Eleni (10 page)

Both Mourtos and Mussolini were disappointed in their expectations of an easy victory. Fourteen miles inside the Greek border, the Italians were stopped for days by a ragged army of soldiers in mismatched uniforms and shepherds’ cloaks. Outnumbered two to one, the Greeks astonished the Italian generals with their courage and the accuracy of their artillery, although they had only six mortars for each division against the invaders’ sixty.

An early and bitter winter fought on the Greek side. Freezing rains flooded the Kalamas River, which cuts off the northwestern corner of Greece, turning it into an impassable yellow torrent, clogged by dead animals and the rubble of blown-up bridges. In the pass above Metsovo called Katara (“the Curse”) Italy’s proud Alpinists of the Julia Division became victims of the white death, which turned their legs and feet black and swollen like potatoes.

They rubbed mud on their shiny black-plumed helmets, which seemed to draw the Greek mortar shells. They slept in the yellow mud, their once white puttees sodden and heavy. They urinated on their frozen fingers and learned to crack open the skulls of the donkeys dying of exhaustion and use the steaming brains for warmth. In the end, 12,368 Italians returned home mutilated by frostbite, 13,755 were buried in the mud of Greece, and another 25,067 were missing.

Within a month of the invasion, the Greeks drove the Italians back into
Albania and kept on going. On the morning of November 21, the villagers of Lia saw the denouement of the Italian campaign taking place in the hills below them.

Greek troops attacked and routed the Italians at Plokista to the south. The Liotes, looking down from their vantage point near the top of the natural amphitheater, watched as the fleeing Italian troops left their animals, supplies and guns and took to their heels, scrambling up the side of the bowl created by the Mourgana like an army of ants in disarray, retreating on bloody, frostbitten feet right through their village toward Albania, leaving many dead and wounded: gray-green forms that stiffened in the mud. When the last of the Italians had gone, with the Greek soldiers at their heels, some of the villagers began to climb down to the battlefield to strip the corpses of anything useful.

Among the scavengers was Foto Gatzoyiannis, who returned to his house triumphantly carrying a pair of fine leather boots and two dismembered fingers, sliced from an Italian corpse, still encircled by gold rings. His wife Alexo, horrified, begged him to take the plunder back. Belongings stolen from the dead brought
harami
(“bitterness”) to their taker, and she feared God would make their children pay for his sacrilege. Foto was unconcerned. “I’ll handle God!” he roared at her. “You clean the boots!”

The villagers had finished with the Italian corpses by the time the carrion birds began to circle. The Greek peasants were disappointed to discover that contrary to the popular rumor, not one of the dead Italians was wearing silk underwear.

The Greek forces pursued the fleeing Italians all the way into Albania, and by December of 1940 they had even taken the port of Aghies Sarantes, which had been renamed Edda by the Italians in honor of Mussolini’s daughter. The entire Western world took hope from the incredible Greek victory, the first defeat of the Axis powers. The Greeks went mad with pride and patriotism; church bells rang, flags blossomed everywhere and pedestrians shouted “On to Rome!” In Nashelis’ coffeehouse in Lia the drinks were free and the walls fluttered with tacked-up newspaper clippings about the triumph.

But the rejoicing was short-lived. Hitler had to enter the fray, not to save Mussolini’s face but to secure his own southern flank for the invasion of Russia. He threw at the Greeks four panzer divisions, eleven motorized divisions, the Luftwaffe, and his elite corps of parachutists. The German war machine mowed over the Bulgarian border into Greece on April 6, 1941. There was no hope of resistance. Within days, every Greek airplane had been destroyed.

As the king’s brother was knocking at the door of the mansion of Prime Minister Alexander Koryzis, who had taken over after Metaxas’ death from cancer, he heard a gunshot inside. The prime minister had just blown his
brains out. King George II and his government escaped to Crete, and then to Cairo, where he remained in exile for the duration. On April 26, as the last British tank rolled past the old flower market in Omonia Square, leaving Athens just ahead of the Germans, the abandoned shopowners threw blossoms in its path, then closed their stalls and went home to wait.

On April 27, 1941, the streets were empty and all windows were shuttered as the Germans marched into Athens and raised the swastika on the flag pole high atop the Acropolis.

The arrival of the Germans isolated Greece from the rest of the world, cutting off vital imports to a land that could grow only 40 percent of its food. As the Greeks braced themselves for the occupation, Eleni Gatzoyiannis saw her worst fears becoming a reality. Her life line to Christos had been broken. There would be no more money. There was not even the chance to ask him how to save herself and the children. She had always relied on tradition or a man to tell her what to do. But war washed away all laws except the fundamental one of survival.

She missed her mother-in-law more than ever. Fotini had been her closest friend and adviser. But even when her husband died, leaving her destitute, Fotini had brothers and grown sons to help her fend off starvation. Eleni was more alone than her mother-in-law had ever been, for she had only five small children, all dependent on her for their lives. For the first time she realized that there would be no one else to share her burden, and not even the example set by her mother-in-law could help her through the ordeal ahead.

During the first winter of the occupation, 1941–42, the blockaded cities and the mountain villages, cut off from the plains which had supplied them with grain, salt and oil, suffered the most. Athens became a nightmare landscape of skeletal figures with bellies swollen, shuffling hopelessly in search of food, falling dead and lying unburied in the streets. The children and the elderly died first.

In the first two months of winter, 300,000 people starved to death in the capital. In order to keep the deceased’s ration cards, families did not report deaths but threw the corpses surreptitiously over the walls of cemeteries. Every morning trucks patrolled the streets, picking up the bodies of those who had died in the night. There were rats and the smell of sewage everywhere.

The ration cards were nearly worthless, since bread was nonexistent, the food shops closed and shuttered. The smallest purchase required sacks of paper money, and cemeteries were ravaged by graverobbers looking for gold teeth and rings. If a baker happened to find enough flour to bake and sell a loaf of bread, he set the price in British gold sovereigns.

Everyone who could walk spent the entire day until curfew searching for food. The poor stripped the countryside of greens for miles outside of Athens. Trees in the avenues and parks were cut down for firewood. Servants of the wealthy were sent to outlying villages and islands with family treasures in search of a loaf of bread or a chicken.

Babies were born without fingernails, and nine out of ten of them died within a month. There were epidemics of cholera, diphtheria, whooping cough, scurvy, enteric fever, and everywhere, typhus spread by lice.

Stewed cat passed for rabbit, barley would have to do for coffee. The only dinner party in Athens featuring real meat and wine was given by
Greece’s most successful undertaker for eight of his gourmet friends, whom he sent home through the German patrols after curfew hidden in back of one of his hearses.

Nighttime brought mass executions of Greek prisoners accused of sabotage. By day the streets around the palace of Archbishop Damaskinos were black with crowds of gaunt women and children begging for news of their imprisoned men.

The towering, white-bearded archbishop moved between the Greeks and the Germans, pleading for food for the starving, and news of the prisoners. Shortly after Christmas Day he defied German orders by digging up the graves of fourteen newly killed men so that the bodies could be blessed and identified.

When two hundred prisoners were secretly shot in a mass execution, Damaskinos obtained their clothes, which had been stripped from the bodies, and hung them on lines strung across the great hall of his palace. Then he opened the doors to the women who, with their children, moved between the ranks of bloodstained clothes—stylish suits and muddy peasants’ rags—fearfully searching for those of a husband or son. A bride of a month found the clothes her husband had worn at their wedding; a mother identified the clothes of both her sons. The archbishop’s staff watched in horror as one woman after another fell to the floor shrieking, clutching a bloodstained jacket, while others, numb with dread, tore through the pockets of a familiar-looking coat, searching for some certain identification in bits of paper, cigarette butts and combs.

During the winter of 1941 in Athens, packs of stray dogs howled on the hills below the Acropolis, mass graves were dug in the gardens of the royal palace, and death waited on every street corner.

T
HE FIRST FOODSTUFF
to disappear from Lia in the springtime of the German occupation was coffee, Eleni Gazoyiannis’ special passion. It was replaced by a weak brew of ground, toasted barley or chickpeas. Soon rice was gone too, and like the other women in Lia, Eleni used the little wheat that remained instead, grinding it between stones into a coarse rice substitute called
kofto
. Because wheat was too precious to use for flour, white bread was supplanted with rough corn bread, called
bobota
, which would become the staple diet of the villages throughout the occupation.

In the summer of 1941 the villagers anxiously planted every square foot of soil they owned. The only tillable land in Lia had to be cut straight out of the mountainside, terraced and shored up with stones. The families who owned not even a handkerchief-sized plot faced the winter with growing dread.

There had been no word from Christos since before the Italian invasion and Eleni’s money was gone. She managed to hire Tassi Mitros and his oxen by paying him in corn to plow the family fields, but she couldn’t pay Anastasia Yakou and her two daughters any longer to sow the crops, nor could she afford to have the half-witted shepherdess, Vasilo Barka, take the animals up to the pastures. So Eleni decided to sow the wheat and corn in the high fields herself and take one of her daughters with her to help. But the problem was which girl should be sent up to watch the sheep and goats. There were men hidden in those gullies and ravines: shepherds and brigands whose numbers were growing now that hunger was turning the poor to thievery. At thirteen, Olga was maturing rapidly. Just to be seen going up with the flocks could ruin her reputation. Eleni knew that Olga was flighty and naïve; not wary enough for her own good. She finally settled on Kanta as the one to take the flocks. Only eight, Kanta was thin and wiry, and not likely to inspire lust. She was also shrewder than Olga; in fact, one of the best students in the village school. Kanta resembled her mother not only in her lean, chiseled features, but in her love of learning as well.

Eleni was one of the few village women of her generation who was
literate. She had attended only two years of school, but after she was put in charge of her parents’ flocks she amused herself scratching letters on rocks with a piece of charcoal. She also bribed a cousin who lived next door to teach her what he had learned in school every day.

Eleni decided that Glykeria, who was now seven, would accompany Kanta to the pastures, even though her chubby legs would tire quickly trying to match Kanta’s long strides. Glykeria could guard the back of the flock while Kanta walked at the head, on the alert for wolves, snakes, robbers and straying animals. Meanwhile Eleni would take Olga with her to plant the fields, and the two of them could keep an eye on Fotini, three, and Nikola, who was now nearly two.

Kanta balked when she was told of her new responsibility. She despised the filthy animals, she wailed, but Eleni was adamant. She said that Kanta was to go along with Crazy Vasilo for several days to learn how to care for the flocks.