During the Occupation, from ’41 to ’44 in other words, I was with my family in a village on Parnonas, one of the two big mountains in Lakonia. The other one, Taygetus, is well-known from history. Parnonas is just opposite it.
It was a village called Geraki. A very old village which goes back to prehistory. It played an important role back in Byzantine times, so they called it Head Village.
And when the occupying forces arrived, the village was put into the Italian zone.
So a group of about 10 Italians came and set up a "carabinieria" headquarters.
It was in an old mansion house from the last century, a four-floored stone building, it was almost like a castle.
It belonged to a strange public notary who suddenly decided, in his seventies, to marry a 20-year-old village girl.
She was pretty with rosy cheeks, and within four days he was almost dead. He told my grandfather, who was the local doctor: "Doctor, my friend, a woman’s need is a health hazard, indeed."
Anyway, this particular health hazard put herself at the service of the Italian armed forces in her capacity as a widow.
When the resistance started… but first, I shouldn’t have to tell you that these Italians were on very friendly terms with the people in the village – they were just a group of youngsters with guitars who danced all the time … they’d sell a rifle or some bullets now and again to some rebels they were in contact with. In any case, I don’t think they really had anything to do with what you’d call war.
There were two olive presses in the area, and the Italians imposed a tax on them and used to collect the oil in some big tanks. So, when they’d collected lots of oil, the guerrillas came down from the mountain… they were really well organised - they’d taken animals from all the surrounding villages, and they loaded them up with the oil and took it away.
But the devil had his hand in it and they killed 3 of those Italian kids.
The next day a company of Italian troops came from Sparti for reprisals. "You killed 3 of ours, so we’ll kill 3 of yours."
I was at primary school back then, in one of the first classes. They’d taken the school away from us for all those soldiers, and we got the job of taking them their wine.
The Italians summoned the priest, the mayor, and the schoolteacher – as the local leadership, let’s say – and they asked them to hand over 3 Greeks for execution. The three heroically put themselves forward, because they could never hand a fellow villager over for the Germans to execute.
The Italians locked them up in that castle of a headquarters of theirs in a room with bars and a view of the village square.
When they were locked up they started thinking about things a little differently, as their fellow villagers were walking up and down free in the square, drinking their raki. It might have bothered the villagers in the square a bit that the three of them were locked up in there, but they were free, after all, so it can’t have bothered them that much.
So, they thought: "Isn’t it a pity that they’re going to kill us? We’re the leaders of the village after all. What’ll the village do without us, the schoolteacher, the priest, and the mayor? We’d better find them some smaller fry."
And just then the priest got inspired and remembered that the Italians had an informer in the village who they used to ferry information… -Because there’s always someone like that and they’re very useful…- and he says: "Let’s hand over Thimios. Let’s get rid of him once and for all. The Italians will kill him and we’ll get rid of him, and we’ll get out of this alive." Who else?
They noticed someone limping round the square, a blind, crippled beggar who wasn’t from the area…no one knew anything about, and he lived by begging for bread in those hungry times. "Let’s say him over there." So, that’s the second out of the way. "Now, who can be third? Let’s give them the village loony!"
Now, the village lunatic’s madness was of a very specific type. He was this guy called Vasilis, a little short and fat, like so. He always wore a long greatcoat which was dyed black. It almost went down to his ankles, and he never wore trousers underneath. Whenever he met a woman in the street he’d open up his coat and flash his wares. That’s how his madness came out. "Let’s give them Vasilis."
The next day the Italians issued a command and the whole village was assembled outside in an open area in front of a wall.
The whole village was there, all the women and children, and the school kids all lined up because we had to see how bad people get punished.
So, the priest went up ahead with a cross mumbling what priests usually do, and then there was the poor beggar from foreign parts who wasn’t limping any more and was suddenly cured of all his ailments, and behind him was Thimios who was cursing the Italians, the Germans, and anyone else he could think of for their "ingratitude, their meanness, and what sort of a life in this?"; and Vasilis brought up the rear in his long coat. He walked along proud and completely indifferent.
Anyway, they lined them up at the front of the wall and raised their rifles. An officer had drawn his sword to give them the signal, and just then, just before the bullets struck, Vasilis opened up his coat!
Anyhow, that’s one of the stories from the occupation, and like all my memories it’s got Italians in it because we were occupied by the Italians, not the Germans.
A little later, when the guerrillas had formed into something like an army, two or so companies of Italians came from Tripoli to clear Parnonas of guerrillas. So they took over the school again, and we were kicked out again, and the Italians had the great idea again of punishing the locals, too, because they had a new commander, a major – I’ve just remembered his name – Major Festuccio. I know his name because later on they wrote a song about a battle and people called him Festuccis.
Anyway, Festuccis gathered all the men of the village and all their livestock in a spot where was no water, and forced the women to carry water to them from a well 2 hours away so they wouldn’t croak. Then he summoned all the village, and gave a speech from on high – there was a young interpreter who translated it – and said that the rebels are cowards, "They don’t have the balls to come down and fight me here when I’m waiting for them, so I’m going to go and flush them out of their holes up there."
So up he goes ahead with his flags and his drums, and takes a few villagers as guides and animals to transport them and sets off for another village on Parnonas called Kosmas, a really lovely village that got burned down 3 times. Anyone who got the chance just burnt it down! The last ones to do it were Greeks.
So, the Italian column went into a gulley where 15 rebels were waiting for them. They had a machine gun, God knows where they got it from. The rest of them were armed with double-barrelled shotguns loaded with bird shot. They let the Italians go into the gorge – they had the machine gun at the back of the gorge, not at the front – and the machine gun started up and the rest just fired their shotguns into the gulley like crazy!
They must have killed about 50 of them and the rest surrendered.
The rebels took them higher up the mountain and stripped them of their weapons, their clothes, their boots, everything they had – above all their watches – I’ve seen a guerrilla with 7 wrist watches! they were a luxury at the time.
And then the Germans came and started negotiating for the return of the prisoners – and there were lots of them, and some of them were wounded, and they were all in a terrible state.
It was high summer if I remember rightly, and I still have an amazing picture in my mind of this whole army coming towards our village barefoot, in its underwear, through a dusty, rocky landscape, totally and utterly exhausted, and hanging round the neck of the soldier right up front is an enormous sign which said: "You are free to go home."
So all these soldiers were suddenly in the village and the villagers – although they had suffered quite a lot at their hands - couldn’t bear to see all these people in such misery, and they opened up their houses and took them in, got doctors in from around the area, and started nursing them as best they could, brought them milk and whatever else they had and didn’t have in the world.
But those poor bastards with the big sign said "We’re finished here. We’ve got this which says we can go back to Italy. Don’t drag us here and there, we don’t want to fight in any war."
So they took the Italians away in ambulances and such like .
They got up and left and never came back again.
It was round that time that the official Italian occupation in the area came to an end.
From then on, the Germans made a surprise attack now and again, burned a house or two, killed a few people and left.
That was until we saw another Italian army. It’s now September of ’43. Italy’s surrendered, Bandolio’s in power in Italy and the Italian army in Greece had either been arrested by the Germans, joined the Germans, or become part of the resistance.
Those that joined the resistance had two alternatives: some of them joined fighting units, in fact, lots of them formed special units. And others who didn’t want to fight – they were free to decide - stayed behind in the villages as "slaves".
So, a large group of these Italian troops shows up in the village, an old village it was with really high houses like towers.
Us kids had already enlisted in the resistance with wooden rifles and swords and such. They were replaced afterwards, very soon afterwards, with real ones.
So the poor buggers come, and they’re on their last legs, and they’ve already been stripped of everything on the pretext that the guerrillas were short of uniforms – their clothes, their boots, especially their watches, and as for their weapons…they were the first things to go.
So they arrive and they’re exhausted and they just lie down on the cobblestones.
We’re on top of a 4 or 5 storey tower, and we’re kids, and joining in with the anti-Italian spirit of the times someone says: "Hey, let’s piss on them." So some 15 kids climb up to the top of the building and we start pissing on the poor bastards down below.
It took them some time to realise what was going on, but then they scattered and the ELAS police arrived –they were called OPLA – and sure, they were our fathers, but they grabbed us none the less and took us to the guard house and gave us the beating of our lives. We had to swear that we would never piss on Italians again, but as for Germans, there was no problem at all there.
The history of the occupation has a somewhat strange ending.
As it went on and the resistance grew, our games got more and more warlike. So when we knew that the guerrillas in the surrounding villages were ready to strike some German column, we were there bringing up the rear like some reserve column.
Our goal was firstly to collect the empty shells for the old guns we played with, and secondly to find some dead soldier and empty his knapsack. We found cans of food, and anything else you can possibly imagine in them. It was fascinating.
And in this way, stealing a rifle now and then, and later on discovering some weapons the guerrillas had hidden in a cave – really old rifles they were, from the First World War or even earlier…- we got a lot of stuff together, and because our dads thought they were old and useless weapons, they didn’t give us a beating, and we kept them and played our games with them.
The bullets we had were mostly Italian, for a gun called the Aravida, they were very narrow. Now, the bullets we used in those old rifles were different, at least twice as thick.
Anyway, someone had the great idea of going and robbing the tinker who used to go around tinning pots and pans.
So we took all the lead and pewter he had , melted it down and used it to make the bullets thicker, fatter, so they’d do for the old rifles. We got them more or less the right size and then we filed them down till they were finally a good fit.
And so one day when we’d taken the old rifles with us – we were 11 years old then, and we were parading down the street – the rifles suddenly started going off and, of course, there were our mums and dads running into their houses for cover, shutting the windows and the rest of it, guerrillas, big men with hand grenades and automatics scattering in panic and such like. They’d never seen anything like this before.
And we climbed up to our headquarters – up on the roof we’d pissed on the Italians from – and settled down for a siege. We shouted that anyone who came out into the square would get it.
Our dads came out and shouted up to us, and then the mothers sent their own delegation which brought us something to eat because there was no way we were going to surrender our weapons.
And no one could figure out where the hell we got the bullets from.
A lot later, after negotiations with schoolteachers and mothers, we decided to give ourselves up, they took our guns away and burnt them publicly, and we got the beating we deserved.
Time passed and we waited heroically as roles changed and Greeks came down to kill fellow Greeks, and we scattered in all directions.
The end result of all this was 3 or 4 kids killed by hand grenades.
Now lets get back to where we left off….the Italian soldiers who surrendered to ELAS.
Those that wanted to formed special units or just joined existing ELAS units, while the rest stayed in the villages and the locals were to choose who they wanted for a servant –a "slave" in other words.
The selection was rather primitive to say the least – there were the men, the Italian soldiers, in a line and the villagers came up one by one, looked at them, checked them over, looked at their teeth like you would with a mule, and either took them away or rejected them.
When this tragicomedy was over and they’d made their choices, there were about ten Italians left who nobody wanted. What was wrong with the poor bastards that were left over? One was a schoolteacher, the other was a agriculturist. They were educated, they were…anyway, there was something different about them. They weren’t the sort of men you’d choose to come and dig your field for you or something like that. So nobody wanted them.
What were we going to do with them? We had two choices: we either forced someone to take them, which meant they wouldn’t have a good time of it, or we could find another solution.
So they had a meeting and decided on a solution – the community as a whole would take them on as public servants, or rather public "slaves".
So the old Athenian system was applied whereby there were both private and public slaves. Some of the public slaves in ancient Athens were responsible for public order, so , strangely enough, a slave could arrest free Athenians.
Our "public slaves" were put in charge of keeping the village clean, the schoolteacher was to give us Italian lessons, and in between they’d play their guitars.
I remember once when they had to carry a big machine-gun part. There were two of them, both skinny the poor buggers. They’d lift it up, move it a couple of steps, and put it down again. They were really sweating and they just couldn’t do it. I’d learned some Italian and I can still hear them saying: "What are we going to do? What’s going to happen?" and they would lift it up and move it a little forward.
They stayed with us until liberation or just after it, and the private "slaves" had a great time of it. Most of them were from Southern Italy and they were very good farmers. And they’d sit down and teach the villagers better farming methods, how to prune back better, how to keep the fields in better shape, what to do with the vines. They proved to be really loveable.
Really loveable, but also great lovers!
Things suddenly got very complicated because the Italians were more handsome and the women wanted them more than the men they had, and there was a lot going on behind their husbands’ backs – someone even wrote some little songs about it, but the bottom line was that everyone was really fond of these boys.
The Germans left, some English units arrived, and the Italians were desperate to get home. We told them to wait, but they left.
They went up to Patra, and needless to say, the Italians’ leaving was a tragedy for the villages. The tears, the sorrow!
In Patra they put them on a boat bound for Italy, but a German submarine torpedoed them on the way. Not one of them got home. They all paid for their impatience.
We had one of them in our house - his name was Petro, Petro Rousso, from somewhere in Catania – so when, years later, I was doing some documentary work in Italy, I made a real effort to find him and thoroughly researched the matter. Not one of them made it.
There’s a graveyard in Bari. It’s a military graveyard with the remains of all the Italian dead from the Second World War. A ceremony takes place there every year. I felt very strange when I saw that most of the Italian dead had been killed by Greeks both here in Greece and in Albania.
Sure, the Germans were responsible for the mass slaughter of the Italians on Kephallonia in ‘43. They killed fourteen and a half thousand Italians in three days.
There was a division of Italians called Aqui on Kephallonia in Argostoli, and a small German unit of 15 to 20 men in Lyxouri. When the Italians switched sides, the Aqui division decided to attack the Germans and they hit a convoy and killed a few Germans. Hitler then intervened personally – he saw the attack as treason, so he sent…
There was a General Langst in Giannena who commanded the 5th Mountain Division, and he sent a battalion - a battalion’s got about 700 men –while there were 15 and a half thousand Italians. Just look at the difference in numbers!
So the battalion arrives and kills all the Italians, hardly any got away.
They killed them – it wasn’t easy, but the Germans were logical people, and they got round that problem of theirs of how to kill more people in less time – that’s why they set up the concentration camps and the gas ovens.
Anyway, they had this technical problem and they either solved it scientifically or, as they did in Kephallonia, practically.
What did they do in Kephallonia, then?
They take some Italians and line them up - over there, let’s say – in front of the Italian ranks. There are 3 machine guns aimed at the Italians, and behind them there’s a German with one machinegun drinking his coffee. So, when the three Italians have finished gunning down their comrades, the German kills the 3 of them. That’s how all the Italians were killed and Kephallonia’s wells filled with corpses.
The Italians hold a big memorial service every year – on the 23rd off September, I think.
I made a film about the survivors. One of the survivors was a certain Lieutenant Pambaloni whose story is supposed to be that of Captain Corelli and his mandolin. Supposed to be. But it wasn’t him. He was one of the two Italian captains – the other was called Apolonio – who decided to attack the Germans.
As it happened, both of them survived. One with a bullet in the neck – he was rescued and joined ELAS – and the other was captured by the Germans.
They didn’t kill him because he was from a heavy artillery battalion - you could hit Athens from Corinth with those guns - and the Germans wanted him to train them how to use them.
Anyhow, Apolonio gathered together the survivors and they stayed there.
And, you know, history is such an irrational thing… Pambaloni, who’d joined ELAS, was decommissioned as a lieutenant, but the one who stayed with the Germans ended up commander-in-chief of the Italian army after all his adventures.
I met them both and they told me their stories, but they, of course, weren’t on speaking terms.
Anyway, I was talking about the Italians who are buried in the graveyard in Bari. Lots of them died in Kephallonia, but many others were killed in Greece during the occupation.
And it felt strange to think that all these people were there at the memorial service – and there were lots of tears, because the Italians are a demonstrative people like us - because so many of their brothers had been killed by you and yours. And somehow you feel responsible, even if it was just on a collective level. But then, on the other hand, you thought: "We didn’t go to Rome to kill them, so why did they come to us?
I remember an Italian major, a really nice guy from Milan, who told me about the day before they invaded Greece from Albania. His soldiers kept coming up to him because they couldn’t understand why they should want to march into Greece. They were wondering about this, and they asked him: "Senor Tenente. Perché?", "Mr. Lieutenant, why? Where are they taking us and why?" They couldn’t understand.
People sometimes say that the Italians didn’t fight, because they really didn’t. It’s because they didn’t understand - they had no will to fight whatsoever. A madman has an idea – he says "let’s go and take Greece" and there are another 50,000 madmen behind him. But what about the other 50 million – that was the population of Italy back then? Are they all mad, too? It was a huge army.
So when they came into Greece, they weren’t coming to fight.
If you read Prasca’s memoirs, you’ll see that they expected to be welcomed.
And there’s something even madder.
There was no live television back then to film them as they arrived, and since Mussolini wanted to show their triumphant invasion of Greece in the cinemas as it was happening, they had to film the whole thing in Cinecita…
NOTES
Lakonia Region of Greece in the Southern Pelopponese. Its capital is Sparti.
Tripoli City in the central Pelopponese
ELAS "Greek People's Liberation Army", the guerilla troops of the mountain resistance.
Patra City in the north-west Pelopponese
Kephallonia Greek Island in the Ionian Sea
Argostoli Town on Kephallonia
Lyxouri Town on the island of Kephallonia
Giannena City in western Greece
Corinth City in the northern Pelopponese, about 80 km from Athens.
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