Karrer, Alexis. 2004. El-Ntampa He Historia Mias Homerias Hexenta Hronia Meta (Al-Dab`a the History of a Captivity: Sixty Years Later). Athens: Entos.
- Chapter 3. 1944–1945: The Battle of Athens
- » And They Took Us to Al Dab`a
Chapter 3. 1944–1945: The Battle of Athens
And They Took Us to Al Dab`a
As we all know, writing (at least recent writing, done by people who do not have the luxury, or the disadvantage, of a stay-at-home spouse who raises children, manages the household, puts dinner on the table, and acts as a social secretary) is a profoundly social act. Despite the fact that what finds itself on the page at the end bears the responsibility of our decision to put it there, what makes the decision possible is the constant fort-da of the exchange with other minds, encounters with objections and approbations of the object/subject at hand.
Al Dab`a has stayed with me for a very long time. Maybe because there is so little mention of it in almost all of the historical analyses of the period. Maybe because not too much importance has been given to it. Maybe because of the ways in which the operation was carried out, in scattered mentions, here and there, in testimonials by people interned on Yáros, about a place on Yáros called “Ntámpa,” an encampment of punishment within the encampment of punishment that the place was, tickled my propensity for minutiae. But Al Dab`a cannot, and ought not to be, considered minutia. Perhaps, as Angelakopoulos says, “compared to the other horrors, the experience of this particular British camp would not merit great attention.” But in the larger scheme of things, in the overall assessment of the processes that have made the enfleshment of the danger of the Left possible, Al Dab`a opens the space of barbed wire for Greece.
The place (also known as El-Daba`a, and later, among Greek detainees in Yáros, simply as Ntámpa) is a Bedouin Awlad 'Ali village on the Egyptian coast, which was also a station and goods siding on the railway. It is located approximately 60 kilometers from El-Alamein, 200 kilometers from Alexandria to the east, and 600 kilometers from Tobruk to the west, and it should not be confused with the oasis Tell El Daba`a, which lies further to the east and slightly to the south, where a major Hyksos settlement has been recovered. The British had an RAF base in Al Dab`a, established in 1938. It included a prison that was then nothing more than a space open on all sides, called by the British “the tented encampment,” encircled by barbed wire, or, as a New Zealander Axis prisoner there called it, “a cage.” According to Karrer (2004: 55), Camp 381 was 1.5 kilometers long and about 800 meters wide, broken up into twenty-four cages placed at intervals of about 15 meters and separated by three lines of barbed wire. Every five meters there was a lamppost and every two cages there was a watchtower covered with a tin roof. The camp was captured by the Germans under Rommel during the first battle of El-Alamein in June 1942 and used as a prisoner-of-war camp. It was retaken by the British under General Montgomery in September of that year, during the second battle of El-Alamein.
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.”
I asked who had arrested him. “The Third Mountain Brigade, the Rimini,” he said. “Right there, in the middle of the street, they caught me and they took me to the police station; from there to Hasani, do you know where Hasani is?”
I did. Hasani was the name of the old airport of Athens, later named Hellenikon, which the British had commandeered.
“And from there to Goudi [the military camp on the other side of Zographou]. There they stripped us of all our valuables—wrist watches, money (though what money did we have? no one had any money with him), billfolds, pens, whatever we had that had some value. They kept us for a long time. First we were guarded by the English, but then the National Guard joined them.”
We talked about their treatment at the camp, whether he could see any others that he knew, how they were transported to Al Dab`a.
“We had no idea where they were taking us,” he said. “They put us all in huge transport ships, and we were sailing for days, in the middle of the war, right? I am still amazed that we did not get attacked by the Germans. At some point they let us out, and we were at Port Said.”
“How did they get you to Al Dab`a?” I asked.
“By train, by lorries, anything they could. They took us there and I can't tell you… The whole camp was just a huge area with barbed wire all around it. Three deep. There were no tents, no buildings. There were watchtowers everywhere, but the thing that gave me a jolt was the fact that there was nothing green around. Nothing at all. No trees, no shrubs, no bushes, nothing. On the right was the sea, and on the left the desert. Well, this was in the desert anyway.” When they arrived at the camp, they were ordered to shower and wear gray pajamas with a large black rectangular patch on the back Karrer 2004: 51). I asked again if while there he saw anyone he knew, wondering out loud how could he in the midst of eight thousand people?
“It wasn't eight thousand,” Mimis said. “There were at least twelve thousand of us, probably closer to fifteen thousand. I calculated the number because there were fifty cages and each cage held three hundred of us.” This is the number that Angelakopoulos has also estimated, although Karrer stays closer to the official number of eight thousand.
“Is there a list, do you think, of people who were taken there, at least of the numbers?” I asked.
“What lists?” Mimis said. “I told you, this was a human roundup [anthropomázema]. They just rounded up people. They rounded up little children ten, eleven, twelve years old. They accused them of running news errands between the partisans.”
This is exactly the same narrative Angelakopoulos has given. He added that the children were frightened and kept crying for their parents, so that the actors who were there would put together little skits to calm them down. No one had informed the families of the arrested what had happened to them, and no one could find out anything about them. “Such awful days were those,” Karrer writes, “that if anyone went missing unexplainably or unexpectedly from home he had to be considered dead, or wounded, or taken hostage, and all meant the same” (2004: 37). The families tried to find out the whereabouts of the arrested, but it was impossible. The narratives are very similar, and I would be inclined to believe them commonly invented (in Benedict Anderson's sense of inventing) and shared among Al Dab`a prisoners, but Mimis and Angelakopoulos did not know about each other's being there until I told them both. These narratives coincide independently. Angelakopoulos knew that the actor Mimis Fotopoulos was there but did not know that he had published his memoirs of the place.
Fotopoulos has given a slightly different chronology of his arrest and detention, although his account of his arrest is just as absurd as the rest that I have heard. On that New Year's Eve day, Fotopoulos had been down the street to Hippocratous to look once again at his destroyed house. On his way back to the apartment, he stopped at Kolonaki Square, where some peddlers were selling toys. As he stopped to look at the toys, wearing his pajamas underneath his clothes to keep warm, someone tapped him on the shoulder. When he turned, he saw an usher from one of the theaters, who, accompanied by an army lieutenant, asked him to follow him to the police station “for a little interrogation.” At the station he was first asked what the red cloth that kept peeking out from underneath his trousers was. He said that it was his pajama bottoms, to keep him warm. He was then accused of having yelled “Power to the People [Laokratia]” during the demonstration on December 3. He denied it, but the interrogator had a witness: the usher.
“But he was a member of the theater division of EAM,” Fotopoulos protested. “He was, but now he has recovered” was the response of the interrogator. From there Fotopoulos was taken to Goudi, where he realized the extent of the operation, and from Goudi to Al Dab`a. He was not seen or heard from until June 3, when the same navy ship brought the last group of those who survived back to Greece.
By December 29, two days before the New Year, in Athens the British, aided by the Greek Security Police, had rounded up most of the men they would eventually transport to the camp at Al Dab`a. By early January ELAS had been pushed out of Athens, through the operations of the Rimini Brigade. With Churchill's intervention, given that he considered Papandreou soft on Communism, Papandreou resigned and was replaced by the staunch anti-Communist General Nikolaos Plasteras. On January 15, 1945, Scobie agreed to a ceasefire in exchange for ELAS's withdrawal from its positions at Patras and Thessaloniki and its demobilization in the Peloponnese. This was a severe defeat, but ELAS remained in existence and the KKE had an opportunity to reconsider its strategy. The defeat was mainly military, but as it was retreating ELAS took along close to eight thousand hostages from various parts of Athens, in a manner not unlike the one used for the hostages that were sent to Al Dab`a: people picked up in the middle of the street or pulled out of their homes in their pajamas, some in their slippers, with no food, no provisions. Some of them died on the long march out of Athens. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
OPLA re-imagined itself at this point as a self-appointed vigilante and salvationist body. The scope of its operations extended far beyond the protection of individual fighters and the exposure and execution of collaborators. Nearly twelve hundred people were executed for various political crimes, mainly collaboration, but also simply on suspicion. KKE, attempting to reorganize its forces and avoid the clear oncoming terror of the Greek fascist and royalist organizations, turned inward. A painful culture of mistrust and fear of informers or “snitches [hafiédes],” what Talal Asad (2005: 186) has termed “organized suspicion”—something that had existed since the Metaxas dictatorship—was solidified during this period. It would endure for a long time to come. OPLA executed Leftists and non-Leftists alike as it became an organization of fear and paranoia, and it managed to produce an image of the Communist as a bloodthirsty villain who would use the cut-off tops of tin cans to execute his victims, an image that permeated the social imaginary of Greeks until at least the beginning of the 1980s. The cut-off tops of tin cans, collectively named konservokoutia, became a common point of reference, almost synecdochically, for the Left in general. Athens, and Greece in general, entered a phase of terrorism by the militias and paramilitaries that led to the period known as the White Terror.
The danger from the Right-wing paramilitaries was so great that in December 1945 Octave Merlier, director of the École Française in Athens, arranged for fellowships to be granted to a number of young university graduates for postgraduate studies in France. Merlier, with the support of Deputy Director Roger Milliex and his wife Tatiana Gritsi-Milliex, chartered the New Zealand military transport boat Mataroa to take these students, most of them belonging to the Left, though a few of them belonged to the Right, to France in order to save them. And they needed to be saved: some had participated in the Resistance and the Battle of Athens; some were Trotskyists and needed to be protected from the KKE and OPLA; some were members of the Party and needed protection from the paramilitaries. Some (very few) were Right-wing, and they were probably offered the fellowship for political reasons. The students came from every faculty of the University of Athens and the Polytechnic School: philosophers, sociologists, economists, architects, engineers, painters, sculptors. They later became leading intellectuals and artists in France: among them the philosophers Cornelius Castoriadis, Kostas Axelos, Kostas Papaioannou, and Mimika Kranaki; the historian Nikolaos Svoronos; the composer and architect Iannis Xenakis; the artists Kostas Koulentianos and Iason Molfessis; the cinematographer Adonis Kyrou . Forty-five of them boarded the Mataroa, and another hundred or so were sent by train. The Mataroa sailed from the port of Pireaus to Taranto and from there on “undependable trains, through a desolate Italy” (Castoriadis 1990: 3), the young Fellows were taken to Paris through Switzerland. As Dimitris Papanikolaou notes in his review of Mimika Kranaki's memoir, the Mataroa does not index “only the trauma of each one who left Greece on it in 1945, or perhaps the traumatic experience of any migrant in the modern world; it becomes metonymically the collective trauma of History. …Kranaki seems to be saying that the traumatic experience does not emerge the moment when History invades each person's life and turns it upside down. Quite the opposite: History is precisely what happens when one's trauma gets indelibly mixed up with the trauma of everyone else” (2008: 30). But the Mataroa is also the beginning of the brain drain from Greece.
Officially called stasis at the time, later called “the second round” of the civil war by Rightist historiography and Dekemvrianá by everyone else, the twenty-eight days of December 1944 foretold of the impending darkness. “At the end of the war we counted ourselves and we were found fewer,” Georgis Maratos says, announcing, in 2003, for the first time the killing of his father by OPLA on December 3, 1944.
Karrer, Alexis. 2004. El-Ntampa He Historia Mias Homerias Hexenta Hronia Meta (Al-Dab`a the History of a Captivity: Sixty Years Later). Athens: Entos.
Karrer 2004: 63. Karrer's son Aris, who wrote an introduction to his father's memoir, calculates the number to have been 12,000 (2004: 19), although Karrer's own arithmetic adds up to 14,400, when he mentions that he was put in charge of organizing his cage of 600 people and that there were twenty-four such cages at Camp 381. Probably Karrer counts subdivisions of the cages, whereas Mimis and Angelakopoulos count whole segments.
This is exactly the word used by Karrer, also. Mimis did not know of Karrer's memoir when I spoke with him, so the term has been used by both of them independently.
Asad, Talal. 2005. “Where Are the Margins of the State?” In Anthropology in the Margins of the State, ed. Veena Das, and Deborah Poole, 279-89. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1990. “Entretien d' Agora International avec Cornelius Castoriadis au Colloque de Cerisy.” http://www.agorainternational.org/CCAIINT/pdf, accessed January 23, 2007..
The line is from a folk song, whose lyrics were adapted to the realities of Al Dab`a. The original song, from the islands, was a love song (of sorts) about a woman who owned a fishing boat. It was adapted by Vassilis Tsitsanis early in 1945 and was recorded in 1946 by Tsitsanis and Stratos Payioumitzis.
Tha sas po mian historia
Apo ten aihmalosia
—varka yialo—
Kapoia mera tou polemou
(den to pisteva pote mou)
—varka yialo—
Hoi Egglezoi mas kyklosan
Me ta tanks kai mas tsakosan
—varka yialo—
Mas eperan ta roloyia
Me to xylo, me ta logia
—Varka yialo—
St' autokineta mas valan
Kai ten piste mas evgalan
—varka yialo—
Sto Goudi kais to Hasani
Ki apo kei gia to limani
—varka yialo—
Mas evalan sto papori
Kai gia to Port-Said plore
—varka yialo—
Mas eferan sten El Ntampa
Kai sten plate mas mia stampa
—varka yialo—
Mas edinan te vdomada
Dyo koutalia marmelada
—varka yialo—
Mas edinan kai fystikia
Pou 'tane yia ta katsikia
—varka yialo—
Mas edinan kai mia stala
Sympepyknomeno gala
—varka yialo—
Den xehnousan hoi Egglezoi
To helleniko trapezi
—varka yialo—
Kai mas dinan taktika
Kai mpizelia araka
—varka yialo—
Den to teloume to gala
Oute kai ten marmelada
—varka yialo—
Mono theloume na pame
Piso sten glykeia Hellada
—varka yialo—
I will tell you a story
From captivity
—boat by the shore—
One day of the war
(I would never have believed it)
—boat by the shore—
The English rounded us up
With their tanks they captured us
—boat by the shore—
They took our wristwatches
By force or by persuasion
—boat by the shore—
In the lorries they put us
And we suffered much
—boat by the shore—
At Goudi and at Hasani
And from there to the port
—boat by the shore—
They put us in the boat
And they took us to Port Said
—boat by the shore—
They brought us to El Ntampa
On our back they put a stamp
—boat by the shore—
They gave us two spoonfuls of marmalade
Once a week
—boat by the shore—
They gave us peanuts
That you use to feed the goats
—boat by the shore—
And they gave us a drop
Of condensed milk
—boat by the shore—
The English would not forget
The Greek cuisine
—boat by the shore—
And they fed us regularly
Peas
—boat by the shore—
We don't want the milk
Nor the marmalade
—boat by the shore—
The only thing we want
Is to go back to sweet Greece
—boat by the shore—
Another version, recorded in New York by George Katsaros and Stella Kay (Standard F-9014-B) mentions the campaign as one of exile specifically, both in its title They Took Us to Exile, and in the lyrics.
Kai mas pegan exoriaAnd they took us to exile
Makrya apo ten AthenaAway from Athens
—varka yialo——boat by the shore—
I am indebted to Lila Abu-Lughod and Timothy Mitchell, who helped me decipher the name Ntámpa, which I kept reading and hearing about in testimonials by Yáros detainees, and identify it as Al Dab`a. Abu-Lughod (2000) has shown how such stations became the nuclei of towns where the Awlad 'Ali sometimes settled or were used as markets. For a detailed account of the Al Dab`a camp during the Second World War, see http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei.
The Hyksos were invaders or migrants from the Near East (some suggest that they were probably Canaanites) who ruled the Delta region of Egypt from 1720 to 1570 b.c. Some have argued that they were Minoans. See Shaw 2000; on the excavations at Tell El Daba`a, see Bietak 1996.
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).
Fotopoulos, Angelakopoulos, Beis, and the songs about Al Dab`a all mention that an English soldier went around with a soup tureen collecting the valuables of those arrested.
Laokratia means literally “the krátos of the people,” krátos in its ancient Greek meaning of power, sovereignty, puissance.
Pharmakes mentions that, after the Dekemvrianá, people whom he knew had been members of EAM would say, “We? at EAM? never. We were with EDES, we were with these, we were with those… Because, as you know, the Greeks are always on the side of the winner” (Pharmakes 2006).
The Metaxas government, especially Maniadákis, had systematized the use of infiltrators (hafiédes) into the Central Committee of the ΚΚΕ. As Maniadákis himself noted, the benefit was double: not only would the state manage to have complete control of the organization and (eventually) the operations of the Communist Party but it would create an environment of such distrust within the Party that it would, in effect, collapse. Maniadákis nearly succeeded on both counts. At the beginning of the war in 1940, the Party was in disarray, as many of its members were interned or exiled and a climate of deep distrust hampered the operations of the members who were still underground. Maniadákis seems to have thought that, in time, with the right maneuvering, patience, and skill, he would be able to infiltrate even the Communist International. See Lymberiou 2005: chaps. 11, 12, 13.
The presence of Iannis Xenakis on the Mataroa is contested. Although the story that Xenakis had left on the Mataroa circulated in Athens until I was a university student in the late 1970s, including that he was still recovering from a wound inflicted during the Dekemvrianá by a British shell, which cost him his left eye, both Nelli Andrikopoulou and Xenakis's biographer, Nouritza Matossian, say that he was not on the boat. According to them, after he was wounded he was found by his father (or by the National Greek Army; it's not entirely established) and taken to the hospital, where he stayed until March 1945. In the summer of 1946 he finished his studies at the Polytechnic School, at the School of Engineering. He then fled to France in 1947, after he had been conscripted into the army, had been asked to sign a dēlôseis, had refused, and was given safe passage by one of the recruiting army officers so as to be saved from being sent to Makrónisos. Xenakis himself never talked about this experience.
Cornelius Castoriadis, Mimika Kranaki, and Nelli Andrikopoulou are the only ones from the Mataroa group who have written or spoken publicly about the experience. In 1950 Kranaki wrote a small essay in Temps modernes with the title “Journal d'exil,” which she later expanded and contextualized in her seminal Philhellenes (1992). Recently she republished the essay in a bilingual (Greek and French) edition under the title “Mataroa” in Two Voices: Pages of Emigration (2007). As Dimitris Papanikolaou has noted in a review, “the Mataroa became mythical, to the extent that we assumed that every Greek who had a career in France after the War had left in that boat” (2008: 30).
The account provided by Castoriadis is of great interest. In an interview for Agora International during the Colloque de Cerisy in 1990, Castoriadis spoke about his involvement in the Resistance movement during the occupation, his interpretation of the Dekemvrianá (which, in a strange twist, he calls a Stalinist coup-d'état, as if the Communist Party had been the official government of Greece in 1944 or as if ELAS were the national army), and his own trajectory, which brought him to be included among the 150 young intellectuals awarded the fellowship, “120 young leftists and people who had just graduated from the Polytechnic,” says Castoriadis (1990: 4). Castoriadis had studied philosophy at the University of Athens with the “neo-Kantians” Panayiotis Kanellopoulos, Konstantinos Despotopoulos, and Constantine Tsatsos, who had studied law and philosophy in Germany in the interwar period (ibid.: 3). During the occupation, Castoriadis says, they were discussing Hegel's Logic and Kant's Prolegomena.
By all accounts, travel to Paris was a traumatic experience. Food was scarce and travel precarious, although, as Kranaki (2004) reports, there was great camaraderie among the fellows. They subsisted on galettes and handouts from peasants wherever the train stopped. Arriving in Switzerland, where, as Castoriadis mentions, there had been a rumor that the government had announced in December 1943 they might have to ration chocolate (1990: 3), they were handed chocolates. As Castoriadis reports, having lived with the sight of dead bodies strewn in the streets of Athens during the famine of 1941 to 1942, they arrived in France to find that “people were laughing, eating sausages, drinking wine. One rediscovered one's self in Paris” (ibid.: 4). See Andrikopoulou 2007, Castoriadis 1990, and Kranaki 1950, 1992, 2004, 2007. See also the review of Philhellenes in Gourgouris, 1994, and the reviews of Andrikopoulou 2007 and Kranaki 2007 in Papanikolaou 2008. On Xenakis, see Matossian 1986. I am indebted to Papanikolaou, who pointed out to me the inconsistencies regarding the passage of Xenakis to France.
This photograph was taken probably in 1946, post Al Dab`a, although neither the family of the young man that made the photograph available to me nor the photographer who took the photograph can tell with any degree of certainty. The photograph is inscribed on the back “Al Ntampa Aprilios 1945 [April 1945]” but this probably indicates that all persons depicted on it had been held together there and not that the photograph itself was taken at the camp.
The young man with the cigarette is Yiorgos Kontarines, a student at the Business School at the University of Athens and an ELAS member who participated in the Dekemvrianá and who was arrested and transported to Al Dab`a in January 1945. Only one other man on the photograph has been identified— Gregoris Tsevas, the one with the moustache standing on the right of Yiorgos Kontarines .
Yiorgos was captured and sent to Al Dab`a in January 1945 and returned to Athens probably in April 1945 (although it could have been as late as June) having contracted tuberculosis. After spending some time at a sanatorium in Penteli he joined the KKE (the Communist Party of Greece) and the Mazikê Laikê Autoámyna (the Massive Popular Selfdefense, an organization that had been instituted in Thessaloniki as a response to the massive excesses of the paramilitary organizations). During all this time he had a love affair with a young woman from his neighborhood, nineteen-year-old Katina Evripiote. Katina was the sister of Yiorgos’s best friend, and whose family was of a different political persuasion than Yiorgos was. In February 1946, Yiorgos was drafted into the National Army. While serving his military service he found out that Katina was pregnant with his child but that her parents were preparing to marry her off to someone else, as they did not allow her to marry a communist. Yiorgos deserted the army in June 1946 at which point he and Katina attempted to elope but failed. On June 6, 1946 outside of her house, Yiorgos shot Katina and then committed suicide. Katina’s house was right next to the “X” offices in Dáphnē (a suburb of Athens). This, however, is a story the historicity of which becomes unstable as more information is excavated. Although Yiorgos’s death certificate initially mentioned penetrating head trauma as the cause of death, it was later amended (in a “different handwriting and in red ink” his niece told me) to rule his death as suicide. There is no official information available on Katina’s death.
The story was told to me by Demetra Halikia, the niece of Yiorgos (his sister’s daughter) who, while looking for any information on Al Dab`a found out about my research and contacted me. Demetra mentioned to me that her mother was sixteen years her brother’s junior, and that she had grown up constantly enveloped by the story of her brother. Demetra made a point of telling me that when her uncle died he was twenty-two years old, her mother was six, her grandmother thirty-seven, and her grandfather forty. She also mentions that when she was a child she and her grandmother visited her uncle’s grave every week, where her grandmother would sing ELAS and EPON songs on the grave. She also adds that she grew up with stories about the Occupation, ELAS, and her uncle. She has named her son after her late uncle. To this day the two families are at odds with each other. Specific details about the story were supplied by Demetres Athanasiou, a friend of Yiorgos who was arrested a few days after him, held at Al Dab`a with him and who later was sent to Makronisos (in 1950). He described Yiorgos in very positive terms but as a harsh and determined person. He has added that all of them felt at that time despondent, defeated, and hopeless.
The cross on the photograph was drawn by Yiorgos’s father after the murder/suicide. The scratches on the face of the man in front were unintentional and probably happened over the course of the years. The photograph is being reprinted with the kind permission of Yiorgos’ family in whose private collection the photograph belongs.
I want to thank the family of Yiorgos, especially his niece Demetra Halikia, who made this story available to me.