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What was in store for them was the temporary camp of the Hippodrome and then transport to Yáros. The army had taken over from the police by then. At the Hippodrome, Karousos noted again the age of those arrested, ranging from forty-something to the upper eighties, with some being over ninety years old. He remarked to someone there that they were all out of commission, they were too old, their arrest was nonsensical. Everybody knew everybody. Here was the leadership of the Communist Party, all of them just barely out of prison, the cadres of the Party; they all knew each other from various camps and exiles. “This is the result of this modern disease, anti-Communism,” Karousos thought (ibid.: 53), turning the tables on all the medical metaphors that had been used throughout the century to describe and fight Communism.
Meanwhile, the news of the new government appeared in the newspapers, and Karousos was able to steal a glance at the paper of one of the officers. The new undersecretary of public security was T. Totomis, who had been a snitch for the Gestapo, a collaborator. He had fled the country with the Germans and had been found by the Americans, who took him with them. Twenty years later, they sent him to Greece as a high-ranking official in Tom Pappas's businesses (the same Tom Pappas who financed part of Richard Nixon's campaign, advised Spiro Agnew, and collaborated with the junta).
“It was the same, the same story,” Karousos says (ibid., 79). They didn't know what would happen: collective torture or execution? “The memory of Indonesia never, not for one moment, left the camp,” he writes (ibid.)
If those arrested never forgot their history, if the compounded experience of persecution, terror, and abjection never really left them, if their memory was riven by fissures that could not be sutured, the same was true for the junta. The arrested and the junta traveled across the same familiar cognitive and conceptual topography, a topography that, in turn, produced two drastically different topologies: one of extraction, the other of inclusion.
Obviously, the junta could not keep the thousands of people that it had arrested in the Hippodrome, in military camps, and in football stadia. At some point, Karousos says, it became clear that they would be transported. Indeed, military lorries were there to pick them up. With his indefatigable sense of humor, he notes, “The optimists expect Ikaria. [They say] 'They will be embarrassed to take us to Makrónisos or Yioúra. They have to take international opinion into account.' You are lucky that you haven't realized yet what American gangsterism means. The pessimists are thinking, 'Indonesia.' Most of us expected Makrónisos or Yioúra.”
Then Karousos describes what has become a commonplace in the topology of crises: he engages in radical topography. In the total absence of any information, he tries to decipher the intentions of the junta by applying himself to basic geography: “Now we will see. If [the lorry] turns left, we are headed to Lavrion, so that from there we can be easily transported to Makrónisos. There is the advantage of water. It takes just half an hour for the water-transport boat to come from Lavrion. If they turn right, then we are headed to Piraeus. Yioúra, undoubtedly. We are all hoping for Makrónisos. At least from there we could see the opposite shore, we could see cars' headlights at night as they appeared and disappeared on the winding road to Athens; we could even see, during starry nights—and those are the majority in Greece—far away, behind and over the peaks of the hills of Mesogeia, the glare from the lights of Athens… We come out from the street. We turn right. We are going to Yioúra. Some of us still do not want to believe it. No! We might embark on Piraeus to Makrónisos. Not Yioúra! Not Yioúra! No one wants this” (ibid., 84).
Lavrion with Makrónisos in the distance, 1945. Photograph by Dimitris Harissiadis, from the exhibit catalogue , Benaki Museum. Reproduced with permission.