The girl hurried out the gate and down the familiar path as the reality of her mother’s death pressed in on her like a suffocating weight. When she reached the Church of St. Demetrios, now being used as the stable, she looked up at the brightly painted icon of the saint on horseback set in a niche beside the door. She stared at the saint, as real to her as any neighbor in the Perivoli, and anger bubbled up in her chest. Raising a small fist, she began to scream, “Damn you, St. Demetrios! Don’t you see what they’ve done? Why don’t you strike them down? Why don’t you blind them, tear out their eyes?”
She heard a stirring behind her and spun around to see a man in guerrilla uniform who had been feeding his horse in the churchyard. It was Antonis, the aide of Colonel Petritis who had lived in their house and worried over Nikola because the boy reminded him of his own son. He came toward her, his head bent to hide the tears in his eyes. “I know what’s happened, child,” he said quietly, “but I couldn’t do anything to stop it. Your mother was a good woman who never harmed anyone.” Then he walked away, leading the horse.
When she entered the Haidis gate, Glykeria was approached by two of the family’s small goats who had been left free and were scavenging in the bean field below. One had been nicknamed “Orphana” by the children because it was an orphan, and the other was called “Skoulerikia” because the two dewlaps of flesh hanging from its ears looked like earrings. The kids nuzzled her, crying plaintively for her to feed them; the sight of their mournful gold-irised eyes fed her anger. She shoved them away, crying, “We’re all orphans now and you can die for all I care! We’re all going to die!”
The only woman in the village brave enough to speak to Glykeria was the feeble-minded shepherdess, Vasilo Barka, who had long been the butt of Glykeria’s cruel teasing. Drawn by the bleating of the hungry kids, she came to Glykeria’s door and offered with tears in her eyes to care for the animals for free. “It’s the only thing I can do,” she cried, hugging the girl. “Your mother was like one of my family.” Remembering the many times her mother had scolded her for baiting the unfortunate woman, Glykeria hung her head as she mumbled a few words of thanks.
Later that day, as Glykeria wandered the fields, looking for something to eat, neighbors like Tassina Bartzokis and even relatives like Kitchina Stratis, her mother’s first cousin, turned away without a word when she wished them “Good day.” There seemed to be no one left on earth who would share her grief.
The carrion birds of the guerrillas arrived at her door the next morning in the persons of Foto Bollis, Christos Skevis and Elia Poulos, the die-hard Communists who had returned to the village after Operation Pergamos and been rewarded with administrative positions. “Give us everything, whatever you have,” Foto Bollis demanded. He opened a wooden chest and found a few pounds of flour and some ears of corn that Eleni had left. The men loaded everything in cloth sacks. “Leave me enough to bake a loaf of bread,” Glykeria pleaded.
“We’ve been authorized to confiscate everything,” Bollis replied. To the others he said, “I saw some ripe corn in the fields. Get it.” As he turned away, the girl took off one of the slippers she was wearing and threw it at him, bouncing it off the back of his head. When the door slammed, she curled up in a ball, still clutching her mother’s dress, and prepared to die.
Later that day Eugenia Petsis came up from the ruined mill nearby where she lived. “Come to my house, child,” she whispered. “Your mother asked me to look after you, and I will. But you have to promise not to try to escape or they’ll kill us all.” Glykeria nodded obediently. Before she walked out the door, she took off the red dress she had been wearing for three months and put on her mother’s brown dress, the only garment left in the house.
The next morning Stavroula Yakou tracked the girl down in the Petsis mill and ordered her back to the security police for more questioning. Stavroula took pleasure in persecuting the daughter of the Amerikana, one of the girls she had envied when her own family was living off the scraps from the Gatzoyiannis table. She made Glykeria her special victim during the next two weeks, arriving every morning to lead her up to the security-police station for questioning, assigning her every afternoon to work details: carrying wounded guerrillas and supplies to Tsamanta. It was a dangerous journey, leading an overburdened mule over the mountain paths through heavy shelling. Glykeria moved like an automaton, deaf to the cannon fire and the cries of the wounded. She often returned from Tsamanta on the back of a mule, so tired that she would doze off and fall from the saddle. At the end of each day’s journey, Stavroula Yakou would be waiting for her with the words “Now you’re going again, this time for Olga and next for Kanta’s turn.”
One morning after the daily interrogation session, Stavroula was leading Glykeria back down the path when she stopped at the door of her mother, Anastasia Yakou. As they were talking, a procession on horseback passed by. It was Sotiris Drapetis leading the Migdalis couple and another prisoner back to Babouri. All three had been savagely beaten and had their hands tied behind their backs. Sotiris preened under Stavroula’s admiring gaze. “Hey, girl,” he shouted to her as she smiled at him, her teeth gleaming like bleached almonds. “After we go round that bend down there, listen and you’ll hear three bullets. I’m going to kill them and dump them in the ravine.”
Within minutes, just as Sotiris had promised, they heard three shots and Stavroula’s mother crossed herself. “The poor souls are gone,” she sighed. But later they learned that Sotiris had only been amusing himself by frightening the prisoners. They were put to death the next day in a public execution in Babouri’s churchyard before the eyes of the entire village, including their elderly parents and small children, who were warned that if they made a sound, they, too, would die. Koula Migdalis was a strong woman and it took several rounds to kill her. Afterward the guerrillas left the bodies in the churchyard for several days as an example to the villagers.
The guerrilla command decided to send a last group of children for the pedomasoma to Albania. They would have to go over the mountaintops to the northeast, because the roads toward Tsamanta were under heavy shelling.
Dina Venetis, who had been released after the trial, was approached by a woman guerrilla who told her to prepare her nine-year-old son, Vangeli: “He’s leaving today.” Dina ran down to her house. “I found him some clothes,” she says, “a little jacket. Some shoes he never liked. They were too tight but I made him put them on.”
The mothers and children were gathered in the village square. “There were about a dozen of us from Lia,” Dina recalls. “Other groups of mothers and children came up the mountain from other villages. One boy had been bitten on the way by a rabid dog. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be fine once he’s inside,’ the guerrillas told us. ‘Our doctors will take care of him.’ When they got to Albania he went crazy. They shut him up in a room and tied him because he was biting his own hands. He died in terrible pain.”
The mothers were told they could accompany the children as far as the Chapel of St. Nicholas. “When we got to the place,” Dina says, “I kissed Vangeli and turned away. I was afraid to cry in front of him. As soon as he took a few steps, the heel came off one of his shoes and I watched him limping all the way up the mountain.” When she mentions the shoes she always starts to cry. “He was nine when he left, and when he came back, he was sixteen years old,” she adds, recovering her composure, “but he looked twelve, no more, thin as an ax handle, his bones pushing through his skin.”
As news of the planned attack on the Mourgana filtered back to the refugee community in Igoumenitsa, the Gatzoyiannis family passed each day in increasing suspense. Marianthe Ziaras, who had joined her family in Filiates after her escape, said that Eleni and Alexo were in jail but had not been tried. Then word reached them that a young andartina from Lia named Xantho Michopoulos had been found gravely wounded on a battlefield near Vrosina and was carried by soldiers to a hospital in Filiates. The girl had been conscripted into the same group as Kanta and was a cousin of Sp
iro Michopoulos. She would surely know what was happening in Lia. Kitso Haidis decided to go to Filiates to learn what he could. Nitsa said she would go with him. The children were left in the care of their grandmother, Megali, and their uncle Andreas.
Xantho Michopoulos did not live long enough to reach Filiates, but before she died she told the soldiers the names of the five civilians executed in Lia. When Kitso arrived at the army hospital in Filiates, he learned of his daughter’s death. Crazed with sorrow, he lunged for a wounded guerrilla nearby and tried to strangle him in revenge. Soldiers pulled him away.
Nitsa heard whispers as she shopped in the open market of the town. When she went to the house of Lukas Ziaras, one look at the faces of the tinker’s family confirmed her worst fears and she collapsed on the floor, screaming. She continued to keen for her sister all night until her voice was completely gone and she could only croak. In the morning Nitsa boarded an army truck back to Igoumenitsa, but her courage failed her and she told the children in a whisper that she had caught a cold which had developed into laryngitis. She added that the soldiers were about to attack the Mourgana villages and their grandfather had stayed behind to follow the army into Lia and learn the fate of their mother. “She knew about the executions all along and never said a word,” Olga exclaimed later, “even though I was going around Igoumenitsa in a red kerchief, like a bride.”
Kitso stayed behind in Filiates to nurse his grief alone and wait for the liberation of Lia. He walked about the old town, his features blurred by a stubble of beard, his erect posture replaced by the shuffle of an old man. He was a true peasant, loath to bare his feelings, suspicious of everyone. He became obsessed with the idea of returning to Lia to see the truth with his own eyes. The soldiers said it was only a matter of days before the attack on the Mourgana would begin.
The plan of Operation Taurus called for two brigades of government troops to advance toward the Mourgana villages from the south in a diversionary action and to unleash a downpour of bombs and heavy artillery on the guerrilla fortress until the morale of the 1,500 men barricaded there was shattered. Then two other brigades, creeping along the peaks of the Albanian border down from the northeast, would launch the main thrust of the attack, a surprise assault on the highest peak of the Mourgana. If it fell, the guerrillas would be cut off from their escape route to Albania and the pipeline through which they had been receiving reinforcements and supplies.
The assault, bombing and artillery fire from the south began on September 10, two weeks after Eleni’s execution. The rain of death was heavier than the village had ever seen. Several houses were hit by bomber planes. One village woman was struck by a piece of shrapnel which entered her mouth and projected from the side of her head, but she would not die for several days.
The guerrillas ordered the Liotes to gather in caves high above the Perivoli. Most of the people spent the night of September II huddled in the same caves where they had hidden from the Italians and where their ancestors had taken refuge for centuries. Glykeria was crowded in with her second cousin, Vangelina Gatzoyiannis, and her five children. Before dark, a bomber swooped low over the clearing, disgorging a blizzard of paper leaflets. Gregory Tsavos, the elderly field warden who had spoken up for Eleni at the trial, picked up one of the leaflets and read it aloud to the crowd that gathered. It was signed by General Thrasyvoulos Tsakalotos, the commander of the First Army Corps, whose Eighth Division was leading the assault, and it told the villagers to take courage and stand firm: “We are coming to liberate you. We will soon be in your village.” Their eyes swollen from lack of sleep, the Liotes exchanged nervous whispers as they crawled back into the caves; the soldiers were on their way but they knew the guerrillas would never leave them behind to welcome them.
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 reputati
on 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.
Eleni Page 60
