Family moves to Ritini 1940
We can now
return to the sequence of events. Having
achieved the kind of reputation that he did in Katerini as Headmaster of its
best school, Papadopoulos was now chosen by the Department of Education of Northern
Greece to join its headquarters in the city of Thessaloniki. It was an honor he could not refuse and so
the family moved to Thessaloniki in 1938.
This phase in his life and career lasted only two years. The declaration of war in 1940 and the fierce
fighting on the borders of Albania with the Italian army convinced the teacher
that the family would be safer in the village.
So the decision was made to move to Ritini. The teacher also decided to
sell all big household items and use the money to buy provisions from Katerini. Our mother felt uneasy, to say the
least. She was upset with the
dismantlement of the household which they had put together less than two years
before. It takes long for a family to settle
into a new town, make a home and find schools for the children. All that had
been achieved and now they had to leave.
Eleni remembers that mother was also upset at the thought that her
husband had worked hard for many years to get to where he was, and he was now
going to move backwards to where he had started eighteen years ago. It was like demoting himself. The idea was discussed
that only the family would move to the village and father would stay in
Thessaloniki in the hope that we could all move back once the hostilities were
over. But father wasn’t that optimistic. He refused to be separated from us longer
than absolutely unavoidable, and he believed that what was happening would not
be resolved quickly. He anticipated that
Greece, and indeed the whole of the European continent and even further, was
entering a long period of struggle and hardship. He was right.
However, there
was more than the loss of prestige and the new uprooting that was worrying our
mother. She had a foreboding premonition.
She had been aware, all those years, of the envy of some of the villagers, some
of them even relatives. There were those who loved her husband, more especially
the needy people in the village. But
there were also those who felt that the teacher, a stranger to the village (in
Greek ‘xenos’), had risen too fast from a poor refugee to the envied position
of being the Headmaster of their school, and then promoted to the position of Headmaster
of the First Municipal School, the best school in Katerini. Being called to the ‘big city’ of
Thessaloniki a few years later for an even higher position in the Department of
Education only increased their envy -- one of the seven capital sins, and a
common one universally.
Glykeria may
have been unhappy about the return to the village, but she could also see that
there were good reasons for it. She
couldn’t foresee what was coming for the people of Greece
The immediate plan
was to move us and most of our necessary possessions first. Father would then return to Thessaloniki to
finalize the rest – empty the house, sell furniture etc. and get the approval
for his transfer. The move wasn’t a smooth one by any means. Xanthoula, then about fourteen years old,
remembers getting on a full train from Thessaloniki Thessaloniki
The older children
later understood that splitting up the family was a precaution on the part of
our father so that the whole family wouldn’t be wiped out in case the enemy
planes came down low shooting at us, or in case a bomb exploded. Fortunately the planes left, the train was
not bombed, and eventually we all went back on it, only to find out that the
railway lines had been blown up further down.
That particular train couldn’t get to Katerini. According to the memories of my older
siblings, we had to walk to another railway line to pick up another train with
a different final destination but still going through a station called ‘Makrygialos
(‘Long Beach’) about 5 kilometers from
the village where father’s family lived.
Father had to quickly improvise and change the route. That second train was by now so full, my
brother described the people hanging from everywhere like “bunches of grapes”. But we managed
to get on it and continued our trip to the safety first of the village of Sfendami
From that whole episode,
I have a vague memory myself of getting off the train and moving through fields
on my father’s shoulders. Again it is the
traumatizing sound of the sirens that stayed with me over the years. But the rest of the trip is completely forgotten. It was a cold day in November 1940 and I was only
four and a half years old.
In the years
that followed, our father’s
predictions were proven correct, Xanthoula says. People suffered more in the
cities, killed by bombardments or died of hunger. Schools closed for winter
1940-41, then opened sporadically for some of the following school year. During 1941-42 two years of schooling were
condensed into one, to make up for the lost year. Once the German occupation was firmly entrenched,
permission was granted for schools to remain open, at least in the bigger towns
and cities. But there were problems of
space caused by the occupying forces. In
the cities and towns many of the school buildings were taken over to house the
invaders’ army. Our brother Stefanos
recalls in the tapes with graphic accuracy classes being held at various
locations in Katerini during his first years of high school: in the big church
near the central square or under trees in the park, if the weather was
good. A piece of cardboard would be stuck
on the trunk indicating what year class was being held under that particular
tree. In the colder but still bearable weather, they would sit under makeshift
roofs and dividing walls with blankets hung in-between trees, wearing as many
heavy clothes as they could. And in very
bad weather, they were just sent home. School
principals were always on the lookout for some space that could house their
classes. In the villages, many of the
schools closed for various reasons, one of them being that the local teacher,
if he/she was young enough, had decided to join the Resistance movement. Or because, suspected of helping the Allies
and the partisans, they were arrested and sent to a prison camp. This was the
case with our own school in Ritini when our father was arrested in the summer
of 1943. The school closed and children
of my age had to wait until the Germans left Greece to go to school for the
first time.
Xanthoula
remembers that, after missing year 1940-41, she and our elder sister Eleni went
back to school for 1941-42. The two
girls first stayed with various relatives or friends in Katerini. They couldn’t all be accommodated together, so
Stefanos, by now at high school age himself, stayed with another family of
friends in Katerini. Being the youngest,
I stayed in the village. I have no
memory of this, but I have been told that my father taught me to read and write
before he was arrested in 1943. It seems
that he spent hours with me, day after day, teaching me to read and write for a
year but I don’t remember... After his
arrest, the school in Ritini closed and I never attended formal school until
1944. At that time they asked me how old
I was and placed me in the class where I should have been according to my age. By then I was nearly 9 years old. I was lucky that my father had taught me to
read and write before he was killed, lucky that there were many books around
the house and lucky that I liked reading.
Eleni started
University in September 1942 and had to go to Thessaloniki while Xanthoula was
still attending high school in Katerini. Eleni first stayed with friends and it was in
the following year that Xanthoula joined her.
They stayed at the YWCA together with many other young girls doing their
studies away from home. Life in the city
during the Occupation was as my father had predicted. The Greek currency, the
drachma, was devalued and couldn’t buy much, but even if it could have, food
supplies had become very scarce. People
were seen selling everything they had -- clothes, jewelry, household items -- for
a bag of flower. Hunger was widespread
in the cities and people were dying in the streets begging for food. Through the Teacher’s Association, the two
girls had access to food rations, which they could go and collect daily. On the way back, they saw such misery and
hunger out in the streets that these meager food rations often didn’t make it
back to the YWCA. Eleni remembers handing
the food out and crying all the way.
They were lucky that they lived at the YWCA which was partly supported
by the International Red Cross so some food was given to them.
The cities
suffered particularly from hunger, but even life in the villages wasn’t easy.
Apart from the usual geographical isolation of villages and the traditional
poverty of most families, the food shortage was aggravated by recurring raids
from the invaders in search of whatever they could confiscate to feed their own
troops. And when the Resistance groups started forming, their needs for survival
took further toll on the already heavily burdened villagers. Those who risked
their lives going to the mountains to fight the enemy also needed food.
Some of our
personal experiences of that period have been marked indelibly in our memory. The
first incident is a combination of my memory and that of my brother, as he
recounts it in one of the tapes in my possession. It was sometime towards the end of 1942 when
the more ruthless and systematic burning and killing had started. The Germans were raiding villages in the hope
of finding and killing groups of partisans, or at least getting information
regarding their whereabouts. They came
to our village. We were all instructed to gather at the village square where
the church and the school stood. A Gestapo
officer, who must have been in charge of this operation, spoke through an
interpreter and assured the villagers that nothing would happen to them if they
cooperated. Children were given candy
and people were invited to come forward with any information they had on
partisan activity in the area. But
people didn’t volunteer freely, so the next thing I remember is German soldiers
with guns making a circle around the school.
We, the children, were isolated and taken inside the school for
interrogation while parents and older people stayed inside the circle, in the
school yard. I remember steely grey-blue eyes set deep in a thin and pale face,
looking through black-rimmed glasses, asking questions which were translated to
us. My brother has exactly the same
memory of the same steely eyes. I don’t
remember speaking, probably none of us small children did. We were old enough
to understand what was going on but were frozen with fear. With no information from the children, the
next step was the interrogation of the adults.
We had to change places. They
were taken inside and we stood outside, surrounded by the German soldiers with
the guns turned towards us.
Nothing dramatic
happened on that occasion and at the end we were all allowed to return to our
homes. I will never be sure why. Was it that they didn’t want to alienate us,
hoping that the people of the village would be more forthcoming in the
future? Was it that they were satisfied
that we didn’t know where the partisans were hiding and decided to leave us
alone? Or was it because someone did
give information, and the Gestapo left content that this village wasn’t against
them, hoping for future collaboration? I
will never be sure, but later events and rumors seemed to confirm the last
supposition.
Xanthoula, Eleni
and I have visited Ritini several times over the years. We are always drawn to the village square
where the church and the school still stand.
The original church was
demolished and a bigger one is now in its place, but the old school, built with
local stone, has been carefully preserved and restored in its original form
with its stone walls and slate roof. It
now serves as a local cultural center for the village. A good part of our father’s life was spent in
that school, and the three of us sisters stepped with emotion inside the small
office of the Schoolmaster in our last visit there. On that beautifully sunny day in May 2006, in
order to exorcise any bad images and sad memories, I took a photo of my two sisters
on the back steps of the beautifully restored old school, overlooking the yard
where, over half a century ago, I stood with other children in fear with the
German guns pointing at us.
Another
memorable event of my childhood is a tragic one and it happened in November of
1944. All three of my siblings
remembered it in the tapes I made in 1986, as all of them happened to be in
Ritini at that time. I remember I was
playing with some neighborhood children in my grand father’s garden beside our
house. Children came to our house often
to play with me. I liked to think then that they came because they liked me,
but later I realized that it may have been also because my mother would cut
thick slices of bread, spread over them a little oil and salt or sugar with
cinnamon, and distribute them to all of us, often with a handful of dry
raisins. On that day we suddenly heard
the distinctive noise of machine guns, not too close but close enough to be
clearly heard in the stillness of the mountain air. Then, looking up towards the mountains, we
saw smoke. Everyone could tell that it
came from the village of Elatohori (‘Village of the Tall Pines’), the next
village up from ours, about ten kilometers away.
People feared
the worst, and several men started going up the road to see what happened. Many of us children did too, and we were
about a third of the way up when a man came down agitated bearing the dreaded
news: the Germans had come from the other side of the mountain, not through the
rough and narrow road that linked more directly the town of Katerini to our
village, and that was the reason why we didn’t know about their coming. They rounded up everyone in Elatohori, older
people, women and children, as most adult males had already joined the Resistance
movement. Having found traces of
ammunition in the village school, and having interrogated the people of the
village without getting any information, they set the houses on fire and
ordered the small population to start marching down on the main road towards
our village. When they were on the road,
they opened fire on them. Most of them
were hit and fell on the ground, some were badly wounded, a few survived
miraculously because they could run away. The road was covered with blood, some
of the small children still alive and crying next to their mothers’
bodies. The Germans then left, moving up
to the next village, rather than down to ours...
When the news
reached us, we, the children, were told sternly to go back home. As soon as the Germans were out of sight,
people from our village went up to clear the road and bury the dead.
After the war,
Elatohori was rebuilt by a few survivors slightly lower on a ridge overlooking
the plains of Katerini. The old site
remained untouched, some walls of its stone houses still standing, ghosts with black
gaping holes in them. I saw them some
forty years later, in the seventies and even eighties, still in that same
condition. The people who returned
didn’t want to live there, but perhaps they didn’t want to forget too soon
either. So they left things untouched in
the old village for several decades. It
probably takes at least that long for wounds to heal. Nearly half a century later the growth of the
new village and the more recent construction of a ski station on the
neighboring slopes helped to revive the old village. When feasible, the old houses are being
rebuilt more or less as they were. A few
small guest houses have opened, built in the local style with stone walls, wood
floors and open fireplaces. The old school
is also restored and has become a picturesque restaurant run by the grandson of
one of the villagers. The old Elatohori
is now visited by tourists, mostly Greeks, who may or may not know about the
past tragic events. Most of them come
to spend a day away from the city looking for a quaint old village and a good
restaurant. But the attentive visitor
will notice a modest and somewhat worn marble memorial on the side of the road
with a long list of names carved on it.
They are the names of the people who lay on the road, one day some sixty-five
years ago (27 November 1944), near that very spot.
I also remember,
when our village would be alerted that the Germans were coming, how my grandfather
would put me on his shoulders so that the family could move faster. He would take us to a secret hideout he had
made outside the village, under a big rock near our orchard, camouflaged with
branches and leaves. My brother Stefanos
had an even clearer memory of that hideout and he described it in detail in one
of the tapes. He stayed there for a while
with two other young men who were cousins, Takis and Alekos. They needed to hide because Takis’ father, a
former Major in the Greek army, was a well-known leader in the Resistance
movement. The two young men first stayed
in our house in the village but with the fear of the German raids they went to stay
in the hideout for more safety. The
harboring of these two young men was later to become part of the accusations
accumulated against my father.
During the raids
our family would hide there with some food and blankets for sleeping through the
night, until the word went around that the Germans had left. For some reason our
village was never burnt and there were no mass executions. In fact, the case of our father was a unique
one in Ritini. No one else from the
village was arrested by the Gestapo, taken to a prison camp and executed. The rumor went around that our village was
spared because the mayor of the village was friendly with the Germans, and because
a couple of other men, prominent in the village, gave information on guerilla
moves and collaborated in various ways with the Gestapo. The enemy troops that came to our village seemed
to be content with taking anything they could find in the way of food: chickens,
goats, sheep, pigs, flour, corn, wheat, dried beans, onions, even fruit and
vegetables.
On that subject,
there is one incident that I can never forget.
Once, when the Germans came and we were still in the village, I saw a
young German soldier drag a screaming pig up the hill near our house, towards
the village square where their truck had stopped. It was quite funny to see him sweating and
probably swearing, trying to get this fat but unwilling pig to move. It sat on its short hind legs, resisting and
letting out shrill sounds as if it was being slaughtered. I remember being proud of it, thinking “even
the pig is resisting”! The pig belonged to our relatives next door. Ours was a two-storey house, under one roof
but with two separate entrances, built by my grandfather who had brought money
from his years of work in America. He
was helped by his younger brother, Nikolas, to select and carry the stones and
the wood necessary for its construction.
His and our family shared the house. I knew this pig well because I watched it over
the fence being fed and grow fat in our relatives’ back yard. It was white with black patches all over, or
black with white patches. I am not so
sure now which color was the dominant one, but it was definitely black and
white. As far as I remember, we never
fattened a pig ourselves, because by the time I was born we no longer lived in
the village, except for summers. But
almost every other house in the village would have one, if they could afford to
get a little one and if they had enough food and leftovers to feed it. The families would fatten the pig and
slaughter it before Christmas to have meat for the holidays and salted fat to
be used for cooking for the rest of the winter.
To come back to
the pig scene: it was heartbreaking to see my old auntie following the German
and her pig, begging him not to take it away, explaining that it was food for
the whole family for the winter months, talking, talking, without him
understanding a word. Soon she was on
her knees, dragging herself on the dusty road behind the German soldier and her
screaming pig, but to no avail. He kept
going ignoring her, screaming on top of his voice, and so the Greek black-and-white
pig met its fate in the hands of the Germans. Later, thinking about the scene, I
was surprised that my auntie wasn’t shot.
There were probably strict orders. And I continue to wonder why I can
remember so clearly the pig scene, and so many other details, but not my father
teaching me to read and write...
Both my sisters and
my brother remember that our parents gave willingly from the provisions they had
brought with them. They also gave from those
my father bought when he went down to the town of Katerini to collect his
salary. Women of the village would come to our mother with a couple of eggs,
some goat’s milk, or sometimes nothing if they were too poor, asking for some
flour to make a little bread, for a cup of oil to stir in with the vegetables,
or ‘for the vigil light’ as they would say.
Other things in demand were a little sugar, coffee, soap, or aspirin for
fever and any other medicine in my father’s medicine cabinet. Glykeria always gave. In the afternoons, she
would cut slices of bread for the neighborhood children who came to play with
me. Our father resumed not only his
duties as a teacher when schools were allowed to reopen in 1941-42, but also
those of ‘doctor’ in the village. Nothing much had changed since he had left
Ritini. The poorest of the village, the widows and orphans, found again their
protector. And the others, the envious, kept a watchful eye on him.
It must have
been spring 1942 when, at the first national day celebration on March 25th, a day commemorating
the declaration of the Greek revolution in 1821 against the Turks, our father
felt he had to honor the Greek national heroes as it was customary – and still
is in Greek schools today -- with a patriotic speech and a school parade. But he also felt he had to include in his
address a message about the present occupation of Greece
But he was
wrong. This speech was reported to the
Gestapo in Katerini. Eventually it
became part of the accusations accumulated against him. Someone in the village who was collaborating
with the enemy either out of fear or out of desire for power, and who was
consumed by an old envy rekindled by the teacher’s presence in the village,
took the opportunity to do him harm. Other
more significant accusations were also added: harboring partisan’s relatives
and Allied soldiers.
The teacher was
47-48 years old, father of four children and Head of a school full of children
who needed him. He was past the stage of
taking up arms and he considered it his duty to stay and teach. He decided however not only to help the
village people but also to contribute to the fight for freedom by helping as
much as he could those active in the Resistance movement. Some Allied soldiers (British, Australians,
New Zealanders), mostly escapees from prison camps or from trains transporting
them to prison camps within and out of Greece, found themselves in the region
of Mount Olympus and the mountain range called Pieria just above Ritini. Hunted down by the Germans, they needed
shelter and food, at least for a while, until they could find a way to leave
the country. The word went around
quickly that the schoolteacher of Ritini would open his door to them.
Progressively, several of them were sheltered in our home, although our father
knew exactly what punishment awaited him and his family if Allied soldiers were
discovered: as a rule, execution on the spot.
The teacher’s
harboring Allied soldiers, giving hospitality to the two young men related to a
leader in the Resistance movement, and that speech during the 25th
of March school celebration openly condemning the occupational forces and
praising the pursuit of freedom, all that put together made enough of a case to
the Gestapo in Katerini. These were just
accusations; there was no tangible evidence, just the word of someone from the
village. But that was enough. The Germans were becoming increasingly nervous
about the British intervention in Greece
During the
summer of 1943 the whole family was up at the village. The academic year was over and Eleni had
already finished her second year at the University. Xanthoula had just finished high school and
was also planning to enter the University.
Go to 10. "Ioannis Papodopoulos imprisoned & executed" blog.
Go to 10. "Ioannis Papodopoulos imprisoned & executed" blog.
