Chapter 2
The next day they took me in. That’s when it was. I’d come from Kastrí. I left with Paraskeví that evening. The men sent me to check the house, and so I wouldn’t be alone I stayed with your girls, Iríni. At your place. I went out to the square to go to your house, I see a lot of people. Where the Telephone Company is now. They’re saying, They burned down Ayiasofiá1 last night. There was killing and the like. I leave, I go to Chrónis’s pharmacy. He says, Yeorghía, they saw your brothers in Másklina.2 I didn’t know a thing. What are you talking about, Lámbros? I started crying. I went up to your house. Yiórgos Haloúlos was there. He was with Anthí. Pavlákos was there, down at the butcher’s. At Goúnas’s. In the doorway. And he gave me a look, like that. Nikólas did. I go find Yiórgos and Anthí. They were talking about me. I was terrified after Lámbros told me about my brothers, that they’d seen them in Másklina. Because I was the one would pay for it. Don’t worry, Yiórgos Haloúlos tells me. We were just talking about you, to see where to hide you. Well, anyway. Anthí takes me, and we go to the shack, you know, the shack, Iríni. To see if I could stay there. I tell Anthí. I was a young girl, in the prime of my youth. I tell her, Anthí, honey, that Pavlákos fellow was giving me the eye. Sly-like, you know. That son of a bitch, says Anthí. That son of a bitch. Don’t pay him any mind. Later on I understood why he was looking at me. That night Pótis Lenghéris comes by. Who doesn’t know anything yet. I was still with the girls. He says, They want you at the office. The office was at Mángas’s house. They want to question you, he says. He takes me there. Mángas’s house was just a few steps away. We go inside. I see the Koutsoyiánnis family from Douminá. Relatives of the others who’d left with our brothers. It must have been evening. The sun must have set. Stávros Koutsoyiánnis, his son Yiórgos and Vasílis Koutsoyiánnis’s wife. I started crying. I also saw some villagers from Ayiasofiá. They’d arrested them the same day. The day after they burned down their village. It was July, because we were harvesting. And there I am crying. Your father comes in, the girls had fixed me something to eat. He brought me eggs with potatoes.
— Was Pavlákos there?
— When I went he wasn’t there yet. The other men were there. Kléarhos, Velissaróyiannis,3 Mavromantilás. They were the leaders. At night they got us and took us to Ayiopétro.4 The girls come in, Anthí—no not Anthí, Sotiría, she brings me a blanket. She puts it right in my hand. And there I was in these sandals. They said they were taking us to Ayiopétro for questioning. They take us there, they shove us in some cellar dungeon. The next day they move us. They put us in line to send us off to the detention camp. As we’re going there, Pavlákos comes along. There were about twenty of us. Lyghítsos’s wife Eléni was there.
— Is Eléni alive?
— She is, she’s in Athens. Pavlákos comes over, he comes up next to me. He says, When they question you say that you’re willing to work for the Organization.5 That was his advice to me.
— Pavlákos may have been whatever he was, but he wasn’t a die-hard Communist. He would cover for our fellow villagers. He was the one who helped Kalosynátos escape.
— Yes, but let me continue now. And as we were about to get started, Pavlákos says, Wait, I have to announce something to you. Just this minute, he says, they went to Koubíla to burn down the Makrís family’s houses, his exact words, and to take in the rest of the family, and they didn’t find anyone. They’d left for Másklina. They went to the Germans. And Kléarhos said, Looks like they were traitors.
— Didn’t he say anything to tip you off, all he did was make that announcement?
— That’s why they arrested her. That’s how her brothers left. But she didn’t start it right.
— How my brothers left is another story. I’m telling how they arrested me.
— They arrested you, that’s why they arrested you.
— They took us to the detention camp. We go inside. The balconies are packed full. Yiórgos Kontós from Karakovoúni. Mítsos Kapetanéas, Chrístos Petrákos, Nikólas’s brother, Dímos Kokkiniás, Thanásis Grigorákis, someone named Theodorópoulos from Dolianá, and Panayotoúros. Let me try and remember them.
— Themistoklís?
— Themistoklís and I went to the detention camp together. With his brother Chrístos.
— They had Chrístos in the detention camp too?
— They did. They beat him something awful.
— Which Chrístos?
— Anagnostákos. Themistoklís’s brother.
— Did they beat him too?
— They did. Don’t interrupt me, because I’m going to tell it all. He’s dead now. We went there, we go in. I was lost, there were so many people. We lie right down. I lay out the one blanket your sisters had given me. I lie down and pass out. They come in, Get up, Chrysanthe says to me, get up, it’s nighttime. I get up, they take us up to the cells. Going up, on the stairs I see Nikítas Braílas with his mother. I start crying. A man named Yiorgátsis comes in, worked at the detention camp. I don’t know where he was from. Girl, you should have cried those tears for your brothers. For my brothers, so they wouldn’t leave for Másklina. They take us upstairs, the cells are all full. They take us out on a balcony. Me, Lyghítsos’s wife Eléni, a couple of women from Ayiasofiá, and one from Tegéa, a young girl. I put the blanket in front of us on the railing. And we waited. Vasílis Tóyias comes by. He tells me.
— Tóyias was there?
— He was the camp commander. Tóyias from Mesorráhi. He was killed. And Stratís Karadímas. The General, we could say. He came in, he put a fright in me, We’ll cut off your hair, you.6 Why cut off my hair, just put a bullet in me. And Tóyias says to me, No, you’re a hostage, we’re holding you because of your brothers. We’ll cut the hair off the other women. Thirty-six days I was a hostage. I wouldn’t eat. They’d give us watery soup with flies in it and a tiny piece of bread. Like a piece of antídoron.7 They’d tell us: Any of you don’t eat your bread, you take it with you. I didn’t eat. I was going out the door one day. Why don’t you take your bread with you, the General asks me. You think we give a damn that you don’t eat? I didn’t answer him. Then that Tóyias gave us a speech. They gathered us in the church. And this is what he said, I heard every word of it. Like for example, if Makrís, Yeorghía’s father, does anything for the Germans right now, of course his daughter will pay for it. He said that in his speech. Three days later they took me to be questioned. There was a hunchback there in a large cell, with firearms in it. He says to me, Come over here, are you going to tell us the truth or do you want to go to the hole. I got scared. I didn’t know about holes, didn’t know what they were and what they did. I found that out later there. But I was scared. Very scared. He was a deformed man, that interrogator, a hunchback. He says, Who were your brothers with, what was their relation with the Germans? I say, Our men were at home, they didn’t have relations with anyone. They arrested me in Kastrí, and I found out that they left. I don’t know what happened in between. He says, Did they say anything in defense of the Germans? In our house, I say, never. Never heard any talk like that. And he says, If we give you a gun now will you go and kill your brothers who went with the Germans? I say, No, I won’t go. Why, you afraid of the blood? I am, and especially of my brothers’ blood. He kept trying to get me on his side. One hour of questioning. It was crazy. Finally he says to me, If we give you a position will you work? Yes, if you give me one, I say. I mean, if we send you to a hospital. I say, If you send me there I’ll go. And then when they sent us to Prastós and Lyghítsos’s wife Eléni came down with typhus, they put me in charge of her care, I had her, and I had Themistoklís. His care was different, rubdowns and salves for Themistoklís.