by David Pratt
thousand victims to their toll.
The Cretans hoped the Germans would come out
to fight in open battle, but the fall
of Athens cut their sources of supply;
they stayed on guard and waited out events.
When war ended, the German garrison
on Crete surrendered to an Allied force.
Protected by a squad of Allied troops
they marched out to the docks at Souda Bay,
embarked for Germany, and Crete was free.
For some participants, this did not end
their story. New Zealand soldier Ian Begg
had fought in the defence of Crete, and had
been captured by the Germans, and escaped.
He took off for the mountains. There he got
a dose of hepatitis, and was helped
by villagers one of whom was fourteen
year old Marika Lagonikakis.
The Germans captured him again and shipped
him to a prison camp in Poland. He
survived a death march and at last got home.
He wrote a letter to Marika, then
he had to wait for seven months before
he got her friendly letter in reply.
He sent a telegram: Come over to
New Zealand now, he said, and marry me!
Across New Zealand and Australia,
women, old women now, think back to days
when they were young in Cretan villages
and carried water, food and messages
to virile young escapees whom they hid
in barns, in chapels, caves or in the woods.
Muller and Bräuer, two former commandants
were brought to Athens, put on trial, and shot.
They were the only ones. The past is past.
The prisoners in Germany went home,
the partisans went back to farms and sheep,
the priests and monks resumed a life of prayer,
the British agents found civilian roles
in universities or government,
or writing memoirs and translating Greek.
Each village has its war memorial;
destroyed communities have been rebuilt.
The towns are thronged with tourists, some of whom
are German. An old Cretan has been known
to look intently at an elderly
German tourist and then to ask, Were you
a paratrooper? Bravo, you fought well.
The ending of the war brought little peace
to the runner Giorgiou Psychoundakis.
Through some gross blunder he was charged
with being a deserter, and was sent
to jail for two long years, a trauma so intense
that all his hair fell out. He was obliged
to do two years service in the military,
then, to support his family, he worked
on building mountain roads in central Crete.
Each evening in his hut by candlelight
he wrote his recollections of the war.
He gave the manuscript to Fermor who
translated it and found a publisher.
The Cretan Runner was an instant hit.
By now Psychoundakis had become
caretaker at the German cemetery.
He went on to translate the Odyssey
into the Cretan dialect for which
the Greek Academy in Athens honored him.
When Fermor told him that his book
The Cretan Runner was soon coming out
in paperback, he ran into his house
for his revolver and fired several shots
into the air in a grand feu de joie.
The German cemetery is found above
the airfield, long disused, at Maleme,
on the long slope of Kavkazia Hill,
Hill 107 on military maps.
Here lie four thousand four hundred Wehrmacht
and Luftwaffe troops, two by two beneath
flat gravestones with an orange scattering
of Mesembryanthemums among the stones,
above the scene of their hard-fought success.
Today the isle of Crete lies peacefully
washed by the blue Mediterranean.
You can still find in kafeinons and in
town squares old men who can recall
the days of battle and resistance
and younger folk who still preserve
the stories of those years. From old days come
the tales of Dedalus and Icarus,
of Theseus and Ariadne, to them
are added now great names like Vasili,
Psychoundakis, Fermor, Pendlebury,
Paterakis, and their heroic deeds
to join the legendarium of Crete.
The Author
David Pratt is a writer who lives in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. More of his work can be found on his website, davidpratt.ca.
Email: [email protected]
