Cruel World (76 page)

By the fall of 1943 the main lines of this terror war had been drawn. The Italians had withdrawn, leaving the suppression of the Greek Resistance to the Germans, and Allied aid had begun to flow to the insurgents, who were organizing rapidly. Young people were very much in demand. Here too the Germans attempted to carry out labor roundups. Teenagers of all classes escaped from the cities to find the Resistance units, spurred on by the lack of jobs and the closure of schools and universities. In the countryside, partisan chieftains of various persuasions would appear in villages flaunting guns and wearing dramatic, if somewhat thrown together, uniforms featuring capes, crossed bandoliers, and other accoutrements. There would be hilarious propaganda skits and dancing in the town square. The leftist ELAS organized a youth wing and even a branch for small boys, known as the “Little Eagles.” The allure was powerful, especially to young village children heretofore kept under very tight parental supervision:

But for most, no such colorful persuasion was necessary. Costas Gkioulekas was fifteen when he began doing minor jobs for the partisans in Macedonia. He and his friends distributed leaflets, listened to the BBC, and sometimes got to carry guns. Their activity ceased to be a game when the Germans killed the parents of one of his best friends. Later, more than 300 were murdered in his own parents’ hometown, including children three and four years old. One acquaintance was shot as she ran away from soldiers trying to rape her, and others died in burning warehouses.
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For those who remained reluctant to help the partisans after such events, pressure to join was applied with threats of retribution to families. The families, which soon consisted mostly of women, children, and the old, were in a no-win situation. If they had a relative in a leftist partisan force, they were subject to reprisal by the Nazis and their Greek collaborators; if their
young did not join the partisans, the whole family was suspected of being pro-German, and was equally at risk.

By the end of 1943, “antibandit” warfare in Greece, and every other theater, had become a major part of Goebbels’s “anti-Bolshevist” total war. The Nazis did not leave the disciplining of the Greeks just to the Wehrmacht, but brought in elements of the Einsatzgruppen and other SS formations that had gained so much experience in the USSR. Here too, Hitler authorized “any measures without restriction even against women and children if these are necessary for success.”
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The Nazis were aided in their work by their Italian and Bulgarian allies and by the murderous competition between the various partisan groups. So-called Security Battalions mustered by the anti-Communist Greek puppet government aided the Germans too, as did a number of independent bandits and collaborators who had no compunctions about killing their countrymen or sharing in the spoils of the deportation of the Greek Jews.

The increasingly tragic situation of the Greek population in the regions where the activities of these myriad forces were greatest was observed in detail by courageous Red Cross operatives, who, having dealt with the famine in Athens, continued to try to deliver food and medicine to the neediest in the face of terror, counterterror, and the arbitrary prohibitions of the Nazis. As early as January 1943, the Red Cross had pointed out that the restriction of distribution points by the occupation powers and limitations on the amount of food each person could obtain on each visit, especially in the northern mountains, where travel even on foot was extremely difficult in winter, would “condemn a whole population to death by starvation.” In August, two Red Cross officials from the Thessalonika office, M. Wenger and Mme Haidis, reported on a four-day tour of the region around Kastoria in the northwest corner of Greece (western Macedonia). The team had seen twelve towns and villages. In Lechovo, the first stop, Germans and Greek auxiliaries had given the townspeople so little warning to leave their houses before a raid that they did not have time to put their children’s shoes on. All the cattle had been driven into the houses, which were then burned. Nothing was left—“not even a tea cup.” Those who had returned were living on some Red Cross food and the produce of their gardens, and many children were already ill. In Vogatzikou the Italians had “burned every house in which no men were present,” leaving the women and children homeless. And around the bigger town of Kozani, thirteen small villages had been totally destroyed, leaving 24,500 refugees without anything at all. In many places the Italian or Bulgarian soldiers present refused the Red Cross entry or interfered with their delivery of food, even
to invalids and children.
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In Epiros, added terror was provided by Turco-Albanian bands that preyed on Christians and stole their cattle and food.
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By December, the bishop of Grevina, pleading for food and fearing that 60,000 would die, wrote in outrage that in more than thirty burned-out villages in his diocese the inhabitants remained “in the open air at such a time of year, deprived of shelter and clothes, starving and prey to malaria, infectious diseases, such as diphtheria, typhus.… There are more dead every day, especially among the children; mothers dig holes with their own hands in order to bury not one, but often two or more of their children.” Furthermore, he wrote, when seventy-two women from a village that had been burned four times had arrived in Kozani, after walking for two days on snowy paths through steep mountains, they were refused all help, as the Germans, obedient to Goebbels’s total war policy, had forbidden any aid to such supposed “Bolsheviks.” The bishop had intervened and obtained bread and money for them, but the women had not been allowed to buy anything with the funds, not even medicine and blankets for their babies, and left Kozani in the greatest despair.
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With the growing presence of SS units and their collaborators in 1944 came an increase in reprisals in every occupied country. These units, whose officers were radicalized beyond all help and who now, after the news of D-Day, felt the fear of inevitable defeat, often viewed the entire population as the enemy. On June 11, a Waffen-SS battalion commanded by Fritz Lautenbach, a young graduate of the SS Leibstandarte Division, whose troops included a large number of very young and inexperienced
Volksdeutsche
, passed through the Greek town of Distomo,
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about fifteen miles east of the tourist mecca at Delphi. The inhabitants were not unduly frightened. Distomo was not a center of resistance, and relations with the Germans had been good. Just outside the village, however, the SS troops were attacked by partisans. After this skirmish the Germans returned to Distomo and spent the next three hours killing the population with unparalleled viciousness. Pregnant women were eviscerated with bayonets and their intestines wrapped around their necks. People were decapitated and children’s heads crushed. Houses were burned with all the occupants inside. Women and little girls were raped, then executed. All the beasts of burden were killed too. It was estimated that 50 to 60 percent of the approximately 350 dead were children.

Aleco Zaoussis, a young medical student working with the Red Cross, and his colleagues, who arrived on the scene from Athens soon after the massacre, were overwhelmed by what they saw and by the stench of unburied bodies and dead animals, whose bloated shapes lay scattered everywhere. Bloodied and stunned children were found hiding under bushes and in the rocky landscape all around the village. One little boy had survived by lying down between the bodies of his parents and splashing himself with blood, so that the SS men sent to finish off the wounded would think he was dead. A little girl in one of the three trackloads of surviving children taken to Athens by the Red Cross “became mad with fear” on the way. On the lists of the orphaned and homeless children evacuated the oldest age recorded is thirteen.
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The atrocities were thought to be excessive even by the German command, and there was an inquiry, but the attack was ultimately declared to have been a “military necessity.”
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A Greek widow and her children who survived the Nazi detraction of Distomo
.
(photo credit 14.3)

It was not a good week for children, or indeed their parents, anywhere. On June 13 the first V-1 rocket landed on London. The day before Lieutenant Lautenbach had attacked Distomo, a fellow SS division, Das Reich, which also had a large complement of young
Volksdeutsche
draftees, some of them Alsatians had inflicted similar atrocities on the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane, near Limoges.
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If the soldiers had any doubts about what was taking place, their officers, also veterans of the East, did not. Oradour too was suspected of being a center of resistance, which it
appears not to have been. Here the massacre was a bit more organized. The SS troops came into town after lunch on a busy Saturday, sealed off all access roads, and ordered everyone to assemble in the town square. All the men were then put in barns and garages while the women and children were locked up in the church. Six hundred forty-two people, unable to escape from the church and the barns, among them 205 children, including babies and toddlers, were sprayed with machine gun fire. They were then covered with phosphorous and other materials and set ablaze; many were burned alive. Some of the children had come into Oradour from outlying villages to go to school. Their mothers, who had gone to look for them when they did not come home on time, would also die in the church. Anyone still moving in the town after these events was hunted down and shot, and the rest of the houses were set on fire. Two days later, the Nazis came back and tried to cover up the magnitude of their crimes by burying the half-burned bodies in shallow graves or hiding them under debris.
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These almost simultaneous atrocities at Oradour and Distomo were apparently not directly coordinated, but were separate manifestations of the relentless total war against partisan resistance mandated by the SS high command in the now dwindling reaches of Hitler’s Reich.

Distomo was far from being the last doomed village in Greece. The gruesome reprisals continued on into September, until life for many was unbearable. M. Wenger of the Red Cross, returning from inspecting particularly terrible attacks at Gianitsa, came face-to-face with a crowd of fleeing inhabitants in a scene that was being repeated all over Europe:

By the fall of 1944 there were an estimated one million homeless people in Greece, of whom a large percentage were children. Desperate mothers had sent boys and girls off to other villages and even to Athens and other cities to fend for themselves. There they formed street gangs that foraged for food and slept in whatever shelter they could find, from abandoned boats to caves. Little groups of siblings in which a ten- or twelve-year-old had become the head of the family haunted the soup kitchens. Orphanages, holding the victims of towns like Distomo, were
jammed. These waifs were not of racial interest to the Germans, but they were of interest to the Communists in the ELAS, who kept careful track of all the children in the areas they controlled. After the defeat of the Germans, during the continuing Greek Civil War, more than 28,000 children were first taken to homes and camps in Albania and then sent on to the USSR and its satellite countries. They were not necessarily orphans, but had been sent away for temporary “protection” by their parents at the urging of the ELAS leaders, who thereby kept their hold on the families.
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The Communists were not the only ones indulging in these good works. The “right” would also rescue tens of thousands of children from the civil war zones under a program set up by the Greek Queen Fredericka, with the aim of taking them “before the Communists do.” Indoctrination was heavy on both sides and competition fierce in this
Paidomazoma
, or expatriation of the young. The Communists’ removal of the children was condemned by the United Nations, and according to some sources they were badly treated behind the Iron Curtain. There is, however, some evidence that, like the Spanish Civil War children, many in fact were treated well and were carefully educated in Greek, and that some were reunited with their families, who had followed them into exile.
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But for all of them, whether fate had deposited them left or right, as well as for millions of others in Europe, the forlorn dream of a return to lives gone forever would never vanish.