Were they hostages? Alexis Karrer, a journalist who was picked up on December 6 and sent to Al Dab`a with the second shipment on December 19, says that, when they arrived at the camp, the Scottish colonel announced to them that they were hostages of the Greek government (2004: 56). A few days later they asked a British lieutenant for more food and cigarettes but were denied both because they had been classified the same as German prisoners of war. The lieutenant promised them that he would intercede with Middle East Headquarters to change their classification to that of Italian prisoners of war, so that they would be entitled to more cigarettes and more and better food. The prisoners wrote memorandum after memorandum telling him that they should not be considered prisoners of war because they had not been indicted for having been arrested in battle or bearing arms, as international laws of war require. The colonel admitted that they were not prisoners of war but rather “refugees.” But Karrer notes about the colonel: “He does not know what we are, he is confused. He has received orders and he is carrying them out. But we know very well what we are: hostages. Nothing else. Not even political prisoners” (2004: 58–59).
- Chapter 3. 1944–1945: The Battle of Athens
- » And They Took Us to Al Dab`a
A friend in Athens, knowing my insistence on the importance of Al Dab`a, kept looking for references, comments, anything to do with that place. In one of his e-mail messages, he sent me the press release for a small, privately published pamphlet entitled 381 Camp El Ntampa, by Georgios Angelakopoulos, who had been taken to Al Dab`a “at the age of eighteen, sometime in the middle of December” of 1944. When I spoke with him, he could not remember the exact date. He had been stopped for a random check in Athens, while he was going from his uncle's house to his parents'. In tattered clothes, a jacket that he had been wearing for a few years, full of mended and unmendable holes, he was searched over and over by the police, and there, fallen through a hole in his jacket pocket, was a poem that he had written against King George II. He was immediately arrested and taken to the police station. On the way, he yelled his address to some bystander, asking him to notify his parents that he had been arrested.
The press release placed Angelakopoulos's experience within a wider context, mentioning names of three more well-known Greeks who had also been taken there. Two I knew about: Vassilios Kokkinos (later chief justice of the Greek Supreme Court) and Mimis Fotopoulos, whose account of his experience I had already read (thanks again to the friend who had looked for months for a reprint). The third name startled me. I knew this name only too well. It belongs to a very old and close friend of my family, a man only a couple of years older than my father, who had grown up in the same neighborhood as my father and whom I had not seen for fifteen years. This man is Dimitris Beis (Mimis to his friends), former mayor of the Zographou municipality in Athens, where we lived and where my father had been born, subsequently mayor of the city of Athens and member of PASOK (the Socialist Party, established by Andreas Papandreou in 1974). I called my parents immediately to see if they knew about this. They did not. My mother remembered when Mimis had been imprisoned by the junta, but nothing about Al Dab`a. My father remembered that he had been picked up by the English but could not remember what happened to him after that. As a matter of fact, I found out that neither of my parents could recall anything about Al Dab`a, although they remembered very well the prison camps in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt (Tobruk and Asmara). But they did not know about the hostages of December 1944.
“They picked me up on St. Nicholas Day,” Mimis told me. St. Nicholas Day is December 6, so he was picked up three days after the first demonstration, the same day as Karrer was picked up (2004: 14).
“Why did they pick you up?” I asked.
“Probably because I was in EPON,” Mimis said. “The funny thing is that, a few hours before they picked me up, OPLA had come to the house looking for my brother, who was on the Right.” (My mother had already mentioned this to me: “Mimis had always been democratic; but his brother was really Right wing, although later he changed, too, and became democratic also.”) “We managed to hide my brother; he went into the rema [the creek], and he left from there, all the way down to the bridge. So I went out to play ball with my friends [Mimis was sixteen years old at the time], and they caught me right outside of your house.”