Eleni
Authors: Nicholas Gage
More praise for
Eleni
“It is impossible to doubt a word of his terrible story … A profoundly imaginative work … He can describe in dazzling detail what happened in one small village…. The separate strands lead to an intensely moving climax, making
Eleni
one of the rare books in which the power of art recreates the full historical truth.”
—The New York Review of Books
“A painstaking, loving, and deeply moving narrative … A stirring tribute to a particular woman … But
Eleni
is at the same time a memorial to all the civilians who suffer in every war.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“This is Greek tragedy in its most poignant sense, a series of adversities that is so overwhelming and appalling that the reader will feel as if his heart is being torn out, page by page.”
—San Diego Union
“Her life and death glow with dignity and humanity…. Through Eleni’s love and sacrifices for her children, we glimpse a more profound reality that rises above the shameful record of brutality and inquisition inflicted by men upon other men and women in the name of causes and crusades. All of their legions and philosophies are not worth this woman’s soul.”
—Chicago Tribune
To the memory of
E
LENI
G
ATZOYIANNIS
A
LEXANDRA
G
ATZOYIANNIS
• V
ASILI
N
IKOU
S
PIRO
M
ICHOPOULOS
• A
NDREAS
M
ICHOPOULOS
But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten.
But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them.
Even memory is not necessary for love.
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
—T
HORNTON
W
ILDER
,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
O
N AUGUST
28, 1948, at about twelve-thirty on a hot, windless day, some peasant women with firewood on their backs were descending a steep path above the Greek village of Lia, a cluster of gray stone houses on a mountainside just below the Albanian border. As the women came into view of the village below them, they encountered a grim procession.
At the front and rear, carrying rifles, were several of the Communist guerrillas who had occupied their village for the past nine months of the Greek civil war. They were guarding thirteen prisoners, who were walking barefoot to their execution on legs black and swollen from the torture called
falanga
. One man, too beaten to walk or even sit up, was tied onto a mule.
Among the prisoners were five people from Lia: three men and two women. The older woman stumbled along with a fixed stare of madness. She was my aunt, Alexo Gatzoyiannis, fifty-six. The younger woman, with light-chestnut hair, blue eyes and a torn blue dress, caught the gaze of the villagers and shook her head. She was my mother, Eleni Gatzoyiannis, forty-one years old.
One of the peasant women began to cry, seeing her brother among the condemned. A thirteen-year-old boy who had stopped to drink at a spring watched the prisoners climb the mountain; soon they disappeared over the horizon. A few minutes later there was a burst of rifle fire, then scattered shots as each victim was finished off with a bullet to the head. When the guerrillas passed again on the way down, they were alone. The executed had been left in the ravine where they fell, their bodies covered by rocks.
Sixteen days later, when it was clear that the guerrillas were losing the war to the Greek nationalist forces, they rounded up every civilian left in the village and herded them at gunpoint over the border into Albania. Lia became a ghost town, the crows descending on the corpses left behind. A village that had been inhabited for more than twenty-five centuries ceased to exist.
I learned of my mother’s execution twenty-three days later at a refugee
camp on the Ionian coast where three of my sisters and I had found shelter after managing to flee our village. Although our mother planned the escape, she was forced to stay behind with my fourth sister at the last moment. Six months after the news reached us, we boarded a ship bound for the United States to join our father, who had been cut off from Greece by World War II and the insurrection that followed it. I was nine when I saw him for the first time.
My mother was one of 600,000 Greeks who were killed during the years of war that ravaged the country from 1940 to 1949. Like many of the victims, she died because her home lay in the path of the opposing armies, but she would have survived if she hadn’t defied the invaders of her village to save her children.
I had been her favorite child and the focus of her life, loved with the intensity a Greek peasant woman reserves for an only son. I knew that I was the primary reason she made the choices she did. No one doubted that she died so I could live.
As a boy growing up in the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, living with my sisters and the stranger who was my father, I couldn’t talk about my mother and her death the way the rest of my family did, although it was with me waking and sleeping. Every Sunday, in the church full of Greek immigrants, I heard the priest recite a
trisagion
to her memory. My older sisters spoke of her constantly, often reporting dreams in which our mother appeared to them with some message or warning from the land of the dead. In
my
dreams, she was always alive, engaged in familiar scenes from the past, baking bread, harvesting the fruit of our mulberry tree, laughing at my pranks. My sisters had accepted her death, but each time I awoke it came as a new shock.
As a nine-year-old boy struggling with the English language, I felt helpless against the fact of my mother’s death. It was not something that I could talk about to anyone. There seemed to be nothing I could do to make up for her sacrifice except to hope that my sisters were right, that God would ultimately punish those who had betrayed, tortured and murdered her.
Then, in the seventh grade, a teacher assigned me to write about my life in Greece. It was one of the first days of spring. I looked out the school window, remembering our mountainside blazing with purple Judas trees, the Easter kid roasting on a spit outside each house, my mother boiling the eggs in a vat of blood-red dye.
I wrote how, in the spring of my eighth year, I overheard two guerrillas say they were going to take the village children away from their parents and send them behind the Iron Curtain. I ran to tell my mother what I had heard and she began to plan our escape, setting in motion the events that would end in her execution four months later.
The essay won a certificate of merit, and I realized that I was not as
helpless as I had thought. I would learn to write and eventually describe what was done in that ravine in 1948 and by whom. I didn’t speak of these ambitions to my father and sisters, who were working in factories and diners to keep us alive.