Witness of the occupation of Athens

Looking back at it, the whole story of the occupation, the occupation of Athens, seems like a nightmare.

When the Germans came into the city, everyone had agreed not to go out into the streets, so they’d enter a dead city. Deserted. A deserted city.

We’d closed the shutters on the windows…Athens didn’t have any blocks of flats back then, it was quite a different city from the one you see now…and we sat there peering through the closed shutters at the spectacle of the Germans entering the city.

It was terrifying. We’d never seen people walking like robots before…Their arms and legs! How they’d all raise an arm and a leg in unison…and once in a while sing a burst of song as they marched along.

And being a music lover and having a talent for music, when I heard them singing I said to my mother: "But mum…if that’s the enemy, how nicely they sing!"…and she slapped me there and then for the very first time…she gave me such a crack that I remember it to this day.

Anyway, in they came… and this is strange, because even though they’d agreed to hand Athens over to the Italians - the city was going to be under Italian control, in other words - somehow or other we only ever saw Germans. Whichever way we looked, we saw Germans.

They came to our house, as well. They took over the upper storey and made it into a command centre, so they lived upstairs, and we lived downstairs.

They were difficult times.

The Hunger of ’41 hit hard, and no one’s come up with a convincing explanation for it yet…some said the roads were closed and food wasn’t getting through, others that the Germans took the food for their soldiers, for the army – but no one could explain to us exactly why there was no food.

Anyhow, there was terrible hunger and the animals disappeared one by one. We ate all the canaries in their cages…we roasted them in Briyol, and we ate them… we didn’t have any oil, so we used the stuff we put on our hair…hair oil, brillantine. We ate the canaries, people say we ate dogs, people say we ate cats…everything there was to disappear disappeared one by one.

The black market was doing good business, but the black marketeers were punished really severely by the Germans…they were really strict, they were really hard on them…so the only thing left for my poor mother to do was to take her shopping basket and join the queue for carrots. Big, fat carrots they were, which we ate and supplemented our daily menu with.

My father had studied in Germany, and he made a mill, a home-made machine of sorts, and the neighbours would bring whatever they had – wheat, barley, whatever – and we’d mill it, we’d grind it in our mill and they’d leave us some so we ate, too.

We usually ate, I remember, the famous "broom bread", the corn-cake of the occupation, which was either made from chickpeas, if we were extremely lucky and found some, or from broom seeds…from the broom we swept with: we’d pick off the seeds, grind them, make broom bread, and eat.

And my cousin would take the doors down off their hinges, pare away at them, take the saw dust, make flour with it and eat what we called "woodbread".

But broom bread one day and woodbread the next causes stomach ulcers, and we had terrible stomach upsets right through the Occupation.

I’ll never forget the cry, the cry that pursue every Greek who lived through those years. That terrible cry would come up to us through the window at night from down in the street… "I’m starving!"…day and night, "I’m starving!" Children, old folk, people who’s luck had run out on them. We had nothing to give them…we didn’t have much and it was barely enough for us. We had nothing to give, but I’ll never forget that scream because I rings in my ears at night even now.

When I set off for school in the morning with the other kids I had to walk over the bodies of the men, women, or children who had died during the night…had been dying all night long from hunger… and I had to walk over them to go to school.

Later on the Germans issued an command – they were real experts when it came to giving orders – that we had to bury our own dead. And how were you supposed to bury the dead when you were just skin and bone yourself, and didn’t have the strength to raise an arm or put one foot in front of the other?

And I remember the infamous carts of the Occupation with a lamp which swayed in the wind at night, passing by, loading up the dead and taking them somewhere where those who still had a little strength dug holes and buried them.

That, more or less, with lots of other incidents in between, was what life was like during the occupation.

One of the incidents I remember was that my uncle, my mother’s brother, who was a harbour master in Piraeus at the time and a member of a secret English organisation, was involved in sabotaging the Germans in Piraeus and used to transmit news to the Middle East, to Cairo, every afternoon.

Well, one day when he was transmitting his report, the Germans located his signal with a radio detection device, set up road blocks around the city block the signal was coming from, and poured into the building.

The young officer who was with my uncle, I can still remember him, Marineris was his name, says to my uncle: "Sir, you leave. You are more vital to the cause. You know a lot more and can do more. I don’t know much, so leave!" He opened up the window for my uncle to get away over the roof, and my uncle replied: "But, son, you have a family, you’ve got kids." But he insists: "Go, sir! Do me this favour!", and he pushes him out of the window, and my uncle left and as he was getting away over the roofs, he heard the shots as the Germans gunned down Marineris on the spot.

He came round to our house at 2 in the morning, knocked on the door, and we were scared stiff because there was us downstairs and the Germans upstairs. He knocked on the front door and said to my father who came out: "Take my guns… -2 pistols that he had-…because I’m leaving for the Middle East. Everything’s arranged and I’m leaving. You’ll see me again after the war, if we’re still alive." He handed him the pistols and left.

The next day, my father took the guns and went to bury them in the garden. They saw him. We don’t know who saw him, but they went and reported him to the Germans…

They turned him in to the Germans, and the Gestapo came to our house to arrest him.

They turned the house upside down and inside out! There was absolutely nowhere they didn’t search! There was an interpreter with them who people said was a traitor, and he told my mother "Give him a blanket to take with him, because you won’t be seeing him again".

They didn’t find the pistols, but they arrested my father and took him to Merlin Street. That was where the Gestapo had their headquarters, and it seems they took everyone they caught there before sending them to Chaidari to be tortured until they told them everything they knew.

We hadn’t seen my father for 2 months, and we thought he was dead. We got by however we could.

I’d found a different way: it so happened that one of the Germans who lived upstairs was a good musician. He played the piano, and once they found out that I sang, they’d often call me upstairs to sing for them while he accompanied me on the piano.

That was a real turning point in my life, because it was the first time I’d been accompanied on the piano, so I went upstairs often, I’d sing and they’d give me something to eat, because I told them that if I didn’t eat, I wouldn’t be able to sing… and they made me drink milk, which I never liked, and they’d shout that they’d come to Greece to fight, but they’d ended up being nursemaids because they were forcing me to drink my milk instead of fighting. Sometimes they gave me milk, other times a biscuit or a chocolate bar.

A couple of months went by, and one day there was a knock on the door and we went to open up and there was father.

We expected to see a skeleton… we thought he’d tell us about terrible ordeals …but he looked extremely well-fed. He walked up the steps, we asked him "What was it like with the Germans?", and he said: "I’m alive because I speak German. They asked me one day …-I’d told them I was an engineer-…if I knew how to repair trucks and cars. "Sure I do", I said, and they say "Will you repair our trucks?" "With pleasure' , said my father.

He worked on those trucks for a couple of months and they fed him, and when the time came for the trial, one of the Germans who lived upstairs from us came forward and said that my father had given the pistols to him… I don’t know what he said he’d done with them after that, but, anyway, he got my father off the hook and that’s how dad got back home.

And it was back to the same old story of the occupation…

Dad secretly made radios. We could pick up the Free Greek transmissions with them and get real news about the war from Cairo.

The Germans who lived above us got wind of this, and every evening they’d say "Shall we go down to see Giannis? Let’s go see Giannis", and they’d sneak down…

And I remember my father’s room with the hidden radio, and the Germans sitting round it listening to the news …and they’d send a guard out onto the balcony to keep watch in case the radio detector patrol showed up and caught them secretly listening to the news. And I remember my father saying "Gentlemen, this war isn’t going to be won. Come to terms with the fact that this war cannot be won."

The days went by, and one day on my way to school… the Tychopoulos School in Ameriki Square… there was me with another little girl on our way to school and suddenly there’s a road block in Ameriki Square…there are trucks coming from all directions and Germans jumping out with rifles, and they wouldn’t let us go on and they held us there and suddenly we saw two Greeks being dragged onto the road.

They pulled and dragged them to a tree, threw two ropes over a branch and put a big placard on their chest, a piece of cardboard with "Enemies of the People" written on it in Greek.

When we realised they were going to hang them, we started asking "Why? What have they done?". They told us that they were black marketeers, and that the Black Market had been forbidden by the Germans on penalty of death. They’d caught them trading in Black Market goods, and they put the noose round their necks right there in front of us and they hanged them.

The little girl next to me was sobbing and didn’t want to watch. Suddenly, one of them came up with his rifle and twisted her head round with his trungeon so she would see the execution whether she wanted to or not and learn from it. They held us there until it was over… the hanged men stopped kicking.

And the Germans disappeared, leaving the bodies hanging from the tree.

They left them there for a week, and they didn’t allow us to bury them…"as an example", they said.

After they’d taken them away and buried them, I still avoided walking past the tree on my way home from school because I thought I could feel the dead men’s feet touching my shoulders. So I always went home another way, and I was always careful when I was leaving school not to catch sight of the tree and to go home.

There were a lot of talk at the time, most of it about the executions at the shooting range in Kaisariani.

In Pangrati one time, there was…and I don’t know whether this is true or not…there was this red liquid running down the gutter next to the pavement. They said it was the blood from up in Kaisariani, from the executions at the shooting range. They said the blood had flowed all the way down to Pangrati. They used to take them from Chaidari to Kaisariani for execution, and then leave them there for us to bury.

One day my mum gave me…and I can remember this clearly… a tray of corn-cake to take to the baker’s. I took the corn-cake to be baked, and then around noon my mum said "Go and pick it up now." Corn-cake was something really special for us…a real treat.

I pick the corn-cake up, and as I’m on my way back home, the siren suddenly starts up. I’m so scared that I drop the baking tray…it just slips out of my hands and falls into the middle of the road…and run and curl up on a basement window ledge and wait for the alarm to stop sounding so I can go home.

And from my window ledge I can see the tray with the corn-cake, and you should have seen what came running!…just how many dogs and how many cats -every single one that hadn’t been eaten - and rats and whatever else… and they fell on the corn-cake and ate the lot. There wasn’t a crumb left in the tray. And then a plane swooped down…I’ve no idea what it was…"Rat a tat tat" goes the machine gun and sprays the whole road with bullets.

I waited on my window ledge until it went away, before going out to see what’s happening, and decide what to do. So when the siren stopped, I come out to pick up the tray to take it back home, I pick up the tray and it’s like a sieve! The bullets have gone right through it and it’s full of holes! I pick it up and think: "What am I going to tell mum? …What can I tell her?"

And I get home and I say to my mum "Here’s the corn-cake." She looks at the tray…"And where were you? How come you weren’t shot? How come you’re still alive?" I told her "I was on a window ledge, and I waited for all the noise to stop before I…"

It was the only time that my mum didn’t shout at me. She didn’t say a thing. Not a word.

Where can you start? Where can you finish?

Another night, someone knocks on the door. It’s the middle of the night again, and my father went down to open up in his underpants.

He opens the door and we see a poor Italian with his weapons and everything on the doorstep, his whole body trembling…and he says as best he can "Please, good Christians, hide me. The Germans are after me and they’ll kill me."

And my father says "You’re just what we need right now! As if things weren’t bad enough already, now we’ve got you as well!" …and we took him down to the cellar.

Now, no one could find the cellar because there were no doors or windows or anything, just a trap door in the floor which you could only open and go down if you knew how, otherwise, not even the trapdoor would open…

We put the Italian down there. And how were we going to feed him? With all the terrible things that were going on, we didn’t have enough to eat ourselves. And since we went hungry ourselves, how could we find food for the Italian? We went round to everyone we knew, to all our family, and begged and got what we could to give to him…and we went without so he could eat.

But it wasn’t just the Italian.

The Jews came next, because the Germans were hunting the Jews down, too.

I had two classmates at school, two little Jewish kids. And when the Germans started hunting the Jews they found out about them, so they came to us and said: "Hide us. They’re going to kill us."

And my mother says to my father "You do know what you’re doing, don’t you? This is punishable by death." And my father tells her "So you’re telling me to let the Germans take the children of our friend and neighbour? No, they’re going into the cellar, too." "Them, too?" "Yes, them, too."

So we put the Jews down with the Italian. We hid them all together.

And how were we going to feed all of them? It wasn’t easy! By God, it wasn’t easy at all!

And then came the high point of my life … I was to give my first concert, I was going to sing!

The Germans came downstairs and asked my father’s permission for me to sing…it was Schubert, I remember … to give a concert for the Germans.

My father asked them "Does she want to?" and they said I did. "Well let her sing, then, since she wants to", said my father.

I remember that they prepared me for the concert, they fed me well, very well…they even gave me some meat to eat… they fed me back to strength and then they said "All right, then. We’ll all get together on Wednesday for the concert."

There was a big sitting room upstairs where they’d gathered, and I went up to make my entrance.

When I saw them all there my legs almost gave way beneath me.

The dress uniforms! The medals!, the caps!, the helmets!, and so on and so forth…the sight of them just took my breath away! I asked myself "Who are you singing for?"

But then I remembered Schubert and thought "these people here want you to sing in the way they like. So just try and sing in the way they’re most likely to consider the best interpretation of Schubert."

And I started to sing.

The experience of my life! I’ll never forget how they rose to their feet and applauded me at the end.

And one of them came up to me and said: "You know we had to get special permission to feed you because we’re not supposed to give food away. If you don’t eat, you won’t sing. Well, just make sure you eat, and regularly, so you’ll be able to sing." Then he said "Really, you should study music. As for us, we’ll leave eventually, but remember what I told you. After we leave, make sure you study music."

I’ll never forget what he said, and I wish him well…I don’t know what became of him…I never even saw him again…

I went downstairs and told my father. And my father said: "He’s not wrong. You should do that, as well… but not only that…if we get through this alive."

It doesn’t matter how young I was at that time, because I was only 9 years old when the Germans marched into Athens, there are certain things that stay engraved on your memory which there’s no way you’ll ever forget.

There’s no way, for example, that you could forget the street battles, or the shooting.

My mum and I couldn’t walk round the house standing up – we had to crawl from one room to another on all fours because bullets would come in through the windows and embed themselves in the interior walls. Lots of people were killed by stray bullets inside their own homes.

In my family, all my cousins were in EAM, they were all members of EAM, and they’d go out at night to shout the news of the day through a loudhailer and write slogans on the walls…That was the only comfort we had left…waking up every morning to read what EAM had written on the walls during the night, what those brave lads had daubed on the walls.

Yes, and they took us kids with them to keep watch… so, they’d be there painting slogans on the walls -"FREEDOM" or "LIBERATION’S ON THE WAY" or "PATIENCE, WE WILL SOON BE FREE" - and we’d be standing watch round about in case some German patrol turned up to gun us down, which is what they usually did if they caught you painting slogans…

And one day…. we woke up and there wasn’t a single German anywhere in Athens.

We couldn’t believe it and we started searching. The rooms above our home were empty. They’d upped and left, just like that, and we hadn’t realised a thing. They’d left during the night, the lot of them had moved away and emptied Athens in a single night. We woke up the next morning and there wasn’t a soul there.

And at the time… there was a really popular game us kids played during the occupation…we’d exchange empty cartridges. We’d swap them with each other. You’d give someone some rifle cartridges, and they’d give you …I don’t know how many…let’s say a clip’s worth of aeroplane rounds in exchange. That sort of thing.

And when the Germans left, they left the road covered with ammunition… they’d dumped it, they mustn’t have had time to load it, and they left loads in the street.

You should have seen the kids running out of their houses to collect the empty cartridges to play with!

I remember that when I grew up I asked myself "What are you going to do with all those?" and I gave a whole box full…I don’t know how many there were in it, maybe 2000 bullets…to my cousin, who was younger, 8 years younger than me, and who had just started to play with them.

And when the Germans had gone, and the streets were empty, the loudhailer came round, openly for the first time, to tell us that the Allies had disembarked in Piraeus, and that Allied forces were just then entering the city.

All our neighbours were out on their balconies or were standing at their windows listening. It was mum that shouted " Hooray!" first.

And we went and fetched all Greek flags we could find and hung them out to greet the Allies as they entered.

Then a jeep appeared coming along the road in the distance, and in the jeep was an officer in an admiral’s uniform and in the jeep with him were his English aides…it was my uncle Antonis, my mother’s brother, who had fled to the Middle East…and he was one of the first officers to set foot on Greek soil.

He came into the house, shouting "Maria, Katerina, Vina…are you alive? Are you alive?", and we all ran to embrace him. I remember he lifted me up high and told me "I’ve brought you lots of goodies", and put a chocolate bar into my hand.

That chocolate was one of my most important experiences, and since then I’ve been faithful to chocolate…it’s the only sweet thing I like and I eat it.

So, that was what the Occupation was like, and how we got though it as best we could.

NOTES

Chaidari Military camp, outside of the city of Athens, used by the Germans as a prison.

Kaisariani Neighbourhood of Athens, an area inhabited mostly by refugees and workers. It had a strong communist background and was one of the main poles of the resistance against the Germans. During the occupation, the Germans have executed thousands of patriots in the shooting range in Kaisariani.

Pangrati Neighbourhood of Athens, next to Kaisariani.

EAM "National Liberation Front", the organized resistance movement.