Tuesday, July 9, 2024

Anectry 13 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: The Arrest

Nazi collaborators and informers were rounded up and pilloried in the streets. Mr. Yiannis’ daughters, perched on the windowsills behind the shutter grilles, secured for better or worse by Vasiliki, witnessed a sad procession of “traitors” in front of their house on its way to the schoolyard, their dragging feet on the dry dirt of the streets raising a cloud of dust behind. Uncle Leonidas, the grocer, stood out tall and husky, leading a band of fellow villagers and guerrillas of the Liberation Army who had dragged those "traitors" from their homes. Some hearts of the former beat eagerly in anticipation of some justice and retribution, the hearts of the latter were nearly broken by anguish, in fear of the worst, their faces pale in horror under the winter morning sun. The guerrillas of the “People’s Liberation Army” would not be taking lightly any crime that would have cost lives in the hands of Germans –they knew that much; summary executions of informers and collaborators took place after a rudimental process from make-shift courts, sometimes on the flimsiest of evidence or on biased testimonies from vigilantes. Mr. Yiannis participated in these shaming and pillorying in a rather measured and restrained manner. In the People’s Courts that had taken place in the small village square, he might have been appointed chairman or moderator, he might have been summoned as a witness, or he might have been acting as a prosecutor -the least likely. Whatever happened to the most prominent of the German "collaborators", amongst those escorted under the eyes of Mother and her sisters and tried in the small square, I could not find out. Few knew, and even fewer witnessed their fate in the aftermath of these trials, and any attestations would have been buried under the anti-communist fear that gripped Greece in the aftermath of the liberation. Rarely would the punishment, in such cases, have been commensurate with the misdemeanors or even "crimes" committed, in an ambience of bias and anxiety, and a general lack of moderation and equanimity from the two extremes of the political spectrum, which ended up being belligerents in the ensuing Civil War. The tensions were high, strong emotions of anger and revenge prevailed and, like a black storm, they darkened reason. There were few in the small rural communities of Magnesia and the surrounding villages that their active collaboration with the Germans and snitching would have cost lives of fellow villagers, even fewer were directly involved in war crimes against civilians; and those would have been handed over to the rebels to be summarily executed. Others, with minor misdemeanors and extenuating circumstances, petty servile confidents or, simply, obsequious lackeys of the occupiers, who frequented their headquarters and camps for some business, had likely been allowed to return home after some reprimands, some wagging of the finger, as in naughty schoolchildren, or, at worst, some spitting and cuffing, that is the mildest possible forms of public lynching, supposedly cathartic for all parties involved.

The local authorities, police and security services of post-occupation Greece were made up of par excellence ideologically ignorant ignoramuses, vassals of an already subservient and dependent on foreign power political system; several among them were possessed fanatics and paranoid of a looming communist threat or simply paid agents, their job merely being spying on fellow citizens. Some, in this rather menacing to the common folk pack, discovered in the various "enlightening" lectures of Mr. Yiannis, which were no more than superficial school-level speeches addressed to a semi-illiterate audience, unmistaken communist propaganda elements, emanating by dark forces, with the Communist Party and the Democratic Army being their long arm. They were considered, therefore, threats to the socioeconomic system and the “way of life” imposed onto the general populace by the establishment, a servile government and its American sponsors.  The boundaries between truth and false propaganda were murky. Mr. Yiannis was branded as, at least, sympathetic towards the left movement after liberation, with the communists at its core threatening with social upheaval and revolution, although he himself had never been an active member or associate or even conspicuously supporting the Communist Party -the number one bogeyman for those striving to preserve, tooth and nail, the national and international status quo.

The "national unity" government had a few former National Liberation Front members progressive actors (“progressive” in the broadest sense of the term) alongside several liberal and open-minded ministers. One of those ministers, a family friend from the same hometown, appointed him superintendent of schools in the area at the end of the war, the onset of a national reconstruction effort. It was a promotion. He no doubt possessed the qualifications, while he was also recognized in that largely volatile political climate as "progressive", professionally, "enlightened", a charismatic teacher by his counterparts and the few educated people in his social circle. The tide of liberation and the progressive visions with socialist hues that accompanied it, thanks to the new political landscape that seemed to have started taking shape after the war, began to recede, and the socialist movement with nebulous or unrealistic aims in the post-war Greek society was disintegrating. The hitherto described as "reactionary" forces, by and large rooted in fascism, Nazism, and ultra-nationalism, were now finding their nerve and determination, further encouraged and funded by the well-known foreign factor. On the other hand, the "spheres of influence" in the post-war division of Europe had already been decided at the highest levels of the hierarchy of the planet between the great powers that won the war. They began, without necessarily a broader acceptability and credibility or moderation and even a democratic mandate, but with extreme zeal and determination and few scruples, to proceed with the plans of their own counterrevolution: to quickly regain the lost ground in the consciences of the common folk and mark victories in the struggle of ideas and the distribution of wealth. Their influence was expanding rapidly: on the lower and middle strata of society, the people of a country exhausted by war, on urban populations affected by unemployment, privation and hardship, the principal concerns being their survival amidst the rubble and the gradual rebuilding of their lives on what was left, instead of an ill-defined socialist future. Eyewitnesses of the grandfather's "enlightening" speeches, from that other side, which after the war started erecting embankments against the “communist tide” and went on the counterattack, existed, and lurked from many quarters of the local society. There were policemen in abundance, there were former and current informers, civilians frightened or greased by the authorities, vengeful former collaborators and black-marketeers, victims of pillorying and abuse by the guerrillas of the Democratic Army.

English translation. A spring evening of 1947, late, with the Civil War in full swing, national security agents knocked on the door of Yiannis’ home. Such heavy knocks late at night by “Security Guards” appeared in the family life of Yiannis and others like him, in a way as something inevitable at this historical conjuncture, as an anticipated consequence under the circumstances of one’s actions and political footprint until then. Mr. Yiannis had already been blacklisted, in the minds and files of vindictive or "loyal" characters, who, nevertheless, did not necessarily possess any firm political opinions or ideology or even traces of a political conscience. These are the apolitical shadows of every regime, either "useful idiots" or opportunistic individuals motivated by self-interest, and who tend to side with those in power and serve them for survival and profit. After all, political power, especially of the authoritative type, likes to anchor itself firmly on the pedestals it has erected and to eliminate any small or large, real or imaginary, threats that can potentially challenge it.

In this environment, few informers sprang around, known and marked in the consciences of ordinary people. Through the gossiping that followed the arrest of grandfather a few were named and exposed to no purpose: a certain H, a coach driver from a neighboring village, or J -another local bus driver, but, especially, G, a well-known scumbag and owner of the café-pool club at the intersection, where the coach from the city stopped; all were central figures in spying and snitching, thanks to a strategic business location and verbiage of drinkers in the café or from the daily murmuring of passengers in the coach, having established links and in cordial relations with the police and security officials, who, in turn, relied on such snitching to demonstrate effective policing and establish civil older. In short, these were the shady characters who muttered and "confirmed" to the willing and smug ears of the Security, the supposedly pro-communist, propagandistic activity of grandfather.English translation. 

The girls were fast asleep that night when the door thundered, but the knocks and the kerfuffle that followed woke them up. Yiannis was in his pajamas, Vasiliki in her nightgown. It was shortly after a meagre evening meal -yoghurt and bread. Everything happened callously and hastily. A security guard with a rifle on his shoulder grabbed him from the shoulder, with no excuses or declarations of rights, just incoherent threats, and ushered him towards the “Jimmy” truck whose engine was rattling outside; in front of the acacia tree at the edge of the small front yard and the three concrete steps leading to the front door, while Yiannis’ girls watched in horror from the crack in the door of their room. Bewildered, with no idea what was going on, without daring to pop up to ask, Vasiliki remained silent, numb by surprise and fear. Feeling the cold night outside, she impulsively ran behind them, as they were lifting him onto the truck, and managed to throw on her husband's shoulders one of the woolen cardigans she had knitted for the winter.

She was strong enough for either hysterics or whining, while she knew that protesting would have been pointless and it could even have caused harm: you are not supposed to argue with the authorities in Civil War Greece, in any shape or form. She stood expressionless, firm as a rock, almost imperious, apparently undaunted by the uncertain and turbulent times ahead, next to her old parents, rushed out of their beds from their elder granddaughter instinctively reacting to the inexplicable commotion. No one in the family was aware of the precise “how and why” of all this, nor what was about to come, where they would take him, what they would do to him. Nor did anyone know what course their lives would follow from that moment on, and how long that course would last in the darkness. There was no compass no more: the old parents, the three daughters, the handicapped Giorgos, their household, without Mr. Yiannis' wages, was left high and dry.English translation. 

The American “Jimmy” disappeared in the darkness of the night, with only the very close neighbors having come to realize what that whole episode had been about. The Security gang led grandfather, along with a handful of other hapless souls from the same security black-lists they picked up on the way, to a detention center in Olympus Street, in the old Vegetable Market of Thessaloniki, near the Government House. He was imprisoned in an underground cell or ‘dungeon,’ a bodrum as Vasiliki described it. She paid frequent visits to Yiannis during the days of his detention there, carrying baskets with food. A small window of the underground cell facing upwards from an elevated corridor, opened to the visitor’s cell above for a few words of conversation with Vasiliki and the eldest daughter Alice. For the two younger girls and for their virginal psyches, the environment and conditions of detention, the brutal faces of uncompromising security guards, the pitiful spectacle of their teacher father who, they knew, left one night for “some business”, would not be becoming, but unwelcome features in their nightmares.

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