Sister Elini Imprisoned
Eleni had
finished her studies but was still involved in student circles, still a member
of the organization called EAM, an underground organization of civilian resistance
which she had joined as a student during the Occupation. With the arrival of the family in which she
was seen as the head, also working full-time and studying for her comprehensive
exams, she had become less active, but still kept close company with some
active members. Full of enthusiasm and high ideals about freedom, justice,
equality, and so on, like many other young people, she could not but support freedom
of expression and human rights. Xanthoula,
still only around 19 years old, stayed with the youth movement, EPON. Our brother Stefanos, although not yet
seventeen years old and still in high school but a very articulate young man
and angry about the turn of events, started becoming active in the same
movement. Only ten years old when we
arrived in Thessaloniki in 1946, I spent the next couple of years listening to
heated but quietly spoken political discussions that took place behind
carefully closed windows and shutters in our home – the walls had ears, in those
days. Eleni’s and Xanthoula’s friends, bright and idealistic young people, some
of them still struggling to get their University degrees in a post-war Greece, would
come to our house in the evenings to sit and talk. Mother would bring out any food we had and
put it on the table, served with Greek mountain tea or coffee. Bread, olives, some feta cheese, yoghurt, a
bowl of bean or lentil soup, tomato and cucumber salad, desalted anchovies in
oil and vinegar – my brother’s favorite.
But one day in February
1948 some of these friends didn’t
come. They were arrested, and our sister
Eleni was among them. ‘Security’ had
picked her up from work. A new ordeal
started for us and for many other families, as we were trying to find out where
our sister was detained and how she was being treated. Everything was done under the utmost secrecy
in temporarily set up prisons, usually in dark basements of local police
stations. However, we soon found out where
she was and started taking food to her since they provided neither food nor
beds and bedding. February is a cold
month in northern Greece, and the place where she was held was a basement with
no windows. Eleni described it as a long
narrow hallway with a series of small cells on either side, with nothing but a
concrete floor, not even a wooden chair.
We were allowed to take her a thick hand-woven rug (in Greek called
‘Velentza’) that could serve as mattress and cover at the same time, as she
could roll herself in it. She still has
that red ‘Velentza’ carefully folded and stored. She says that it saved her
life.
Eleni was
twenty-five years old at that time. During
that bleak year of 1948, I was nearly thirteen years old and in my second year
of high school, the expensive high school where my sisters had decided to send
me in spite of the high cost. I remember
well the sequence of events for I was part of them. I also heard Eleni speak of her experiences in
prison after she came out and at various other times in later years. In 1986, I interviewed her especially about
the prison and military court episode. So
with all of that documentation and with Xanthoula’s as well as my own memories,
I believe I have an accurate account of what happened. This was an experience that profoundly
affected Xanthoula and was a major factor in her later decisions. It was at the
end of this dark episode that she decided to change her life. In the process of changing hers, she also
changed mine in a big way...
After she was
arrested, Eleni went through some harsh interrogation but physical pain was not
inflicted on her. She remembers only a
few slaps in the face. They wanted a confession about her involvement and wanted
her to give out names of people with whom she collaborated in ‘unlawful’
activities. She kept saying ‘I don’t know
anything, I don’t know anyone’. She told
us later, and also recalls in the tapes I have from the 1986 interviews, that the
worst experience for her was spending over a month in isolation, in a tiny
concrete cell, some nights without her rug. When the interrogator wanted to put
more pressure on her he would take her red rug away from her. Those nights seemed interminable, she says, not
being able to sit or lie down, in the freezing cold and in darkness. It was the time when she got bronchitis which
left her with a chronic cough, a cough that is revived even today in cold
weather. The cells had no light,
although electric light was on twenty-four hours a day but only outside the
cells in the long hallway where the guard stood or walked up and down. What saved her was that she was able to keep
awake doing mathematical exercises -- she was always good at math --, and the
fact that one of the guards, an older family man, took pity on her. On those nights when her rug was taken away,
he secretly took off and gave her his pullover.
He also kept talking with her during the night through the small window
on the top part of the door, to help her stay awake and not lie down on the
concrete floor. She remembers to this
day with gratitude his voice repeating to her ‘don’t lie down’ ‘don’t lie
down’, and giving her little quizzes that he was giving to his children just to
keep her awake. In that way he had
become her guardian angel.
There is a
little sequel to this unusual friendship: after the prison and the trial ordeals
were over, between 1949 and 1952, before Eleni was finally given a teaching
position in Katerini and had to leave Thessaloniki and us, she always made sure
to visit a butcher in the central market of Thessaloniki whether we were buying
meat or not. After Xanthoula left in
1950, I used to go shopping with her, and I finally asked her why we always
went to that particular butcher. She
smiled and told me that he was the now retired policeman who had been so good
to her during her isolation and interrogation time.
During the time
of the interrogations we weren’t allowed to see her and we found out nothing
about the reason for her imprisonment until the newspaper ‘Ellinikos Vorras’
(‘The Greek North’) published, on the 26th
of September 1948, the names of fifty-six new “suspected terrorists” to be tried by a military court in
Thessaloniki. Our sister’s name was among
them. Our hopes that she would be released
were dashed and we felt even more anxiety since we already knew how easily the
military courts were now dispensing the death sentence.
Once charges had
been made and the date of the trial had been fixed, while waiting for the trial
to begin, we were allowed to ‘visit’ her and give her clothing and food. I wrote the word in quotation marks, because the
way it was done it didn’t deserve the word ‘visit’. The prison was an old former tobacco storage red
brick building in one of the upper suburbs of Thessaloniki, a kind of
industrial area. It was too far for mother
and grandfather to walk there, but Xanthoula remembers going once and Stefanos a
couple of times. It was mostly I who
visited Eleni and took her food and clean clothes twice a week. With Eleni’s arrest, it was best for Xanthoula
to remain as invisible as possible. The
same applied to Stefanos, by now 19 years old and a University student himself,
already known as a fiery speaker during the youth organization’s secret
meetings. At thirteen I was too young to
be arrested for ‘terrorist’ activities, although I had done my share: I
remember on a couple of occasions, when Eleni felt she was being followed, that
I was sent to meet someone at the little park opposite the Aristotle University,
under the still standing white marble statue of a national hero of the
revolution against the Turks. I was to
pick up some money collected by students to pay for paper and printing expenses
for what the ‘Security’ had labeled ‘subversive’ literature.
As for the
‘visit’ to see Eleni, I remember going up a dark and steep staircase whose entrance
was guarded on either side by a policeman.
For years after that, the sight of the khaki green uniform gave me heart
palpitations. I was pushed up by people in
a hurry to catch a glimpse of their relative or friend in the large barn-like
room behind two rows of thick bars. One
would expect that the people behind them were dangerous criminals. The noise
and the shouting were so loud that I couldn’t exchange any words with my sister.
We just looked at each other and tried to smile. I would give to the guards the basket or a
pot with food, a small parcel with clothes, or whatever else mother could send,
with Eleni’s name written on a small piece of paper, and after having stood
there for a while smiling at each other I would go down the dark stairs again. I did this after school about twice a week
when ‘visiting’ times would permit. Including
the trial, Eleni was in prison for about ten months.
The trial was set
for the month of October. In the
meantime, a few months after she was arrested, Eleni sent word for Xanthoula to
leave Thessaloniki and hide. She had
heard in the prison that the ‘Security’ forces were now cracking down on the
younger organizations as well and wanted her younger sister to go into
hiding. Xanthoula remembers it was
already summertime. In the tapes made in 1986, she recounts how Eleni got the
message to us – a detail I had forgotten.
When returning a small pot in which I had taken some food to Eleni, she
put in a small piece of paper pierced repeatedly with a pin to form two words:
“Leave Thessaloniki”. The little piece
of paper went unnoticed in the unwashed pot. The prisoners were given water to drink but
there was none to wash pots and pans or clothes. The guards knew that and didn’t bother opening
the pots, although they always checked the clothes.
Xanthoula had lost
her job anyway. Previously she had
worked as a cashier at the ‘Central’ store replacing Eleni for several months
in 1946, while Eleni was studying for and taking her comprehensive exams. When
Eleni finished her exams, she returned to the store and Xanthoula returned to
her part-time job at the lawyer’s office.
She also supplemented her income with private lessons to the children of
the four partners who owned the store. After Eleni was arrested in February 1948,
Xanthoula took over the full-time job as a cashier and book keeper at the store
and, to make up for the income Eleni was no longer bringing in, she continued
the private lessons to the children of the owners. She worked about 12 hours a day for a while
to help the family make ends meet. The
owners of the store liked both Eleni and Xanthoula and had the highest regard for
them. Because of their seriousness,
their honesty and hard work, they trusted them completely with their books and
their money. But they were now afraid
that there would be reprisals against themselves in some form or other for
employing the sister of someone who was in prison and was being tried by the
military court. They themselves were
reputed to have leftist ideas and couldn’t afford taking any further
risks. With many apologies they asked
Xanthoula to leave. So as soon as Xanthoula got the secret message sent by
Eleni, she was free to pack quickly a small bag and leave for Athens to stay
with Uncle Elias’ family. The rest of us
would manage as best we could.
Our brother Stefanos
was now twenty years old and a University student. He looked for work and found a job in a truck depot managing the
small dusty office where he organized schedules making sure that the right load
went on to the right truck destined for the right place. This place was not too far from my school. So sometimes after classes, when I felt
especially forlorn, I would walk by the door of that always crowded office,
full of noise and smoke, hoping to catch a glimpse of my brother. He was always very busy, either on the phone
or talking to drivers, but he always gave me a nod and a smile as I stood
outside for a few minutes. I would then
continue to go home either to start immediately on my homework or, if it was a
visiting day, to pick up the basket prepared by mother and walk to the prison.
My brother’s studies at the University were pretty much suspended, as there was
no time for him to attend classes during the day. But he went back to them later and finished
with high honors, which led him to do a doctorate in Modern Greek History at
the University of Thessaloniki and eventually become a well-known and respected
professor and scholar.
For this period,
when absolutely necessary, the family used a gold sovereign to supplement
mother’s monthly pension. I was to begin
my second year of high school in September 1948, but the monthly fee of one
gold sovereign a month now looked impossible for us with neither of my sisters
working. The decision was made that I should attend the free public high school
so Xanthoula went to talk to the nuns before she left for Athens. Fortunately for me, the nuns offered to keep
me for free. It helped that I was at the
top of my class in my first year there.
The French school had no formal policy of awarding scholarships so the
arrangement had to be a secret between us.
I didn’t have to perform that highly to stay in the school, but the
nuns’ generosity and the obligation I felt towards them were the major factors
in my becoming the top student in my class for the rest of my high school
years, until I was eighteen. From then
on this pattern was set in my life, and in retrospect, I sometimes think that
excelling in my studies had more to do with a sense of pride and obligation
than with anything else.
The ordeal of
the trial started in October, and we followed anxiously day-by-day the reports
in the newspapers. It lasted about a
week or so. The military courts
expedited the proceedings although there were fifty-six people involved only in
this one trial. They were all supposed
to be members of the organization EAM. There were no lengthy defenses put forward and
some of the people didn’t even have a lawyer.
They had to say a few words in their own defense, if they could, if not
they were judged on the case file that had been compiled against them and on
what the prosecutor presented to the court.
None of us could attend the court proceedings which were held in the
mornings. Stefanos was working, I was at school until three in the afternoon,
and Xanthoula was in Athens
It also helped
that most of our gold sovereigns went to hire the best lawyer we could find in Thessaloniki
Eleni had said
all along that she didn’t know anyone in the EAM organization, and all but one
of the others in the group had already denied knowing her. They were telling the truth. In fact they didn’t know her. In these organizations which had become
‘underground’ no one knew everyone involved.
They simply had one or two contacts.
Some of them, Eleni still remembers, were simple people and weren’t even
members of EAM. Many people were shocked
by a government that hunted down the very people who had fought for the
liberation of Greece and by practices that ignored the most basic democratic
values. So even without being deeply
involved, they helped raise small sums of money to be used for the activities
of the organization. They were never
involved in anything that had to do with arms or arm supplies to the guerilla
movement or with any real sabotage. EAM was
a strictly civilian organization. The
one person in the group who was a leading member and who knew Eleni, Giorgos
Mertzios, was a fellow-student and close friend who came often to our house and
with whom Eleni spent months studying for their final exams. Giorgos would rather die than say anything to
endanger Eleni’s life. And die he did.
He was one of those who were sentenced to death and executed. A beautiful human being, Giorgos had become
like a member of our family and I remember him well. I remember his smiling
face surrounded by light brown curly hair, his warm bright eyes and his soft
melodic voice. He was always attentive and tender towards me and took an
interest in my schooling. We all sensed
that he loved Eleni, but she says that he never spoke of it, they were just
devoted friends. Those were difficult
times and many young people like them were deeply committed to ideals such as
freedom of speech and human rights. Those were powerful, more collective bonds
that seemed to transcend personal intimacy. Also Greek culture, which has changed
dramatically within fifty years, didn’t encourage easy and passing intimate
relationships. So young people gave more time to friendships and comradeship
but were nevertheless ready to die for each other.
Following the
trial and then waiting for the verdict was a traumatic experience for us. Earlier during the interrogations a young
girl, Emilia, under stress and fear for her life had said that she recognized
Eleni as a member of the organization. While
they were all detained together in the tobacco storage building waiting for the
trial she asked Eleni to forgive her.
She confessed that during one of Eleni’s interrogations, they had hidden
her behind a curtain so that she could see Eleni and identify her. She admitted that in a moment of weakness and
fear she gave in. But on the day of the trial she, like the others, said that
she really didn’t know Eleni, and that she only said she knew her to avoid
being thrown back in the isolation cell and being further interrogated. Eleni says that indeed she didn’t know this
young girl either. There were clearly grounds for ‘reasonable doubt’, argued
the lawyer, who also pointed out that Eleni was now the head of an orphaned family
and shouldn’t be convicted on unfounded suspicions.
At long last the
verdict was announced: ten out of the group, including our good friend Giorgos
Mertzios, were sentenced to death and others to prison sentences of various
lengths. Eleni was among the few who
were acquitted and were going to be set free shortly. We never found out what the actual vote was,
whether it was unanimous or not. It
would have had to be at least three out of five in her favor in order to be
acquitted.
It was a great
relief for the family amidst our sadness and shock about the death
sentences. We prepared to receive Eleni
back home, as well as Xanthoula. She had
read the news in Athens and quickly reserved a passage on a boat from Piraeus
to Thessaloniki. But our hopes for a
family reunion were dashed. By the time
Xanthoula found a boat and arrived at the port of Thessaloniki, instead of
Eleni she saw grandfather waiting for her at the pier. Within a few days of her release Eleni was
arrested again, not by the ‘Security’ but by the local police station. The narrow-minded and overzealous Chief of
the neighborhood police station believed that anyone who had been accused and was
tried in a military court, even if they were acquitted, presented some threat
and it was safer to have them deported. Eleni
was a liability for him, he would have to spend resources which he didn’t have
-- someone to keep an eye on her, follow her to see with whom she was keeping
company, and so on. He had so much
following and spying to do on new people that he thought it would be simpler to
send her off to one of these camps set up on desert islands scattered throughout
the Aegean Sea.
Nearly a month
went by since Eleni’s new arrest and nothing happened. The Chief was compiling information to make a
case for her deportation. Eleni then
decided to take a more active stance: she started protesting and asking the
guards to take her to their superior. She
finally succeeded. She remembers defending
boldly her position: she had gone through a long interrogation, a long detention
and a military court trial, but she was acquitted of all charges. She asked that she be given the chance to be
a useful citizen, to put her studies to use and exercise her profession, which
was to teach, rather than be rendered useless in a camp full of other people
who were also rendered useless through isolation from the rest of society. She remembers that she overcame her fear and
spoke with fire and persuasion. It seems
that she was able to convince the Chief of the police station, and he set her free.
That event also
has a curious sequel: in later years, when my brother had finished his doctoral
degree and was teaching at the Aristotle University, he mentored a young
student who became a fervent admirer of his and went into an academic career
himself through my brother’s help and encouragement. This young man turned out to be the son of
the Chief of the local police station who had arrested Eleni and then had set
her free.
With Eleni free
from the second imprisonment, it looked as though we could finally have a
family reunion and some sort of Christmas and New Year’s celebration. But it was hard to celebrate with close
friends waiting to be executed. Eleni
recalls in the tapes of 1986 that in a desperate attempt to save our friend
Giorgos’ life, mother handed over the last few gold sovereigns to another
lawyer, the one in whose office Xanthoula had worked previously. He made promises that he would go to Athens
That was the
last time our sister Eleni saw the inside of a prison. But her personal odyssey was not over yet. Nearly
twenty years later, in 1967, another black chapter opened in the modern history
of Greece: a military coup took place and Greeks suffered the seven-year-long
reign of a military junta in Greece (1967-1974). Based on her past ‘criminal record’, Eleni was
dismissed from her position as a teacher in the state high school in Katerini,
but at least she wasn’t put to prison or sent to a desert island. Her husband, Takis Dimitriou, a veteran of
WWII who had fought on the Albanian border as an officer in the Greek army, and
had also fought as a partisan until the end of the war, was sent to a desert
island after the new government came to power.
Eventually he was released.
He had married
Eleni in 1951, followed her to Katerini when she was finally appointed there to
teach in the boys’ high school, finished his interrupted degree in mathematics
at the University of Thessaloniki, and eventually made a name for himself as a
mathematics teacher. After much hard
work, he had opened a night school where working boys could do their high
school studies at night after work. As
soon as the Greek Generals took over, the ‘Security’ was revived and once again
it ruled over people’s lives. Eleni’s
husband was forbidden to teach or even approach physically his school. He was ostracized from his own home and
school in Katerini. In despair, he retreated
to his village home, about five kilometers away. There he tried to occupy himself with his
garden and fruit trees, but one day in 1969 he died suddenly barely fifty years
old, sitting under a tree in his garden. Everyone who knew him felt he died of a broken
heart. Eleni was left alone to survive with
no visible income and keep her two children alive and safe. It was the time when we all had to help
financially, Xanthoula and I from overseas, and our brother Stefanos from
within Greece. She ultimately found a
way of getting some income from the school, which was run by a family friend,
and who paid Eleni a percentage of the fees collected. In 1974, at the end of the military
dictatorship, Eleni was reinstated, taught for several more years, and finally
retired with the rank of High School Principal.
She is widely respected and revered by her former students in the town
of Katerini where she still lives. Her
spirit remains strong and undaunted, she is a superior role model for me, other
people in the family and beyond. In
2006, at the age of 84, together with other old students, she was awarded a
medal by the Chancellor of the University of Thessaloniki in recognition of her
contribution to the Resistance movement during the war and for upholding the
principles of democracy during the civil war and the military dictatorship. Xanthoula was present for that significant
and moving event.
Eleni’s own
story deserves special attention, but I summed it up quickly here as it is
closely related to Xanthoula’s, and that makes the bond between them
indissoluble.
Back in November
1948, Eleni’s release from prison returned our family life to a more normal
course. Stefanos continued working with
the truck depot, trying to fit in taking a course here and there at the
University. I continued to do well at the French school and practiced the
violin every day. The two sisters looked
again for jobs. Xanthoula found a job in
a men’s ready-to-wear clothing store as a cashier and book keeper and Eleni
also found work as a cashier and book keeper in a wholesale store that sold
china and glassware. It seemed that
their hard-earned degrees were not going to be put to use. The stigma of being considered a leftist
wasn’t going to be lifted easily under an extreme right-wing government and they
both waited for a teaching appointment in vain.
Towards the end
of 1949 we moved to another smaller and less expensive house in the higher and
older part of Thessaloniki, not far from the medieval walls that surrounded the
old city. The civil war was continuing,
and there were still political prisoners and every now and then trials and some
executions. The house in which we moved
was on the main road that led from the lower, newer part of the city and the
shopping district to the area behind the old walls, where most of the
executions took place. I still shudder
at the memory of hearing the noise of a truck laboring up the narrow and
cobbled street past our place, and the sound of voices singing well-known
partisan songs. I made the mistake of
asking why these people were singing so early in the morning. I was told reluctantly by my sister Eleni
that they were people who were taken to be executed behind the old walls. Now, sixty or so years later, there is a new
and thriving part of Thessaloniki behind those walls which have been repaired
and are maintained by the City as a monument.
It is full of cafes and restaurants as well as homes. There is a narrow park along the walls, and
in one corner of it now stands a small plaque in honor of those who fell there
during the late forties. I don’t know
how many people go to stand there in silence, but I and my two sisters did when
we went up there together in June 2006.
By 1950 the
military operations were successful in either annihilating the guerilla groups
or driving the survivors outside the borders of Greece into the Communist
countries – Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Russia. Their fate in those countries and their
ultimate return, at least for those who came back when eventually Greece opened
its doors to them, was to become another sad chapter in the history of modern
Greece.
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