Ancestry 5 - From Melnik: Magdalene

Great-aunt Magdalene was the dark and obscure figure with the enigmatic personality amongst the seven siblings of Panagiotis' family. Dark, like her raven hair and black eyes, she produced the mysterious beauty on display in the family photo taken in the 1930s. It seems that life matched her mien and transversed dark and arcane paths, leaving only just a few family testimonies to illuminate some of their turns. The story of her short life remains grey and obscure and was concluded by a sad, as much as unjust and unresolved end. It could even be said, against our contemporary criteria in a judgement of one’s life, that Magdalene’s was wasted. She left early from the family home that she shared with her great-grandmother, Socrates and grandfather Leonidas, to be married. But then, she divorced her husband before the Germans descended to and occupied Thessaloniki. Divorced, perhaps, because of frictions of personal or, as it was common in Greek families, of political nature; perhaps, by the exertion of unidentified external forces; perhaps, as a sacrifice to the needs and demands of a higher ideological cause. She bore no children. Instead, she embarked, along with a handful of comrades, to raise the red flag and consciously and actively participate in the Resistance and the Civil War, alas, on the losing side of the conflict. She was executed by a firing squad at dawn in 1947, in a wasteland behind Yendi Kule, where several executions of communists took place at the peak of the Civil War in Greece. The exact date of the execution and death of Magdalene and the few comrades with her was not recorded. For it was yet another unceremonious execution, amongst dozens of anonymous people sided with the communist cause or eponymous party members, before the humiliating defeat of a futile struggle for dubious ideals. For nothing.

Magdalene was arrested in 1946. She and her sister Calliope, Father claims, offered clandestine hideouts to comrades, members of the Communist Part, in a house in Garibaldi Street, of those hidden behind one of the elevated banks of the Toumba stream. In the Party and Civil war jargon, she acted as a "link”, a liaison between the Party leadership and the rank and file, between the instructorship in the mountains or beyond the border and the militancy in the cities. She was arrested along with her brother-in-law and sister Calliope and sentenced to death by the so called "Third Special Military Court of Thessaloniki". Great-aunt Calliope was sentenced to life imprisonment, but after being granted reprieve, she returned to her home and children. Her husband was acquitted. Whether Magdalene’s offense, being a "link" in such a period of vindictiveness, intolerance, and blind hatred, justified a death sentence, or if there were other, more sinister causes, some personal vendetta or unjust slander, we will not know and will never find out. The trial, the accusation and condemnation, were not recorded or, were there a case file, it decayed or destroyed in a basement and lost. A notorious "Third Resolution" by the reactionary and compliant government, which led to summary executions of many communists and their sympathizers, provided unlimited scope to prosecutors and ample flexibility for subjective interpretations by any zealot to the main cause of cleansing Greece from the communist menace. With its generalizations and ambiguity, it unleashed the vengeful will and power of military commissioners: punishable by death is “He who wishes to wrest part of the national territory, or to facilitate plans to that end; He who conspires or instigates rebellion or colludes with foreigners, or forms an armed group, or takes part in any treasonous associations."English translation. 

Father, a child then and above all suspicions, brought food to her aunt, as he did to his uncle. This time into the confinement of a cell in the dark basement of the Police Headquarters, where she was initially held as prisoner. And those visits, to provide food for his aunt, were the last few fragments left of Magdalene’s existence in Father’s and the collective memory of the Ibrişimci family. Any traces of a still alive Magdalene were lost in that basement cell, and, along with them, the last threads that bound her to the core of the family. Nowhere in the internet and the blogosphere, nowhere in books and newspaper archives of the time or historical theses, no matter how exhaustively I researched with all plausible keywords in my searches (‘civil war’, ‘women/communist executions’, ‘ΟΠΛΑ’ (the Organization for the Protection of People’s Struggle -the communist urban militant group which she might have been a member of, etc.), through various historical paths and points of view -and I devoted endless hours, Magdalene’s name appeared nowhere, in itself or in association.English translation. 

I have been wondering… Why and how did that happen? What crime did she commit that would justify, without any reasonable doubt in the minds of prosecutors and judges, a death sentence and, eventually, a hasty summary execution? Was she afforded any defense? Were the anti-communist prejudice and high emotions of the time so strong that they clouded judicial proceedings and distorted life-and-death judgement? How was it possible that such sentence and execution that followed were reported nowhere (barring the few cases of members at the higher echelons of the Communist Party), let alone explained, at least for the benefit of an already brow-beaten and compliant public? How did Magdalene react to the death sentence? What went through her mind when the verdict of the biased, insulated from the press, Military Court was delivered? Did she cry, did she feel hopeless or she stood firm and proud? Did she regret her life choices? What did she say to any of her comrades or captors in the days leading to their execution? Had she been given the opportunity by anyone to denounce her beliefs, avoid death and get on with a miserable life in Greece or in exile, as many like herself did? Why did she not sign a ‘declaration of repentance’ that could have exonerated her? What feelings and thoughts overwhelmed her before the execution in a death row cell in Yendi Kule? Was she granted a last wish? Were there any last words? Was she hoping for a review of her case or clemency and a last-minute reprieve? How did the soldiers of the firing squad, reluctant conscripts from the same humble origins as herself, feel when firing at communists? Where was her dead body buried? Was anyone informed by the family? Did anyone care, or rather all involved, friends or foes, were enveloped by fear and horror?

English translation. Nobody knows, nobody will ever know. It has not been recorded anywhere, in no footnote of the history of the City or of the Party she dedicated her life to, or embedded in tales of the neighborhood and our family, but unaccounted for in any of the many books written about the tragic events of that period. Likely, she was buried in some unmarked grave behind the medieval Yendi Kule, in one of the makeshift "invisible" graveyards for executed communists and criminals from the Nazi Occupation and the Civil War years, razed after the war ended, unbeknownst to her husband and family, if not forsaken. The deep and dignified gaze of the family photo hid untold courage and will and determination. From that photograph and the fragments of dad’s memory, I only know of you, Magdalene! Although, I did also raise the red flag in my youth, like you did, fascinated by a nebulous revolutionary vision on the side of the damned of this world and wept whenever I heard "You have fallen victims, brothers, you..." -the anthem of the fallen Resistance fighters, I came in my maturity to the blunt and unfortunate realization: your sacrifice was not worth it. And that filled me with the deep sorrow for the unjust loss in vain of you and many of your comrades.

Several times, alone or with a partner, I climbed to Thessaloniki’s Acropolis and the Yendi Koule fortress through the cobbled streets of the Upper Town several times. I told, Magdalene, your short story to everyone I had by my side in those visits. I walked into the detention chambers, into the solitary confinement cells, into the claustrophobic courtyards surrounded by tall walls. I walked around behind the walls of the Ottoman fortress, which the modern Greek stake transformed to a notorious prison, where communists, the Nazi Fritz Schubert, and other criminals, last being in 1968 of a certain Pagkratides, were jailed and executed. Unkempt grass, weeds, some scattered old trees, the floodlights that illuminate the grey walls of the miserable prison, for the benefit of tourists and passers-by, then houses, too many houses, the main road, the school that was built on the graves of the executed, the church of St Paul, the pine forest beyond. Nothing would have hinted to the horrors that unfolded further down the barren hill decades ago.