December 1944 was one of the darkest times in modern Greek history. During that month, and well into January 1945, communist guerrillas, belonging to the ELAS mountain “army” under the control of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) and seconded by the extensive network of the civilian, subversive EAM organization, fought a devastating battle with British troops and token Greek government forces for the control of Athens. The communist aim was to prevent the return of the King and an anti-communist political elite to power after three-and-half years of Nazi occupation of Greece.

The battle ended with the thorough defeat of the pro-Moscow insurrection, but not before large parts of Athens had been turned into ruins and thousands of civilians massacred by the communists. In fact, ELAS and its corollaries went after anyone who could be a “hindrance” to a Greece under proletariat rule: priests, teachers, professionals of all kinds, merchants, “rentiers,” politicians on the opposite side, intellectuals not fond of Stalin, the neighborhood grocer, the postman, and so many others. It is estimated that the retreating communists butchered at least 10,000 hostages, whose bodies were later discovered in many of the city environs, some in shallow mass graves, others simply left to rot where they had fallen.

My father, who was a primary target of these early purges, before “socialism” would arrive to save the Nation, because he owned a small garment business, was caught twice by the communists and was twice placed against the wall to be shot… only to miraculously survive. In fact, these two near misses complemented an earlier one during the Occupation, when a communist band targeted him as a “sympathizer” of the Germans solely because he was a “bourgeois shopkeeper.”

Papa or “Baba,” who died early when I was very young, was not a story teller, but he never got tired of telling the story of the Decembrist massacres and how he had escaped the firing squad twice. Here’s the story, very much in his own words, as it was in fact recorded by one of his friends, who later produced a book on the local holocaust presided upon by the noble “people’s forces.”

December 1944 – Kallithea Municipality, southern Athens – Act One

[Papa speaks]   The battle in the center of Athens was well under way, when, one Tuesday, Kimon came into the shop to warn me there were communists infiltrating down Theseus avenue and near the football field (Kimon was an old neighborhood friend).

The police station had been already attacked the night before and the officers had barely escaped with their lives only because, in the middle of the firefight, a British armored car appeared to make mincemeat out of the attackers with its machine guns. Now the communist bands had extended their grip along Syngrou avenue (a main thoroughfare linking downtown Athens to the seashore) and were battling retreating police near the Hippodrome.

house Kimon was a nice fellow, well educated for the time, the son of a post office official. His family had lived in Kallithea for over 100 years, having arrived from the islands around the time of King Othon. Kimon was employed by the public bus company and was married with two young children.

Shortly after he brought me the news that day, and while returning to his house, ducking and evading the snipers, Kimon run into a neighborhood EAM “active detachment,” local youngsters recruited by the communist guerrillas as scouts. Kimon knew most of his captors. One of them, a girl called Katerina, was even a distant relative on the side of his mother. These simple human facts did not stop the “detachment” from, first, cutting out his tongue, then gouging out his eyes with a bayonet, and, finally, dousing him with naphtha and setting him alight.

When I heard of Kimon’s death, I got really scared. I knew that the “detachments” had a habit of searching for the friends of people they had already killed in order to kill them too. There was no rhyme or reason in their terrible actions. It was just simple, raw bestiality of the kind I thought only Turks and Nazis were capable of (Papa was a refugee from Asia Minor).

That very same evening, I moved out of my house, next to the old marketplace, and went to hide in the house of one of my old friends from the Athens stock exchange. Nikos, then 35 and a widower, after his wife had died during the Occupation of tuberculosis, was friendly with leftists and it was a bit of a gamble to seek sanctuary under his roof. But, I always thought, Nikos was decent and honest and I knew he deeply appreciated the help we tried to give him while his wife was dying.

Nikos quickly admitted me and settled me in the basement, with some blankets and a lamp. “You are safe here,” he said; “I know the neighborhood ‘committee’ and the ‘kapitan’ (the communist chief cadre) is my friend from high school.”

So, I went to sleep, cold and hungry, but, at least feeling “safe” under a protective roof.

It was just before sunrise when I was abruptly awakened by a terrible racket above me. It was as if the house was collapsing. There were cries and screams and much breaking and smashing of furniture… and then gunshots.

In no time, the basement door was broken off its hinges and I was literally dragged up the stairs by two burly wild men, wearing black caps and leather breeches.

I was kicked and rifle butted and forced to the floor of the kitchen that looked as if it had been hit by a canon. Nikos was nowhere to be seen. I was surrounded by at least five communist “policemen,” one of them actually a “policewoman,” a filthy looking creature that nobody would take for a woman if it were not for her set of oversized breasts hanging like loose strained yogurt bags under her stolen German army tunic, torn and crusted with mud.

“So, you are the merchant, eh?” the chief “policeman,” a short round man with a long beard, grunted, digging his boot deep into my back.

He was pointing a rifle at me, the muzzle only one breath away from the side of my face. His comrades all pointed their guns at me, too. I just groaned and writhed on the floor. I didn’t utter a word and didn’t think except repeating in my mind “That’s it, old boy, it was not an easy road, but what a way to go in the end…” My shoulder hurt terribly, my kidney was killing me, and I was bleeding from a cut on my forehead, but these simple inconveniences measured little in anticipation of what was surely coming next.

I was violently lifted off the floor and thrown out the door and into the muddy yard of the house. It was raining hard. With the corner of my eye, I could see many shadows crowding at the far corner of the fence. There was whimpering and muffled pleading from people I could not see, but I could sense they were very near.

The chief “policeman” was now conferring with a tall man in much crisper military kit tightly strapped over a long spotless raincoat. The tall man, I could see despite the haze produced by my warm bleeding forehead that obscured vision, was wearing the shoulder boards of a “regular” ELAS “officer.” This was little consolation of course, but it was not unknown for such “soldiers” to sometimes show mercy to totally innocent people about to be butchered by “detachments” and other “people’s forces” that roamed both city and countryside in those days.

My dim hopes though were rudely crushed a moment later.

“All of you,” the tall man in the crisp military kit said in a strong, clear voice, “have been found to have connections with the enemy.”

“All of you” included myself and the shadows in the corner of the yard that had now emerged as men as the early morning light tried to penetrate the cloud canopy above. For some mysterious reason, and despite being paralyzed with fear, I quickly counted “All of you” and found we were a group of 14 men about to be shot where we stood by the people’s militia.

“All of you,” the tall man went on in the same deep, strong voice, “neglected your duty to follow the people’s uprising. All of you gave support to the police. All of you opened your doors to assassins from the police. And all of you will now pay for your offences against the people of Greece with your unworthy lives.”

There was much wailing and groaning and tearing of chests now, some of the men in the corner actually dropping on their knees and begging, and the communist “policemen” hitting them with clubs and rifle butts, and the tall ELAS “officer” actually pulling his pistol from the holster and firing once into one of the begging men kneeling in the mud.

The man dropped, face down, and all the wailing and screaming and movement stopped at once.

I was again being lifted from the scruff of my neck and pushed in the direction of the other men, who had been quickly forced to stand up against the wall by the communist “policemen” with their rifles. Slipping and sliding in the mud, I was stood at the end of the line, my back firmly against the wall, hot piss running down my pants and getting mercifully washed away by the unstoppable rivulets of the driving rain.

Here we were staring down the barrels of at least two dozen rifles, the tall ELAS “officer” positioned to my immediate left and looking surprisingly close to me at less that ten paces, his cleanly shaven face clearly visible, despite the sheets of rain, his hand still clasping his pistol.

“Detachment, arm your weapons,” the ELAS executioner blared, his voice carrying like a gunshot and bouncing off the wall behind our backs.

The next moment though was the briefest moment of sudden deafening silence… and a split second later a huge roar, and a massive blast of air, burst upon us like the Coming of Prophets… and we were all in one big heap, some bleeding, some almost naked, their clothes torn off their bodies by this unstoppable gasp from the Tartarus, some screaming at the utmost top of their hoary voices… and some just lying there, limp and lifeless.

I remember clearly lying on the mud that was sucking me in as the torrents from heavens kept coming down, and making the earth one thick oozing mass that threatened to swallow us all, and thinking: “That was it… that’s what it is like when the firing squad lets loose… that was the volley… and I am dead…!”

But I also knew I was still breathing.

*   *   *   *   *

I woke up in my brother’s home not very far from Nikos’s house where I had earlier died. I was in bed, lying in clean sheets. Dr. Artavanis, the lifelong Kallithea general practitioner, was bandaging my left arm. But otherwise I was intact.

Kosta, my brother, recounted how a mortar shell, fired, most likely, by communists trying to hit some British troops fighting alongside the Greek army’s Sacred Band — veterans of Libya, the Italian campaign, and the allied drive into the Reich — had actually landed in the yard of Nikos’s house at the very moment the communist “police” squad was about to shoot us.

The explosion had decimated the communists, killing almost all of them, including the tall ELAS “officer.” Neighbors had actually crawled into the yard and pulled five of us out as the communist gunners continued to fire short and deadly, raining metal on their own comrades.

Years later, we heard that the sector communist guerrilla commander, a man by the name of Mitros, who was a dairy farm worker before the Occupation, had tried to turn on the British one of their own heavy mortars, captured in a confused firefight, but couldn’t set the elevation correctly. Mitros was the man who had saved us that December morning — unwillingly, of course, but quite effectively.

Mitros went on killing Greeks until the end of the insurrection and, later, returned to his village, in central Greece, where he was eventually cornered by a right-wing death squad and hanged from his heels until he died days later…. watched, all along, by guards posted so that none of his fellow villagers could cut him loose.

January 1945 – Phaliron Municipality, southern Athens – Act Two

[Papa speaks]   With the communists obviously losing the battle for Athens, and the southern neighborhoods largely free of communist ELAS gunmen, some of us attempted to resume a “normal” life. I went and rented a small house in the Phaliron seaside neighborhood, very beautiful in those days with flower gardens and palm trees and the clear blue sea only a short step away from the coastal road.

bear My neighbors were the Aretzis family. George Aretzis was a well known surgeon, a hero of the Albanian campaign during which he saved innumerable lives of both Greeks and Italians operating in dark caves and flimsy tends in subzero temperatures. His wife, Mrs. Elli, was a fine, talented woman, who collected island embroidery and was an accomplished piano player. Their two sons, Markos and Vassilis, had gone underground when the Nazis arrived and they eventually ended up in the Middle East, where they joined the Hellenic Brigade.

The communists had dared not touch the Aretzis couple. In fact, many of the bearded uglies, who had descended on Athens from the surrounding mountains, owed their lives to Dr. Aretzis’s scalpel. But the insurrection was an insane time, with sons killing their parents and parents shooting their sons and brothers ambushing and killing each other and all Greeks trying very hard to push themselves and their country into the deepest recesses of Hell.

One morning, Mrs. Elli went out to find food and did not come back.

The doctor, myself, and numerous others took to the streets searching for her. We looked everywhere we could reach, day and night, sometimes exposed to direct fire. We found nothing.

Dr. Aretzis went, alone, into communist-held territory to search for senior communists he knew from the 1940 war, when they were still serving in the national army. He came back, three days later, empty handed and exhausted.

It was now Sunday and Mrs. Elli had been missing for over a week.

Then, around midday, two communist ELAS fighters appeared at the Aretzis house doorstep.

I was sitting with the doctor in the living room, both of us wrapped in our coats as there was no fuel for heating the house. When the doorbell rang, we both went to open, hoping for good news, and found ourselves face to face with the two communist gunmen.

Dr. Aretzis was one cool man and showed no emotion at the sight of the two grizzled fighters, wrapped in woolen short coats, with bandoliers across their chests and both carrying rifles, but I started trembling uncontrollably. Dr. Aretzis greeted them and invited them inside. In my shaking and trembling, I had missed that both these men showed an obvious respect and deference to the doctor.

Soon, it turned out that these two uglies were actually former artillerymen whom Dr. Aretzis had treated in the mountains of Albania. The one, by the name of Gouras, carried a metal plate which Dr. Aretzis had neatly placed to cover a hole in the man’s cranium after he was brought in half dead following an enemy barrage. The other, by the name of Retsos, had survived to fight another day only because Dr. Aretzis had removed a bullet from his lung.

Both had come to offer information about Mrs. Elli.

“They’ve taken her hostage,” Gouras said. “They are now well on their way.”

“They will kill them before long,” Retsos added.

“They” were the notorious OPLA – the Organization for the Protection of People’s Struggle, the communists’ most feared security battalion tasked to kill anyone who even appeared opposed to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Throughout the insurrection, OPLA had butchered thousands and taken tens of thousands hostage.

When Gouras and Retsos left, after having told us the location Mrs. Elli and other hostages were seen last, Dr. Aretzis got under way. He would walk out into the mountain to find the OPLA detachment and try to free Mrs. Elli. This was guaranteed suicide of course, but Dr. Aretzis was already in his army boots and bundling some food into his doctor’s satchel.

We parted with a handshake and the promise to meet again.

Two days after Dr. Aretzis had started on his mountain Odyssey, I was walking near the Hippodrome on my way to a soup kitchen the Red Cross had opened near the train station after the fighting had subsided. I was still in “wild country.” Dead bodies were strewn in the streets, whole neighborhoods devastated by artillery fire, the old airplane factory savaged by weeks of fighting.

Not far from the train overpass, I suddenly found myself surrounded by a group of people fleeing. I had no idea what was happening — finding yourself among crowds in desperate flight in those days wasn’t uncommon — so I tried to get out of their way, but I was pushed to the ground and before I knew it I was again surrounded by people… but this time these were armed men and obviously not “friendlies.”

In no time, I was standing up again amid a group of ELAS gunmen in no mood for mercy.

Quickly, I was pushed behind an old factory building where another group of fighters held approximately twenty men and women at gunpoint. The man in obvious charge, of average build and wearing a British army tunic complete with the previous owner’s battle ribbons, was gesturing and pointing at us as two of his lieutenants were apparently trying to say something he didn’t like.

I knew we were not very far from something terrible happening. Funny thing, but I felt no fear. Well, you know, I said to myself, you’ve been spared only recently but the odds of really escaping are very, very low, so, lucky you, you survived for a few weeks longer… and now it was time that you met what was coming…!

The animated conversation between the British tunic man and his lieutenants had ended and we were being rifle-pointed against the factory fence. Men cried. Others were silent. I was simply resigned. I was very tired and hungry. Again, funny thing, I was thinking of soup and black bread, not bullets flying my way.

We were now all lined up and standing there, trembling.

The British tunic man was again gesticulating as one of his lieutenants was obviously not agreeing with what was about to happen. The firing squad had formed and was ready. Strange, I thought, as sweat run freely down my back, although it was freezing cold, they are debating whether we will live or die. They never did this before. We would have been dead by now. They’re losing this fight!

I then felt a grip closing around my arm. I half turned and looked straight into the face of Gouras, Dr. Aretzis’s surgical patient from the Albanian mountains. Retsos, his comrade, stood one step behind him.

Silently, Gouras pulled me out of the group standing against the wall.

There was much commotion building around the British tunic man and others who had joined the disagreeing lieutenant. There were shouts and some pushing and shoving. Then, the British tunic man stepped away from the knot of men, cursed, and, pulling a revolver from his belt, shouted: “Aim and fire, aim and FIRE…”

The firing squad hesitated… but, then, the men nearest myself and my two saviors opened fire. The whole squad then fired.

The volley cut down the group against the wall but didn’t kill everybody outright. The British tunic man stepped forward with his revolver and started aiming and firing into the heap of fallen bodies.

Silently, Gouras and Retsos shepherded me away from the killing ground, their comrades paying absolutely no attention to us. When we got to the railroad tracks, we shook hands and parted.

I kept on walking and sweating and then my bowels went loose and I was one embarrassed hungry man walking alone in the middle of nowhere.

*   *   *   *   *

Weeks later, the Red Cross discovered the bodies of both Dr. Aretzis and Mrs. Elli. They were among the approximately 10,000 bodies of other hostages OPLA had killed at various places north of Athens.

I never found out what happened to Gouras and Retsos after the fighting ended in Athens.

I guess I was “lucky.” Many of my friends, and two of my brothers, didn’t survive the Occupation and the insurrection. God is great. He has a mysterious way of choosing.

But luck plays a part, too.

[Papa continued with his business after the war, an anti-communist republican until the end of his life. He never spoke about those dark days to us. He used to go to the ‘kafenion,’ the coffee shop, with some of the survivors of those times to play backgammon for endless hours. Whenever I went to call him back to the shop, I would meet a group of men with the saddest faces on earth. I couldn’t exactly understand why they all looked so grim. But, apparently, they all had good reasons for feeling the shadows lurk all around them].