(the whole chapter, slightly edited)
In September 1939, we, Pouliopoulos and I, were incarcerated in Aiyina. All the Stalinist detainees in the prison were then exalting in and celebrating the victories of the two partners in the Pact: the carving up of Poland, the occupation of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia by the Russians, and of Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Norway by the Germans, the fall of France, the tragedy of Dunkirk.
By way of a everyday amusement they competed to see who could invent the most stupid jokey remark against France and Britain: about Gamelin and his “military talent”, about de Gaulle and the “Free French”, about Churchill and his appeals etc.
At the end of two months, with his sentence completed, Pouliopoulos was transferred to Akhronaflia. Then I was alone for a long time in the midst of hostility, animosity and incredible stupidity. Finally the archeiomarxist Tzikas arrived. Then Ioannidis (or Yovanis) arrived a few days after. He was a school teacher from Amyntaion in Macedonia, a member of our group, a militant of the most hardened variety. He was lame from the consequences of an unfortunate attempt to escape. In the room where they were passing judgement on him in Thessaloniki he was sitting near the window which overlooked a tree. He believed that if he jumped out he could reach it. He gave it a go. But the branch which he hung onto broke and he fell to the ground, where the gendarmes picked him up and took him to the hospital on a stretcher.
These two militants met their death under the Occupation. The Stalinists murdered Tzikas, even though he had proposed to them that he fight with them within ELAS. Ioannidis was relegated to the Isle of Aï Strati till the end of his sentence. He refused to “sign” when the majority of exiles had done so and preferred death from hunger when the Germans forbade the inhabitants of the isle from selling goods to the exiles.
In May 1940, I was summoned to the secretariat of the prison where they let me know that I had served my sentence and that I must get ready for the next morning. Then the same old procedure began again: I was released, but with handcuffs, and a sealed letter to the authorities of Akhronaflia (with the strict note “Attention, extremely dangerous”) and an escort of two gendarmes. Two or three days in the transfer section of Piraeus, and from there the ferry to Nafplio. In the camp they sent me to the First Wing this time.
In our group there was Makris, Rigas, Remboutsikas, Voursoukis and Krokkos. Panayotidis and Skaleos were dead, Tsoukas had been transferred to the mental hospital and Mantas had signed, with the agreement of the other comrades, so as to go and reconstitute the group on the outside. But the war began and he was mobilised and killed. From the Pouliopoulos group, there were, apart from Pouliopoulos, Yannakos, Xypolytos, Tournopoulos, Kh. An., Kh. Soulas, Mitsis, Paraskevas and Loukas. There were the archeiomarxists Hatzichristos, Saoussopoulos, Berachia, Pierakeas and Il. Papadopoulos. Phlorias was dead and Christophas had been transferred to an island. Finally, there were Seitanidis and Iliadis.
The camp was as I had left it two years before, with its secretariat, its room bosses, its male nurses, its postmen, its workshops, its various officials and its severe discipline.
The humour of the Stalinists had obviously changed. Like their comrades in Aiyina, they rejoiced in the victories of the two partners of the Hitler-Stalin pact and celebrated them. But, during the invasion of Finland by the Russian army, they foamed with rage about the relentless and victorious resistance of the Finns. Why, they cried in a righteous anger, wasn’t the little country being reduced to ashes, why weren’t the cities being bombed?
In August 1940, agents of the GPU assassinated Trotsky in Mexico. Stalin had finally achieved his goal. First of all he had literally exterminated the family of Trotsky. His first wife (…). One of his daughters (…) The other committed suicide (…). Their husbands also died in Siberia. Their children disappeared. (…) All his personal friends, his secretaries and his parents met the same end. (…)
No man had ever been persecuted with such rage as Trotsky was by Stalin. (…)
We organised a political commemoration in the Third Wing together with the Pouliopoulos group, with Pouliopoulos and myself as orators.
The Greco-Italian war began in October 1940[1]. We learnt about it from the appearance of the black-out. Two or three days later the camp authorities themselves made public the poisonously chauvinistic letter of Zachariadis[2] : “To this war which the Metaxas government is leading, everybody, we must dedicate all our strength...”, etc. The leadership of the Self-help Group called assemblies for each wing. All the Stalinists were without exception for the “defence of the fatherland”. They solemnly declared themselves in agreement with the letter of their chief and signed a petition to be mobilised and sent to the front.
For our part we spoke up in the assemblies, during the few minutes allotted to us, condemning the treason with all our strength, denouncing the chauvinist politics of the CPG and the Zachariadis letter, defending the principles of revolutionary internationalism and the transformation of the war between peoples into a war of peoples against their exploiters.
In the assembly in our wing it was D. Paparigas who represented the Stalinist leadership and its chauvinist politics. He did not respond to the basis of our critique, any more than he responded to our questions: isn’t the nation and the fatherland that calls the people to shed their blood for it bound up with capitalist society? Is capitalism or is it not responsible for wars? In what way is this world war to be distinguished from the previous one? Isn’t it also a war between brigands, the stuffed against the starving, for the dividing up of the world? Was the position of Lenin during the last war correct or not, and if it was for that time, why isn’t it anymore today, what has changed?
Paparigas didn’t answer. What could he answer? We were defending precisely what he had himself defended over the years. By way of a response, at the close of the assembly, he attacked us by accusing us of... trying to weaken the confidence of the people in the CPG, the “party of the working people” etc.
The nationalist policy of the CPG was in complete contradiction with its own principles, with the essence of its programme, and with all of its action up until 1932. It went back on everything it had stood for.
The Communist parties had been founded in the revolutionary wave which had followed the world conflict, when the peoples cursed the war and those responsible for it: men, classes and the social system. It was the very policy of transformation of the imperialist war into revolution which separated them from the old social-democratic parties. It is on the basis of this that Lenin differentiated himself: at Zimmerwald he opposed himself to the majority because they refused to put into their proclamation that principle which he judged essential. “The struggle against the war”, he said, “presented in such a general and abstract manner, without an appeal to its transformation into a civil war, is nothing but a trick”.
The first proclamation of the Communist International began with the words: “Remember the war”. One of the twenty one conditions whose unreserved acceptance was indispensable to form a section of the Communist International was the exclusion from the party of any cadres who had pronounced themselves for the defence of the fatherland during the war. During those years being taken for a patriot was the worst insult for a communist. It amounted to being accused of treason.
We will cite a few passages from Lenin’s The proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky.
“From the point of view of the proletariat, recognising ‘defence of the fatherland’ means justifying the present war, admitting that it is legitimate. And since the war remains an imperialist war (both under a monarchy and under a republic), irrespective of the country - mine or some other country - in which the enemy troops are stationed at the given moment, recognising defence of the fatherland means, in fact, supporting the imperialist, predatory bourgeoisie, and completely betraying socialism. In Russia, even under Kerensky, under the bourgeois-democratic republic, the war continued to be imperialist war, for it was being waged by the bourgeoisie as a ruling class (…)”
“If a German under Wilhelm or a Frenchman under Clemenceau says, ‘It is my right and duty as a socialist to defend my country if it is invaded by an enemy’, he argues not like a socialist, not like an internationalist, not like a revolutionary proletarian, but like a petty-bourgeois nationalist. Because this argument ignores the revolutionary class struggle of the workers against capital, it ignores the appraisal of the war as a whole from the point of view of the world bourgeoisie and the world proletariat, that is, it ignores internationalism, and all that remains is miserable and narrow-minded nationalism. My country is being wronged, that is all I care about - that is what this argument amounts to, and that is where its petty-bourgeois, nationalist narrow-mindedness lies. (…)”
“The socialist, the revolutionary proletarian, the internationalist, argues differently. He says: ‘The character of the war (whether it is reactionary or revolutionary) does not depend on who the attacker was, or in whose country the ‘enemy’ is stationed; it depends on what class is waging the war, and on what politics this war is a continuation of. If the war is a reactionary, imperialist war, that is, if it is being waged by two world groups of the imperialist, rapacious, predatory, reactionary bourgeoisie, then every bourgeoisie (even of the smallest country) becomes a participant in the plunder, and my duty as a representative of the revolutionary proletariat is to prepare for the world proletarian revolution as the only escape from the horrors of a world slaughter. (…)’ [3]”
All this is very clear. Lenin wrote so as to be understood. He did not use the smallest word which could lead to confusion. Revolutionary defeatism was the most fundamental principle, the most essential one of the CPG, at least until 1932. How can this have transformed itself so abruptly, without the slightest condemnation, without the slightest critique of this principle, into an “authentic” Greek nationalist party? We will return later to its metamorphosis and its “patriotism”.
The Greek army had already pushed back the Italian invasion and taken the offensive, taking the war onto Albanian territory. The popular masses celebrated the victories. The Stalinists as well. But they also rejoiced when the armoured columns of Hitler pulverised armies, towns and borders.
It is then that the Stalinists of Akronafplia disavowed their central committee with great shouts and recognised the “Provisional Leadership” as the authentic leadership of their party. They openly accused the members of the central committee of being traitors and in the pay of the police, and were full of praise for the militant virtues and the faith in the party of those who made up the Provisional Leadership.
We witnessed things directly then. We only came to learn a long time afterwards what had really happened. It appears that their central committee (Papayannis, Mathessis, Kanakis, Ktistakis)[4], in its resolution[5], concluded that the passage of the theatre of operations into Albania had removed all defensive character from the war and that it had transformed itself into an act of Greek aggression. In consequence, according to them, the duty of the CPG was to take from then on a position against the war and to denounce it.
This policy was without doubt in agreement with that of the USSR and the Communist International at the time. The Germano-Russian pact was in full force. Communist parties could not, by their politics or their actions, put Germano-Russian friendship in peril. Italy was an ally of Germany, and what was good for the latter became consequently good for the former.
The central committee was therefore in total accord with the official policy of the CPG after the Pact, that policy set out with such clarity and even more cynicism by the manifesto of the CC of the CPG in Rizospastis, 2 May 1940, and already cited here.
But this pacifist and anti-war policy of the Papayannis central committee could create problems and have displeasing consequences for the government, the regime and the conduct of the war. Maniadakis then decided to do what no other police force in the world had succeeded in doing until then: to fabricate for himself a “central committee” and provide the leadership of the CPG. His personal experience had given him the exact measure of the moral courage and the political firmness of the leading cadres of the CPG (as was shown by the success of his plan). Thus the “Provisional Leadership” was born from the Security Police.
Its principal cadre was Yannis Michailidis, a graduate of KUTV, a member of the political bureau of the CPG and a close friend of Zachariadis. They were both imprisoned in Corfu when Zachariadis gave him the order – at least he was asked to sign so that he could take in hand the leadership of the party and purge it of dubious elements. He went over to the service of the Security Police and executed his boss’ order very well, but under the direction of Maniadakis.
The Provisional Leadership grouped together with him Tyrimos, an MP for the CPG, secretary of the Athens organisation and member of the political bureau, Manoleas, MP, Moschos, kutvist and member of the central committee, Tatassopoulos, who had signed the “agreement on common action” of 6 October 1934 for the CP, and some others. In a proclamation they denounced the members of the Papayannis central committee as traitors and agents of the Security Police and declared that consequently, to preserve the party and save its honour, they would take the initiative of constituting themselves into a provisional leadership, demanding their recognition by the party members and cadres. And those, at least the ones who were in the camp of Akhronaflia, solemnly recognised that central committee manufactured by Maniadakis as the legal leadership of their party. The event was without parallel in political history.
The Tsarist Okhrana, that police force which was so effective in persecuting the revolutionary movement, was able to place its own men in key positions in revolutionary organisations. Azev, for example, in the combat group of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Malinovsky in the central committee of the Bolsheviks and in their parliamentary group, and some others, in almost all the revolutionary organisations. Yet they never succeeded in, and they were not capable of, taking in hand the leadership of one of these organisations, and, moreover, making its own members accept the policy. That success of the Security Police, unbelievable, incredible and without precedent, could only have been obtained with the Stalinist party and the cadres which it had formed.
Of the members of the old central committee, I knew Papayannis. He had been a member of the regional party committee for central and western Macedonia, of the organisation bureau and of the union committee during the years 1928-1931. Devoted, active and capable, he was the principal trade union cadre in Thessaloniki for a long time, and also the secretary of the trade union centre. He was a waiter. After the “liberation” he took an active part in the left-wing trade union movement without this old accusation against him ever being brought up again[6]. It is obvious that he was the victim of slander.
Arrested in mid-1941, he was transferred to Akhronaflia. The Stalinist leadership isolated him in a little room, on the corridor between the first and second wings. The wing chiefs made it known to us that it was a matter of a “dodgy element” and that all contact with him was forbidden. The next day I went to visit him. But he told me himself that it was necessary to respect the decision of the “leadership” and made me conform with this as well.
As for Damianos Mathessis, I learnt some years later that he was a man of absolute trust in the CPG as well as the International. I knew him. More exactly I saw him at the Fourth Congress and at the Second and Third Plenums of the party. He did not belong to the central committee and did not participate in the debates. But he was responsible for the delegates of the International, for hiding places, housing etc.. I cannot formulate an opinion on the very serious accusations brought against him. He obstinately rejected them himself. In reality there is no concrete proof. V. Nefeloudis[7] spoke of “suspicions”. What is said by Solon Grigoriadis in his History (Volume I, page 182) proves nothing and rather pleads in his favour. Mathessis was linked, he tells us, to a group of officers[8] with lieutenant V. Venetsopoulos at their head, known to Solon Grigoriadis. These officers wanted to join the CPG, but Mathessis prevented them, telling them that the leadership of the party was in the pay of the British and perhaps also the Germans. Finally, S. Grigoriadis himself revealed to the officers that Mathessis was the “grass supreme. From an agent of Maniadakis, he had become an agent of the Gestapo”. And the officers, despite the attempts of Mathessis to hold them back, moved away from him and joined the CPG.
One is thus entitled to ask why he didn’t hand them over to the Gestapo.
I once questioned Haïtas about the responsibilities of Mathessis in the party. He replied: “Let it go, it’s nothing to do with us”.
Among the six hundred detainees in the camp it wasn’t difficult to notice those who were in quarantine. Their punishment was total: absolute isolation, not the slightest relation was allowed with them. What crime could they have committed to merit such an inhuman punishment? We could never know.
Those who knew held their tongue. The punished even more than the others. They even avoided all contact with each other.
Nevertheless, three of them, Gakis, Paris et Kapenis were in permanent contact and separately formed an amicable group. Stamelakos joined them afterwards. He was a leading union cadre of the party, the secretary of the Federation of Shoe Workers, he had been at one time secretary of the Unitary General Confederation of Greek Workers (EGSEE).
It seemed that they were reproached for some political opinions which they had in common, opinions contrary to the line of the party. Which ones? We never knew anything about them. (…)
One day, suddenly, completely unexpectedly, a mass of thugs descended on them, screaming like savages and literally beat them to a pulp. (…) They threw them unconscious, half dead, bloody and with their clothes in tatters, at the entrance of the camp where the guards came to collect them.
I had personal experience of the sudden and massive outbursts of the screaming cops (…). But I had read pity and even shame in the eyes of some of those doing the beating. The faces and the eyes of the thugs of Ioannidis and Bartzotas expressed only a frenzied madness and sadistic pleasure.
Their work accomplished, they sat down to catch their breath and said, as they had been ordered: “After all, we only want to dispatch them back to their masters”. They meant the camp governor and the Minister of Security. But if their victims had really belonged to the Security Police, would they have dared to subject them to such treatment? The Stalinist leadership religiously respected the rules of the camp. (…)
I would add that if the Ministry of Security had needed informers in the camp, they would not have been those who had divergences with the “leadership” and the “line”. They knew that their least severe punishment was to be isolated, and that they would have put themselves in a situation where it was impossible to accomplish their work. (…) If there were grasses in Akhronaflia, it was only perhaps (…) among the “Stalinist fanatics” who gravitated towards the leadership, and among the thugs.
Gakis and Kapenis met a tragic end. Here is what Yannis Manousakas wrote on the subject, on page 152 of his book Akhronaflia: “To finally close this sad chapter, I consider it my duty to say a couple of words about their end. At the start of the Occupation, Gakis received an order from the Volos organisation to join the resistance. Shortly afterwards, because of his skill and courage, the partisans recognised him as ELAS chief for the Pelion. But when Bartzotas and the others were freed from Sotirias[9], and Ioannidis freed from Petras[10], they sent an order to the Thessaloniki organisation to kill Gakis. They also killed Kapenis who they found in the region of Agrinion, where he was the EAM official for a village. They put out a rumour that ELAS had captured them while they were serving as soldiers in a German unit and that it had killed them. So, Bartzotas and Ioannidis did not leave them, even after the iniquitous death which they had reserved for them, to find a little rest in the soil of their country, where, I am sure, history will show that they struggled for the people and progress and that they died with full honours”.
In a footnote on the same page he adds: “In 1956, when I was locked up in the Alicarnassos prison, a venerable septuagenarian came to my cell one day. It was Yorgis Roghas, from Volos: ‘I have come, comrade Yannis’, he told me ‘in the hope of going to find the Party one day and denouncing the tragedy that the putting to death of Gakis has been in the Pelion command.’ He added that when the members of the command took up the defence of Gakis, several of them were murdered. The old man spoke after the Twentieth Congress and the Sixth Plenum[11], which gave militants the right to speak for a little while”.
I only knew Stamelakos and Gakis a long time ago. Stamelakos was the ordinary type of paternalist Stalinist. Neither better nor worse than others like him. Stavros Gakis was on the contrary incontestably a militant. I knew him in Thessaloniki in 1929. The political bureau had sent him there with P. Ikonomidis. He was devoted, active and competent militant.
In April 1941, the Germans set themselves the task that the Italians could not accomplish: conquering the country[12]. They declared war on it and invoked the usual pretexts. Metaxas died[13]. The Prime Minister, Koryzis, committed suicide shortly after the German invasion. King George took on the presidency of the council himself. The armoured columns of Hitler moved forwards crushing all resistance. The dictatorship’s generals surrendered and the army was disbanded. The New Zealanders[14] did not have the strength to contain the fascist columns which descended, sweeping aside everything in their path. The only thing they could do was to flee Greece as quickly as possible.
Nafplio was one of their ports of embarkation for the ships for Crete and Egypt. Each evening, under a complete black-out, the port filled up with transports and war ships which the New Zealand soldiers got onto. During the day, every day, swarms of German planes bombarded the port, the forts and the railway station. Some ships burned, others exploded.
Every day we lived a nightmare, in a permanent anguish about being blown to bits. But the situation was more favourable for our escape. In a state of panic, the camp garrison no longer left their improvised shelters. It was absolutely possible for us to escape, and without a single victim. The garrison, in the psychological state it was then in, would not have had the strength to oppose it.
We were always posing the question of our collective escape, everywhere finding an echo in the mass of detainees. It was the only subject of conversation. You heard it on all sides: “Why don’t we flee? Are we going to wait for the Germans to come and take us?” The Stalinist detainees were exasperated by the passivity of their leadership. In response to the outcry the Stalinist leadership dispatched a committee to the camp governor to ask him to grant us our freedom. After endless discussions with him the committee, satisfied enough, told us that the governor had assured them that he would open the gates and let us go when the government had abandoned Athens. “It is, he said, the order that I have received from the Ministry of Security”. To prove to the committee that the government was still in Athens he had put them in telephone contact with Maniadakis. Persuaded of the sincerity of the governor, the committee denounced proposals for escape as adventurist and dangerous, recommending calm, discipline, confidence in the leadership and... reinforcing the Stalinist guard so as to prevent any attempt at individual or collective flight.
This is what this committee, made up of men enjoying the absolute confidence of the party leadership, declared. But was it the truth? We believed it was then. We couldn’t read the newspapers and had no means of knowing what was happening outside. Today we can be sure that everything in its communications was false. It was absolutely impossible, when the last New Zealand soldiers were getting onto the ships and running away, when Nafplio was being savagely bombarded, that the government could still be in Athens. Their supposed intervention with the governor to free us was a lie. The assurance received from the governor that he had the order to open the camp gates after the departure of the government from Athens was a lie. The telephone contact with Maniadakis was a lie. These were all lies that they had invented with the governor to prevent any escape.
Two or three days later German paratroops seized Nafplio. Armed, they surrounded the camp.
If the dictatorship is guilty once for handing us over to the Germans, the Stalinist leadership is guilty a hundred times. We want to make it clear here that the majority of the detainees of Akhronaflia were shot. None of the leading cadres were, because, evidently, everything was arranged for them to escape.
Their shameful and criminal attitude can first of all be explained by their fear of a probable confrontation with the garrison, but above all by the illusions which they harboured about the attitude of the Germans, who were still allies of the USSR at that time. They awaited them as friends, as their own.
Once, the mass of Stalinist detainees did become discontented and irritated with their bosses, who were so obviously responsible for handing them over to the Germans. But it didn’t last long. The Stalinist leadership quickly persuaded them that the Germans would in any case free them. They believed it, there’s no shadow of a doubt.
At the beginning of May, a few days after our handover to the Germans, two German officers and a dignitary from the Bulgarian embassy[15] came into the camp with a list of names of twenty seven “Slavo-Macedonians” and freed them. We all knew that these twenty seven were Communists. Those who made up the list, the Bulgarian embassy (more exactly, the Bulgarian security police) had assured the Germans, were not Communists but Slavo-Macedonian nationalists. This guarantee from the embassy was enough for them.
The Stalinist leadership felt no need to politically explain such a strange event and on the contrary they rejoiced in it, presenting it to the mass of detainees as proof on their part of the good intentions of the Germans.
This had reinforced their certainty about a liberation in the near future and they had begun their preparations. Every day we were subjected to their aggressions and provocations: for us there was no question of their Hitlerian friends and allies liberating us. We all had to prepare ourselves for the firing squad. They spoke and conducted themselves as if they were from then on the masters or the associate masters, with the Germans, of the situation. Those reading these lines must understand that nothing is in the least bit exaggerated.
From the day that the German troops seized the country, all of us, the political prisoners, became hostages. They told us it, and we knew it. The collective executions must have started in 1942. The hostages were promised death, the Greek gendarmes guarded them and handed them over to their executioners on behalf of the occupation authorities.
The German paratroops only disarmed the camp garrison for a few hours. They very quickly agreed things with the governor. It wasn’t difficult. There was only the obstacle of language between them. They found some interpreters and they found that, beyond the differences of speech, they spoke the same language. The gendarmes got back their arms, and the governor his position.
A lot has been written, more or less everywhere, about this dramatic period of the Occupation. We will confine ourselves to one point: the strict guard, very strict in fact, of the warehouses of goods for the army maintained by the Greek police. A guard against who? Against the Greek people. On behalf of who? The Germans. When a few people set about opening the warehouses at Kokkinia they were confronted by the guns of the police.
How many of the thousands of people who died of hunger in the terrible winter of 1941-1942 would have been saved if the population had been left free to share out the goods in the army warehouses and merchants’ shops, after most of it had been taken by the Germans?
Some of those who describe, “with their pen drenched in tears”, the shame, emotion, etc., who direct the people to the sight of the swastika flag floating over the Acropolis, present, filled with “national pride”, the fact that their was no looting or vandalism as an example of civic responsibility.
In June 1941, without any warning, Hitler abruptly unleashed his troops against the USSR. The Stalinists were struck dumb. Their hopes and dreams had flown away. In the communications of the first few days the German high command didn’t give any concrete information. Not only did this lead to the most fantastic rumours being spread by word of mouth, but also the Stalinists circulated an information bulletin “from reliable sources” about the victories of the Russian army or the bombing of Berlin by hundreds of Russian planes. When the truth became known about the lightning advance of the Germans towards Moscow, the Caucasus, Leningrad, the millions of Russian prisoners, etc., the Stalinists remained paralysed. But they didn’t waste any time in persuading themselves once again that all this could only be part of a brilliant plan by Stalin.
It goes without saying that the USSR and the Stalinist parties of the whole world then put a new record on. Hitler became the enemy of humanity. He aimed, by fire and iron, at the submission, the reduction to slavery, the annihilation of nations and peoples. Britain and France, from being imperialist states, were transformed into peace-loving democracies. From now on they defended civilisation, democracy and so on. Stalin dissolved the Communist International and Ioannidis, in Akronafplia, declared that this event was the “most important for the workers’ movement since the Communist Manifesto” (those who collect the comments of great men mustn’t forget this one).
The aggression of Hitler against the USSR was a painful surprise for the Stalinists of Akhronaflia. They incontestably believed that the alliance was solid and long-lasting, and perhaps even that the two partners in the Pact would dominate the world together. (…)
What was important for Hitler when he signed the pact was to protect his rear, in the East, so as to be able to launch his armies without danger against the West. Stalin gave a guarantee of his security and it is perhaps the first time in his life that he remained true to his word. (…)
Stalin guaranteed the security of the Eastern frontiers of Hitler, but he also supplied the aid necessary to his murderous work. Moreover he put the Communist parties at his disposal. An assistance surely unbelievable and unhoped for by Hitler.
The policy of the CPs at that time was to facilitate the work of Hitler, who they considered to be a faithful ally of Stalin. In France, the CP achieved this with its “why”. In every country they tried to do the same thing. In Greece as well this is what the CPG set out to do. Its manifesto of 2 May 1940 testifies to this. It declared very clearly that for its own safety, to preserve peace and its prosperity, the country must act like Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. But these two states, at that particular time, were allied to Hitler.
Another tragic event revealed the lying character of this fifth column policy (…). In Yugoslavia on 27 March 1941, the army and the people overthrew the regent and denounced the pact with Hitler[16]. The new government actually demanded aid and intervention from Russia. By way of aid Russia refuelled Goering’s aircraft so that they could reduce Belgrade to ashes.
Towards mid-1940, when a large enough number of members of the two Trotskyist groups which then existed found themselves in Akhronaflia, we decided to organise a debate on the most essential problems of the movement at that time: fascism, war, the defence of the USSR, the struggle on two fronts, the united front, etc.
The two groups were the Internationalist Communist Union and the Unified Organisation of Internationalist Communists. I belonged to the first one, Pouliopoulos to the second.
These debates took place orally at common meetings and in written form in a bulletin which was circulated and read by all the members of the two groups. My own writings covered around five hundred pages, and those of Voursoukis, Krokkos and Makris at least as much. It was possible to preserve all the bulletins and send them out of the camp. We confided our writings to a member of the Unified OIC to whom the other members of that group had already given theirs.
Almost forty years have passed and they have always been in their hands. During this whole period they have published and distributed a number of polemics by Pouliopoulos and others directed against us without making known our real opinions and, even worse, citing falsified and truncated passages from my articles. Militants and workers have therefore not had the right to learn for themselves what a group of revolutionaries stood for, in the most nightmarish conditions, in the camp of Akhronaflia.
I have had in my hands for a little while, since 16 June 1977, the copy of two of my texts: Our divergences with the Unified OIC and The USSR and the struggle for world revolution. There is still a lot more of my studies and the whole of the articles and studies of Voursoukis, Krokkos and Makris. These three militants are dead. The first one was murdered by the Stalinists and the two others were executed by the Germans. The Trotskyists themselves also did the work of the executioners. They executed their ideas.
These debates don’t only have a historic interest. The problems that we tackled then continue to have a vital importance for the revolutionary movement. We are publishing the essential points of these two studies[17].
We then also belonged to the Fourth International and we considered ourselves as Trotskyists. The reader will notice that, if we use in one way or another the same traditional terminology and refer to the principles of the Fourth International and Trotsky to defend the correctness of our ideas, our conclusions and the tasks that we set ourselves are diametrically opposed to them. We believed ourselves to be orthodox and consistent Trotskyists and that the opportunists and more or less social-patriotic ideas of the Unified OIC were foreign to the principles and programme of the Fourth International. Subsequent events have demonstrated the contrary. The OIC only expressed and defended the ideas of the Fourth International and Trotsky. Social-patriotism, opportunism, and the most incredible confusion existed in their “principles” and their “programme”. The essential thing for us was that, during the war, in those conditions where the endurance and the firmness of individuals and organisations are subjected to trial by fire, the Fourth International crumbled to dust. Its sections, almost in their totality, whether because of the slogan of defence of the USSR, whether because of the supposed progressive character of the movements of national resistance, found themselves on the side of the Socialist and Communist Parties, in the service of the world’s executioners.
The camp had some stocks of flour when the German occupation began. So for the first months we had bread and it wasn’t too difficult for us to find dried beans. But the stocks became exhausted. The camp administrators told us straight out that they couldn’t do anything for our subsistence, that they had nothing. The Germans and the Italians had stated from the beginning that they had no responsibility for our supplies and that they had no obligation in that regard. We had to get by on our own.
This event is not very well-known and it seems that those who speak and write about Akhronaflia haven’t given it much importance. We were prisoners or hostages. They had locked us up in a strictly guarded prison building, awaiting the firing squads. Those who had locked us up and those who guarded us and those for whom they guarded us declared that they were in no way concerned with our subsistence. We were condemned to death by hunger. I am not aware, and in any case I have not read or heard anything about, whether a similar situation has any precedent.
In the beginning we managed to get a large enough amount of beans and potatoes from Tripolis, but without oil or bread, and without salt. But all this disappeared from the market very quickly. We sent out SOS calls in all directions. Those who had family or relations in the villages wrote to them to ask for help. From Macedonia there came to Nafplio whole “convoys”, as they were called by those leading them, of horses and mules laden with household utensils and foodstuffs, primarily wheat flour, trachanas[18], pasta etc. Most of the people were originally from Pontus[19]. They showed the greatest solidarity. Undoubtedly these people are among the best.
Once every twenty four hours we would eat some dry beans or some noodles, without oil or salt. Often we remained completely unfed. Two or three times, we rose up, desperately, and the Italians[20] gave us some pasta.
Hunger reduced us to wrecks. Discussions had stopped. We remained sprawled on our beds so as not to use up calories and we were no longer capable of thinking of anything but the next mid-day, of our next handful of chickpeas, trachanas or gruel. Something peculiar: those who had gastric problems were cured. When, two or three times, a handful of olives made up the whole of our meal, some of those who had solid teeth collected the stones and, transforming their mouths into a grinding mill, ate them. This included those who had previously suffered from stomach problems and had been on a light diet.
I will mention here two facts which say a lot about the gendarmes, our compatriots, and the Italians, the foreigners, and about human and class solidarity. The Italian soldiers often passed or threw us cigarettes from the top of the walls which dominated the square. Because they weren’t short of them. The sympathy and the pity could be read on their faces. You could say that perhaps they were Communists. But with the following episode we are talking about fascists.
I had to sign a document, and for that I had to go down into the town to find a notary. I received authorisation. The gendarmes who escorted me had kept my handcuffs on during the journey, but also at the notary’s place, so that I couldn’t sign. Two Italian soldiers, with the uniform and insignia of the fascists, watched the scene. Furious, they came forcefully into the office, showered the gendarmes with abuse, and made them take off the handcuffs. When they left one of them tapped me amicably on the shoulder and said: “Signore, tutti i uomini siamo fratelli” [“Sir, all men are brothers”].
What is said about this by the Greeks who never stop talking about their common history, national solidarity and all that blather?
Six hundred men were condemned to death by starvation, apart from certain detainees who never knew famine: the cadres of the CPG.
With the authorisation of the governor they were assembled in a special wing, an extension of the Second. They had opened a door between the two sections and fifteen or twenty of them went through it under the pretext that they were ill. They were also exempted from forced labour.
These gentlemen did not know hunger and they ate plenty and well. Two or three times a day the orderlies passed by the multitude of their starving supporters who lay on their beds with covered plates of I don’t know what delicacies destined for the chiefs. We knew that to attain the heights of the Stalinist hierarchy you had to abdicate any human sentiment (if you had any), but didn’t they take account of the impression that this cynical provocation would produce on the mass of their supporters? No. The masses had to learn that only the cadres and the chiefs were called upon to survive. And, judging from their attitude, they seem to have assimilated, integrated and become habituated to that. Perhaps never have slave owners had such a contempt for the life and dignity of their slaves, and the slaves supported such contempt and degradation on the part of their masters.
In December 1941 an International Red Cross steamer full of provisions destined for the camp dropped anchor in the port. Hundreds of sacks of beans were transported from its holds to the camp stores. The representatives of the IRC told us that, taking account of our number, they had themselves fixed a ration of 225 grams per individual per day, and assured us that, well before they ran out, the steamer would return again to the port with new provisions.
The Red Cross nuns visited us in the cells and themselves distributed raisins, biscuits, blankets and, above all, pullovers. Humanity, nobility, gentleness and kindness lit up their faces. What a contrast between these brave women believers and the Bolsheviks that the “leaders” had designated to escort them, and who stood at their sides, rude, severe, ferocious. They asked the questions and gave the responses, because no one other than them had the right to speak. “We are not a herd”, “whoever you are you can’t say anything without it being approved by the top”, “that is what Lenin and Stalin taught us” etc.
One of the nuns was from Corfu. Getting around the restrictions, I asked her if she knew what was happening in Corfu. She replied that the situation was even worse than in the rest of Greece, because the Ionian Islands, annexed by Italy, were not considered as occupied, and the Italian government had not authorised the Red Cross to provide aid.
The pullovers had been knitted by the women, particularly the village women, for the soldiers. After the debacle, those which were left had been given to the Red Cross. Most of them had a coin and a little greeting card stitched into a corner. In the one I received there was a twenty drachma piece and the card said “God be with you”.
The Red Cross representatives had clearly declared, in front of all of us, that they had themselves fixed our daily ration at 225 grams per person. But from the day of their departure, the well-fed Stalinist leadership, in concert with the governor, decided to reduce it to 130 grams, arguing that this was war and that it was possible that the Red Cross, despite what was said, would be late and that we had to have reserves.
We protested immediately and very energetically. The donations of the IRC were to be shared out honestly to each one of us, and it wasn’t the business of either the camp authorities or that of the Group. We kicked up a real fuss, threatening to immediately telegraph the IRC.
This was the first of two incidents which provoked a savage aggression of the Stalinist thugs against us. The second was the refusal of Voursoukis to do his forced labour.
On the New Year’s Eve of 1942, the chief of the wing told Voursoukis that he would be doing forced labour the next day. He told the chief that there must be an error, that his turn hadn’t come yet. We knew the response in advance: that the 15-20 people in the special wing were ill and exempt from work. And Voursoukis and all of us explained that these gentlemen were in very good health, ate well, had their comforts and that they even did their exercises every morning. If they need to be served they can contact an employment agency and take on a maid from outside. We were not disposed to serve them as domestics. They persisted and provoked a series of incidents.
On New Year’s Day (a memorable day) were formed a committee to go and discuss and protest with Aridas, the secretary of the Group in the second wing. We had not even opened our mouths when a mass of thugs, already gathered around Aridas, threw themselves on us screaming. The attack spread to all the wings. The camp was turned upside down. Our revolt was so serious for them that they had not taken account either of the garrison nor of the Italians who were in the offices of the camp authority. It has to be said that they were hardly afraid of any intervention from that side. The risk was really very serious for them: our constant demands for food and our “lack of respect” for the well-fed scumbags of the special wing risked making the mechanism of the robots seize up.
They “sat” quickly and took the decision to exclude us from the Self-help Group. Their decision was read out in a very official tone in the wings by “Death’s Head” (Lykouris).
For sure the governor heard all the noise. The next day he called Pouliopoulos and I to his office. He knew all about us. And he was violently hostile to us. Above all it was because we were not patriots like the others. We had not signed the Stalinist petition to be mobilised and sent to the front to defend the fatherland. We had also refused to participate in the celebrations of 25 March and, during a theatrical presentation of the Group which was attended by the governor and other “officials”, when everybody was set to sing the national anthem, we stood up to leave singing the Internationale. The affair of the provisions had brought his exasperation against us to its height. He entirely rejected any responsibility for any incidents against us because, as was reported to him and as he himself could testify, we were not disciplined and did not respect the rules of the camp, and what’s more we wanted to eat all the beans so that the camp wouldn’t have any reserves (provocation). He added that the hatred of the Stalinists against us was justified because we were anarchists and had no country. We replied that this hatred of which we were the object was a great honour for us, and proved the correctness of our ideas and our policy. Their hatred is the same as that of exploiters and the privileged against revolutionaries. Finally, he told us that for his tranquillity and ours he would send us to another wing. Thus we were sent somewhere else. And with us the archeiomarxists, Seïtanidis, Iliadis and two of those who were ostracised.
For sure we took all the provisions to which we had a right, down to the last gram. But we didn’t have any cooking utensils. The Stalinists refused to give us what there was, despite the fact that the Group’s utensils had been bought with our money. Finally, as best we could, we managed to procure an incredible collection of oddments. Then we had to find a cook. The first to offer himself was Paraskevas. He had, he told us, knowledge, practice and skill. More as a joke than to check his skill, we asked him if you proceed in the same manner for pasta, dry beans and fresh beans. He answered straight away, without the slightest embarrassment, “No”: you immediately put pasta and fresh beans into cold water before heating them up. Whereas, on the contrary, when you throw dry beans into the saucepan the water must be boiling. Finally, it was Makris, a cake shop worker, who was put in charge of the kitchen.
225 grams of beans, even without bread, without oil and without salt, is better than nothing, and it satisfied our hunger, after so many months of clear soup from the Self-help Group.
When the occupation authorities decided to empty Akhronaflia and to transfer the detainees elsewhere, they began with us. The reason for this preference was that the place where we were locked up had not been intended to serve as a prison. This was lucky for us. If we had remained a bit longer at Akhronaflia, none of us would have survived. A little after our transfer, the first collective execution of camp detainees was carried out as reprisals[21].
Of the seven who were then executed by the Italians, four would have been executed in any case by the Stalinists: Seïtanidis, adversary of the CPG since 1924, Thoïdis, Tsourtsoulis et Kastanias, all three excluded from the CPG and placed in permanent quarantine. Who made this selection? Was it by chance? The three others were Berketis, Anagnostopoulos and Koskinas. There was only one logical explanation: this selection was made by the leadership of the camp and the Stalinist leadership together. If we had still been there the governor would not have needed to ask the Stalinists who to hand over to the Italians for the firing squad. He knew who they had designated, those who he had already isolated as anarchists, agitators and people with no country, and he would have them ready for the first batch.
In mid-March 1942 they ordered our transfer to Piraeus. We had an appalling journey from Nafplio to Piraeus, tied up and packed tightly like sardines in a lorry. The behaviour of the gendarmes in our escort (Greek gendarmes in the service of the occupation authorities) was bestial. (…)
(…) They handed us over to the transfer section and we were locked up in the cells. There, for the first time, we saw with our own eyes the atrocious drama that the people lived in the first period of the Occupation. It wasn’t men who occupied the cells, but skeletons, shadows, human ghosts. Most, if not all of them, were accused of stealing from the occupation authorities. But no one was a professional thief. At that time everyone stole. The visitors had the same ghostly aspect. In the arms of the women who came to see their detained husbands there was nothing but a pile of bones. One could only distinguish in this little pile two big eyes filled with distress and reproach. Reproach towards the great executioners who had bloodied the whole country in such a small amount of time, but also towards the whole of humanity which had tolerated it, reproach for the generations and centuries to come.
Each time the wife of an imprisoned baker appeared in the visitor’s room, all the detainees, from behind the barred openings, cried out: “Madam baker, just a crumb of bread!” From a plate of beans (without oil, obviously) that you were passing to someone a bit of broth (that is to say, cold water) fell onto the foul ground while they were passing it through the grill of the cell. Everyone immediately fell on the ground to lick it up. Every day people died of hunger. The corpses were dragged away by their feet, to where the municipal lorry collected them, like so much rubbish.
Many days later, perhaps on the intervention of the Red Cross, every twenty four hours they gave us half a ladle of a soup whose colour made you think of maize, but it wasn’t. Some said it was the shavings of a tree from Ethiopia. In any case, we threw away more than we ate.
An Armenian lay on the same blanket as a boy from Chios, in the darkest corner of the cell. At mid-day, as well as his half-ladle of soup, he took that of his friend from Chios who, he told us, couldn’t get up. It’s only when he began to stink that we realised that he had been dead for several hours. Once, they brought to us three people who had stolen, killed and eaten a donkey. They all died in a few hours.
Lice swarmed. (…)
We must have been something like seventy political prisoners. In addition to us, who came from Akhronaflia, some exiles arrived from the islands of Folegandros and Gavdos, all Stalinists, apart from Tamtakos, who was a member of our organisation. The occupation authorities had decided to gather together all the politicals at Haïdari and Larissa. But the camps were still not ready and that’s why they provisionally kept us in the transfer section of Piraeus. A provisional arrangement which lasted a long time. We stayed in that hell until mid-July 1942, that is more than three months. We protested continuously and the Red Cross transmitted our protests to the occupation authorities and the government. They finally decided, while waiting for the camps to be ready, to send us to various police stations in Evia[22]. The whole time we were in Piraeus, comrades outside visited us every day, morning and afternoon, bringing us whatever provisions they had managed to gather. It is thus that a contact was re-established which had been broken for some years.
Tamtakos managed to escape. An escape organised in a very intelligent fashion – several days passed before the gaoler was aware of it. But he and the gendarmes then became enraged. As well as insults, swearing and threats, they took measures to make our lives more difficult. Yet the Greek gendarmes knew that we were hostages at the disposal of the Germans and generally destined for the firing squad.
When Voursoukis tried to flee and failed, because the waiter in the section café knew about it and informed the gendarmes, they beat him and locked him up in handcuffs. Pouliopoulos and Yannakos had been admitted to hospital.
In mid-July we were on our way to the railway station, around seventy political prisoners, tied up and escorted by a crowd of gendarmes. In the morning they had taken us for disinfection in the bath and the steam room, but when the commander of the escort gave the order to leave, our clothes were still in the steam room. We retrieved them as best we could and wore them crumpled and sopping wet.
Some horrible wagons were waiting for us at the station. We protested and refused from the start to board, but when we saw a detachment of Germans preparing their machine guns, we hurriedly got into them. They shut us up in the wagons in the unbearable heat of July, and only opened them again on arrival at Halkida.
There, in the transfer section, during the formalities of handover and reception, some of us suggested that the bugs in the cells could be counted in millions and that we risked being “devoured” by them. We asked the sergeant-gaoler to remain in the courtyard and to let us lie down there. Faced with his refusal, we refused in turn to enter the cells and grappled with the gendarmes. Remboutsikas gave the sergeant a punch in the head which knocked him back two metres. Finally, they made us enter by force and locked us up thanks to the intervention of armed Italian mountain troops. The bugs didn’t wait for the night to throw themselves on us in their thousands. (…)
Yet, apart from the bugs and the beastliness of the sergeant, our stay in the transfer section of Halkida didn’t pass too badly. Of course the section didn’t give us anything to eat, and it was impossible to find what there was in the market. But the bishop of Halkida took care of that and we received a large enough quantity of peas every day. We cooked them ourselves and ate them. Skarimbas[23] came to visit the section. He saluted us one by one with a great deal of emotion, recommending courage and patience to us and gave each of us a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches.
At the end of July we were transferred to various police stations on Evia. They sent me to the one at Konistres, a village around an hour from Kimi, possessing a telephone and telegraph and a few shops. It was in some way the commercial centre of the region. Each Sunday there was a fruit and beans market.
The inhabitants behaved well towards me, as did the sergeant and the gendarmes. With the sergeant’s permission I rented a room, and on the order of the bishop of Karystos they gave me the same ration that the International Red Cross provided for children: gruel and raisins almost every day.
I established friendly relations with a barber from Piraeus who lived with his brother-in-law, an old atheist and two close sympathisers, one from the same village, the other from Passas, a little village inhabited almost entirely by workers in the lignite mines. They competed as to who could provide me with the most raisins and figs.
I passed my days in discussion with them, often openly, in the café. The sergeant was tolerant and didn’t care. The old man (who was called Mitsos Karalis) was famous. He knew very little about the revolutionary movement but he was a convinced atheist and he’d read a lot, particularly the authors that Marx and Engels had described as vulgar materialists (Büchner, etc.).
Bishop Panteleimon of Karystos (who then lived in Kimi) had taken on a real affection for all the exiles of the region. In addition to organising the provisions and medicines of the IRC, with which he helped the exiles and condemned men, he also seems to have been linked to the Allied secret services. A short time after our escape he also left for Egypt and returned with the government[24] and the Rimini brigade[25] as the Metropolitan of the armed forces. In the persons of these two bishops, that of Halkida and that of Karystos, we had known two men who demonstrated affection, sympathy and real concern for us. Kordatos and Dante were wrong when they placed them completely on the side of reaction, for one, and completely in Hell, for the other.
In mid-October, after two and a half months of staying in Konistres, I decide to escape. I made it known to my friends and to the bishop. He suggested that I travel to the Middle East and hide myself in a secure place and wait. I refused, but without revealing my disagreements with the patriots. He gave me sufficient beans that I could set out with a full stomach. Apart from that, after having stabbed my leg with a needle so that you could believe it was a dog bite, this generous priest signed and sealed a letter in which it was written: “I have been bitten by a rabid dog and I must immediately be presented at the anti-rabies centre”. “You will show this document in case of a raid” he told me “I have predated it so as to make the danger more pressing and therefore the treatment more urgent”. He hugged me and wished me bon voyage and good luck. It wasn’t necessary to show the paper. But I was profoundly moved by the ingenuity and audaciousness of this bishop.
I sent a note to Voursoukis, Makris and Krokkos telling them in advance of my decision, according to the agreed manner and calling on them to do the same. Voursoukis escaped the same day as me. Makris and Krokkos, I don’t know why, didn’t escape. Two days afterwards they were transferred, like all those who didn’t escape, to Larissa, and were later executed: Makris at Kournovo on 22 June 1943 and Krokkos on 1 May 1944 at Kaisariani. Soulas, Xypolytos and Mitsis, members of the Unified ICO, didn’t escape either. They met the same fate. Xypolytos was executed at Kournovo, and Mitsis and Soulas at Kaisariani.
It has been said enough times that comrades in Athens provided us with money and false papers. This is a lie as far as we are concerned. Not only did we not receive them, but those who did receive them did not even feel obliged to inform us that a collective escape was prepared. It is entirely by chance that our own escape happened at the same time.
I took to the road later, after midnight. After two and a half days walking with bare feet I arrived in Thiva. The whole time I only fed myself with a half eaten quince and the skin of a watermelon. I scanned the already picked vines in the hope of finding just one bunch of grapes. But in vain. Who knows how many had already been there before me. The journey from Halkida to Thiva was more tiring than that from Konistres to Halkida. A little after Halkida, the Thiva road is straight and interminable, for kilometres and kilometres, without a single tree by the side or even a telegraph pole for shade to rest under. I suffered terribly from the sun and from thirst, my tongue stuck and my breathing short. This agony lasted for hours. It is a miracle that I didn’t collapse from sunstroke on the way.
I had not foreseen this danger when I left, otherwise I would have taken a bottle of water and something to protect my head from the sun. From Konistres to Halkida, the road had been pleasant and I had always been able to rest in the shade, in that tropical vegetation in the south and centre of Evia. Water was always abundant. But there was nothing to eat. The only thing that I feared when I set out was crossing the Halkida bridge. I knew that the carabinieri carried out checks very strictly, and I supposed that this would be reinforced even more, in one way or another, when the exiles’ collective escape had become known. On the dawn of the third day of my escape, arriving in view of the carabinieri post, I prepared the paper which the bishop had given me. But no one stopped me or asked for anything. I greeted them and they greeted me. “Bongiorno Siniori, bongiorno Siniore”, and I passed.
At the road blocks, the Italians, like the Germans, only checked the buses and lorries and those on board. They didn’t pay any attention to pedestrians, particularly pedestrians like me who had bear feet and were dressed only in ragged trousers. At Thiva, I drank my fill of water and never has any drink seemed to me to be so sweet and delicious. Midday was long gone when I climbed into an old lorry which was going to Athens. Arriving at Dafni, where there was a German check point, I got off and set out on foot for Piraeus. I hoped to go to the house of the barber I had known in Konistres. We had talked about my escape and he had given me the address of his house. He had left Konistres a few days before and was in Piraeus.
It began to get dark. The road seemed interminable to me. I walked for hours, without knowing how to get my bearings, with the impression of being completely lost, in the total darkness imposed by the black-out, at an hour when it was strictly forbidden by the occupation authorities to be out of doors. I groped my way from wall to wall, avoiding even the back roads for fear of falling upon a German or a police patrol. I stopped at each instant and put my ear to the ground to listen for possible foot steps, remembering that they had told me to do that in the army. It must have been well past midnight when, without having met a living soul, I finally arrived in Kastella, at the address that I had been given by my friend from Konistres.
Even today I still can’t explain how I managed, in that darkness, to go from Dafni to Kastella. I had never made that journey before. I advanced like a sleep-walker, without trying to orient myself consciously. Did instinct guide me? There are such aspects of ourselves that we can’t explain. I knocked. A man appeared at the window, I told him who I was looking for and, to my misfortune, he told me that the barber had moved house a few days before. I thought for a moment to tell him who I was and ask him for asylum for one evening. But I was too late. Terrorised, he had already shut the window.
In despair I headed towards Faliro. On the way I saw a rather large isolated house, surrounded by a low wall. I climbed over it and jumped inside. An enormous dog ran to me, but without even opening its mouth. I stroked it and a little later my eyes closed with the dog in my arms. I woke up early in the morning and set out on foot for Athens. The only address which I remembered after so many years was that of a comrade who kept a cake shop in Kypseli. I found her and she led me to another friend’s house where, for the first time in months, I ate a well cooked meal in someone’s home. There they gave me socks, shoes and a jacket and they told me where I could find Tamtakos and the other comrades, and I went to find them.
Then began a life and an action which belonged to history and which will remain immortal, despite all those who try to cover them up or discredit them.
[1] Mussolini sent an ultimatum to Greece on 28 October 1940, demanding numerous territorial concessions, including Crete and Corfu. Then he immediately invaded Greece from the north west, setting out from Albania which he had annexed in April 1939.
[2] From the depths of his prison Zachariadis had sent to Maniadakis this “open letter” to “the people of Greece” on 31 October. The minister immediately had it published in the press (on 2 November). The leaders of the CPG who were still free believed it to be a fake and denounced it as such.
[3] This translation comes from the Lenin section of www.marxists.org
[4] A small group of cadres who had escaped capture had taken the initiative of forming a central committee at the end of 1939, after the arrest of all the principal leaders of the party. It was known under the name of “the old central committee”.
[5] On 7 December 1940.
[6] When the leadership of the CPG reconstituted itself in July 1941, it refused to come out in favour of either the Provisional Leadership or the old central committee, both accused of being composed of grasses.
[7] Member of the political bureau from 1931 to 1938.
[8] Mathessis was an officer himself. The story takes place during the German occupation.
[9] Sanatorium where the detainees were sent who were known to have tuberculosis.
[10] Same as 9.
[11] Those of the CP of the USSR where Khrushchev denounced Stalin and the “cult of personality”.
[12] The Greco-Italian front stabilised itself in Albania. Two months from the invasion of the USSR, Hitler had decided to lance the boil on his southern flank, all the more because the British had landed troops in Greece. He attacked on 6 April 1941, setting out from Bulgaria.
[13] From an illness, 29 January 1941.
[14] The New Zealanders were mostly in the British Expeditionary Force.
[15] Bulgaria, allied to Germany and Italy, had its own zone of occupation in the north-east of Greece.
[16] Yugoslavia, already in Hitler’s sphere of influence, only formally adhered to the Tripartite Pact (signed on 27 September 1940 by Germany, Italy and Japan) on 25 March 1941, which led to the overthrow of regent Paul and the government two days later.
[17] These two texts are published at the end of this volume [i.e. the French edition].
[18] A dried up gruel of semolina and milk curd.
[19] i.e. the Greeks of Pontus (Black Sea Region) expelled in 1922 who had been established in Macedonia.
[20] Nafplio, with the Peloponnese, made up part of the occupation zone of the Italians.
[21] The reprisals of the Germans and the Italians against the actions of the partisans.
[22] A big island in the Aegean Sea connected to the continent by a movable bridge next to Halkida.
[23] A well known poet and writer of the left.
[24] The Greek government in exile, which was in Cairo.
[25] The Greek brigade formed in Egypt which participated in fighting in Italy in 1943-1944, notably in the taking of Rimini.