Eleni

by Nicholas Gage

  While Zachariadis’ ignominious end gave me gratification, as I began probing the fate of other Communist leaders after the war, I learned that two of the men most responsible for my mother’s death had not suffered for their crimes. Kostas Koliyiannis, the individual who held the single greatest responsibility for the executions in the Mourgana villages, had floated to the top of the party leadership after Zachariadis’ downfall, winning his crown as leader of all Greek Communists. The glowering, bearlike political commissar of the Epiros Command had played his cards well.

  Koliyiannis proved to be every bit as dictatorial as Zachariadis had been. In 1968 there was a revolt as dissidents seized the party’s radio station and denounced Koliyiannis’ methods. His winning streak finally came to an end and Moscow removed him from power. Spurned by the party he had devoted his life to, Koliyiannis died in Hungary a bitter old man in 1979. He returned in a casket to the country from which he had been exiled for thirty years.

  When I learned of Koliyiannis’ death, I had been living in Greece for two years. I could take some satisfaction from his fate, but it angered me that after all his crimes, Koliyiannis had risen to the top of his world and been allowed to die in bed. When I came to Greece in 1977 as foreign correspondent for the New York Times, I intended to track down my mother’s killers, but political upheavals throughout the Middle East kept me out of the country almost continuously. The news that death had cheated me of confronting Koliyiannis convinced me that if I was ever going to find her killers I had to do it at once.

  The final catalyst that made me leave my job to devote myself completely to the search was my discovery that the other primary actor in my mother’s fate, Koliyiannis’ agent Katis, was still alive and living comfortably in Greece. Katis was the man who had assembled the case against my mother, prosecuted her and ordered her torture. If Koliyiannis was my Himmler, Katis was his Eichmann, and I couldn’t postpone my need to confront him any longer.

  It was at this point that I obtained an unmarked, unregistered hand gun, a Walther PPK, which I brought to Greece in a shipment of personal belongings, concealed inside the canister of an Electrolux vacuum cleaner. I had no clear idea what I intended to do with the gun, but I didn’t want to face Katis without it.

  The move to Greece in 1977 had been a rude awakening for me, shattering any belief I might have had in my sisters’ view of divine retribution. From overseas I had found solace in the Communist Party leaders’ fate—outlawed, imprisoned and torn by internecine battles. But I arrived in Athens to be confronted with a resurgence of Communist power in the country.

  Immediately after the end of hostilities in 1949, the Communists who had not fled behind the Iron Curtain were persecuted and imprisoned with all the rancor that had taken root during the war years. But slowly the pressures on them relaxed. In 1954 the first exiles were allowed to return from Hungary: carefully screened Greeks who could prove that they were taken by force and harbored no sympathy for the party. Among them came many of the villagers abducted from Lia. After that, refugees began to return in increasing numbers, and the screening process that allowed them back in the country was made more liberal.

  After the Communist Party was legalized in Greece in 1974 and the thirty-year statute of limitations on all crimes committed during the war years passed, the Greek Communists in exile came flooding back and began to propagate their own version of the war, making the Communist guerrilla leaders into popular heros. When I moved to Greece, I was confronted daily with the party’s success in winning the loyalties of Greeks who had been born since the war.

  Fresh-faced college students knocked at my door every weekend, handing me propaganda leaflets and inviting me to the ubiquitous Communist youth festivals. If they were asked about the pedomasoma, civilian executions and guerrilla brutalities, they smiled and shook their heads at my ignorance: those things had never happened, they explained patiently.

  There was no escaping the Communists’ success in glamorizing the guerrillas in the eyes of modern Greek youth and rewriting the history of the war, even in the minds of children born to those from my own village. Once, at a name-day party full of Liotes, I overheard a friend about my age arguing with his nephew, a twenty-two-year-old university student. The uncle was saying to the boy, “Didn’t they break up our family, drag your grandmother, your mother and me out of our village and put us in camps in Hungary for six years?”

  “They did it for humanitarian reasons,” the boy replied levelly, “to save you from the fascist bombs.”

  “And what about the thousands of civilians they executed in the occupied villages? Was that humanitarian?” his uncle persisted in a louder voice. “What about the five they killed in Lia?”

  The boy’s eyes narrowed. “They wouldn’t have killed them without a reason,” he said. “They probably had a very good reason.”

  To erase these atrocities from the Greek consciousness, the Communists, as soon as they were legalized, launched a widespread movement to stop all official memorial services for those killed during the civil war, victims who included my mother. They succeeded in persuading the new socialist government, which came to power in 1981, to abolish such services.

  By then I had left my job with the New York Times and was spending all my time investigating my mother’s death. My years in Greece had convinced me that it was important to write about her fate not only for my sisters and myself, but also for my fellow Greeks, especially the postwar generation, who would perhaps learn something they didn’t know about the civil war.

  By the time my investigation was complete, I would have interviewed more than 400 individuals: former villagers and soldiers who fought on both sides, British commandos, nationalist and Communist officers, murderers and the survivors of their victims. I traveled throughout Greece as well as to the United States, England, Canada, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Many of the accounts I recorded were contradictory or incomplete, but piece by piece the puzzle began to take shape.

  The original clue given me by the baker Makos, who happened to recognize the guerrilla Taki twenty years after my mother’s execution, had set me on my way. Each fact I learned led me to another witness. At first all my efforts to find the judge Katis ended in frustration. The former guerrillas who had been exiled with him seemed to think that he had died in Czechoslovakia.

  Eventually, an urbane judge, Demitris Gastis, and a former guerrilla general turned hotel clerk, Yiorgos Kalianesis, gave me the information I needed to track Katis to his home. But before I confronted him face to face, I knew I had to exhaust every last witness to his crimes.

  There were still two major holes in the web of evidence I was assembling against the man who had been my mother’s judge and torturer. I had learned that the guerrilla we called “Zeltas,” the head of the security police in Lia, lived somewhere in Greece, but I needed his real name and his location in order to interview him. It was also essential that I travel behind the Iron Curtain to find a handful of former Liotes still in exile—some of whom were personally involved in betraying my mother, others well-known collaborators of the guerrillas in Lia who would have essential information about what went on there.

  When I had put together the necessary visas to travel to Eastern Europe, I flew on November 28, 1981, from Athens to Budapest, Hungary, then drove through a snowstorm to the refugee village of Belloyiannis, forty miles to the west. It rose like a mirage from the snow-covered farmlands: a bleak series of barracklike buildings, dingy brown, gray and yellow. Belloyiannis looked like an army camp despite pathetic efforts to make it seem a Greek town by giving the streets Greek names. This forlorn place was where most of the villagers evacuated from Lia eventually ended up after a year spent in Shkodra, Albania. They built the long rows of barracks with their own hands. Most of the refugees who could get permission returned to Greece in the 1950s. Those still living in Belloyiannis either were refused repatriation because of their Communist ties or stayed behind in fear of retribution from relatives of
their victims.

  I had come to Belloyiannis to confront Foto Bollis. He was the main prosecution witness against my aunt Alexo and came to the Haidis house two days after the executions to steal the last bits of food that my mother had left behind for Glykeria.

  I found Bollis to be a thin old man, shuffling about with a coat thrown over his pajamas in the small apartment he shared with his wife and grown son. He walked with precarious balance, and his sallow skin revealed sharp bones underneath. A drop of moisture hung from his beaked nose. When I confronted Bollis with his role in the trial and asked him why he had sworn falsely against my aunt, saliva sprayed from his mouth in his eagerness to protest his innocence. He insisted that he had said nothing against the two women on trial, and also denied taking Glykeria’s food.

  I quickly grew tired of his lies. An insignificant man of poor repute in Lia, he had betrayed all his moral scruples for the chance to be the center of attention, rewarded by the guerrillas for his cooperation, but now he was as powerless as he had been before his moment in the limelight. I said to him that he alone knew why he acted as he did in 1948, but it was too bad that his wife and children had to suffer for it ever since, living in this wretched place. The rodentlike old man seemed to shrink under my words and avoided the eyes of his family.

  Bollis’ daughter, Olga, had been the twenty-year-old guide for the group of children taken from the village on the day of my mother’s trial. As we sat in Belloyiannis, Olga told me how the trial was halted long enough for the children to say goodbye to their parents and how my mother had embraced Foto’s son Sotiris, who was just my age.

  I looked at Sotiris, who was listening; a plump, balding man with a puffy face and several missing teeth, sitting in baggy brown pants with no stockings to protect his slippered feet from the cold. He appeared years older than I did, and as I studied him I realized that I was looking at what my fate would have been if my mother hadn’t saved us from the pedomasoma.

  My visit to Belloyiannis convinced me that Foto Bollis did not deserve any further punishment for his treachery to his neighbors. He was a gutless, mean little man who had been manipulated by the guerrillas through his desire for power, eager to lie on the witness stand in exchange for crumbs of glory. Now he was reduced to his original insignificance, and I could only feel contempt for him, not hatred.

  My next stop was Zgorzelec, Poland, where I hoped to find Calliope Bardaka, the widow who had been considered by the Liotes the most wanton of the village collaborators, informing on her neighbors and eagerly giving her children to the pedomasoma. She had sat in on many of the guerrillas’ interrogations of villagers, and if anyone could give me details about the workings of the security police, she could.

  Zgorzelec, the former German city of Görlitz, was given to Poland after the war, and it was nearly empty until Greek exiles were brought there to revive its factories. When I found the address I had been given in a housing project and climbed the dingy staircase to knock on the door, it was hard to reconcile the gray-haired, pasty old woman who opened it, bundled in a house dress, a threadbare flannel robe and a jacket, with the pretty young widow who scandalized the village. But when she led me into the one room of the unheated apartment to sit under a naked light bulb, I saw on the wall a picture of Calliope as she had been then: a full-figured, pretty woman with a sensuous mouth. When she learned who I was, she welcomed me effusively and began a long tale of woe: how the guerrillas had brought the Greek exiles to Zgorzelec to work in the idled factories, where she labored on a production line making handbags. She said that the Communist Party took half their meager salaries, ostensibly to aid jailed comrades in Greece but really to permit the Greek party leaders in Poland to live in luxury. She quickly became disenchanted with Communism, she added, and left the party.

  When I asked Calliope about her wartime cooperation with the guerrillas, she glibly produced excuses and rationalizations. “I had little choice after my husband was killed,” she said. “I didn’t have food for my children. The Germans had burned my house. I was caught between a chasm in front and a precipice in back. We may have made mistakes, some of us, but we got carried away because we had never known such barbarians before, and when we realized what they were really like, we were linked to them, stuck with them.” As she talked, she kept straightening the doilies and shawls that covered the worn furniture. “They had our children. We could only say and do what they wanted us to.” She dabbed a handkerchief to her eyes as she described how she fainted on the day she was separated from her seven-year-old son and six-year-old daughter, whom she didn’t see again for seven years.

  I mentioned several instances in which Calliope had accused fellow villagers of disloyalty just to ingratiate herself with the guerrillas, and I asked her if she realized that her testimony might have cost them their lives.

  “Oh yes, you’re quite right,” she agreed. “One wrong word could kill in those days. But in such times you just don’t think about it. You think of yourself.”

  Calliope insisted that she had no part in my mother’s condemnation and death. “If it is found out that I said a word against your mother,” she declared melodramatically, “may all my children burn in the same oven! Your house was the first house in the village. Everyone looked up to your mother. I could never have said anything against her!”

  It was true that none of the villagers I interviewed named Calliope as one of my mother’s accusers. I had come to Poland because I wanted information from her, especially the name and address of the head of the security police, “Zeltas,” with whom she had been on close terms. When I asked Calliope about him, a spark of the old cunning ignited in her eyes. She whispered, “He has a sister living here. Don’t you worry! I’ll pay her a visit and find out where he is. Before you leave, come back here and I’ll have the information you want.”

  As I left Calliope’s apartment for the one hotel in town, I was thinking how little she had changed. She was obviously hoping that I might help her in getting out of Poland and was eager to betray one of her former comrades if it would be to her advantage. I could see what a dangerous woman she must have been.

  The next day I returned to Calliope’s apartment, where she wished me a safe journey and insisted on giving me a bag of food for the trip. I asked her in Greek if she had obtained the information I wanted, but she looked around as if the walls had ears and said only that she would see me to my car. On the way down the stairs she slipped a piece of paper in my hand. “It’s all there,” she whispered, “but you must never tell anyone where you got it!”

  I unfolded the paper and read: “Zeltas—Christos Nanopoulos—Alkiminis 24, Salonika, Greece.” I glanced back at Calliope’s puffy, smiling face. Feeling vaguely embarrassed, I put a $20 bill in her hand and hurried off. On the road leading out of Zgorzelec I admitted to myself the reason for my discomfort: I had used the same informant and the same tactics as the guerrillas in order to get the information I wanted. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that while the guerrillas exploited morally weak villagers to give false testimony in order to achieve a predetermined political goal, I was interviewing them to find out the truth, without knowing in advance who were the prime movers in my mother’s death.

  My last stop in Eastern Europe was the small town of Znojmo, Czechoslovakia, where Milia Drouboyiannis was living under a Czech version of her maiden name: Mila Drabkova. She had been the fanatically loyal young andartina who testified against my mother in order to protect her own mother, swearing as she stood with her gun beside her that she had convinced her family not to join the Amerikana in the escape because “soon all Greece will fly the Red Flag.”

  I flew from Warsaw to Vienna, rented a car at the airport and drove the fifty miles to the border of Czechoslovakia. It was dark when I reached the border, which proved the most difficult I had yet to cross. I was interrogated at length as to whom I was visiting and gave the border guards Milia’s name and address with no regrets for any difficulties it might cau
se her. They began pulling out the contents of my suitcase, but when they found a copy of one of my books on organized crime which had been translated into Hungarian, they apparently felt I must be sympathetic to Communism to be so honored. They let me through.

  I drove a few more miles to the small city of Znojmo and began to circle around aimlessly until I found someone who recognized the name and address written on the paper I had with me. When I knocked on the door of Milia’s apartment, it was opened by a man in his thirties, a large husky Czech with a red beard. When he was told there was a foreigner asking for Mila Drabkova, a middle-aged woman appeared, peeking out fearfully from behind his body. I told her who I was and she began speaking in a falsely accented, broken Greek, protesting that she had left the country so long ago she didn’t remember the language.

  Milia was a small chunky woman in her early fifties with jet-black hair framing a round face. She kept cocking her head to one side in an odd movement, suggesting someone who either has difficulty understanding or is mentally deranged. I said that while I was only nine when I left Greece and she was at least eight years older, she must surely remember enough Greek for us to communicate. Reluctantly she let me in and led me to a tiny kitchen where we sat at an aluminum table. There was a room off the kitchen where I saw her tall, redheaded daughter and two small boys—her grandchildren. She demanded to know what I wanted of her.

  “I have come a long way,” I said, “to find out why you betrayed my mother.”

  Milia’s Greek quickly lost its awkwardness as she denied she had ever betrayed anyone, all the while bobbing her head excitedly like a bird.

  I named the many villagers who described how she gave the most damaging testimony against my mother at the trial, thumping her rifle on the ground and shouting, “I swear by the gun I hold that everything I have said is true!”

  Milia protested that she couldn’t remember anything about a trial. “I was a young girl when they made me fight in the mountains in the cold and snow,” she whimpered. “I left the village very young and remember almost nothing. My first husband left me. My nerves were shattered and I had to be put in a hospital. Now I have that man you saw. I’m forced to work as a cleaning woman to survive. And only twelve days ago my mother died.” She jumped up and removed a bottle of pills from a shelf, popping one into her mouth.