Elias’s heart beat faster. This was a critical moment. Persons caught armed were subject to the death penalty. However, although all the others had testified against him, the second Italian officer, who had been with him during the gun negotiations, stated that Elias knew absolutely nothing; furthermore, he doubted whether “this Greek” even knew how to use a gun, intimating that Gozanni had stupidly handed over his gun voluntarily, even knowing that Elias was not a German.
Elias could hardly believe what he was hearing. The Italian officer might pay dearly for this response. Elias never learned the man’s name but remained grateful for his heroism, which was made even greater because, as became apparent later, he had also destroyed the map Elias had been carrying. If discovered by the Germans, the map would have disclosed the whereabouts of Greek resistance fighters and British soldiers, surely leading to their arrests and probably to their deaths.
Gozanni’s statement complicated matters. To please his masters, the Greek interpreter Giantiskos shook Elias hard by the shoulders and in a “dramatically wrathful tone” threatened, “If you don’t reveal where you conceal the British and the guns, your blood will run in the streets.”
Elias stifled his fear and, swallowing hard, viewed him with utter contempt. “You can kill me, but you won’t get anything from me,” he said with teenage bravado. “One day you will pay for your crimes, traitor,” and spat in his face.
Then his tortures began. They went after soft tissue and organs, muscle, and bone. Elias was certain he was going to die. When Giantiskos finished beating him, they handcuffed him, brought him downstairs, and threw him into a car. An officer holding a gun sat on one side of Elias. On his other side was a Greek collaborator, also with an unholstered gun, who snarled at Elias: “Don’t move or I’ll shoot you.”
Elias later described the episode:
I was not sure whether the Italian officer had given the map to the Germans and my head was splitting. There was no way to warn the others. I could endure their tortures, I could even commit suicide, if necessary. But the map was my nightmare still, and, unable to do anything else, I placed my faith in God. Finally, I saw the car turn [onto] Korai Street, and the black building of the German Kommandatura.8
Inside the occupied government building, his captors shoved Elias into Room 41, marked “Feld Polizei.” A short SS officer glanced at the inquiry report, abruptly arose, and shouted: “Spriech!” When Elias refused to answer, the interpreter flogged him until he fainted. When he regained consciousness, Elias found himself still in handcuffs. He understood they wanted to search his home.9
The Germans drove to Dafnomili Street and barged in brandishing machine guns.
Panagiota took one look at her son’s bloodied and beaten face, let out an anguished scream, and collapsed in a heap on the floor. “Fortunately, the day previous to my arrest, I had carried away two dynamite cases, and other contraband material,” Elias later recalled. The Germans ransacked the house looking for guns and, at the end of their fruitless search, demanded that his trembling mother disclose where he had concealed the weapons. Ashen and worried more for her son than for herself, she merely shrugged her shoulders and nodded silently in negation. The home invaders redoubled their search and this time found five pistols Elias had squirreled away. These were capital offenses.
The Germans shoved Elias back into the car and drove him the short distance to what before the war had been the fortified Ethniki Insurance Mansion at 4 Korai Street. The complex, part of which had been imported from Germany before the war, was requisitioned by the occupiers in 1941.10 There they yanked him out of the vehicle and forced him, still handcuffed, to the top floor, which was used by the Gestapo and SS for interrogations. After reading the report to another officer, the duty officer ordered Elias taken to a nearby room.
From the ceiling hung a contraption involving a pulley from which dangled a thick rope. There were also four blood-stained whips. When Elias did not reply to SS questions, his hands were tied behind his back. Then, in a variation of strappado, he was suspended by a pole, tied to the rope, and slowly lifted off the ground.
Afterward, half-dead, he was moved to a small sub-basement cell in one of the two floors of underground rooms that had been specially built as an air raid shelter. There were heavy iron doors and structures to protect insurance-company personnel against gas attacks.
During the war, these rooms became underground detention wards used for holding prisoners before it was officially determined whether they’d be sent to one of the Athens jails at Averof Prison, to Gestapo headquarters on Merlin Street, or to Chaidari, where they’d frequently be tortured, put to forced labor, and then loaded onto trains going to German concentration camps. Some prisoners scheduled for imminent transfer only stayed at Korai for a few hours or days. Others, like Elias, who were ordered to trial, were kept longer. Conditions were sometimes overcrowded and, with just a single bathroom on each floor, nauseatingly fetid. Graffiti scrawled on the walls pleaded for water and food.
Once a day, the prisoners were taken up from their basement dungeon and permitted to walk slowly in a circle on the plaza at the entrance, under the gaze of heavily armed German guards. Friends, family, and curiosity-seekers would gather nearby, some throwing assorted edibles to them.
Elias’s mother prepared a food package and asked a Peiramatikon classmate to take it to her son. He gave it to the Feldkommandatur, who never passed it on to Elias. Afterward, while observing the somber ritual of slow trudging inmates, the friend was surprised to see a teenaged walker raise his right fist and break the silence, proclaiming: “My name is Elias Demetracopoulos. I am Greek, and I am proud to be Greek.” And then he repeated, “My name is Elias Demetracopoulos and I’m a proud Greek.” Such flamboyant temerity did not go unnoticed. Again, he was punished.11
A journalist recounting Elias’s experience at Korai Street wrote in Stavros magazine: “It is impossible to describe how the Greek patriot suffered. For two weeks, morning, noon, and evening, he underwent the most inhuman torture of the Inquisition. Yet, he did not utter a sound, did not even open his mouth. He groaned and bit his tongue, to cut it if necessary. But, until the last day when he was bound and taken to the Parnassos auditorium for a trial and sentenced to death on two counts, Demetracopoulos bore all tortures bravely.”12
After sentencing, Elias was taken, along with six other convicts, to the infamous Averof Prison, the dreaded gray stone bastion on Leoforos Alexandras Avenue, which loomed as a dark blot against the azure sky. For decades, incarceration at Averof was the penultimate punishment imposed on political prisoners of the left and right who’d been condemned to death. During World War II it reeked from overcrowding and fear, with resistance fighters randomly pulled from their cells and executed in the courtyard.
The boy tried to keep up an unflappable demeanor as his new German handlers roughly pushed him into a seven-by-eight-foot cell, but that effort soon evaporated. Incarcerated and alone, he felt his body tingling with a strong sense of foreboding. He remembered that the “superhuman” Ivanof had tried twice to escape these walls and armed guards, but that even he had been caught and shot to death. In November 1943, fourteen-year-old Elias was feeling quite human and terribly vulnerable. Moved to a larger, crowded cell, Elias met airmen and soldiers from Australia and New Zealand and was able to practice his English. He tried to help smuggle out a letter from a Captain J. K. Lewis to his family in Sydney but was caught and punished.
“The days passed,” Demetracopoulos later wrote, “without any hope of salvation. Exhausting gymnastics, whipping, and other tortures were a part of the daily schedule.”13 He heard stories of inmates given severe beatings for simply pleading to be fed. Some prisoners were battered in their cells every two hours, their floors flooded with water between the beatings to keep them from resting. Others, condemned to execution, spent their last night out of the main building in a special underground cell called the Arapis, a covered pitch-black hole.
One afternoon, two boyhood acquaintances named Zampetakis and Levantakis, were brought from the Parnassos Court Martial. They smiled wanly and told Elias of their death sentences. The following day, when the Germans came to escort them to the place of execution, the two teenagers, both a little older than Elias and originally from Crete, turned to the other prisoners and said: “Don’t worry, boys, Greece cannot die because we will go [sacrifice ourselves]!”14
Elias Demetracopoulos awaited his turn. He remembered how he had once thought the job of underground wireless operator was the worst in the OAG, because the Germans used tracking equipment to pinpoint the location of transmitters and shot the operators on the spot. It was a task he’d been relieved he’d never been assigned. The operators claimed with gallows humor that they were the lucky ones, since their immediate execution prevented torture. Now, Elias had the worst of both worlds. He’d experienced the torture and was now preparing for his execution. Every day he heard the sounds of firing squads coming from the courtyard, as he waited to die.
—
SHORTLY BEFORE CHRISTMAS 1943, Archbishop Damaskinos, Spiritual Leader of Athens and All Greece, paid a holiday visit to the prison. The inmates were let out of their cells and ordered to line up for his blessing. Resplendent in black vestments and a sparkling pectoral cross, the fifty-two-year-old Damaskinos, with his flowing white beard, soulful eyes, and wise countenance, was an imposing presence, well beyond the fact that he symbolized church power. At six feet four inches tall, with his pastoral staff and wearing a kalimafkion—his tall cylindrical hat—the archbishop towered over the guards. Damaskinos fought hard to protect his flock during the famine and hardships of war.15 He repeatedly challenged both the occupiers and the quisling government. He also famously intervened to save thousands of Athenian Jews facing deportation, directing his prelates to provide baptismal certificates to those fleeing and arranging hiding places for others. Threatened with a firing-squad execution, Damaskinos—alluding to the fate of Patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople in 1821 who had been lynched by an Ottoman mob at the start of the Greek war of independence—told an SS commander that Greek religious leaders are hanged, not shot. “I request that you please respect our traditions,” he said.16
Elias, the youngest of all the prisoners, was startled to see the important visitor. To him, Archbishop Damaskinos was more than just a venerated church leader. He was a dear friend of his Uncle Costas, and Elias had met him. When it came time for the boy to kneel down, kiss the prelate’s hand, and receive a benediction, he said in a barely audible whisper, “Please tell my uncle I’m okay.” Then he paused, adding for emphasis, “today.”
Damaskinos didn’t respond as he worked his way down the line. After he left, the prisoners were again locked away. The next morning, the day before Christmas, German guards roused Elias early, shackled his wrists and frogmarched him outside in the early dawn.
Armed guards walked him at a brisk pace down the street across from the empty soccer field and past the unoccupied US ambassador’s residence. At that hour, as they turned down Panormou and Zaharof streets, the loudest sounds were the clacking of hobnail boots hitting pavement. Elias had no idea where they were taking him. After just a kilometer, they stopped at a sprawling and imposing topaz-toned building, about a mile from his house.
To his great surprise, instead of being led to the firing squad, Elias had been transferred to the Eginition Home for the Insane. The Germans brought paperwork that declared him a “psychopathic” case. This was not a matter of sudden German respect for the mentally ill. Somebody on the outside had made the appropriate connections. For the time being, his young life had been spared.
Since Elias’s arrest, his father had been stoic, but Panagiota was distraught. Working different approaches simultaneously, she beseeched friends and family to call in all favors and explore any avenue to get Elias out of Averof Prison. She repeatedly pressured her brother Costas Bokolas to use all his customer and business contacts. She even demanded that her brother-in-law Christos Apostolou, a retired naval commander, ask for help from a collaborator judge advocate in the German courts who as a young sailor had worked part-time for Costas.
Willing to pay anything for his release, Panagiota offered bribes to anyone she thought could free her son, but apparently no money ever changed hands.
Most effectively, Panagiota turned to her St. Nicholas priest, P. Vamvakas, who energetically worked his network up the ecclesiastical chain and together with Costas directly approached Archbishop Damaskinos. Elias later speculated that Damaskinos had probably played the decisive role in sparing his life as part of a Christmas goodwill package. He could hardly conceive that he was still alive.
At Eginition, Elias, now just past his fifteenth birthday, was first placed in a two-bed room with another inmate, who asked him all manner of questions. He quickly concluded, probably correctly, that his roommate had been put there to ascertain if he were really mentally ill or just avoiding his death sentence. Twice a day he was let out to exercise by walking the narrow corridors in a serpentine line with other inmates, under the watchful eyes of Greek staff, including assumed collaborators, and armed German guards. Elias didn’t know how he was supposed to act, but felt he had to play along with the diagnosis. When he protested loudly that he wasn’t insane (which he thought an insane person would do), other inmates mocked and mimicked him, pointing at him, some cackling hysterically. This apparently confirmed to the guards the correctness of his incarceration. They moved him to a ward with seriously mentally ill patients.
To Elias’s great surprise, one of the first people he saw during the asylum walks was Dr. Kostas Giannatos, whose whereabouts and fate had been unknown to him since shortly after Ivanof’s death. For the two years following his arrest, Giannatos had faked insanity to escape execution. To help make his case, the previously impeccably mannered doctor smeared himself with his own feces and even ate it. The two exchanged furtive glances and whispered brief comments from time to time while passing, but never had a real conversation.
One can only begin to imagine the emotional and physical impact of the Eginition experience, especially on a teenager. Though there were no accounts of eugenic programs, “crude, odd, and unproven” psychiatric treatments were used, including special diets, laxative treatments, bloodletting, hot and cold showers, mechanical restraints, opiates, malaria experimentation, hypnotherapy, insulin-induced fits, and lobotomies.17 Elias was spared the worst of these, but only because the medical and nursing staffs were so shorthanded.
Whatever hardships Greece suffered during this time, asylum life was worse. Parts of the building were used as barracks and arsenals, making conditions more crowded. Food was tightly rationed and often inedible. Inmate-prisoners were sexually abused by hospital personnel. Windows, tables, and chairs removed for firewood during the winter famine were not replaced. The death rate of mentally ill patients in Greek hospitals during the war was 50 percent.18
The sickening smells and frightening sights of broken humanity, most with serious psychopathological problems; the constant moans, shouts, and keening, the lack of light and fresh air, the coughing, sneezing, and spitting in overcrowded conditions that enabled diseases to pass readily from one inmate to another, shaped a life in extremis. Whenever Elias tried to shut out his new world, vivid memories of his tortures in Averof Prison came flooding back. He had been helpless in the face of powerful forces. He promised himself that if he ever got out alive, he would never live in fear nor let anyone bully or brutalize him again.
The seasons changed from winter to spring to summer and then autumn. During nearly a year in Eginition, Elias was cut off from the climax of the war. Before his arrest he had been vaguely aware that Communist and non-Communist resistance fighters seemed to be more at each other’s throats than united in the struggle against the occupiers. He knew almost nothing about what had happened since his incarceration.
In October 1944, the German occupiers, fearful of the advancing Red Army, withdrew from Athens and mainland Greece. They took down the swastika flag from the Acropolis and, with no shots fired, convoyed north out of the city, blowing up bridges and highways and despoiling the countryside on their way.
Shortly after dawn on Thursday, October 12, Elias and some of the other inmates realized that no one was guarding them. Sympathetic medical staff opened the doors of the rooms of those they thought to be political prisoners and not actually insane. Elias was free to go home. Without looking back, he simply walked out through the main door.
All alone, Elias blinked at the daylight and beheld his new surroundings near central Athens. The aptly named Eleftherias (“Freedom”) Park was just ahead. Starting with a brisk walk, interspersed with brief trots, he took in snatches of the familiar streets and buildings of Kolonaki with fresh appreciation. As he approached the southwest corner of the great black rock of Mount Lycabettos that, according to legend, Athena had dropped while carrying it to her temple on the Acropolis, Elias took a shortcut, away from the concrete sidewalks and through the forest of Mediterranean pines near its base. He inhaled the intoxicatingly sweet, clean smell of the resinous sap, his footsteps muffled by the silken needles. As he rejoiced in his newly regained liberty, an unsettling phantasmagoria of scenes from the past year flashed in his mind. He picked up his pace.
