Occasional support from Panagiota’s family, along with her inheritance—which included gold sovereigns, jewels, and gold jewelry squirreled away under floorboards and other hiding places at home—was enough to permit the Demetracopoulos family to weather the worst, even when inflation ran rampant and barter became the means of exchange.30 But, unsure of how long the war would last, they knew they needed other income. Panagiotis worked odd jobs, but steadier employment was critical, and ultimately he turned to Panagiota’s wealthy brother, Costas Bokolas. Among Bokolas’s business interests was a highly successful eponymous patisserie and coffee shop in Kolonaki. Costas doted on his youngest sister and had ample resources to help out his many family members, but, according to Elias, he made Panagiota’s husband grovel for the hard-to-get job, then intemperately bossed his more intellectual employee around the store in front of customers. The shop flourished during all the privations, and Panagiotis’s long hours working the counter selling sweets and waiting on tables were indispensable to the family’s survival. But the image of his taciturn, lean, and proud father bending over a broom, hectored by his short, pudgy uncle, lingered long with Elias.
The boy, sensitive to his parents’ embarrassment and wanting to contribute to the meager family budget, had already dropped out of Peiramatikon. A childhood friend remembered an awkward encounter when some of his former classmates saw Elias trudging down a street, carrying a large sack, hawking cigarettes and candies. Elias tried to make light of the situation, offering free caramels to his friends. They, knowing how important each lepto (a hundredth of a drachma) was to him, declined, but also bought nothing.31
Besides running with OAG and peddling cigarettes and caramels, Elias arose early to help distribute various censored publications to a public hungry for news. OAG found hidden print shops that were willing to publish its resistance leaflets and illegal newspapers. It was risky business. Producers, editors, and distributors of free underground newspapers such as Eleftheria were hunted down. Thirty-year-old Evangelos Votsadopoulos, who performed all of those roles for OAG’s illicit publications, was executed. Others were sent to a facility in the northern suburb of Chalandri, which was used for forced labor and as a transit depot to death camps. The children who distributed the one-page news flyers house-to-house were mercilessly targeted. Elias was one of them. He had some close calls, but for a long time he eluded capture.
In autumn 1941, OAG’s resistance activities grew in audacity and impact with the arrival of the dashing Polish-born Allied-forces commando Jerzy Iwanow-Szajnowicz, who would become another important figure in Elias’s life.32 To some he was known as Georgios Ivanof, simply Ivanov, or by his cover name, Kiriakos Parissis. To British intelligence he was cryptonym “033B.” Son of a Polish mother and a Tsarist Russian colonel father, he was born in Warsaw on December 14, 1911. His mother divorced the colonel, married a Greek (Giannis Lamprianidis), and moved to Thessaloniki. In that cosmopolitan community, the dashing Ivanof, with wavy dark hair and blue-gray eyes, blossomed. He became a multilingual scholar and an outstanding athlete: an Olympic-level swimmer, he went to Warsaw on holidays to star on the Polish championship water polo team.
When the war broke out, Ivanof, using his contact with the Polish consul in Thessaloniki, went to Palestine to become an officer in the Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade and fight the Germans in the Middle East and North Africa. He then joined the British Special Operations Executive Unit No. 004 in Cairo. Trained in Alexandria, he was transferred to Greece by submarine, going ashore near Marathon under cover of darkness on October 13, 1941.
Ivanof’s OAG connection was established by Mariana Giannatos, the sister-in-law of Elias’s mentor Dr. Giannatos, who worked at the Polish Embassy in Athens. She was married to the doctor’s brother Dimitrios, a butcher who was also an early OAG member. For tactical reasons the conspirators decided that Ivanof would be better trusted within OAG if he were presented as Mariana’s brother. Equipped only with a pistol, a switchblade, and a small radio transmitter, Ivanof contacted Bobotinos, then set himself up within the OAG intelligence network. His goal was to help the English by interrupting German logistical chains as materially as possible, whether they operated by air, land, or sea. Young Elias was instantly impressed when he met Ivanof and was eager to work for him in whatever way he could be useful.
A polyglot whose languages included Polish, Russian, French, Greek, German, Italian, and English, Ivanof had a remarkable ability to infiltrate installations and sabotage equipment. He readily found “work” at different facilities and used the positions to gather information on Italian and German supply transports heading from the port of Piraeus and other locations to Rommel’s Afrika Korps. On some of his undercover jobs, he gained access to German submarines, on which he planted magnetic mines, once destroying a base of German frogmen. Ivanof and OAG made it their business to know the location of Axis naval vessels, especially submarines, and would radio the details to British bombers. Elias’s longtime interest in military matters dated from this period. He wanted to learn everything about the planes and ships, the men who made the decisions about when and how to deploy them, and when and how to destroy them.
To reduce the risks of betrayal, Ivanof usually worked alone. Believing that Mussolini was coming to Athens, he posed as a German officer to infiltrate the crowded Grande Bretagne Hotel, then serving as German headquarters. He stealthily set explosives in the basement, but, when Il Duce failed to come, he snuck back in, disarmed the bomb, and removed it, at the same time stealing secret German documents. On the rare occasions when Ivanof felt it necessary to work with others, he chose from former naval and police officers and boys who liked fireworks. “The Greeks are brave people,” he supposedly said, “but they don’t like the bangs of explosives.” His carefully selected team targeted rebuilt fuel tanks, anti-aircraft gun positions, and the routes of German convoys. Elias understood that the death penalty awaited anyone convicted of assaulting or sabotaging the occupying armed forces or their property. He volunteered but was not selected.
Elias engaged in other sabotage. One of his targets was the local radio station, located in the back of the massive Zappeion Hall near the Palace Gardens.
“Anything you destroy counts in the effort,” Ivanof would often say. Everyone had a role to play. Elias wasn’t one of the more agile saboteurs. But he was quick-witted and had a fierce work ethic, and his fluency in English was unequaled by most others in the group. He used it to help communicate local developments to British operatives and MI6 contacts in Cairo.33 He became a low-profile but important combatant and was increasingly respected as such.
OAG was a small organization that grew to about 200, but within it were smaller units that operated in strict secrecy from one another. No more than two from each group were given assignments in advance of their missions. Precautionary measures were critical. When a safehouse was exposed or its activities compromised, the group would disband and then regroup. A favorite song was “My Peaceful Night,” which included the line “the less you know, the better you sleep.” Counterespionage was a constant problem, with Axis forces aggressively injecting informants into resistance organizations and setting up “false flag” philhellene groups as traps. There were many betrayals during missions, Bobotinos later wrote, “because of bribes from the enemy, but also because of personal conflicts, egotism and lack of selflessness.”34
The sustained attack on the Maltsinioti engine maintenance factory was one of the best sabotage operations of World War II. OAG members had infiltrated the plant before Ivanof arrived, putting a mixture of metallic and rubber powder into the crankcases of the engines, which caused the engine oil to decompose. After dozens of planes crashed unexpectedly, interrogations led to discovery of the plot. Five OAG members were executed. Two of them were the Barkas brothers, who had trained Elias in sabotage.35
Underground activities had become increasingly dangerous in early 1942. Growing urban resistance forced the German occupiers to bring to Athens two units of Feldpolizei that specialized in breaking up spy networks. Captured “patriotic amateurs” were routinely tortured by the Abwehr and the Gestapo, who used forced confessions to further erode local networks. It was at this time that Elias Demetracopoulos developed his lifelong habit of compartmentalizing relationships. Because of ongoing security concerns, Elias knew relatively few of the others involved, and then only briefly. He respected the roles they played, but never formed lasting friendships with any of them.
Though Elias knew nothing of Ivanof’s plans in advance, he shared the reflected glory of the underground leader’s daring deeds. He especially admired the story of how on the Ides of March 1942 Ivanof swam alone to the submarine U-133, based in the nearby Saronic Gulf, and sank it with a magnetic depth charge. Ivanof followed this with other aquatic heroics, and his activities assumed mythic proportions. Twice he was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death. The first time, on December 18, 1941, he was betrayed by a childhood acquaintance from his schooldays in Salonika. Conviction was swift, and Ivanof was sent to Averof Prison to await execution. While being transferred by car to Gestapo headquarters for further interrogation, Ivanof surprised his guards and escaped. Wanted posters, with large pictures of Ivanof’s face, were plastered around Athens.
For months Ivanof eluded his pursuers, moving house-to-house. He arranged an escape to Egypt via the island of Evia, but the ubiquitous bounty posters kept him trapped in Athens. On September 8, 1942, he was betrayed again, this time by a policeman who had pretended to be cooperating with the OAG but was likely a garden-variety double agent and collaborator. The arrest led to a court martial and triple death sentence.
This time Ivanof was held full-time within the confines of Averof, with extra attention from guards who were not pleased about his earlier escape. On the way to his execution on January 4, 1943, Ivanof tried again to break free, but was shot in the leg and fell. He got up, tried to run, but was shot in the back. He was then fastened to a wooden post and executed by the SS. Three other OAG members arrested with him, including Dimitrios Giannatos, Dr. Giannatos’s brother, were also executed. Greek and Polish histories claim that Ivanof’s last words were “Long live Greece. Long live Poland.”36
News of the 32-year-old Ivanof’s death hit Elias hard. The teenager had grown accustomed to seeing in the streets bodies of those who had starved, been shot, or been hanged from lampposts. He had known others in their group who had been killed, even hacked to pieces. But Ivanof had seemed larger than life and indestructible. For Elias, his death reinforced the sense of palpable risk shared by everyone in the OAG.
3.Locked Up
WHILE OAG PLAYED A SMALL and largely unheralded role in maintaining the resistance spirit in Athens, the largest and most famous resistance group was the National Liberation Front (EAM), a coalition open to all who wanted to liberate Greece from the occupation. EAM was heavily populated by groups opposed to General Metaxas and the King; its original rank-and-file members were largely non-Communist, attracted principally to the immediate cause, but also supportive of a vision of a better future in which they would be free to choose their form of government.
The EAM leadership shaping this ecumenical message was drawn from the Greek Communist Party, the KKE. This group had been the one most forcefully oppressed by the Metaxas dictatorship, and its members were zealously committed to a life-or-death struggle for control of the country. They created and dominated the People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), the military arm of EAM. Liberation to them was not a goal, but a means to an end: a Communist-controlled peoples’ democracy that would largely follow an agenda shaped in Moscow. Whether these long-term ends could best be achieved through “peaceful penetration and subversion from within” or armed struggle was a matter of tactics, and the KKE vacillated between the two approaches.1
Many non-KKE resistance activists fighting under the EAM banner did not particularly care about the Communist agenda. For them the battle against occupation surmounted old political divisions.2 Some who mistrusted Communist intentions organized an alternative resistance group, the National Republican Greek League (EDES). This group started out with a socialist, anti-monarchist philosophy, and reached out to London, not to Moscow, to guide and fund their activities. As the war progressed, the roster of warring factions became increasingly complex. Superimposed on the traditional divide between monarchists and republicans were conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists and other splits spawned by opportunistic alliances and shifting priorities.
The Germans played one group against the other, convincing both ELAS and EDES that the other was secretly working with them. The collaborationist government also formed armed Tagmata Asfaleias (Security Battalions) composed of Greeks whose hatred of the Nazis was less than their fear of the Communists, and sometimes drew into their orbit EDES supporters. The legitimization of the Battalions’ role would have far-reaching implications in the Greek Civil War and beyond.
ELAS increasingly viewed itself as the legitimate alternative to the government-in-exile and was positioning itself to take power after liberation. When, during the summer of 1943, the Allies tried to trick the Germans into believing that Greece and not Sicily was the intended target of an upcoming invasion, KKE leaders fell hard for the deception. Believing an Allied landing was imminent, ELAS attacked its non-Communist Greek enemies to clear the field. Then, in August, it prematurely rushed to British headquarters in Cairo to assert its postwar demands. The movement then got slapped down hard (and repeatedly)—primarily by the British—and this set the stage for violent clashes in autumn 1943 that have been characterized by some historians as the first round of the Greek Civil War.3
To the extent that he was aware of the larger forces at play, Elias, now fourteen but looking twenty, was probably most sympathetic to the manifesto of EDES in its early anti-monarchist, social-justice phase. Those were clearly the views of some of his neighbors and most of his Peiramatikon classmates. Although he respected Churchill greatly, Elias, like Dr. Giannatos and a minority of OAG members, was opposed to the return of the King, especially if the monarchy were imposed before the holding of a free and fair plebiscite.
At the time, however, he didn’t pay much attention to the convoluted schisms, backstabbing, secret agendas, and looming battles among the antartes and other larger Greek resistance organizations. Elias’s focus was on the quotidian tasks of information-gathering, interpreting, and doing whatever else he was asked to do to support the work of Giannis Bobotinos and his OAG confederates. Circumstances soon conspired to remove him from the scene entirely.
—
REPORTS OF MUSSOLINI’S swift downfall in a July 1943 palace coup in Rome shocked the Italian troops in Greece, and the Italian capitulation on September 8 had a profound impact on resistance activities in Athens. When the surrender became known, demoralized Italian troops, eager to go home, were ready to sell guns, hand grenades, and other equipment to resistance contacts. OAG and like-minded groups were eager to obtain urgently needed weapons, ammunition, and radio sets, but did not have the resources to purchase them in the volume they wanted.
It was a chaotic time. At first, the high spirits and good cheer following the Italian surrender made Athens feel like an “endless market festival.”4 But within days that mood changed. Stories of Wehrmacht atrocities committed against the defeated Italians, notably in the Cephallonian massacre fictionalized in Corelli’s Mandolin, were shared. And word spread quickly when the Germans, who had already largely destroyed the 500-year-old Sephardic community in Thessaloniki, targeted the Jews of Athens. With the Italians out, the Third Reich was fully in charge and eager to impose eine gewisse Brutalität (“a certain brutality”).5 Greek hostages were executed in reprisal for the slightest offenses, and those trafficking in guns and other weapons were often shot on sight.
Despite the risks, the British in Cairo urged resistance groups to get weapons, and lots of them. OAG members determined that their immediate priority must be to disarm the defeated Italians. According to one account, Elias had “proved a real master in drawing up plans for the escape of patriots held in custody.”6 In recent months he had been part of a cell that was able to free at least eight Greeks and three British soldiers from the Vouliagmeni Street military prison. After that operation, he walked slowly down the long hill with the sangfroid of strong self-assurance.
Elias was becoming more vocal in the organization. He audaciously suggested to his OAG elders that one way to comply with the British request was for him to secure a forged identification card displaying a photograph of himself in a German uniform, and then proceed to the Italian military and political headquarters on Amalias Avenue, ground zero for Italian weapons. Not all Italians had bolted. Some were still loyal to their Axis allies, and others were waiting to leave under better conditions. OAG had been told that there were still Italians working inside.
Disguises had been commonplace among OAG members. Ivanof often dressed in Italian and German uniforms, and Bobotinos also passed in Axis garb, learning appropriate gestures and shouting, “Heil Hitler.” At first, Elias’s confederates were reluctant to put the boy at risk by letting him pose as a German. However, seeing a high potential payoff and no viable alternative, they approved the plan and created his fake ID. The next step was to find a suit and tailor it to fit Elias.
In the early afternoon of September 13, 1943, wearing civilian clothes and a somber tie with a meticulously tied Windsor knot, Elias was stopped by an Italian guard at the grand entrance. Saying nothing, he flashed his forged German identification card, and the guard opened the headquarters building to him immediately. Inside, three Italian officers were on duty. Elias strode forward with an air of authority. The soldiers casually greeted him and inquired, “What do you want?”7
Again, without replying, the bold young Greek displayed his German identity card. The three men jumped to attention. The “German officer” then calmly searched and disarmed them, emptied the contents of their desk drawers into a satchel he carried, took all the bullets, two hand grenades, and five small dynamite sticks, and departed as quickly as he had come. To his great surprise, none of the other Italians nearby tried to stop or question him.
Over the next several weeks, OAG learned that Italian officers stationed at Zappeion in the National Gardens would surrender their guns if their personal safety were guaranteed. So, on October 12, Elias, again with false identification, met with an Italian staff officer named Guido Gozanni to arrange a gun transfer on the 15th. During their negotiations, three SS officials barged in with three German officers and an interpreter and demanded: “Who are you, and what do you want?”
At first Elias tried to fake his way through in German, but his ruse was obvious. They attacked him and he fought back, punching the interpreter in the face. German guards with machine guns rushed in. Elias was taken to the radio station in the Zappeion for interrogation.
About an hour later, two black cars stopped at the Zappeion back door. Four more Germans arrived, two in grey-green SS uniforms and two in civilian clothes, escorting their Greek interpreter, Menelaos Giantiskos, a notorious sadist known commonly as “the beast.” Elias tried hard not to show his fear at falling into the hands of Giantiskos.
As soon as they entered the building, the duty officer read the text of the usual inquiry with clenched fists. Turning abruptly to Gozanni, he asked: “How had your gun been found on this man?”
“He disarmed me, under the pretense he was a German,” Gozanni replied, trembling.
“How?”
“He threatened me with a gun.”
