intend to kill her. The fact that her husband was a lieutenant fighting on the nationalist side would certainly be held against her, she knew, but her main accuser, Andreas Michopoulos, had completely discredited himself by trying to escape, so how could they condemn her on his testimony?
Vasili Nikou stumbled along at Dina’s side. Nikou was the father of four grown daughters—three of them would be watching the trial. Aged by tragedy beyond his fifty-seven years, Vasili Nikou had seen more of war and killing than any of the guerrillas who now held him prisoner. He had fought in the Greek army for nine years, beginning with the Balkan wars in 1912 and ending with the Greek campaign in Asia Minor in 1921. After that he returned to his family in Lia and traveled from village to village eight months of the year—from March to October—working as a cooper.
Nikou had just returned from his annual rounds in the fall of 1947 when he heard that the guerrillas were approaching Lia. He had been a sympathizer of the EDES forces of Napoleon Zervas during the German occupation and he knew that the guerrillas would hold his rightist leanings against him. He fled south to Kostana, but when he woke up the next morning he discovered that the guerrillas had entered the town; he was trapped. He told the guerrillas he had come to join them and asked to be taken to Spiro Skevis, whose eldest brother, Yiorgos, was married to Nikou’s sister Calliope. Skevis gave him a pass to return to Lia, where Nikou, one of the few men left in the village, was put on the committee which administered civilian work details.
As he walked now down the path toward the village square, Vasili Nikou consoled himself with the thought that he had consistently claimed loyalty to the cause since the guerrillas arrived. If worst came to worst and he was convicted, he did not believe that Spiro Skevis would let his own sister-in-law’s brother be shot.
Spiro Michopoulos, the sickly village president, and his nephew Andreas made an odd, silent couple as they walked slowly down the path, the boy staggering because of his recent torture, the older man, a tall, gangly figure, all elbows and knees. Spiro wondered if his nephew had given false testimony against him, as he had incriminated so many others. Spiro was determined to cheat death again, as he had conquered the tuberculosis that left him wasted and a village pariah. Perhaps it had been a mistake to try to distribute work assignments fairly, arousing the hostility of the fanatic Communists in the village, he reflected. But after all, hadn’t he stayed behind to welcome the guerrillas when all the other men had left, and expertly administered the village for them?
Andreas could hardly keep up with his uncle. He ached to the very marrow of his bones from the beatings he had received after his escape and his broken skin burned under the sun as if he had a fever. Nevertheless, he too was nursing hope. He knew the escape attempt would weigh the scales against him, but he had willingly enlisted in the guerrillas’ ranks and then, when they brought him in for interrogation; he had given them all the information they asked for and more. He ran his free hand through his dark, matted hair and thought that it would reflect badly on the guerrillas if they killed one of their own, and an eighteen-year-old boy at that.
Of the seven defendants wending their way toward the village square, the most optimistic was Constantina Drouboyiannis, the round-faced, slow-witted woman who had denounced Eleni in Katis’ office. Constantina was delighted to see she was the only prisoner who had not been tied for the walk. Her hands swung free as she reflected that of all the defendants, they had the least evidence against her. Even though her daughters had been taken to freedom by Lukas Ziaras, she had not come along on either of the earlier tries, and no one could prove that she had told her sister-in-law to flee with the girls. Besides, she had been more than cooperative with her captors, telling them everything they wanted to hear.
Eleni and Alexo were bound hand to hand—the first time the two sisters-in-law had seen each other since they were rearrested ten days before. Although they didn’t speak, Eleni drew solace from the nearness of Alexo, who had always been her comforter in times of crisis.
Eleni concentrated all her energy on having to meet the eyes of the curious with composure. She knew that she was not going to be acquitted—she had already admitted going on the early escape attempts and helping to organize the plot. She also knew that she was the one woman in the village the guerrillas most resented because of her position and her American husband. But she could not stop the tiny voice of hope inside her which repeated, “I never tried to convince anyone else to escape or spoke against the guerrillas. Perhaps I’ll receive a prison sentence instead. As long as I’m alive, there’s a chance I may see my children again.”
It was ten o’clock on the morning of Thursday, August 19, a brilliant late-summer day, when the villagers were summoned to the town square by the church bells and bull horns of the guerrillas. No one lagged, because they anticipated the drama they were about to witness: the first public trial of civilians from their own village.
The stage was the area under the huge plane tree at the southeast corner of the square; a small table waited with three chairs in a row behind it. The defendants were told to sit on a platform created by the gnarled roots of the huge tree, while the three judges took their places in the chairs facing the audience. As they filed past, the three magistrates, all in civilian clothes, impressed the watching crowd by their physical stature alone. They were all considerably above average height, and the giant who brought up the rear, a man named Grigori Pappas, but called by the villagers “the tall one,” towered half a head above the other two.
The crowd filled the square and stretched up the slopes above it. Children scrambled into the branches of nearby trees to get a better view. The villagers seated themselves on the ground under the sunlight, which flowed like molten lava. The whitewashed walls of the church threw off a dazzling glare, and black-and-yellow hornets attacked the heavy grapes hanging on nearby trellises.
The watching peasants had no idea how the ritual of justice was carried out, but they understood that the three imposing men seated solemnly at the table held the power of life and death over the seven prisoners, and they leaned forward, the better to hear what was to be said.
The silence deepened as a tall, balding, gray-haired man of middle age with a chiseled oval face, large nose, jutting chin, and intense eyes, stood up. He wore a dark-blue suit, which pronounced him a man of education and urbanity, and his long, delicate fingers rested lightly on the table before him. The villagers stirred expectantly. They recognized this man with the mesmerizing eyes as the person they called Katis (“the Judge”) and they sensed that he was in charge of this drama, as he had been at the trial of the soldier captured during the battle of Pergamos.
Katis’ face showed no strain nor did his sonorous voice betray a quaver, but his nerves were coiled. He was the author, director and stage manager of what was to take place, and he felt the combination of exaltation and fear that fills every performer on opening night. As the man personally appointed by Koliyiannis to handle this case, he had a difficult task. It was essential to repair the loyalty of the civilians, which had eroded during the past months. The villagers had at first been overwhelmingly behind the Democratic Army, but they were now tired of work details and of having their food and possessions confiscated. They had grown weary of battles and artillery fire and the increasing brutality of the beleaguered guerrillas. They objected to giving up their daughters to be andartinas and almost unanimously balked at abandoning their children to the pedomasoma. Twenty of the leading citizens had boldly fled, damaging the authority of the guerrillas even more.
Katis knew that it was his duty in the orchestration of this trial to intimidate the watching Liotes to the point where no more of them would consider such treachery. Moreover, by marshaling evidence against the defendants, he had to make the villagers despise the accused and rally in support of the guerrillas.
Katis was acutely aw
are of the eyes of one of the judges sitting behind him, a tall, handsome, mournful-looking man of forty named Yiorgos Anagnostakis. Katis had been appointed president of the court for this particular trial by Kostas Koliyiannis, the political commissar of all Epiros, but Anagnostakis, who was also serving as a judge, was Katis’ superior officer, the chief of the judicial branch of the Epiros Command. Katis resented Anagnostakis. Not only was Anagnostakis three years younger and his superior, with the rank of colonel in the DAG, but he had no judicial experience in civilian life, while Katis had been a justice of the peace in the town of Konitsa. He also knew that Anagnostakis enjoyed the respect and friendship of the third judge, Grigori Pappas, both men coming from the same area in southern Epiros, and Katis was determined to impress his colleagues with the amount of evidence he had amassed and the thoroughness of his prosecution.
Anagnostakis had entered the Communist-led resistance early, after joining the party in law school, and had swiftly become the chief of the judicial branch of ELAS during the occupation with a reputation as an efficient judge who meted out swift justice to the opponents of ELAS in many important trials. Katis came into the DAG after the resistance and he knew he didn’t have the credentials that the younger man did. Katis’ most important case had been the trial of four nationalist officers captured during the battle of Pergamos. Before that trial Anagnostakis suggested freeing one of the officers, a doctor, noting that the guerrillas had greater need of his medical skills than of another execution. But Katis stood firm: no matter how desperately doctors were needed to treat wounded guerrillas, the man had served as an officer with the enemy and must die. In the end Koliyiannis backed him up, Katis was vindicated and the doctor was killed.
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