Eleni (22 page)

In early February, Eleni walked down the path to the Botsaris house and found Angeliki in tears. The girl told her that the British were preparing to leave. The last straw had been the attempt of the Skevis guerrillas to lead the English and the downed airplane crews into a German ambush.

Captain Philip intended to lead the American and English fliers into Albania, she explained, as he had successfully evacuated General Infante. As always, he notified the guerrilla commanders in the areas he would cross of the route he would take. ELAS gave him a go-ahead, but once they left Lia and crossed the mountains, the British stumbled directly into the path of a German drive which had been in progress for four days. Obviously the ELAS commanders had known the Germans’ position when they okayed the route. The British and the fliers managed to save themselves by hiding out for several days, some of them in a cramped underground baking oven. Angry and demoralized, they retraced their steps to Lia. Years later Philip Nind said, “Clearly, ELAS was hoping that the Germans would kill us, because we were an embarrassment to their efforts to persuade the villagers that the English and American allies were not really fighting the Germans effectively compared to the Russians.”

The attempted sabotage by ELAS drove Captain Ian over the edge, Angeliki said. She described how he called the staff of the mission together, ranted at them in his foreign tongue until his voice broke, and then burst into tears. Suddenly he fainted, falling over “like a cedar tree,” she said. From that moment he was entirely out of control, weeping and raging, and throwing things at his fellow officers.

Angeliki was desolate at the news that the British were leaving. Not only
would she lose the income that had kept her alive, she said, she would be left unprotected from the Skevis guerrillas, who considered her a traitor and worse. She didn’t know how her family would survive without the commandos, and despite their eccentricities, she had become truly fond of them.

In the last week of February the two downed air crews set out for the Ionian coast to the southwest, where they were to be evacuated. Captain Ian went with them after a tearful farewell to his fellow commandos. Philip Nind would never see him again, but he later learned that Ian was evacuated to Cairo, hospitalized in a psychiatric ward and after his recovery was killed in action in Italy.

On the cold, misty morning of February 26, 1944, a large crowd of villagers gathered to wish Captain Philip and the radio operator, Ken, farewell. Eleni was among them. She was nearly as saddened as Angeliki to see them go. She had hoped that the British might curb the brutality and internecine fighting of the guerrillas, and now she feared their departure would mean that more Greeks would die at Greek hands.

The British commandos were as downcast as the villagers. Decades later Philip Nind remarked that the few months he spent in Lia changed him radically. “I came with very clear ideas of right and wrong,” he said. “The Greek mountains were totally different from anything I had known and I soon realized that politics there had nothing to do with the undergraduate politics I had known at Oxford, gentlemen’s politics. In Lia it was politics tooth and claw, and the blood ran literally. It was the first time I saw dead bodies—not dead Germans or dead British, as I had expected—but Greeks killed by Greeks, and worse, some of the bodies were obviously mutilated. During the whole time I was in Lia, I was never given the men to organize a single operation against the Germans, and the ELAS guerrillas constantly tried to indoctrinate the villagers against us. I was almost a Marxist myself until I saw Communism put into practice by the
andartes
in Greece. I left Lia a very disillusioned young man.”

The villagers Nind left behind were more than disillusioned. The commandos were scarcely out of sight when the rumor swept Lia that the British had abandoned them to their fate because the Germans were approaching.

When the Germans suspected a village of harboring guerrillas, the punishment was swift and all-embracing. Throughout Greece more than 150 villages were burned.

In Kalavryta, near Patras, the Germans entered the town in early December and told the 2,500 inhabitants there was nothing to fear. But at six o’clock on the morning of December 8, 1943, the church bells called the people to the town square. They were divided into two groups: women and children under twelve years old, and men and boys over twelve. There was chaos as mothers tried to convince the Germans their sons were too young to go with the men.

The women and children were locked in the schoolhouse and the 800 men and boys led to a wheat field on a hill behind the cemetery, where, after watching their village burn, they were cut down with machine guns.

As the school was set ablaze, the women began throwing their children out the windows. One German soldier took pity on them and opened a door, setting them free moments before the burning roof collapsed. When they found the corpses of their husbands, the homeless women had no shovels and buried the men with their bare hands. Every night wild animals dug up the shallow graves.

By the early months of 1944 the Germans knew they were losing the war and their reprisals became more vicious. All 228 inhabitants of Distomo, near Delphi, were murdered and mutilated, including twenty children under the age of five. The young women were mutilated and cut open from the genitals to the breasts, and the children were disemboweled, their entrails wound around their necks.

Before Easter of 1944 the German commandant in Epiros, Lieutenant General Hubert Lanz, began to plan an assault on the villages of the Mourgana along the Albanian border to flush out the
andartes
hiding in
the mountains and clear a route for a possible evacuation. But first it was necessary to attend to the Jews in Yannina.

Since the ninth century there had been Jewish communities in the large Greek cities, and in March of 1943, 46,000 Jews in Salonika were rounded up and shipped to German concentration camps. But the 1,950 Jews living in the provincial capital, including seventy prosperous merchant families, did not flee. They knew the German troops stationed in their city depended on the Jewish community for food and supplies, and they were reassured when General Lanz promised them they would be safe. The general severely reprimanded the mayor of Yannina for ordering all Jews in the city to sign in at the city hall each morning.

ELAS distributed leaflets to Yannina’s Jews urging them to flee the city and join the
andartes
, but they became suspicious when they read the leaflets, which said: “Take your money and come to the mountains of ELAS to be saved.” Only forty-two Jews answered the call. The rest stayed in their homes hoping that the German commandant was a man of his word.

M
ARCH BROUGHT THE RETURN
of the swallows and the weaning of the lambs. When the Germans did not appear in Lia on the heels of the departing British, the villagers relaxed and began to prepare for Easter.

On March 26, the day after the Feast of the Annunciation, Eleni Gatzoyiannis and her sister sat on the steps of their mother’s house, enjoying the warm sun, while four-year-old Nikola played nearby. Nitsa called the boy over and began to undo a bracelet of twisted red and white threads tied to his arm. “Now that Annunciation’s come and gone we can take off your March thread and hang it on the tree for the swallows,” she said. “And you won’t have to worry about sunburn or insects all summer!”

Solemnly Nikola watched his aunt drape the grimy threads over the walnut tree near the door. Eleni looked on with a mixture of amusement and vexation. “Why do you fill the child’s head with all that nonsense?” she asked. “A red thread won’t protect him from sunburn any more than garlic and a nail in your pocket will keep you safe from wolves!”

“Maybe you can read and I can’t,” Nitsa replied, “but it’s one thing to learn and another to be wise. You like to laugh at my amulets, but if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have a son today but another daughter!”

Eleni turned to her in amazement and Megali gave her elder daughter a warning glance, but Nitsa was already swept away by the drama of her sacrifice. “Ach, what I went through for you to have a son!” she exclaimed, lifting her hands and gazing heavenward for sympathy. “If it wasn’t for that piece of umbilical cord I fed you, you’d be looking at another daughter right now!”

Eleni stared. “I ate
what
?”

Nitsa nodded, full of self-importance. “I had to walk all the way to Kostana to buy a piece of umbilical cord from the midwife there. Of course, it had to be taken from a firstborn son, born in the forty days after Fotini’s birth. Remember that nice cheese pie I made you, full of fresh eggs and butter? You said it was the best one I ever made!”

Eleni didn’t know whether to laugh or be sick, but Nitsa was only beginning the saga of her spells. She had saved a bit of Fotini’s umbilical cord after it fell off and on New Year’s Day baked it in a loaf of bread which was fed to the rooster, she said. “That’s how your luck was turned around and Nikolaki came out a boy! For myself, I can’t grow a boy
or
a girl,” she concluded sadly. “But for you I did everything, and it worked!”

Megali was waiting for Eleni to show the quick temper that she had inherited from her father, but instead she threw back her head and laughed until the tears came, scaring Nikola so that he ran over and tugged at her skirt. Nitsa’s smug expression turned to annoyance until Eleni hugged her and gasped, “After all you’ve done for me, sister, perhaps God will relent and give you a child!”

Solemnly Nitsa crossed herself.

The drowsy quiet of the morning was suddenly broken by shouts coming from the direction of the Petsis house. Nitsa sniffed the air like a pointer and they all got up to see why Lambros Petsis’ girl was so excited.

Petsis owned a small tinker’s shop and a house in Yannina, dividing his time between the provincial capital and the village. He had a son scarcely older than Nikola, but his dark, almond-eyed daughter, Milia, just turned eighteen, was his favorite.

Petsis was visible, just rounding the last curve in the road leading three heavily laden mules. As he came closer, the growing knot of onlookers could make out what he was carrying: bolts of velvet, satin and wool; shiny leather shoes dangling from the saddles; fine linen sheets; lacy woven coverlets; and men’s suits. After four years of turning worn hems and sewing on patches, they stared in wonder at the sight of Lambros Petsis carrying enough finery to ransom a king.

When he reached his front gate, Petsis climbed off his mule and embraced his daughter, who was squirming with excitement. “Where did you get all this,
Patera
!” she squealed. “How could you afford it?”

“It’s all free, my sultana,” he grinned. “There’s enough here for two dowries with plenty left over for our neighbors!”

Everybody began shouting questions.

“It’s from the Jews,” Petsis explained. “Yesterday at dawn, the Germans rounded them all up and herded them down to the lake where they locked them into trucks and drove them off. What a noise they made! Women crying for their children, husbands and wives separated. It would have made an icon weep! They took the family that lived over my store too.” He cleared his throat. “But you know what they say about an ill wind. They left the Jewish houses and stores with the doors wide open. Better us than the Germans, everybody said. The Jews won’t be back! So we took what we could carry. Good thing I moved fast. By nightfall the Germans had locked everything and strung up two boys for looting.”

Petsis, a generous man, began handing out gifts to the women crowding around: an apron, an initialed pillowcase, a little-girl’s dress, dotted with
pink rosebuds. When his eyes met Eleni’s, they faltered. Then he said, “I’ve got a fine piece of green velvet here, and when I saw it, I said, That would make a handsome dress for
Kyria
Eleni’s eldest daughter, Olga.”

“Thank you, Lambros,” Eleni replied, “but I can’t take it.”

“Then a cap for your only son,” he said quickly, holding up a gray wool one. “I’ve never seen a cap on his head.”