(Chapter 6)
Hunger and Hope: Childhood Memories of the Occupation
When the Germans occupied Athens, they installed a government and a mayor, as occupiers do. They weren't obliged to, but they seem to have wanted a semblance of normality, some appearance that daily life was continuing. This effort to maintain the appearance of order was reflected too in how they handled the black market that quickly sprang up. Despite their measures, though, daily life changed beyond recognition.
The black market started immediately. The opportunists and the predators began hoarding everything — hiding food because they wanted to sell it later at extortionate prices. You'd go to the market to buy half an oka — because in those days we still used the Turkish oka for measuring weight, not kilos — of beans, and you'd pay the price of a house. You'd go to buy olive oil and you'd pay the price of another house. Or your jewelry. Or whatever you had. Even whatever you didn't have.
Every time the Germans caught a black market oil trader, they gave him the death penalty. Do you know where they took them? They hanged them in Syntagma Square, on the gallows, as an example to the other black marketeers. The people who saw it were shocked and revolted. I saw it myself as a child. But on the other hand, I think some people also felt a sense of justice, because they had suffered so much at the hands of the black marketeers during the Occupation. My mother, for instance, sold every piece of jewelry she had. To scrape together a little oil, a few beans, a little flour, a handful of chickpeas. Whatever she could find — she gave every piece of jewelry we owned for it. Things were completely out of hand. The Germans couldn't track down all these people; we found out about them by word of mouth. My mother would hear that someone somewhere had beans and off would come all her rings.
And we, small children, went every day — every single day, and not only us, the whole population — to Brahámi. The area that's now called Agios Dimitrios, which has since become a whole suburb swallowed up by Athens, was then an open stretch of fields, and we went to cut wild greens. We lived on wild greens. It was me, my sister, and another girl from the building who used to go, because my brother was only four years old and we didn't take him. He couldn't understand any of it. He was just hungry and cried day and night.
We were older, we could understand, and we didn't cry — we could be patient. "I have nothing to give you, children," my mother would say in despair. "I have nothing." And we were patient. And if we came across an orange, we ate it with the peel to feel full, to feel like we had something inside us. We didn't throw away even the white pithy parts. And my mother had to find food for our brother somehow — she'd take a bite of something and pass it from her own mouth to his to stop the crying. Many times we'd take a bag and a knife and, with the girl who was our age and lived in our courtyard, go out to the fields with my sister.
But once we went the wrong way and got lost. We wandered for a long time, walking an hour or maybe two hours off course. We couldn't see anything familiar, no main road, no cars, nothing. Because in those days there was only one paved road we knew — Veikou Street in Koukaki. Everything else was dirt tracks. Imagine that the tram on Dimitrakopoulou Street ran on rails laid over a dirt road. It went past the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, past the theater, and down toward Thiseio. I learned that later, when I was older and in gymnasium and started walking in the other direction from our house, toward the center rather than toward the fields, and I saw all the tram rails.
When I was in elementary school I didn't walk far, because the school was very close to home. When the bell rang for break, we'd go outside — there was no danger then. In front of the school there was a man who sold sesame-coated rolls and a chestnut seller, if you happened to have ten drachmas to give him. But my father didn't have even those ten drachmas. So when school let out, I ran straight home and my mother would cut a piece of bread, sprinkle a little water on it to soften it, and scatter some sugar on top, and that was my snack. It was wonderful, that little bread. When the bell rang again for class, I'd hear it from the house and run back.
So the day we got lost, we ended up at the Brahámi cemetery. Three young girls walking into a graveyard — and there on top of the graves we found enormous wild greens. In our childish innocence, and in the desperation of hunger, we saw something that looked like a solution. We didn't understand then why the grown-ups avoided picking greens from there. The plants were tall and lush, growing straight up out of the mounds of the graves. In those days graves weren't marble — they were just bare earth, raised up like small hills. Before we knew it, our bags were full. And we found our way back using the same road on which we'd gotten lost.
We were smart enough, though, to agree on one thing: we wouldn't tell our mothers where we'd found them, or they'd throw them out. When we got home, my mother and the other mother said: "Oh! What beautiful greens! Where did you find these?" "We lost our way and wandered a bit into some field off to the side, and Mama, you should have seen it..." I told her. "Nobody had found them, apparently... We filled up quickly and left." They believed it. We boiled the greens and everything was fine.
And now when I think about it, after all these years — what was wrong with those greens? Nothing, really. They were only so lush because nobody ever cut them there, so they kept growing and growing. As for the graves themselves — a grave is very deep, and there's nothing until the coffin has completely dissolved, and how far could a root possibly reach down to where the earth has settled like a small mountain? I was the one who urged the others on. I told them: "We're going to cut these greens. There's nothing wrong with them — what could be wrong? They're not growing out of the body itself. Don't say a word, just cut them and fill our bags and let's go." No one saw us because no one was there — all the older women were far too superstitious.
We only went that one time, because our mothers were frightened at how long we'd been gone and wouldn't let us take that road again. Sometimes we went for greens with our mothers too, to the same places everyone went, and after a while there was nothing left on the ground — because the grown-ups didn't want us straying from the fields where everyone always went.
But once, two mothers — mine and a neighbor — set out for greens, and as they were walking, they came across a paved road, because in every area there was one main paved road as a central avenue. From a distance they saw something black and shiny on the surface — the whole asphalt was black but it was gleaming in patches. They thought some kind of animals had passed and left their droppings or tracks, because there were shepherds in those parts who passed through with their flocks. But when they got closer — what did they find? Black currants. A cart must have passed and spilled them. Because carts in those days were open, and some sack must have split. They gathered them up, turned back, and came home with currants instead of greens. Their bags were full — there was a whole heap of them. That day the mothers came home happy.
I have images in my mind of people dying of hunger — I saw those images every day. We didn't die because of my mother, who was a hero in all of this. She ran to find us food, despite being illiterate, despite having been, her whole life, a closed and private person who made no friends and devoted herself only to her family. The necessity of the Occupation woke something up in her and made her resourceful.
To begin with — and even if it wasn't her own idea, another woman initiated her into it — she did something that saved us. In those days we had no identity cards or anything of the sort. The occupying forces issued a ration card for each family, and every day you could collect bread for however many people were in your household. Five people — five slices of bread; six people — six slices; two people — two slices. Every bakery was ordered to register the families it served, but there was no real oversight. My mother registered six people at the bakery under the name Kalymnios. But a neighbor told her: "You can go to the other bakery where they don't know you and register another six people under your own surname." So she went there too, under the name Xypolyta, and that way each of us got two slices of bread a day. Those slices kept us alive — because at one bakery, six slices made a loaf, and at the other bakery, another loaf, and so we had two loaves of bread a day. That way she had a little more bread to give to my little brother, and a bite for herself as well.
The rations were only for bread. There was nothing else in the shops. There were a few small grocery stores but all the shopkeepers had hidden their stock, so the black marketeers had made fortunes. Some of them may have been in league with the Germans, but most weren't powerful people — they operated in secret. The ones who actually collaborated with the Germans weren't mainly these small-time black marketeers; they were the people who collaborated politically, and they were called dosilogoi — collaborators — and their business was informing on their fellow citizens to the Germans.
The black marketeers were simply crooked traders; they let people starve but they didn't hand anyone over to the Germans, and the Germans had no particular fondness for them either. From the very first day of the Occupation — a catastrophic, cursed day — all goods became scarce and all food vanished. But the day the Germans left, the traders stopped hiding their stock. October 12th, 1944. That day it was as if everything had suddenly sprouted from the ground, and food appeared everywhere.
My mother had a cousin who lived in Kypseli, married to a man from Macedonia. He traveled to all the villages of Macedonia to gather food. Those people still had their land — they could sow and they could eat. The countryside didn't suffer the catastrophe that Athens did. We in the cities starved. Where were we going to sow? Where were we going to plant? On the pavement? So this man would go and bring back supplies. My mother would therefore walk on foot from Neos Kosmos all the way to Kypseli, and there she would leave her gold jewelry in exchange for a few beans, a few chickpeas.
My mother, God rest her soul, was a deeply tender-hearted woman. Whatever she received, she never ate alone — she shared it with the whole courtyard. She'd pour a little oil into a small Greek coffee cup, take it to the neighbor, and say: "Here, put even a drop in your food." Whatever she had, she divided. That is how our entire courtyard survived.
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