(Chapter 8)
"Do you remember any other particular incident from the Occupation? Something that made an impression on you?"
The Blackout Trench and the Doctor's Radio
Of course I remember, because I was the firstborn and wherever my father needed to go, he'd take me with him. Some evenings we'd go to a house in what's now called Dafni — Katsiipodi, it was called then — to a family whose father was like a brother to mine. They had two sons, Grigoris and Pavlos. Strong boys, both of them. They too had come from Russia during the revolution against the Tsar.
On the feast of Saint Gregory, the older one — Grigoris, or Grisas as we called him — was celebrating his name day and invited my father to a gathering. So he took me along and we went. These people had their own house, and the younger son Pavlos was very fond of music and played piano at the time. Of course, gatherings were forbidden, and there was a blackout during that period, which meant the windows were covered with sheets of blue paper so no light could be seen from outside. This was to prevent us from being bombed.
During the Occupation, the Allied forces came more and more frequently to bomb important targets like Hassani, even though Athens was considered an unfortified city. They bombed the airport and the port of Piraeus. We didn't learn the results of these bombings, whether anyone was killed or not, because there were no mass media. The press was controlled by the Germans, newspapers were censored, and information was tightly rationed. We only heard the planes approaching and the sound of the sirens indicating that Allied aircraft were coming. The Acropolis, though, was never bombed — not by the Germans, not by the Allies. They respected the monument. I never heard of any bomb falling there.
We sat and ate. There were only a few people in the house — my father and me, this family, and perhaps two others. There was no formal limit on the number of people, but everything was conducted with great caution. Then the time came to leave and it was already late. We said our goodbyes and stepped outside. When we came out, it was pitch dark — we couldn't see where we were putting our feet, nothing, no lights in the streets, none from the houses either. We went from the warmth and light inside the house straight into absolute darkness.
In those days the streets of Athens had been dug up and turned into trenches. Every time we heard the sirens and the enemy approached — even though the Italians and Germans weren't bombing Athens — people were frightened and threw themselves into these ditches, which were called shelters. As we were walking, we didn't see one of these trenches, and when my father lifted his foot and took a step, he fell straight into it and hit hard. He was holding my hand and pulled me down with him and I fell on top of him. It was a considerable depth, but I didn't get hurt — I was a child and my body was rubber. But my father couldn't get out; he had taken a bad fall and I couldn't help him. He was groaning, calling for help: "Help! Help!" We weren't supposed to be outside at that hour, of course, but he was calling out in the hope that someone in the neighborhood would hear and come out. I managed somehow, being a child, to climb out of the trench, but I couldn't pull him up. And rather than a door opening and someone coming out to help — nothing. Everyone was afraid.
Then an Italian soldier in uniform stopped, accompanied by a Greek girl. In those days, many Greek girls got to know Italian soldiers, married them, and left for Italy.
One of them is the sister of a friend of mine. She married an Italian, lived there, had children, built her family. Not long ago she came back to visit her sister who lives in Halandri. We attended a memorial service together — my friend Anna, her sister Aliki, and me. Many girls were in a situation like Aliki's. At the time, of course, girls who took up with Italians were condemned for it.
But to tell you the truth — when I started traveling for the first time after your grandfather died, I went on a church excursion and we traveled through Italy, starting from Venice, and I fell completely in love with that country. I loved it so much, I loved the land and the people so much, that I said I could live there. What can I say — I was only fourteen during the Occupation. If I'd been eighteen, I would certainly have married an Italian.
During that time, naturally, girls had no idea what Italians or Italy were really like. Many of them were simply hungry, and if they had an Italian companion, the problem of starvation was solved — because the Italians had food in abundance: cornbread, army rations, pasta, which they gave to their girlfriends, who then shared it with their families and friends. While there were many such stories involving Italians, very few girls got involved with Germans, because the Germans were considered a cold people, not easy to approach. And their commanding officers didn't permit it either. The Italians, on the other hand, were a warm people, a people of love. If anything, it was the Italian soldiers who did the pursuing. As for me, I was a scrawny, skinny little thing — who among the Italians would have given me a second look?
I saw a girl approaching — one of ours. Our eyes had adjusted to the dark by then and we could make out faces and everything. She came up and said: "What's happening?" and I told her: "We'd gone out to celebrate a name day for a nephew of my father's, we came out of the house into the dark and didn't see the trench. My father fell in and I fell on top of him but managed to get out. He's hurt and can't get up." She spoke to the Italian, explained what had happened, but he had already sprung into action — he was already half down in the trench and pulling him up. Once he had got my father out, he put him on his back.
From that spot to our house, all the way until he laid him down in bed, my father was carried on the Italian's back. The girl and I followed behind. I will never forget that. When we got there, my mother took over, and my father stayed in bed for two months — that's how badly he'd been hurt. I don't know if anything was broken, but he was in pain all over his body. And if something had broken, it would have mended on its own, because — where would we have gone? There were no doctors, no hospitals to speak of. We did the old remedies: poultices, rubs, whatever my mother knew for the pain. She thanked them, but after that we lost them — we never saw them again, never found out what became of the girl or the Italian. But that incident left an indelible mark on me and I will never forget it, as one of the most significant chapters of my life. Even though I was only a child, it made a tremendous impression on me.
And when all of it was over and the front collapsed, when the German flag came down from the Acropolis and the Greek government returned from Cairo, the celebrations lasted a full week. What went on in Syntagma Square — joy and festivities, I can't even begin to describe it. And by then I was no longer a girl. I was growing up, and boys had started to notice me in the street. I had come into myself as a young woman — I was seventeen, a girl on the verge of becoming a woman, and it was my turn. I remember that wherever I walked, boys would whistle and flirt. Walking from my house to the Third Girls' Gymnasium on Tsami Karatassou Street, I remember passing the boys from the Sixth Boys' Gymnasium on Falirouand Petmezas, and all the boys would be posted there waiting for the girls of the Third Gymnasium to walk by.
Many romances developed this way, despite the fact that schools were separated by sex. If boys saw you on the street and made eyes at you and you responded, they'd find a way — they'd wait somewhere to talk to you and things would progress easily from there. As they say: when both the bride and groom are willing, who cares what the in-laws think.
I lived through that phase too, walking those streets — but I had no interest in any of it. I didn't respond to a single whistle, a single teasing remark, because I had other things on my mind. I was devoted to studying. I wanted that competition to continue — the worthy competition — I wanted to keep the approval and affection of my teachers. These things filled my soul, and nothing else interested me. I didn't reciprocate, didn't even seek out social contact or friendships.
As for my sister, she had a different life. She became a seamstress and stayed home. Despite our poverty, my father bought her a Singer sewing machine — the kind you operate with a foot pedal — which was a good machine, and she began to sew. He bought it in installments with easy payment terms, and so my sister started taking in sewing for households in the neighborhood and became a skilled dressmaker.
I did have one dear friend, though, whom I still remember — a truly close friend, who lived comfortably because her family was well off. They had money and lived in a nice standalone house. The family was just the mother and two daughters, because their father had died, and the mother worked as manager at a well-known jewelry shop. The shop's owner had been godfather at her wedding and helped them financially.
The younger daughter, Chrysoula, was my classmate. She wasn't a strong student. Her house was further down on my route and many times when I set out for school, we'd run into each other at the corner and walk together. And on the way back, we'd walk together again and part at the corner. At some point she said to me herself: "Would you like me to come to your house sometimes so we can study together?" — because she needed my help. She had books, she had everything. I, on the other hand, had no books — only the papers and notes I kept in class. We had no money for books and I learned everything from the lessons themselves. "Come and we'll study," I said. And so she started coming to my house with her books. After school we'd part at the corner — she'd go home and eat whatever you could ever wish for, the full works, and then she'd come to mine. Meanwhile, we ate feta cheese and bread every single day, bread with salted herring as the saying goes, and if we wanted something a little more special, we'd make a salad.
I had no social circle for flirting, but plenty found their way to me all the same. There were people who asked me out — not schoolmates from the gymnasium, but older. I met people at friends' homes: university students training to be doctors, engineering students at the Polytechnic, law students. Despite the many proposals I received from people I met at those gatherings, I accepted none of them.
Especially that one medical student from Kalymnos. All the young people I knew were from Kalymnos, come to Athens to study. My brother's godmother — whose husband was a prominent doctor — had several rooms in Neos Kosmos that she rented out to students from the provinces. Through my brother's godmother I happened to meet many of these young people. One of them, Aristeidis, was a student at the Polytechnic, and since both my friend Chrysoula and I had trouble with mathematics, we'd go there for help. We'd say: "Let's go to Aunt Frosso" — meaning my brother's godmother — "so Aristeidis can work through the problem with us." This young man had made me a proposal, and we'd gone out one afternoon so he could speak to me privately — to ask if I wanted to be in a relationship while he finished his studies at the Polytechnic, and so forth. I said no.
I didn't like that particular person, and I didn't like the other one either, the medical student from Kalymnos I mentioned. That medical student, on the other hand, was deeply, helplessly in love with me. He went to my mother and proposed marriage, and my mother told him: "What can I do? She's young, she's still in school, and you're still a student yourself. What are you asking me to arrange? Finish your studies first, let her finish school too, and then you can discuss it again." But he didn't hear any of it. He went so far as to stage a hunger strike for fifteen days because I wouldn't give him the time of day. In any case, let's leave all of that — it means nothing to me now. These things have no bearing on our lives.
But what I wanted to tell you about was the Occupation, and a friend of my father's who used to come by — a man who had a radio that hadn't been confiscated and sealed. Because they had seized radios and you couldn't listen to whatever you wanted. I was still just a girl, I was twelve when I met him and this man was thirty-two. There was a twenty-year gap between us, or perhaps even more — he might have been thirty-four. He was an established doctor, a gastroenterologist at a hospital. And so every day, this man would come for my father — every single day he did this — and the two of them would go to his home to listen to that radio.
A radio in those days was a rare thing, a luxury. If anyone found out that your radio hadn't been sealed, they might have shot you. You'd go before a tribunal — the occupation court. In any case, he had hidden it well, and my father was careful; after the news he'd come straight home.
The doctor's house was a good distance from ours — a grand, elegant home — and he lived alone, being unmarried. Inside he had a piano. He had no parents, but he had siblings: some lived in France, some in Athens. There was an age difference between him and my father, but as it turned out, it wasn't really my father he was so fond of, or thought of as a close friend. It was me he had set his sights on.
Back to Chapter Index: The Complete True Story
