(Chapter 7)
Author's Note: The views expressed, as well as the geographical and historical references, reflect the personal memory and experience of the narrator as a child (born 1930–1932) and do not constitute historical analysis of events, nor may they correspond to official historical records.
In our courtyard in those days there was a foolish man. He was young — when I was a little girl he was in his prime. He worked at our airport, the old one that was called Hassani. When the Germans occupied the airport, he was the resourceful type and managed to find work there and kept working. The people in the neighborhood were suspicious of him, though, and labeled him a collaborator — a dosilogos — saying he informed on dissidents to the Germans, though he didn't actually do any such thing. He was simply a blowhard, a big talker who wanted to show off, to let everyone know he was doing well, to boast that he had connections.
One day he had an accident and broke both his knees, and after that he walked on crutches. I don't know whether he was genuinely disabled or whether he simply used them to his advantage, because with those crutches he was always first in line everywhere he went, jumping every queue. And certain things people kept hidden — food, for instance — would somehow appear before him alone, out of sympathy.
When the Germans left and the ELAS partisans began settling scores with collaborators, they came for him too — accused of supporting the Germans and working with them. At that time I was still very young, and the events of the Civil War weren't yet widely understood. The December Uprising had happened, and that was all we knew in the neighborhood, because we had all lived through the Battle of Makrigianni — the garrison near my home where the partisans met their final resistance and lost.
To explain what happened with that man: before the ELAS partisans lost, they had their own boys out in the streets, posted on every corner. These were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen-year-olds with guns in their hands. This wasn't so unusual, because even I — younger than them — knew about everything that was happening in the neighborhood and would run out voluntarily to watch. Whether it was the EPON, the youth wing of ELAS, or whether it was EDES, I ran and I clapped. I didn't know the difference — I always thought they were all partisans fighting against the Germans. But they couldn't enroll me anywhere because of my age; I needed to wait three years, and so I never joined any organization.
While we were out in the street playing ball with the children my age, one of these older boys with a gun was standing on the corner, keeping watch. Our ball rolled to his feet and I went to pick it up. At that moment a large man came up to the boy and told him that in five minutes he had to go to a house on Theodoros Geometris Street — such-and-such number — and arrest a man named Stelios Ekonomou. That was my house. They were going to come to our courtyard, the place where all of us lived together and had fought so hard to survive the hunger of the Occupation. He would also send another boy with him — two armed children in total — to bring him in for interrogation up at number 13, which was the execution site at Agios Georgios.
I heard all of this. I was a child and I felt no fear — I didn't even think about the consequences. I simply knew I had to protect someone from our courtyard. I picked up the ball from his feet, gave it to my friend who had been playing with me, said nothing, and went straight inside to the courtyard. I went to Ekonomou's room — this blowhard lived next door to ours — and I found kyra-Tasia, [auntie Tasia] his mother.
I said to her: "Kyra-Tasia, take your son and disappear, because two people with guns are coming right now to take him to number 13 for questioning." I had no time to explain how I'd heard. "Take your child and go!" But they didn't make it in time. He was lying stretched out on the bed — he had become bone idle, only his mother worked. She hauled him up, pulled him to his feet, but they couldn't get out. Just as they were ready to leave, two men with guns walked in and said: "You, come with us for questioning at headquarters."
But his mother followed them, and all along the way she was shouting, screaming, crying: "Where are you taking my child? Murderers! You'll kill him! Murderers!" They tried to shake her off — "Shut your mouth," they told her, "be quiet." Then more men arrived and they dragged him toward the center. But she kept following. They got him all the way inside the headquarters building, and she walked in behind them. She told them: "Give me back my child, or whatever you do to him, you have to do to me first." People came out of their houses because of her screaming and followed along too — a whole crowd gathered outside. And that situation brought fear to the men inside.
In the end, they released him without interrogating him. "Kill me, not him," she was screaming and howling, and everyone wanted to see what would happen. So they let him go, with the intention of catching him another time. But they were never able to find him at another time, because the moment they released him, she made him vanish. No one knows where she took him — he must have gone to another house. She kept him hidden for a long time, and he surfaced years later when things had settled down. And so that man was saved. He grew up, made a family, got divorced, lived his life. Such is life.
Personally, I felt more fear during those days of the Civil War than during the Occupation itself. But there was one earlier incident, while the Germans were still here, that threw our whole family into terror. On Vouliagmenis Avenue, near Neos Kosmos, partisans killed a German soldier. As the German was walking, they had laid an ambush and shot him. When the Germans lost one of their soldiers, they would round up all the men in the surrounding area — a wide radius — and this time that radius included our home. They went from house to house and took every man they found, and I don't know how many men they stood against a wall and shot. Innocent souls.
We heard it by word of mouth. In those days only my uncle was working — my father had a heart condition and had closed his shop in Neos Kosmos. My uncle couldn't manage alone, so he found work as an employee first at a shop in Monastiraki, and later retired from another job, at a factory that made athletic shoes. My uncle was the one keeping the family alive in those years. The moment my uncle heard that the Germans were going door to door, he took my father and us children and left my mother behind with the baby. He walked us on foot to the shop where he worked in Monastiraki, because he had the key. The Germans didn't take women and babies, but he was afraid they might take us girls too. Our mother gave us two blankets and we went to the shop and spent the night there without sleeping at all, out of fear and worry. The next day at noon we returned.
"Did you find out that they had been killed?" I asked my grandmother, because for a moment it struck me that it would have been an extra terror for the children — to have confirmed that what they feared had actually happened.
"We found out that they had taken a hundred and fifty people who never came back. Every man they gathered — not one was ever seen again. It was called reprisals. But... you haven't eaten a thing while I've been talking to you! I brought all of this out for you..."
I remembered what she had told me about how they gathered greens during the Occupation, and I saw the pride in her eyes for everything she had prepared.
"How could I eat... All right then, let's take a break."
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