by Leta Serafim
They reached Aghios Stefanos half an hour later. Built on the summit of Mount Mitsikeli, it was partly hidden behind a scrubby forest of pine. The buildings were in such disrepair Patronas thought at first the village must be be abandoned, but then he heard a dog bark, saw yellow lights in a few of the windows.
Not wanting to disturb the residents, he turned the car around and parked in a field below the village. Starving, he and Tembelos rummaged through the suitcase, searching for the priest’s canned ham.
“God bless America,” Tembelos said. Holding the can, he inserted the metal key and opened it.
They’d eaten about half the ham when, alerted by some kind of digestive radar, Papa Michalis sat up.
“What’s that you’re doing?” he asked.
“Eating,” Patronas said. He took another piece and wadded it in his mouth, determined to eat as much as he could before the priest took possession. By rights, the ham was his.
Worn out by his travails on the boat, Evangelos slept on in the backseat.
The night air was cold on top of the mountain, and they gathered up sticks and built a small fire in the field, using pine cones for kindling and setting them ablaze with Patronas’ cigarette lighter. The priest had packed a small bottle of brandy, and they passed it around as they watched the fire burn, the crackling flames bright against the darkness. The pine cones exploded as they caught, shooting geysers of sparks high in the air.
Patronas gradually relaxed, enjoying the smell of the woodsmoke. Taking a swig from the bottle, he passed it on to Tembelos. “You said it was a mistake coming here. What do you think we should do? Go back?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” Tembelos said. “All I was saying is I probably would have done the same thing if I’d been her. You can’t let it pass, not a thing like that.”
Patronas nodded. Giorgos was from Crete, an island where revenge was part of the culture. The need for it buried deep in the Cretan DNA.
“Scorched earth,” Tembelos said, waving the brandy bottle at Aghios Stefanos. “That’s what they did here. Shot them all and burned the place down.”
Damage from the war had been evident on the road to Aghios Stefanos. The sunken indentations in the land could only be bomb craters.
Patronas had seen a monument to the victims in the town. A simple white obelisk, it had been like a beacon in the darkness. He had made a note of it, planning to have Tembelos photograph it as soon as the sun came up. There were similar memorials all over Greece, listing the names and ages of the dead. Judging by the size of the one in Aghios Stefanos, it was a miracle Maria Georgiou had survived.
The priest reached for the bottle. “I, too, grew up during the war,” he said, taking a demure sip. “And I saw people I love die—my sister of hunger in December of 1941, my little brother six months later. They shot my uncle during a round-up and the fathers of many of my friends. Love thine enemies as thyself? It’s a hard thing to do, I can tell you. Forgive those who trespass against us, harder still. But then what would be the point if it was easy? What value would it have?”
“So we should forgive the Nazis?” Patronas asked. He wasn’t in the mood for a theological conversation tonight—one of Papa Michalis’ little sermonettes.
“You say that as if forgiveness is a passive act, Yiannis. It’s not. Believe me, I know. Forgiveness has power, purpose.” He went on like this for some time, as usual, insisting on having the last word. “You don’t forgive them for them, Yiannis. You forgive them for us.”
Morning came too quickly. Getting out of the car, Patronas walked stiff legged down to the stream and washed his face. It had gotten too cold to stay out in the field the previous night, and around one a.m., he, Tembelos, and Papa Michalis had put out the fire and returned to the car.
Surrounded by trees, the glade was full of shadows and the water was very cold. Wondering if this was where the river had run red in 1943, Patronas searched for evidence of the massacre but found nothing. It was very quiet, the only sound, the birds stirring in the trees.
Tembelos and the priest were pawing through the food when he got back, eating Nutella out of the jar with their fingers. Rolling up his sleeves, Patronas pushed them aside and ate his share.
Now that it was light, Patronas was able to observe the village in greater detail. The shale roofs of many of the houses had caved in, their walls blackened by fire. A stream coursed through the town, pooling in the forested glade where he’d washed his face, but there was little else of note. Athens had been bad, full of empty storefronts and graffiti, but this was far worse. Here the decay was palpable.
“You need to talk to Christos Vouros,” the owner of the kafeneion, the local coffee shop, told him, nodding to a grizzled old man in the corner. “He is in his eighties and his father was in the resistance, one of the antartes. He knows better than anyone else what went on here during the war.”
Remembering Stathis’ warning, Patronas had been deliberately vague about why they’d come to Aghios Stefanos. “We’re investigating the massacre,” was all he’d said.
The owner had approved of their mission, saying he’d help in any way he could, even put them up in his house if they needed a place to stay. “Start with Christos,” he said again.
The old man watched them approach with interest. Bent nearly double, he was no bigger than a jockey and supported himself with a cane. He was dressed in a white oxford shirt and shabby topcoat, a handknit woolen vest.
Keeping a hand on the table to steady himself, he rose to greet them. “Kalimera,” he said, nodding to each of the men in turn. Good day.
They bought him coffee and sat with him for over an hour, questioning him about life in the village after the Germans came.
“Georgiou was the priest then,” Patronas said.
“That’s right. Young, he was, with four children and a wife. Only Maria, the youngest, survived.” His face darkened as he remembered the massacre. “It was a miracle, her surviving that day. Not many did, I can tell you. I’d gone up in the mountains with my father to gather firewood. It’s the only reason I’m alive today.”
Patronas handed him the photograph. “Was this man in Aghios Stefanos?” He pointed to the figure at the center of the picture, the soldier with scars on his face.
The old man got out his glasses and studied the photo. “Bech,” he said after a moment. “That was his name. Bech. He was in the Gestapo.”
Patronas and the others exchanged glances. “Are you willing to swear to that?”
Vouros nodded. “I remember the war. Remember it better than yesterday.”
“Who else was here in the village then?”
“Most of them are gone now. What can you do?” His voice was resigned. “As is the generation of leaves, so is that of men.”
The words were from Homer, The Iliad. Patronas realized he’d underestimated the old man, his level of education.
Vouros had noticed his reaction. “I read a lot when I was younger,” he said by way of explanation. “I wanted to go to university. Would have, too, if the Germans hadn’t come.” His laugh was forced. “Only wanted to eat then. Put my books away.”
He had married a woman from Ioannina and had six children. Two were in Chicago; the rest lived in Athens. “My daughter hired an Albanian woman to look after me. She’s asked me to come live with her in Athens. She doesn’t like me being up here all alone.”
“Will you go?” Patronas asked.
“Never!” He made a dismissive gesture. “What would I do in Athens? I’ve lived here my whole life. Everything I know is here. Who would see to my land if I left? Care for my flocks of sheep, the lambs in springtime?”
He named five people who were still alive and had been in Aghios Stefanos during the war, saying they would verify what he’d said, that the man in question was named Bech and that he had served in the Gestapo during the war.
“How did you know he was in the Gestapo?” Patronas asked.
“I don’t know how I knew. Maybe I
overheard my parents talking. It wasn’t his uniform, if that’s what you’re thinking. He usually wore a suit with a little swastika pin in the lapel. All I know is he scared you. It was like the air went cold when he was around.”
He pointed to a stone house on the corner. “He worked out of there. He’d come for a few days and then go. I don’t know where he went. All I know is death followed him.” His voice was raspy and his hands shook a little. “Everyone was afraid of him.”
Patronas was writing down everything, which pleased Vouros, who asked him to read it back to him, adding more details and correcting certain items as he went along.
“My neighbors will tell you the same thing,” he said. “Knock on their doors and they’ll tell you. They’re here, the five I said. They don’t travel anymore. The only trip any of us will make now is to the cemetery when we die.”
Thanking him for his assistance, Patronas and the others left, eager to get started on the interviews. Five people weren’t many. If they worked hard, they’d be able to finish by the end of the day, get in the car and leave.
“A cheerful man,” Tembelos said. “Only place he’s going is to the cemetery.”
“I hadn’t thought of being buried as a journey,” the priest said, utterly missing the point, “but I suppose in a sense it is—a move from this world to the next, from the earthly to the divine, from the cares of this life to everlasting peace in heaven.”
“Ach, faith, Father, faith,” Tembelos said, shaking his head. “Don’t you ever get tired of it?”
Patronas had prepared a packet for each of them with a blow-up of the deceased’s face and a photocopy he’d made of Maria Georgious’ ID. The priest headed toward the church, telling Patronas he’d see if the marriage and baptismal records had survived the war, and if they had, he’d find out what he could about the Georgiou family. Evangelos was to search out the school, if there was one, and do the same thing. They arranged to meet at the car at noon.
Three of the residents Vouros mentioned were being attended to by immigrant caretakers or family members; the other two were living alone in their houses. Like Vouros, they all remembered the war. The Germans had stayed in Aghios Stefanos for weeks, a woman named Eleni Noutsopoulos said, billeted themselves in villagers’ houses.
“They ate better than we did,” she added, laughing a toothless laugh. “They took everything, you see, and left us with nothing. We were hungry. Panagia mou, how hungry we were.”
The Germans had chosen the village for its vantage point, she added. “The view from Aghios Stefanos was its misfortune.”
Leaning on a cane, she walked outside to show them. “See there, to the south, you can see all the way to Ioannina and to the north, deep into Albania and the heartland of Greece. Also, there weren’t many trees then—people had been burning them for fuel—so there was no place for resistance fighters to hide.”
The story of the massacre gradually unfolded as the day went on. “They saw two antartes near here and that was the end of us,” a man named Stavros Georgakis said. “They rounded up everyone in the village and killed them, then moved down the hill and murdered the people in Lingiades, too, women and children. They didn’t care who they killed. It didn’t matter to them.”
Patronas showed him Bechtel’s photo. “Was he here that day?”
Georgakis studied the photo carefully. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I believe he was.”
“Do you remember anything about him? His name or what unit he served in?”
“The others called him Scharführer. I remember because it sounded like what they called Hitler on the newsreels. Führer. Most of the time he was dressed like a civilian. I only saw him in a uniform once. Gray, it was, with SD on the sleeve.”
An SS man. Vouros had been right.
“He stayed in the house next door to us. They’re still there, the family. They might remember more.”
A middle-aged woman answered the door. “It was before my time,” she told Patronas, “but my mother might be able to help you. She’s in the back. I’ll get her.”
The woman she wheeled into the room was a twisted, wizened creature with a pronounced tremor. Dressed entirely in black, she kept seeking to right herself and control her shaking limbs. Her daughter was very solicitous. Helping her over to an upholstered chair, she settled her into it and covered her knees with an afghan. The room was nicely furnished and there was a television, a new one, in the corner. The chair the old woman was sitting in was part of a set, its arms covered by embroidered cloths similar to the one Patronas had seen in Maria Georgiou’s room.
Nodding to the two policemen, the old woman introduced herself, saying her name was Fotini Chalkias. She had been born in 1923, eleven years after Ioannina had been liberated from the Turks. She was very frail and it cost her precious energy to speak, but her voice grew stronger as she reminisced.
“Of course I remember him,” she said when she saw the picture. “Bech, his name was.” She also verified that he’d been in the SS.
“Bech, not Bechtel? Are you sure?”
“Yes, yes. It was said he ran the Gestapo.”
She grew more and more agitated as she talked and her eyes kept straying to the window. Patronas wondered what she was looking for there, if she was searching for Nazis, afraid they might still come and claim her. “He interrogated everyone, even children. He was always seizing them for questioning, pulling them off the street and taking them down to that cellar of his.”
Locked up in a room with a man with a scarred face, a man whose language they didn’t understand, the children of the village must have been terrified. Worse still, if Bech had been aided by a Greek in a mask, a collaborator, a maskoforos. Patronas remembered the fear in his mother’s voice when she spoke of them, how they couldn’t be trusted and would betray their own kind. Thousands of them had been shot in Athens after the war.
“Why would Bech interrogate children?”
She continued to watch the window, didn’t answer for a long time.
“Who knows the devil’s purpose?” she whispered, her voice barely audible. “Who knows why the devil does what he does?”
“Did he interrogate you?”
“No, but he dragged my brother, Nikos, down there. He was never the same afterward. He went all quiet and stayed that way. Wouldn’t play, wouldn’t talk.”
“Does your brother still live in Aghios Stefanos? Can we speak to him?”
“No. He died in the massacre. They killed all the boys.”
“What about her?” He showed her Maria Georgiou’s photo.
“Ah, Maria. Of course, of course, little Maria.” She thumped the picture with a gnarled finger. “I’d know her anywhere. She looks just like her mother.”
The old woman paused for a moment before continuing, “Her father was the village priest and he lived behind the church. The house is gone now, but you can still see where it was. He had four children, and she was the youngest. They killed all of them that day, every one but her. She’d been down by the stream and escaped somehow. There are caves in the rocks and maybe she hid in one. She was young when it happened, not more than six or seven years old.”
She sank back in her chair. “I can still see them, Maria’s mother and father, her brothers. They were my friends, and I wanted to stop the Germans when they took them away, but my mother held me back. ‘Run, child,’ she said, ‘run to the mountains,’ and I did. I ran and ran. I was wearing a dress and I remember I tore it. I was worried she would be mad, but she was dead when I got back and everything was burning.” Tears filled her eyes. “My mother was gone.”
Next Patronas and Tembelos questioned a man named Dimitra Spanos. Although he was much younger than Fotini Chalkias, he verified her story.
He said he’d be willing to testify in court that a man named Gunther Bech had stayed in their village during the war and that he had been a Gestapo agent.
“Gunther? Are you sure?”
“Yes. My uncle knew all of them.
I don’t know how, but he did. I heard him call him that.”
Patronas made a note, underlining the name, convinced now that the nephew and uncle had switched first names and lengthened their surname from Bech to Bechtel. They’d kept it as close to the original as possible.
Tembelos had brought a video camera with him from Athens, and after getting permission, taped the interviews. Given the age of the witnesses, it was a prudent thing to do. Who knew how long it would take to bring charges against Maria Georgiou and haul her into court? Spanos was in his late seventies. He could be dead before the case came to trial, his memories of Bech and the massacre irretrievably lost. They needed to close the case and close it fast.
A Gestapo operative, Bech had conducted sweeps in the area around Ioannina, Spanos said, picking people up and bringing them back to Aghios Stefanos for questioning.
“Someone said he interrogated children,” Patronas said.
“That’s right. He favored kids.”
The last villager they interviewed was an elderly spinster named Daphne Kallis. “After the Germans saw the antartes outside the village, he took me down to the cellar and told me he’d kill me if I didn’t cooperate,” she said. “I was afraid. There was blood on the floor, blood everywhere.”
“Did you cooperate?”
She looked down at her hands, unwilling to meet his eye. “Yes,” she said faintly.
“What did he want to know?”
“Names. The names of the men in the village.”
The priest reported back that although the church had been set on fire, not everything inside had been burned. A few of its relics had been saved, among them nearly a century’s worth of baptismal records.
“Maria Georgiou’s name is there. Along with the name of her father, Petros Georgiou, and her mother, Anna.”
They also found her parents’ names on the war memorial, along with the names of her three brothers—Philippos, Nikos, and Constantinos—nine, ten, and thirteen years old. All five were listed as killed on October 1, 1943. Altogether, 123 people perished that day.
