TheirStories

Everybody's got a story. Those “normal” everyday people, the ones you see every day in the marketplace or on the street have all been part of history. They have peopled the events in the histories we read and fleshed out the ideas we talk over and argue about.

Take my cousins here in Greece, Potitsa Maroussi and Niki Papadimas. They are two very kind and thoughtful Greek ladies, now caring for their bedridden mother, my aunt Angeliki in the town of Pakia. They are two Greek woman who went to England to work when they were young and then returned to the family farm to retire. But, like I say, nothing is so simple..

In 1940, the fascists under Benito Mussolini demanded territorial concessions from Greece, including free passage through the country and the right to build military bases on Greek soil. On October 28 of that year, the Greek Prime Minister answered a resounding “NO! (Oxi!)” to the Italian demands. Mussolini, from his base in Albania, then invaded, or tried to invade, Greece. In a series of battle over several weeks, the Greeks hurled the Italians back and took over parts of Albania.

This infuriated Mussolini's fascist parter, Adolf Hitler, then planning his grand invasion of The Soviet Union. He diverted some of his Panzers and invaded Greece, eventually subduing the country in five weeks. In payment for his lost time, he ordered a particularly brutal occupation, which included wholesale murder and starvation for the Greek population. But many historians consider that those five weeks were the difference that spelled the eventual failure of the Soviet campaign for the Germans. Winston Churchill celebrated the Greek Army with one of his typical inverted homilies: “Not every Greek fought like a hero, but every hero fought like a Greek.”

That is the history. The personal side of the war, for the Maroussi, is as follows. Pakia, with its wide flat valley, was selected by the Nazis as a landing strip and departure point for planes carrying supplies to German forces in Crete, Malta, and to General Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps in Libya. My uncle George joined the resistance and took to the mountains around Pakia, coming down now and then to raid German garrisons in the area. The SS identified him and went to his home, where my aunt lived with her four – year old daughter, Niki. The Germans questioned the little girl, but she had been prompted to say that she was the daughter of a shepherd who had “forty or fifty sheep.” The Germans took her anyway, and imprisoned her with other hostages in the local jail. The partisans, led by Uncle George, attacked the outpost and rescued her and the others. She spent the rest of the war living in the mountains with the resistance forces.

After the Germans left Greece (as the result of a wartime deal between Hitler and Churchill), the partisan resistance forces, banded together as ELAM, fought a long and bitter civil war for control of the post war government, hoping to replace the monarchy with a democratic socialist government. As happened in many similar situations, the right wing forces supporting the monarchy were often the very same people who had collaborated with the Nazis! At first widely successful, the democratic fighters were undone by massive US aide to the government, and the rigid, authoritarian stance of the Stalinists among them, who as the stewards of Soviet aid, favored a murderous campaign of fear and terror. By 1949, the civil war was over; the US – backed anti-communist forces had triumphed and Greece was saved from progressive democracy.

During the following years my uncle George, who had fought with the leftists, had to leave Pakia. The conservative ruling group had put a price on his head, and the family went to Athens, where they lived in a makeshift treehouse in the slums outside the city. Old friends and relatives were afraid to help them. The police were on the lookout for him and once he was actually arrested. Finally,a distant relative helped raised enough money and bribed the police to let him go.
Later, after several very hard years in Athens, Uncle George and his family moved back to Pakia. His main accusers had died and he and my aunt Angeliki were able to spend their retired years at the family home.
I met him in 1997, but that is another story. My cousins have been unfailingly generous and hospitable to us each time we visit Greece. Even when tending their invalid mother, they welcomed us and opened their house to us. But they have done more. They have passed on to me chapters of their personal history, which, by extension has become my own. Peppermint Pati and Niki the Greek. Two ordinary ladies? Yes, but only ordinary in sense that each of us has lived history and participated in the making of it. Oh, yes...Happy “Oxi” Day.