The misfortune that befell the family with Giorgos’ disability, and their shame, did not deter Yiannis and Vassiliki. In the peaceful interval before the war and the Occupation, they persevered to have more children: to perpetuate the family name and life. After Giorgos, Alice was born. She turned out to be the most dynamic and the, ultimately, domineering, and authoritative character in the family; three years later, in 1938, Mother and her half-twin sister who would grow to be rather meek and malleable personalities, certainly weaker and more insecure than their elder sister. Daily life in the village carried on as normal without many incidents, with Kotis and Dominique occupying the small old house built by the "Resettlement" Agency in the years of population exchanges, Mr. Yiannis, Vassiliki and their children in the more spacious, newly built house in one corner of the one-acre family plot. Yiannis’ main occupation was the teaching at local primary schools, but, as a side job, he was assisting the ageing Kotis with the bahçe and the wheat field, whilst maintaining and improving the two houses and the plots of land, as well supporting Vassiliki with the care of Giorgos, hidden from the prying eyes of fellow villagers.
The relatively serene and
undisturbed family life was abruptly interrupted by the onset of war in the
winter of 1940; a winter that was to mark a heroic epic in
Greece’s modern history, endless accounts of which we were lectured at school.
Grandfather Yiannis, along with Apostolis, Leonidas, and the other able-bodied
young men from the village were conscripted and headed to the mountains of
Albania to fight the invading Italians of Mussolini. They returned victorious
after a few months, in their skanky fatigues, overwhelmed by lice, some
disabled by severe frostbites, but most of them, thank God, safe and alive, into
the peaceful realm of an everyday life in Magnesia. They had fulfilled their
duty to their homeland and its people.
The countryside of
Thessaloniki was only scarcely affected by the war that got in full swing in Europe
upon their return. In the villages, where the bulk of labor was committed to
producing for own and family consumption, where the necessities for a man’s
sustenance, milk, bread, vegetables, eggs, were rarely lacking from the dinner table,
upheavals like the Greco-Italian war, and even the German Occupation that ensued,
did not significantly affect lives, which, by and large, were immersed in the stillness
of daily routine –at least from a materialistic point of view. The lifestyles
were basic and elemental, the requirements and demands few, most households self-sufficient.
They remained so: their lives were easily adapted to the circumstances that war
and privation brought about. Yet, they fared better than the nearby city folk.
Then, the Germans arrived.
They emerged as grey figures amongst the hustle and dust of motorized
battalions, the crackling of their boots on the streets dried and hardened by
the summer sun behind securely locked shutters. Thessaloniki, its port and
railway, its agricultural and industrial surroundings acquired some significance
at that stage of the war, before the invasion of the USSR, although occupying
Greece was probably a footnote in Hitler's "regional strategy" and
grander domination plans. The house of Yiannis and Vasiliki, as well as the
house next-door, where uncle Leonidas with his wife Fani and their children
lived, was commandeered by the Germans, which, however, turned out to be not as
ominous as it sounds. In practice, it meant that German officers from the local
garrison would use one or two of their rooms for their sleep and toilette. The
relations of those officers with Yiannis, Kotis, Leonidas, and other men of the
village, with few exceptions, formed into something typical of the symbiotic,
yet unwarlike relationship between the conquered, a fatalistically introvert
community helplessly subjugated by force, and a foreign conqueror. An attitude was
formed, that of tolerance or unwilling obedience by the powerless and unarmed,
whose rhythm of life was somewhat unexpectedly upset, towards a powerful and
conceited invader, who, fully aware of his power, commanded and imposed orders
unchallenged. The occupier grabbed at will whatever they needed, in an explosive
atmosphere of whispers and anxiety from the enslaved side and orders commanded by
brutal foreign voices, with the sporadic non-compliance suppressed by force.
Then there were the few, the
"collaborators" and profiteers of doom, who not only obsequiously bowed
their heads, but actively supported and cooperated with the occupier: they sucked
up to them, they extorted the populace, bought from the needy at humiliatingly
low prices to resell with huge profits; they surrendered to the conqueror not just
“land and water”, but also some unyielding human souls. At every sharp bend of
history opportunism lurks, whether driven by cowardice and the instinct for
self-preservation or motivated by greed.
Despite the oppressive
atmosphere that spread over the village, Mr. Yiannis' daughters, especially the
twin pretty sisters, Mother and Stella, became objects of sympathy from the
Wehrmacht officers who dwelled in the family home. Apart from the petty teasing
in a language incomprehensible to them and their parents, the officers
regularly offered candies and chocolates, and these treats were greeted by the
two children with the joy of those deprived of such luxuries. In the merciless
and faceless souls of conquerors, barely mentioned in historical narratives
that mostly overlook the individuality of characters of common people, there
lurks somewhere hidden, genuine souls and manners of a timeless humanity.
Eventually, the Germans, as
they had arrived at the tranquil, peace-loving village, so they departed:
without as much “fire and steel”, without mass executions and killings and atrocities
witnessed elsewhere. What could they burn and destroy in such an unremarkable village,
apart from the bridges of Gallikos and Axios rivers nearby, and the railway lines
that passed by the outskirts of the village? Whose killings and what
destruction would the Germans benefit from, in a village of vegetable farms, at
a fair distance from the mountains from where the
guerilla army commenced their forays? What point would there be in the senseless obliteration of livelihoods when
most of its inhabitants bowed down to their orders without much ado and continued
with their lives, whilst some of them, prominent or not, collaborated with the
enemy -even with zest?
Nevertheless, the retreat and
eventual withdrawal of the occupiers did not bring peace and order "overnight",
against the expectations of many of the villagers. The grumbling tolerance
towards the Germans was transformed, through whispers and news that overflowed
throughout the country from radio broadcasts, from newspapers that passed from
hand to hand, from conversations and political fermentation in cafes, into a sympathy
for the guerrillas-cum-liberators; for those hitherto invisible, otherworldly, legendary
characters of the EAM-ELAS organizations who resisted and fought the Germans. The
villagers did welcome them, perhaps instinctively, as sole legitimate
representatives of the masses of peasants, workers, and intellectuals, along
with few enlightened members of the petit-bourgeoisie -at least during those drunken
times. In the towns and villages, the bliss of liberation carried them away, the
morale and their hopes for the future were elevated. Kotis greeted them, grim
and expressionless behind his gray mustache, with his left fist raised in front
of the front door of the “Resettlement” house. He was a rather apolitical man, by
no means influenced by socialist ideas or allured by a “People’s Republic”
communist future. In fact, he was totally ignorant of such notions. On the
other hand, his son-in-law, Mr. Yiannis, the teacher, the de facto intellectual
figure of the village, gave solemn speeches at gatherings of peasants and
guerrillas, fronting his village community in his school yard and the village square:
in popular plenums pulsating with the joy of liberation. Yet, his political sermons
had no significant impact to the illiterate or semi-literate consciences, neither
did they inspire any detectable enthusiasm for the new, but rather nebulous
future, he was advocating for.
Peppered were those exultant and jubilant speeches of Mr. Yiannis, with charming words, such as a “People’s Republic” or "Power to the People", as they were aligned with the slogans, but generally ill-defined, un-crystallized and opaque political objectives of EAM-ELAS and the Communist Party behind it. Rather foggy, nevertheless, for the mostly illiterate populace, even perhaps for himself. Their content was rather vague and idealistic. His speeches were as exultant as when celebrating with his pupils and their parents the Resurrection of Christ at the end of the Greek Easter, but devoid of agitational content. No matter, however, that these speeches acquired for the ears of many people a pro-communist tinge at a time of relentless propaganda and ideological war. The threat of a communist movement, or rather a revolution, that would shake up the established order in Greece had already been identified before the end of the war by the so-called reactionary powers and propagated accordingly. It was consolidated as a “real and present” danger in many souls and minds, at a turning point in history when everything was in flux, where everyone was trying to pick up themselves and whatever remained of their lives. A few intellectuals amongst them were striving to put political thoughts in order, grasp certain ideas and values and form a credible worldview, emerging on the ruins and the poverty the war left behind. Stalin's Soviet Union, whose Red Army had marched as far as Berlin, was envisaged by a handful of conscientiously progressive minds, as symbol of a possible, viable, real socialism, a beacon of a bright historical future for humanity. The most daring amongst them even tried to propagate such beliefs and ideas, at a time when a global ideological struggle were reaching a historical climax. Yet, at this historical junction, who could have foreseen the ensuing armed conflict and the bloody civil war that would bring a poor, devastated country further down to her knees?
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