With Captain Philip away, Ian was alone in charge of the British post when Spiro Skevis returned with his men and resumed hounding him. Ian’s predicament worsened with the addition of a new responsibility—two downed air crews, one British and one American, who arrived in Lia to be evacuated to safety. Of the seventeen fliers, more than half were suffering from malaria. Even though Angeliki and her sister worked far into the night cooking for the new arrivals, there was not enough food, medicine or bedding to go around. Even the outhouse was inadequate for the crowd, so trenches had to be dug on the hill above the headquarters, and they overflowed with the first heavy rain.
The news that a crew of American pilots was in the village filled Eleni with the hope that one of them might be from Massachusetts and have some news of her husband. She had not received a letter from Christos for three and a half years, since the Italian invasion cut off communications. She hurried to the village square, where the fliers who were not ill passed the time in snowball fights with the village children. Eleni resolutely approached the interpreter and handed him a piece of paper with Christos’ address in Worcester written on it. She knew it was unrealistic to expect that one of the young soldiers might have heard of her husband, but she was determined to find out. She watched with falling spirits as the paper was passed from hand to hand and the strangers shouted the words “Worcester, Massachusetts” to one another and shook their heads. Finally the interpreter passed the paper back to her and explained kindly that even if one of them had been from Worcester, American cities were larger than she thought, larger even than Yannina, and the chances of any one American soldier knowing her husband were infinitesimal.
Trying to hide her disappointment from the foreigners, Eleni decided to visit Nitsa, who lived just above the British headquarters nearby. She found Nitsa and Andreas entertaining “Henry” the cook from the mission, a round, garrulous man named Andreas Tsifoutis. He loved to gossip, and with much shaking of his head and expressive gestures, he described how Captain Ian had become unstrung to the point where even the Greek-speaking staff could tell he was having a nervous breakdown. The cook hoped that the other captain would return before something tragic happened. He told how Spiro Skevis had arrived one night, loudly demanding money and arms, and Ian became so frantic that he pulled out a hand grenade and threatened to blow up the entire house if Skevis didn’t leave. The next day Ian called the staff together and told them that the doors and windows of the headquarters were being wired and booby-trapped with explosives because he feared an attack by the Skevis guerrillas. “In the morning, if you don’t see the door open,” Ian advised the Botsaris girls through the interpreter, “don’t come in. Don’t touch anything, because if you do, you’ll blow yourselves to bits and us with you.”
Nitsa rocked back and forth, her hands over her ears, and exclaimed that if the Fafoutis house exploded it would take her house with it. To distract her, the cook launched into a comical recitation of Ian’s behavior when he was drunk, which now was most of the time. Ian slept every night with a pail of Albanian beer at his bedside as well as an empty bucket to use as a chamber pot, and sometimes in the night he’d be so groggy he’d confuse the two.
The hostility between the British and the ELAS guerrillas reached a climax soon after Captain Philip returned, when Spiro and Prokopi Skevis organized a massive demonstration in the village to pressure the British into giving them supplies and money. ELAS supporters flooded in from all over the Mourgana villages and beyond. The central square was not large enough to contain the thousands of demonstrators, who arrived shouting, “Give us food! Give us arms! Give us medicine! We are fighting for you and you have forgotten us!” It was the largest gathering in the history of the village, and the Liotes marveled at the number and strength of the supporters rallied by the Skevis brothers.
Eleni could see that the mood of the demonstrators was ugly and she forbade her children to leave the house, worrying that someone might be hurt. She followed her neighbors to the square and watched apprehensively as the two British officers and their interpreter walked, grim and pale, from their headquarters to the square through the gauntlet of shouting Greeks. They were clearly frightened, and she wondered if Ian’s fragile mental balance would survive the demonstration.
Four decades later Philip Nind remembered his apprehensions. “I was more afraid of Spiro Skevis than of the Germans,” he said, and in his journal made at the time he described the Skevis brothers: “The elder [Prokopi] was a politician … filled with book-read Marxism which used to pour out from his mouth in rather amusing contexts and clichés. The younger [Spiro] was the most dangerous man I met in Greece. He commanded a battalion and commanded it well. Energetic and shrewd, his fanaticism had warped his mind in the most disagreeable manner. He was a sadist with, to my knowledge, many cold-blooded murders to his name; and all the complaints of ELAS torturing in that area were laid at his door.”
The knot of British officers tried to keep their feet in the shouting throng until Prokopi Skevis silenced the people with a gesture and climbed up on a table to address them. He spoke stirringly, demanding that the British honor ELAS requests for money and aid so that they could defeat the traitor Zervas. The crowd cheered every word.
When the applause died down, Eleni saw Captain Ian climb shakily onto the table with the interpreter beside him. She was surprised to hear him speak simply and effectively. “We are soldiers under orders, who do what we are told, just as you do!” he shouted. “You ask for arms. You complain that the dropping of supplies has stopped. It will start again when you end your civil war and return to fighting the enemy!”
He blinked as an angry voice from the crowd interrupted him. “One question, Captain!” someone shouted. “When you fight traitors, is that called a civil war?”
When the question was translated, Ian paused, thinking hard. Then he answered with an analogy that clearly struck home to the family-oriented Greek peasants. “My father has four sons,” he said. “When we fought with each other, he would never take the side of one or the other, no matter what the circumstances. He had to try to restore peace in the family so that it could work toward the good of all of us. We needed the strength that comes from unity.”
Spiro Skevis was too angry to let him go on. “Answer the question, Englishman!” he called out. “Zervas is a traitor! Down with Zervas! Death to Zervas!”
The crowd had wavered for a moment, but now they joined in. “Down with Zervas!” they shouted. “Death!” Eleni was reminded of the guerrillas singing outside the schoolhouse while their prisoners were being beaten inside. Her neighbors’ faces were transformed with hate as they began stamping and shouting for blood. To Eleni, Ian’s parable had seemed sensible and apt. She was reminded of how, when she assigned Glykeria and Kanta each to sweep half of the front steps and terrace, they would wrangle over who had the dirtier, harder part, arguing until nothing was accomplished, and in disgust, Eleni ended by cleaning the steps herself. In the same way, ELAS and EDES were depending on the Allies to sweep the Germans out until not only the steps but the whole house was clean. Then they planned to battle for control of the house, and if they continued wrangling like children, they could end by destroying it and bringing the roof down on their heads.
The crowd was in no mood to listen to parables or explanations, and Eleni watched as the British officers hastily pushed their way back toward the safety of their headquarters before the demonstrators decided to turn their anger on them.
In early February, Eleni walked down the path to the Botsaris house and found Angeliki in tears. The girl told her that the British were preparing to leave. The last straw had been the attempt of the Skevis guerrillas to lead the English and the downed airplane crews into a German ambush.
Captain Philip intended to lead the American and English fliers into Albania, she explained, as he had successfully evacuated General Infante. As always, he notified the guerrilla commanders in the areas he would cross of the route he would take.
ELAS gave him a go-ahead, but once they left Lia and crossed the mountains, the British stumbled directly into the path of a German drive which had been in progress for four days. Obviously the ELAS commanders had known the Germans’ position when they okayed the route. The British and the fliers managed to save themselves by hiding out for several days, some of them in a cramped underground baking oven. Angry and demoralized, they retraced their steps to Lia. Years later Philip Nind said, “Clearly, ELAS was hoping that the Germans would kill us, because we were an embarrassment to their efforts to persuade the villagers that the English and American allies were not really fighting the Germans effectively compared to the Russians.”
The attempted sabotage by ELAS drove Captain Ian over the edge, Angeliki said. She described how he called the staff of the mission together, ranted at them in his foreign tongue until his voice broke, and then burst into tears. Suddenly he fainted, falling over “like a cedar tree,” she said. From that moment he was entirely out of control, weeping and raging, and throwing things at his fellow officers.
Angeliki was desolate at the news that the British were leaving. Not only would she lose the income that had kept her alive, she said, she would be left unprotected from the Skevis guerrillas, who considered her a traitor and worse. She didn’t know how her family would survive without the commandos, and despite their eccentricities, she had become truly fond of them.
In the last week of February the two downed air crews set out for the Ionian coast to the southwest, where they were to be evacuated. Captain Ian went with them after a tearful farewell to his fellow commandos. Philip Nind would never see him again, but he later learned that Ian was evacuated to Cairo, hospitalized in a psychiatric ward and after his recovery was killed in action in Italy.
On the cold, misty morning of February 26, 1944, a large crowd of villagers gathered to wish Captain Philip and the radio operator, Ken, farewell. Eleni was among them. She was nearly as saddened as Angeliki to see them go. She had hoped that the British might curb the brutality and internecine fighting of the guerrillas, and now she feared their departure would mean that more Greeks would die at Greek hands.
The British commandos were as downcast as the villagers. Decades later Philip Nind remarked that the few months he spent in Lia changed him radically. “I came with very clear ideas of right and wrong,” he said. “The Greek mountains were totally different from anything I had known and I soon realized that politics there had nothing to do with the undergraduate politics I had known at Oxford, gentlemen’s politics. In Lia it was politics tooth and claw, and the blood ran literally. It was the first time I saw dead bodies—not dead Germans or dead British, as I had expected—but Greeks killed by Greeks, and worse, some of the bodies were obviously mutilated. During the whole time I was in Lia, I was never given the men to organize a single operation against the Germans, and the ELAS guerrillas constantly tried to indoctrinate the villagers against us. I was almost a Marxist myself until I saw Communism put into practice by the andartes in Greece. I left Lia a very disillusioned young man.”
The villagers Nind left behind were more than disillusioned. The commandos were scarcely out of sight when the rumor swept Lia that the British had abandoned them to their fate because the Germans were approaching.
When the Germans suspected a village of harboring guerrillas, the punishment was swift and all-embracing. Throughout Greece more than 150 villages were burned.
In Kalavryta, near Patras, the Germans entered the town in early December and told the 2,500 inhabitants there was nothing to fear. But at six o’clock on the morning of December 8, 1943, the church bells called the people to the town square. They were divided into two groups: women and children under twelve years old, and men and boys over twelve. There was chaos as mothers tried to convince the Germans their sons were too young to go with the men.
The women and children were locked in the schoolhouse and the 800 men and boys led to a wheat field on a hill behind the cemetery, where, after watching their village burn, they were cut down with machine guns.
As the school was set ablaze, the women began throwing their children out the windows. One German soldier took pity on them and opened a door, setting them free moments before the burning roof collapsed. When they found the corpses of their husbands, the homeless women had no shovels and buried the men with their bare hands. Every night wild animals dug up the shallow graves.
By the early months of 1944 the Germans knew they were losing the war and their reprisals became more vicious. All 228 inhabitants of Distomo, near Delphi, were murdered and mutilated, including twenty children under the age of five. The young women were mutilated and cut open from the genitals to the breasts, and the children were disemboweled, their entrails wound around their necks.
Before Easter of 1944 the German commandant in Epiros, Lieutenant General Hubert Lanz, began to plan an assault on the villages of the Mourgana along the Albanian border to flush out the andartes hiding in the mountains and clear a route for a possible evacuation. But first it was necessary to attend to the Jews in Yannina.
Since the ninth century there had been Jewish communities in the large Greek cities, and in March of 1943, 46,000 Jews in Salonika were rounded up and shipped to German concentration camps. But the 1,950 Jews living in the provincial capital, including seventy prosperous merchant families, did not flee. They knew the German troops stationed in their city depended on the Jewish community for food and supplies, and they were reassured when General Lanz promised them they would be safe. The general severely reprimanded the mayor of Yannina for ordering all Jews in the city to sign in at the city hall each morning.
ELAS distributed leaflets to Yannina’s Jews urging them to flee the city and join the andartes, but they became suspicious when they read the leaflets, which said: “Take your money and come to the mountains of ELAS to be saved.” Only forty-two Jews answered the call. The rest stayed in their homes hoping that the German commandant was a man of his word.
MARCH BROUGHT THE RETURN of the swallows and the weaning of the lambs. When the Germans did not appear in Lia on the heels of the departing British, the villagers relaxed and began to prepare for Easter.
On March 26, the day after the Feast of the Annunciation, Eleni Gatzoyiannis and her sister sat on the steps of their mother’s house, enjoying the warm sun, while four-year-old Nikola played nearby. Nitsa called the boy over and began to undo a bracelet of twisted red and white threads tied to his arm. “Now that Annunciation’s come and gone we can take off your March thread and hang it on the tree for the swallows,” she said. “And you won’t have to worry about sunburn or insects all summer!”
Solemnly Nikola watched his aunt drape the grimy threads over the walnut tree near the door. Eleni looked on with a mixture of amusement and vexation. “Why do you fill the child’s head with all that nonsense?” she asked. “A red thread won’t protect him from sunburn any more than garlic and a nail in your pocket will keep you safe from wolves!”
“Maybe you can read and I can’t,” Nitsa replied, “but it’s one thing to learn and another to be wise. You like to laugh at my amulets, but if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have a son today but another daughter!”
Eleni turned to her in amazement and Megali gave her elder daughter a warning glance, but Nitsa was already swept away by the drama of her sacrifice. “Ach, what I went through for you to have a son!” she exclaimed, lifting her hands and gazing heavenward for sympathy. “If it wasn’t for that piece of umbilical cord I fed you, you’d be looking at another daughter right now!”
Eleni stared. “I ate what?”
Nitsa nodded, full of self-importance. “I had to walk all the way to Kostana to buy a piece of umbilical cord from the midwife there. Of course, it had to be taken from a firstborn son, born in the forty days after Fotini’s birth. Remember that nice cheese pie I made you, full of fresh eggs and butter? You said it was the best one I ever made!”
Eleni didn’t know whether to laugh or
be sick, but Nitsa was only beginning the saga of her spells. She had saved a bit of Fotini’s umbilical cord after it fell off and on New Year’s Day baked it in a loaf of bread which was fed to the rooster, she said. “That’s how your luck was turned around and Nikolaki came out a boy! For myself, I can’t grow a boy or a girl,” she concluded sadly. “But for you I did everything, and it worked!”
Megali was waiting for Eleni to show the quick temper that she had inherited from her father, but instead she threw back her head and laughed until the tears came, scaring Nikola so that he ran over and tugged at her skirt. Nitsa’s smug expression turned to annoyance until Eleni hugged her and gasped, “After all you’ve done for me, sister, perhaps God will relent and give you a child!”
Solemnly Nitsa crossed herself.
The drowsy quiet of the morning was suddenly broken by shouts coming from the direction of the Petsis house. Nitsa sniffed the air like a pointer and they all got up to see why Lambros Petsis’ girl was so excited.
Petsis owned a small tinker’s shop and a house in Yannina, dividing his time between the provincial capital and the village. He had a son scarcely older than Nikola, but his dark, almond-eyed daughter, Milia, just turned eighteen, was his favorite.
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