Katerini Liberated but ....
To pick up again
the thread of the story: the long-awaited liberation finally came nine months
after our father’s execution. In the
early part of 1944, the Germans stepped up operations in the area of Mount Olympus Germany
The official date of the liberation of our
little town Katerini is recorded as the 25th of October 1944, and
our family was there on that important occasion. According to accounts made by Captain
Kikitsas in his memoirs, a 516-page book entitled National Resistance in Macedonia, 1941-1944, published in Athens in
1978, and by the well-known historian of Katerini Savvas Kantartzis (Memoirs, vol. VII, published in Katerini
in 1984), the Germans had already started days before destroying various
installations, such as a small airport outside Katerini’s north side. They started burning records and files –
among them probably all the Gestapo files they had accumulated over the last
three years. By the 23rd and
24th October they had abandoned the town and had gathered around the
local train station. Further German divisions
retreating from Thessaly, the area south of Mount Olympus, and moving towards
the north also gathered there, some 6,000 of them with light as well as armored
tanks and mortars. Many of them were
involved in the last big battle of Kilkis, outside Thessaloniki.
It was on the 25th
of October that the 10th Division of ELAS, by now a full army of the
Resistance, marched in through the main street of Katerini under a swiftly
raised wooden arch of triumph just before the town’s square. Xanthoula remembers that day, as she had come
to Katerini for the event. She was in
the youth resistance movement EPON and was one of the young leaders chosen to
say a few words of welcome to ELAS from the balcony of a house overlooking the
square. People were crying with tears of
joy, singing the Easter hymn “Hristos Anesti” (“Christ is Risen”), and shouting
“Kali Anastasi” (“Happy Resurrection”) and “Zito I Eleftheria” (“Long Live
Freedom”). The town’s marching band was playing
a particular march which is still played during military parades in
Greece. When I hear it, I am to this day
overcome by an uncontrollable urge to weep.
At the age of 73, I still can’t witness a military parade in Greece
After the
official end of WWII in 1945, when my sisters were in Thessaloniki and the rest
of us still lived in Katerini, the government of Great Britain gave our family
a certificate signed by Commander Alexander of the Allied Forces. It expresses gratitude for offering
assistance to the soldiers of the Commonwealth in time of war. That was the time when Xanthoula went back to
the prison of Pavlou Mela to get proof that our father had been held there and
executed, and it was then that she spoke with Mr. Glastras, the prison warden. In the last months of her studies for the
Teachers’ certificate, Xanthoula remembers having to borrow from a friend a
better dress and a handbag, an accessory she didn’t possess, to present herself
to the British Consulate in Thessaloniki in order to receive the Certificate of
Honor. This piece of paper, now in my
hands, reads as follows:
This certificate
is awarded to Ioannis Papadopoulos (deceased),
son of Stefanos Papadopoulos, as a token of gratitude for and appreciation of
the help given to the Sailors, Soldiers and Airmen of the British Commonwealth
of Nations, which enabled them to escape from, or evade capture by the enemy.
H.R. Alexander
Field-Marshal
Supreme Allied
Commander
Mediterranean
Theatre
1939-1945
This recognition
was of some satisfaction to the family and contributed to the feeling that the
death of our father had meaning. The
certificate was followed, sometime in early 1947, by a monetary compensation of
eighty gold sovereigns. Money can’t pay
for the loss of life, but I must recognize the importance of that money which
was earned with my father’s blood. It served the family well: it helped us
settle in Thessaloniki and it paid for the first year of my education in one of
the best private high schools run by French nuns. Much more importantly, it helped save Eleni’s
life a year later. Otherwise, the post-war years were very difficult, as a new
period of horror and misery opened. Another
story should be written about that period, for example the full story of our
elder sister Eleni, who was the central figure in a script of further agony for
the family. I will mention here briefly some
of the events that followed only to describe the conditions under which
Xanthoula lived and how these conditions affected her decision to leave Greece.
As I mentioned
earlier, leaving the rest of the family in Katerini was, for my sisters, a
temporary solution. All the time we were
separated, from early 1944 until mid-1946, their dream was to unite the
family. They came to visit us a few
times, but there was no question of them returning to live in Katerini. Too many bad things had happened to us both in
the village and in that small town.
Also, they had made good friends at the YWCA and in their student
environment during the last two-three years, friends who had stood by them
during the ordeal of our father. At the
time of the liberation we still had a small house in Katerini but they both
felt that the anonymity of the bigger city was a good thing for the family. Mother and grandfather agreed. There would also be more work opportunities
for them in Thessaloniki. Other good
reasons were that Stefanos was soon finishing high school and would be going to
the University, and soon I would follow with my own school needs. It made good
sense for all of us to live in the bigger city.
But the immediate priority was for the girls to finish their studies, and
then find the appropriate moment to relocate us. For the time being, the two sisters were
facing many daily problems of survival as they were trying to finish their
studies and find work.
This was
achieved by summer 1945. Xanthoula had received her teacher’s diploma by then and
submitted her papers for a teaching position in the State system while looking
for a job, any job. Eleni was also looking for a job at the same
time. At the end of the academic year
1944-1945, she had taken all of the necessary courses for her degree in Classics
and History but had not yet completed her final exams. Those days in Greece getting a University
degree involved long and difficult final comprehensive exams on all the
subjects students had taken during their four years of study. Eleni still had a lot of studying ahead of
her to obtain her degree, but she could do it in her own time since there was
no compulsory attendance. She was able
to find a full-time job as a cashier and book keeper in one of the most central
shops in Thessaloniki Thessaloniki
There was little
that was actually ours in uncle’s house in Katerini in the way of furniture and
other household items, so it was the house money again that was used to buy the
necessary furniture for our installation in Thessaloniki
We also acquired
a few pieces of furniture that were fairly ornate: a sofa, two armchairs and a
cabinet with a glass front. The sofa and
armchairs were covered in green and gold brocade fabric. I was very taken by them, spent time admiring
them, not daring to go and sit there. Not that anyone stopped me. I just felt they were too good for me to sit
on. It was our best furniture in the
small living room, for guests. My sisters bought these pieces from the young
man, Takis, who had stayed for a while with us up in the village. He and his cousin Alekos were hiding from the
Germans because of his father being in the Resistance. Captain Vouros – his real name was Thomas
Tselefis -- had come down from the mountains to Thessaloniki Thessaloniki Thessaloniki
Takis lived with
us for nearly two years, but late in 1947 he found out that he had contracted
tuberculosis. There was still not much
that could be done about TB in Greece during that post-war period. It was about then that news broke out with
the discovery of a new therapy for TB with Streptomycin. Using some of the
British gold sovereigns, my sisters found a way to order from France a series
of Streptomycin injections which unfortunately arrived too late. Takis, having been told that he was ill with
TB, an almost certain death sentence at the time, and having found out that his
own mother was still alive in a small village of northwestern Greece, went to be with her for the few months that were
left to him. When he was little, he had
been told by his father that she had died many years ago. We were all very fond
of him, he was like a brother to me, and we all grieved when he died. My mother grieved the most. We were left with the Streptomycin injections which
were finally given to me, as it turned out that I was infected and had the
beginning stages of TB myself. I don’t
remember exactly how many there were, but the process seemed interminable to
me. I had to go to a pharmacy in the center of the city where the injections
were kept and where the pharmacist, a friend of both my sisters, gave me those
injections free of charge.
But I am again
ahead of myself and need to go back to the main events.
Having both
finished attending school, having found jobs that were bringing in some income,
and having reunited the family, the next priority for my sisters was to pursue
the matter of our father’s pension. His
widow and two of his children, my brother Stefanos and I, still under
twenty-one years old, were entitled to a teacher State pension. At that time,
such matters took much longer because public services had been interrupted by
the Occupation. Xanthoula remembers that
the pension which sustained our family, keeping it above poverty level, didn’t
come until three or four years after father’s execution, sometime during 1947-48. Eventually, one thousand and two hundred
drachmas would be paid to my mother every month, and that meant that at least
we wouldn’t be reduced to starvation.
Anything my sisters could earn was still necessary for the rest, such as
paying rent, electricity, for clothing, shoes and so on. The money from the sale of the house had by
now been exhausted. Without thinking, I
recently asked Xanthoula why she and Eleni didn’t buy a little place for us
with the money they got from selling the house, so we would have a roof over
our head. She answered that had they
done that we wouldn’t have had any food to put on the table for nearly two
years, and then went on to explain everything that the house money had paid
for. The same thing happened with the
eighty gold sovereigns from the British government. Again, we could not buy with that money a
place in which to live for it was also needed to supplement our daily existence,
especially when my two sisters were not working. What was left of it was used to save Eleni’s
life in 1948.
Eleni and
Xanthoula both had jobs, father’s pension was approved, and mother now
collected a small but regular sum every month.
We were able to pay the rent and managed with careful spending to have
food on the table for us and for friends in need, mostly students living away
from home. Upon finishing primary school
in 1947, I was sent to the best private high school in town, the Saint Vincent
de Paul French school run by Catholic nuns.
It cost a gold sovereign per month – a fee that would have been
impossible for us if it were not for the money that we were given by the
British government. I was also enrolled
at the Conservatorium for violin lessons.
My sisters felt that I had missed out on a lot of things living in the
village through the war years and wanted me to have the best education
available. Growing up in a remote
village and not having gone to school at all during the occupation years, in 1947,
I found myself going to a school for privileged young girls and leaning a
foreign language. I remember feeling out
of place at the beginning, but I soon got used to it.
Things then seemed
to go well both in the country and in the family, but only on the surface. When
the euphoria of the liberation had subsided, the political climate changed
dramatically within a few months, leading Greece into one of the darkest hours
in its modern history, the civil war. It
saw the rise of another guerilla movement and perpetuated the devastation of
the country for several more years. What
was to follow for the next four years or so was more battles, more bloodshed,
more arrests, more interrogations, more beatings, more imprisonments, more
executions... It was the saddest time in
our lives, in some ways much worse than the German occupation. This time Greeks were persecuting and killing
their brothers and sisters. Much has been written by modern historians about
the Greek civil war, and everyone knows how it has taken the country all this
time to recover from its consequences.
But this is not the time or the place to explain what happened or take
sides. As I have said earlier while
telling Bert’s story, in time of war atrocities are committed by all
sides. I will only mention here how the
civil war affected our family, how it impacted Xanthoula’s life in particular, and
how it contributed to her leaving war-torn Greece
for a better life in Australia
The fact is that,
under an extreme right-wing government which came to power after bloody events
too many and too complex to even outline here, we were branded as ‘Communists’ because our father had been killed by
the Germans. We, and thousands of others
like us, as well as other liberally-minded citizens like students and
intellectuals became the target of the newly established right-wing government. It is sad for me to say this as I still live
in America, a country which has been very good to me: the extreme right-wing
government came to power in Greece with the help of the Americans who were not
fully informed. In their excessive fear
of Communism, they gave their support to extreme right wing elements in Greece Athens and Thessaloniki
The new government
moved swiftly to silence and marginalize a large segment of the population, most
of those who had fought to liberate Greece from the occupying forces. Those who were likely to oppose the
established authority because of their liberal ideas also became a target. Ironically and tragically at the same time, those
same measures were taken later by the Communist governments in countries like Czechoslovakia , East
Germany , Poland
At war’s end, in
countries like France ,
members of the Resistance were awarded medals, while in Greece Greece
In this climate
of political unrest and persecution, the two sisters waited for a teaching
appointment in vain. It began to feel
like their father had died for nothing.
There was no freedom, there was no justice. People who should be honored and free were in
prison, those who should be in prison were often in power. The unfairness of it
all... Where were our Allies, the British?
They, more than any other nation, knew and understood what was happening. Until only a couple of years earlier, they
had helped organize the partisan groups, sent them food and arms, even fought
side by side with some of the people who were now in prison or hunted down over
the same mountains they had walked together not too long ago.
Go to 12. "Sister Eleni Imprisoned" Blog.
