George Weller, Chicago Daily News
DELPHI, SYMBOL OF CULTURE OF ANCIENTS, BROODS OVER DESOLATION WROUGHT BY WAR
Delphi, Greece—probably November, 1944
Delphi, pinned like a reddish polkadot tie on the grey throat of Mount Parnassus, has seen in the last eight years what no mountain village should be compelled to know. From these high cliffs, where the hawks wheel against the blue, falls the pure water of the spring where the Muses once drank. But it will take time to make these waters pure again. Four years of Royalist Fascism, followed by nearly four years of Nazi occupation, have left them defiled.
When the world thinks of Greece it thinks of the Acropolis. But this is an error. Every Greek city had its Acropolis, which was simply a defensive fort. But there was only one Delphi.
Delphi was the Geneva of the ancient world. Here came not only delegates of the warring Greek cities but also Persians, Sicilians and Egyptians, testifying to the unity which transcended materialistic politics and spilled over into the realm of spirit. Up these stiff, green slopes plenipotentiaries clambered in their chitons, not chiefly to consult the oracle, nor even to dicker politically, but to assert the unity of all the known nations.
Among their self-admitted obligations was writing an honest and objective political history of their wars, which shows that Delphi has a lesson for us today. Feeling the Muses' eyes looking down on them from the cold, grey peak above, they recognized duties transcending their boundaries.
The last time I visited Delphi was in 1932. Then, as now, the sharp, dank smell of the newly crushed olives of Amphissa came up from the green valley facing on the northern edge of the ever-blue Gulf of Corinth. Greece's great question was whether the fugitive industrialist Samuel Insull* would be surrendered to American justice. Only Roosevelt's first election blanketed this then all-important matter in the American news papers enough to permit the writer to absent himself two days from Athens.
This afternoon, as one sits by the oracle's deserted niche, the wind that sighs up the valley could tell bloody stories. What is now only the smell of olives smelled recently of smoke, and there were human hearts in the embers.
Some whim of the Nazis and Italians spared Delphi itself, and only a sole citizen here faced death. His executioners were Italian. They gave him a cigarette. While one engaged him in conversation, another put a bullet in the back of his head.
Our way to Delphi will be hard.
GREEKS GREATEST PRIDE: TOWN THAT
NEVER GAVE IN
Nazi Firing Squads Fail to Blot Out Kaisariani
Athens, Greece—November 2-4, 1944
Greece has between 700 and 1000 Lidices—obliterated villages where the barefoot inhabitants crouch in rags in the cold autumn rains, waiting for relief food which has not left the docks.
But Greece wants no one to forget it also has a Kaisariani, unique among hundreds of blackened communities. For Kaisariani is a village—actually, a suburb of Athens—which refused to become a Lidice. Alone among all the communities of the world which have seen their homes ripped apart by shells, this mortar-pocked, death-stricken community still survives, mutilated, but militarily as well as spiritually triumphant; living evidence that people will die to defend their homes.
Kaisariani is victorious proof that flesh and blood can be stronger here than artillery, heavy weapons and machine guns. On the eastern edge of Athens, where the barren knolls of the Hymettos, the honeyhive of Homer's time, rise brownish-grey above henhouse structures making up this community of former refugees from exchange populations of Asia Minor, spirit has triumphed over matter.
The Nazis, Greek Fascists and Fascist-led Greek police attacked this working-class suburb, this Athenian Brooklyn, time after time. Like Vienna's Karl Marxhof and Madrid's University City, it was shelled at point-blank range. At first uniformed assassins were able to fight their way into its pathetic streets which, due to poverty, have the same miniature quality as all Hoovervilles. They killed and burned, occasionally paused for rape and loot, and fought their way out. Captured defenders went to Reich-bound labor squads or, via hostage pools, to firing squads.
Kaisariani, which fought off forty-nine full-scale attacks, received a first sample of what it would soon suffer on April 23 this year. The village was suddenly surrounded by Nazis and Nazi-controlled police. Summoned to the square, 100 men were taken away to the prison at Goudi, to the hostage pool for a firing squad.
At 4 a.m. on May 1, in a city-wide attack on quarters inhabited by refugees from Asia Minor, the Germans assembled a force of about 10,000 men, mostly Nazis, and surrounded not only Kaisariani but also the suburbs of Byron and Katsipodi. A German general had been shot in Sparta, and also a major. The Nazis already had 190 Communists from Metaxas' political prison in Acro Nauplia, but required more hostages in order to make up the 200 they demanded as reprisal for their general's death. After getting them, they commenced the executions. As the trucks moved through Kaisariani to the firing range, the doomed men scribbled notes and tossed them to relatives—slips of paper now preserved in the village's shacks: “We die for liberty.” “Don't weep for us.” “We give our lives for Greece.”
Truckfuls of bleeding bodies—204 in all—were taken to the cemetery in the Piraeus suburb of New Kokkinia. Somewhere women found flowers and dipped them in the blood that ran in the gutters. It required four hours for the execution squads to finish their work. The Nazis had one further formal announcement: henceforward, women would be executed.
But Kaisariani never surrendered.
A sentry system was established which made it impossible for the raiders to enter the rim of shacks without facing spears of fire from doorways and rooftops. Finally, the raids became so costly to the enemy that their technique changed to a siege. Thus, where greater, better-armed and better-fed workmen's suburbs elsewhere in Europe succumbed, Kaisariani lived on and slowly became a fortress for the ELAS, or Communist-led guard, defending it.
In Kaisariani most houses have only one room. Sometimes there is a bed, sometimes only a mattress. Shacks are packed tight together: there are no gardens. Everyone lives by his wits. Rickets, tuberculosis, pneumonia and dysentery have been permanent residents ever since the 1923 exchange of populations with Turkey flooded Greece with non-assimilated, rootless families without rural training.
What it cost to Kaisariani to live instead of dying, to survive in its poverty instead of being destroyed, is visible in the eyes of ELAS militiamen standing by.
Their expression differs from that of their mothers and fathers. They are soldiers, men who know their arms. Back when dictator George Kondylis overthrew Greece's republic to install the monarchy with foreign support, these men knew nothing about streetfighting.
Now they know. Let any combination of interior forces or exterior nations try to bend Greece into a new totalitarianism, and they will need every gun their overseas backers can provide to take unconquered Kaisariani.
VILLAGE FEELS WRATH OF VENGEANCE AFTER AMBUSH BY PATRIOTS
Distomo, Greece—November 15, 1944
To reach the martyred village of Distomo, perched among the grey-cliffed lower shoulders of Parnassus, you must climb the mountain highway from Levadia.
Where the road forks, instead of going right toward Delphi, you turn left among the treeless hills below Parnassus, where icy winds play among the ravines and bearded shepherds with crooks follow the tinkling bells of the sheep and goats on the boulder-strewn slopes.
The Germans and Italians took the right fork to Arachova. In two years, they burned 173 homes in the upper and lower towns and shot 36 Greeks, including five women.
The Germans, on June 10, took the left road at the fork south toward Distomo and the village of Stiri a few miles beyond. Fifteen trucks full of Germans came from Levadia, thirty miles from Amphissa.
Before leaving the fork they tried their marksmanship and warmed their gun barrels on six persons working in fields nearby. They found it amusing to use a mortar as well as
a machine gun on this small game. The Germans decided to take twelve young shepherds and farmers as hostages to Distomo in case of attack by the Greek guerrillas.
About 1:45 on that day, forty-five truckloads of Germans arrived in Distomo. They parked in the lower of its two hillside squares, near the white-plastered schoolhouse. Sensing some such “retaliation” as had laid waste scores of villages between Levadia and Salonika, and eager to propitiate the dreaded SS, Distomo's people came running with cheese, eggs, wine and bread from their meager stores. The German commander was a Greek-speaking Gestapo officer named Teos, believed to be a captain.
Apparently the Germans did not intend general murder. Their mission in the village was to search for anti-Fascist guerrillas and to plunder.
Teos ordered the Distomites indoors and SS men went through the houses, taking the proffered food, wine, and blankets, and sheep rugs as well. Teos questioned the bearded Orthodox priest, Father Sotiris Zisis, whether any Andartes (guerrillas) were around. Zisis replied that a small band had departed earlier.
Reassured that he could lead a party of SS men along the road to Stiri without being attacked, Teos ordered two trucks loaded with about fifty SS men in plain clothes. Around noon the party set forth. It never reached Stiri. About three miles outside Distomo it was ambushed by the anti-Fascist, anti-royalist ELAS guerrillas.
The SS men pulled out arms hidden under the seats of the trucks and replied with fire. In the fusillade five Germans were killed. At Teos' order, the party turned back. Teos himself had a bad wound in the abdomen.
It was not until Teos died just before sunset that day that the horror began. The SS went straight to Father Zisis' house with tommy guns. They already had consulted him twice, and Zisis expected a third overture. Instead he was mowed down. His twelve-month-old son was shot, his wife wounded.
The fact that any of Distomo's 2060 population survived was because of an interval that ensued when twelve bound men, caught at the crossroads, were executed. While some Distomites fled into the hills in the dead of night, others, feeling that the Nazis had slaked their wrath by killing the priest's family and the hostages, hid in their homes. They thereby wrote their own death sentences.
HALF-ALIVE SURVIVORS TELL GRIM STORIES
Distomo, Greece—November 16, 1944
As you stand in the tiny square of this tragic Greek village, with smoldering-eyed people gathered around you, there emerges from the small white church the murdered Father Zisis' successor. He has with him a carefully-written, alphabetized list of persons slain by the Nazis. You ask Mayor Lathas to get his own list in order to make a comparison.
The priest's list has 223 names. The mayor's has seven more, who died of wounds in the improvised hospital up the lower valley.
Nobody has tried to count the wounded, because some may not survive the winter. Like 98 per cent of Greece's obliterated villages, Distomo has received neither food, shelter, nor medicine. So you visit sixty-year-old, wizened Yanoula Limouni, lying on a bedless floor beside a tiny charcoal fire. Her head is swathed in black cloth, and she looks like a Dürer drawing of pain. A German bullet went through her right cheek and cleanly emerged from her left, leaving a large hole. She is holding a dirty bandage against it, and when she tries to talk, her unmanageable jaws make her unintelligible.
This correspondent has a leather coat that resembles a German officer's. Yanoula's two-year-old grandson, shaven-headed, ragged, barelegged Angelo Nikalaou, recoils with a wild scream and runs to his thick-bearded father, George Nikalaou. Fearfully the child rejects candy offered by the dreaded stranger, but after being told repeatedly, “American, not German,” he accepts the sweet.
Angelo is motherless. His mother, Theoxoula Nikalaou, Yanoula's daughter, was tommy-gunned to death in that house with ten others, mostly women and children, while little Angelo huddled in the shadows.
The father sits Angelo on the floor and says: “What happened to mummy?” With a solemnity that wrenches the heart, Angelo bends his body over his knees and remains frozen thus. “And then?” prompts the father. Tiny Angelo, already huddled double, topples stiffly to the floor, whispering in his baby voice, “Eisi, kai etsi” (like this, and then like this).
You talk with grey-haired Angelis Papanghelis, who once had a bakery shop in Gary, Indiana, and later worked in the Congress Hotel in Chicago. He escaped by hiding in the cellar.
One Greek-American who died fighting was 53-year-old Athanassio Panourias, who came back to Distomo in 1928 after fifteen years in the United States. His aged father, in old-style shepherd dress, with a black cap, long white leggings, and short-skirted jacket, tells how Panourias, trapped in his house, drew his knife and got a tommy gun from one German. But two others wrested the knife from him, plunged it in his back and slit his throat.
The mayor shows you where two farmer cousins, 65-year-old Herakles Mikas and 55-year-old George Mikas, were found lying, their torsos slit lengthwise, their hands, stiff in death, attempting to hold in their vitals.
You climb the stairs to the adjacent offices of Judge Constantine Kritzopis and Miliades Kouroumbalis, government forester. From the balcony you can see the green cross over their graves in the yard.
Inside, bloodstains are still visible on the floor. The forester's 27-year-old wife was killed. His seven-year-old son, with a bullet wound in his leg, spent the night on the bodies of his father and mother.
The next room is where Judge Kritzopis' wife, 33-year-old Asteria Kritzopis, saved her girl of eight and boy of six by stuffing them under the bed. The German bullet which broke the lock is lodged in the door frame, and there are holes in the wall against which the mother died. Her throat was cut after the shooting. When the Germans left, the children came out from under the bed and fled to the home of the square-built shepherd, Sideros Kelermanes, who, thus warned, was able to save his own family.
Disbelievers should talk to the family of Marietta Philippou, 25, who offered the Germans wine and was ripped open with a knife.
The 34-year-old, shock-headed Anastasious Stathas stood in his sandals made from old tire treads. The Nazis shot his four-month-old infant while his wife, Euphrosyne, was in the next room, then riddled her chest with bullets, and finally killed both his boys, six and eight, thus exterminating his entire family.
Of Distomo's 450 houses, 62 were fired, 38 in the village itself. The Italians, who burned 29 hostages and took seven, on June 25, 1943, share honors with the SS for this.
The SS returned on June 26 of this year to burn three houses, including the home of the doctor, who was treating victims from the massacre sixteen days before.
Fixing the responsibility for Distomo on the Nazi leaders cannot be done definitely until it is determined who, besides Gestapo officer Teos, commanded the SS Panzer Grenadier outfit No. 7.
Lanky Captain Edward Kimball of Baltimore, who aided the Greek guerrillas around Levadia, has, among abundant traces of their presence that the Germans left behind, orders for neighboring operations signed by Sturmbannfuehrer Rickert, Hauptsturmfuehrer Kopfner, and Levadia's town “mayor,” Obersturmfuehrer Zabel.
Were these officers responsible for Distomo? The village expects the Allies to provide the answer to these questions. Distomo's dead are waiting to see whether the British and Americans are as earnest as the Russians about seeing justice done.
LETTER FROM GREECE
Athens, Greece—November, 1944
For the brewing of political peace Greece is the same sort of laboratory to the world as 1936 Spain was for brewing political war. From a transatlantic distance Greece seems an alphabet soup, with ELAS, EAM, EDES, EPON and a dozen other organizations all mixed in a macédoine. To an observer sitting no higher above Athens than the Acropolis, however, the muddle resolves itself into simple terms.
There is left and right, just about as there was in Spain. The left is composed of a popular front of anti-fascist, anti-monarchist parties, republican by inclination. Its chief force is a communist party, receiving a
s yet no aid from Russia and willing to settle for a democracy and let collectivism wait.
On the right is another coalition of anti-fascist democratic elements, loosely organized. Their nucleus is royalist. The right is heavily backed by Great Britain, whose intention is to see that George II gets back his throne in spite of responsibility for four years of the dictatorial Metaxas police state. A royalist Greece fits nicely into Britain's pattern for the eastern Mediterranean.
The dominating figure in Athens is Rex Leeper, the British ambassador, whose supple policies are gradually whittling down the left and building up the right. The ambassador receives American and British correspondents separately. When they compare notes, they find his attitude toward the Communist party of Greece (the KKE) varies remarkably with his audience … Soviet military missions are seen in the Hotel Grande Bretagne, but they are token affairs of lonely officers whom the Greeks sometimes mistake for the despised Bulgarians.
The main question, as in France, is how to disarm the guerrillas of the left without giving them any guarantees regarding republic vs. monarchy (the plebiscite which restored George in 1935 having been strictly of the bayonet kind) and if possible how to get him back without holding a vote at all. To put this over on the suspicious guerrillas is like trying to undress a sleeping man without waking him up.
The question most frequently asked of any American in uniform is “When are the troops coming?” The Greeks do not yet know that at the Tehran conference Mr. Roosevelt introduced a campaign-year isolationism by writing off America's stake in the Balkans—or rather signing it over to Britain and Russia.
Weller's War Page 60