The Island (18 page)

Authors: Victoria Hislop

BOOK: The Island

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This was not an empty threat, and all those in the room knew it. Even if Crete had been invaded in the past, the inhabitants had always put up the fiercest resistance. The history of their island was a long catalogue of fighting, reprisals and nationalism, and there wasn’t a single house to be found that was not equipped with a bandolier, rifle or pistol. The rhythm of life might have appeared gentle, but behind the façade there often simmered feuds between families or villages, and among males over the age of fourteen there were few untrained in the use of a lethal weapon.

Savina Angelopoulos, who stood in the doorway with Fotini and the two Petrakis girls, well knew why the threat was real this time. The speed of flight was the simple reason. The German planes that had dropped the paratroopers could cover the distance from their base in Athens to this island in not much more time than it took the children to walk to school in Elounda. But she kept quiet. Even the presence of the tens of thousands of Allied troops evacuated from the mainland to Crete made her feel more vulnerable than safe. She did not have the confidence of the menfolk. They wanted to believe that the killing of a few hundred Germans who had landed by parachute was the end of the story. Savina felt instinctively that it was not.

Within a week, the true picture was clearer. Each day everyone congregated at the bar, spilling out into the square on those late May evenings which were the first of the year when the warmth of the day did not disappear with the sun. A hundred or so miles as they were from the centre of the action, the people of Plaka were relying on rumours and fragments of information, and every day more pieces of the story would drift over from the west like thistle seeds carried on the air. It seemed that although many of the men who had dropped from the sky had died, some of them had miraculously survived and fled into hiding, from where they were now managing to take up strategic positions. The early stories had told only of spilt German blood and of men speared by bamboo canes, strangled by their own parachutes in the olive trees or dashed on to rocks, but now the truth emerged that a worrying number of them had survived, the airfield had been used to land thousands more and the tide was turning in the Germans’ favour. Within a week of the first landing, Germany claimed Crete as its own.

That night, everyone gathered in the bar once again. Maria and Fotini were outside, playing tick-tack-toe by scratching the dusty ground with sharp sticks, but their ears pricked up when they heard the sound of raised voices.

‘Why weren’t we ready?’ demanded Antonis Angelopoulos, banging his glass down on the metal table. ‘It was obvious they’d come by air.’ Antonis had enough passion for both himself and his brother, and at the best of times it took little to arouse it. Beneath dark lashes, his hooded green eyes flashed with anger. The boys were unalike in every way. Angelos was soft-edged in both body and mind, while Antonis was sharp, thin-faced and eager to attack.

‘No it wasn’t,’ said Angelos, with a dismissive wave of his pudgy hand. ‘That’s the last thing anyone expected.’

Not for the first time Pavlos wondered why his sons could never agree on anything. He drew on his cigarette and delivered his own verdict.

‘I’m with Angelos,’ he said. ‘No one imagined an air attack. It’s a suicidal way to invade this place - dropping out of the sky to be shot as you land!’

Pavlos was right. For many of them it had been little more than suicide, but the Germans thought nothing of sacrificing a few thousand men in order to achieve their aim, and before the Allies had organised themselves to react, the key airport of Maleme, near Hania, was in their hands.

For the first few days, Plaka went about its business as usual. No one knew what it would actually mean for them having Germans now resident on Cretan soil. For several days they were in a state of shock that it had been allowed to happen at all. News filtered through that the picture was bleaker than they had ever imagined. Within a week the 40,000 combined Greek and Allied troops on Crete had been routed and thousands of Allies had to be evacuated with huge numbers of casualties and loss of life. Debate at the bar intensified and there were further mutterings about how the village should prepare to defend itself for when the Germans came east. The desire to take up arms began to spread like a religious fervour. The villagers were not afraid of bloodshed. Many of them looked forward to picking up a weapon.

It became reality for the people of Plaka when the first German troops marched into Agios Nikolaos and a small unit was dispatched from there to Elounda. The Petrakis girls were walking home from school when Anna stopped and tugged her sister’s sleeve.

‘Look, Maria!’ she urged. ‘Look! Coming down the street!’

Maria’s heart missed a beat. This time Anna was right. The Germans really were here. Two soldiers were walking purposefully towards them. What did occupying troops do once they invaded? She assumed they went about killing everyone. Why else come? Her legs turned to jelly.

‘What shall we do?’ she whispered.

‘Keep walking,’ hissed Anna.

‘Shouldn’t we run back the other way?’ Maria asked pleadingly.

‘Don’t be stupid. Just keep going. I want to see what they look like close up.’ She grabbed her sister’s arm and propelled her along.

The soldiers were inscrutable, their blue gazes fixed straight ahead of them. They were dressed in heavy grey woollen jackets, and their steel-capped boots clicked rhythmically on the cobbled street. As they passed they appeared not to see the girls. It was as if they did not exist.

‘They didn’t even look at us!’ cried Anna, as soon as they were out of earshot. Now nearly fifteen years old, she was affronted if anyone of the opposite sex failed to notice her.

Only days later Plaka was given its own small battalion of German soldiers. At the far end of the village one family had a rude early morning awakening.

‘Open up!’ shouted the soldiers, banging on the door with their rifle butts.

Despite not having a word of common language, the family understood the command, and those that followed. They were to vacate their home by midday or face the consequences. From that day, the presence Anna had excitedly predicted was in their midst, and the atmosphere in the village darkened.

Day to day, there was little substantial news of what was going on elsewhere on Crete, but there was plenty of rumour, including talk that some small groups of Allies were moving eastwards towards Sitia. One night, as dusk fell, four heavily disguised British soldiers came down from the hills where they had been sleeping in an abandoned shepherd’s hut and strolled insouciantly into the village. They would not have received a warmer welcome had they appeared in their own villages in the Home Counties. It was not just the hunger for first-hand news that drew people to them; it was also the innate desire of the villagers to be hospitable and to treat every stranger as though he might have been sent from God. The men made excellent guests. They ate and drank everything that was offered, but only after one member of the group, who had a good grasp of Greek, had given a first-hand account of the previous week’s events on the north-west coast.

‘The last thing we expected was for them to come by air - and certainly not in those numbers,’ he said. ‘Everyone thought they would come by sea. Lots died immediately but plenty of them landed safely and then regrouped.’ The young Englishman hesitated. Almost against his better judgement, he added: ‘There were a few, however, who were helped to die.’

He made it sound almost humane, but when he went on to explain, many of the villagers paled.

‘Some of the wounded Germans were hacked to pieces,’ he said, staring into his beer. ‘By local villagers.’

One of the other soldiers then took a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket and, carefully flattening it out, spread it on the table in front of him. Below the original printed German someone had scribbled translations in both Greek and English.

‘I think you all ought to see this. The head of the German air corps, General Student, issued these orders a couple of days ago.’

The villagers crowded round the table to read what was written on the paper.

There is evidence that Cretan civilians have been responsible for the mutilation and murder of our wounded soldiers. Reprisals and punishment must be carried out without delay or restraint.

I hereby authorise any units which have been victims of these atrocities to carry out the following:
1.
Shooting
2.
Total destruction of villages
3.
Extermination of the entire male population in any village harbouring perpetrators of the above crimes

Military tribunals will not be required to pass judgement on those who have assassinated our troops.

‘Extermination of the entire male population’. The words leapt off the paper. The villagers were as still as dead men, the only sound was their breathing; but how much longer would they be free to breathe at all?

The Englishman broke the silence. ‘The Germans have never before encountered the kind of resistance they are meeting in Crete. It has taken them completely by surprise. And it’s not just from men but from women and children too - and even priests. They expected a full and uncompromising surrender, from you as well as the Allies. But it’s only fair to warn you that they have already dealt brutally with several villages over in the west. They’ve razed them to the ground - even the churches and the schools—’

He was unable to continue. Uproar broke out in the room.

‘Shall we resist them?’ roared Pavlos Angelopoulos over the hubbub.

‘Yes,’ shouted the forty or so men in reply.

‘To the death!’ roared Angelopoulos.

‘To the death!’ echoed the crowd.

Even though the Germans rarely ventured out after dark, men took turns to keep watch at the door of the bar. They talked long into the small hours of the morning, until the air was thick with smoke and silvery forests of empty raki bottles sat on the tables. Knowing it would be a fatal error to be spotted in daylight, the soldiers rose to go just before dawn. From now on they were in hiding. Tens of thousands of Allied troops had been evacuated to Alexandria a few days earlier and those left had to avoid capture by the Germans if they were to perform their vital intelligence operations. This group was on its way to Sitia, where the Italians had already landed and taken control.

In the Englishmen’s view, the farewells and embraces were long and affectionate for such a short acquaintance, but the Cretans thought nothing of putting on such an effusive emotional display. While the men had been drinking, some of the wives had come to the bar with parcels of provisions almost too heavy for the soldiers to lift. They would have enough to last them a fortnight and were fulsome in their gratitude. ‘
Efharisto, efharisto
,’ repeated one of them over and over again, using the only word of the Greek language he knew.

‘It’s nothing,’ the villagers said. ‘You are helping us. It is we who should be saying thank you.’

While they were all still in the bar, Antonis Angelopolous, the older of Fotini’s brothers, had slipped away, crept into the house and gathered a few possessions: a sharp knife, a woollen blanket, a spare shirt and his gun, a small pistol which his father had given him at the age of eighteen. At the last minute he grabbed the wooden pipe which lived on a shelf along with his father’s more precious and ornate lyre. This was his
thiaboli
, a wooden flute, which he had played since he was a child, and since he did not know when he would be home again, he could not leave it behind.

Just as he was fastening the buckle of his leather bag, Savina appeared in the doorway. For everyone in Plaka sleep had been elusive in the past few days. They were all on alert, restless with worry, occasionally roused from their beds by bright flashes in the sky that told of enemy bombs blasting their towns and cities. How could they sleep when they half expected their own homes to be rocked by the impact of shell fire or even to hear the strident voices of the German soldiers who now lived at the end of the street? Savina had been sleeping only lightly and was easily woken by the sound of footsteps on the hard earth floor and the scrape of the pistol on the rough wall as it was lifted from its hook. Above all, Antonis had not wanted to be seen by his mother. Savina might try to stop him.

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