Less than half an hour after leaving Eginition he was on Dafnomili Street. The heavy wooden door at his house was unlocked. When he walked in, his parents were alone. His mother screamed with joy and embraced him, smothering his face with kisses. His father, wearing a warm but reserved smile, said matter-of-factly: “Good to have you back home.” Neighbors treated him as a local hero.
Already thinner in mid-1943 than he had been at the start of the war, Elias had lost more than twenty pounds during his incarceration. He was wan and malnourished. Somewhat under six feet tall, his weight was down to the low 130s. His thick black hair had started to thin. Sunshine hurt his dark brown eyes. But he had an appetite. To help him recover, his mother prepared his favorite spaghetti dishes, followed by freshly made chocolate ice cream she had obtained despite the widespread scarcity.
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TWO DAYS LATER, British forces arrived by sea to a festive welcome, followed by the Greek government-in-exile, which had delayed its debarkation because, superstitiously, it did not want to return on a Tuesday, the day that Constantinople had fallen to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. On Wednesday, October 18, liberation was celebrated. Hundreds of thousands thronged into central Athens to celebrate the end of the war against the Axis. Elias Demetracopoulos, scrawny, deflated but exhilarated, stood with his family, friends, neighbors, and strangers, wearing a broad smile.
There were church bells and fireworks, tears and embraces, parades of soldiers and resistance fighters, street dancing and grand oratory from returning former minister and political leader George Papandreou. Elias didn’t sing, cheer, or wave flags, but he was immensely proud of what had been achieved and glad for his small role in the national victory.
The joys of the end of the occupation were short-lived.19 The devastation facing the survivors was profound. Some 550,000 Greeks had been killed, about 8 percent of the country’s population—a much higher rate of casualties than in France or Britain. Greek losses compared more closely to those suffered in Russia and Poland.
Greece’s economy and infrastructure were in ruins, its currency worthless. Nearly half a million homes had been destroyed, along with more than half of the country’s national road system, 73 percent of its commercial fleet, 66 percent of its trucks, and 60 percent of its large farm animals. Half its urban population was unemployed. Inflation was spiraling out of control, exacerbating a crisis in which old animosities and fresh political confrontations would soon intensify.
4.December Uprising
LIBERATION FROM THE GERMANS DID not bring a political resolution or reconstruction to Greece, as it did to much of formerly occupied Europe. Instead, the end of the occupation ushered in increasingly brutal phases of civil conflict. Even before the German surrender, Greece became a battlefield of the coming Cold War.
The British believed that a peaceful solution to post-occupation conflict in Greece was unlikely. To minimize the negative consequences of a violent struggle, they tried to ensure they had a free hand by keeping the Russians out of any coming fray. Stalin, desiring a similarly free hand in Romania and elsewhere, readily agreed. Over several months of meetings, the two erstwhile allies arrived at an understanding of postwar spheres of influence in the Balkans, and their agreement was finalized in Moscow on October 11, 1944 with the so-called “Percentages Agreement.”1 According to Churchill’s memoirs, this handwritten agreement gave Russia 90 percent predominance in Romania, the UK 90 percent of the say in Greece, and gave them a 50–50 split regarding Yugoslavia. Post–Cold War declassification of East European archives reveal that, months before this understanding, Soviet leaders had already decided to avoid contact with representatives of the Greek left.2 The Greeks themselves were unaware of how the gods were playing with their fates. How Stalin honored this agreement in the coming years had a decisive impact on the battles ahead.
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ANTICIPATING GERMANY’S WITHDRAWAL, and dreading the prospect of the Communist-leaning National Liberation Front (EAM) stepping into a power vacuum before the exiled Greek government could be established, the British arranged a meeting of the different Allied wartime factions in Greece, including EAM, in a villa near Caserta, Italy on September 26, 1944, to bridge partisan differences and design the country’s political future. They agreed to formalize a Greek “government of national unity,” with membership from all camps, to run the country until elections were held. George Papandreou was put in charge, with heavy British influence.
Papandreou was probably the best choice for such a herculean task. Born February 13, 1888, the son of an impoverished Orthodox archpriest in Kaletzi, Achaia, in western Greece, he studied law at the University of Athens, then political science in Berlin, where he refined a lifelong philosophical commitment to social democracy. A protégé of Venizelos, he was exiled under the Metaxas dictatorship and escaped imprisonment during the occupation. A resolute anti-Communist and devoted republican, Papandreou tempered his anti-royalist sentiments to negotiate a compromise solution to the crisis.
Of all the issues facing the coalition National Unity government, the most daunting were disbanding the various resistance groups and forming a new national army. How to disarm and reconcile the antartes on the left, particularly from ELAS, the Greek People’s Liberation Army that controlled most of the country outside of Athens, and, on the right, the pro-royalist Mountain Brigades and often Nazi-collaborationist Security Battalions?
Those on the right passionately believed that the leaders of EAM/ELAS sought a Communist takeover of Greece. It might be done clandestinely, in stages, under the deceitful cover of democratic rhetoric and legalistic procedures. It might be achieved directly, either on the battlefield, or through a coup d’état. The outcome, they feared, would be the same unless they took drastic action.
Those on the left, meanwhile, believed that the so-called National Unity forces wanted to disarm the heroic ELAS resistance fighters to better serve British economic and geopolitical interests and restore the Greek “Monarcho-Fascists” who had been discredited through their inaction, sympathy, or outright collaboration with the Axis occupiers. EAM and their sympathizers feared that the new government would never share real power with the left, but would instead turn the clock back to the prewar political arrangements. This was not the better world for which they had fought and died. There were elements of truth in both caricatures, but they remained oversimplifications.
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LIKE MANY OF their war-weary neighbors, the Demetracopoulos household didn’t want to be drawn into the growing conflict. They just wanted to be left alone. In the weeks since Elias came home, things had been settling down into a more normal routine. Panagiotis had gone back to work at the Acropolis. Panagiota gave daily prayers of thanks at St. Nicholas for her reunited family. Her top priority was feeding her son to help him gain back the weight and health lost during his incarceration.
Elias’s first order of unfinished business was to go to the Hellenic Red Cross and reconstruct from memory a letter guards had taken from him that was to have been sent to the family of Australian 7th Corps Captain J. K. (“Jack”) Lewis, whom he had befriended in Averof Prison two years before. As Elias explained to Red Cross officials, he’d discovered that Lewis had been sent to Germany in March 1944. He didn’t know if Lewis had survived the war but considered it his duty to pass on to Lewis’s brother in Sydney the information and what may have been his last words. It took him several tries and almost a year to get the letter sent. He never received a reply.3
After that, he reconnected with friends and made plans to return to school.
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PAPANDREOU’S GOAL WAS to achieve national unity without conceding anything to the Communists. His government, under pressure from the British, declared the resistance over as of October 31, 1944. The transferring of the Third Mountain Brigade to Athens on November 9, followed by British Commander General Ronald Scobie’s demand that EAM fighters disarm unilaterally, were the provocations that led to December’s violence.4
Left-wing groups, in response, pressured the government and its British protectors with street demonstrations, marches, and the smearing of buildings with political graffiti. EAM refused to dissolve its military arm unless the government also demobilized the Third Mountain Brigade, the Sacred Squadron, and the extreme right-wing organization “X.” “Recriminations and charges of collaboration or treason replaced the sudden exhilaration of freedom. “Accusations became the national discourse,” wrote the Canadian historian André Gerolymatos. “Indeed, fear stalked every corner of Athens, grinding down the little trust that remained and diminishing any hope for the future.”5
On December 1, 1944, Elias celebrated his sixteenth birthday. It was also a pivotal day in Greek history.
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LATE ON THE first night of December, the EAM ministers concluded that the organization’s differences with Papandreou’s British-guided regime were irreconcilable, and resigned from the governing coalition, criticizing British interference in Greek affairs. The government of national unity came apart.
The next day, a cold and rainy Saturday, EAM stalwarts roamed the city with cardboard megaphones calling for a massive protest. To ensure a large turnout, EAM agitators warned that those who failed to participate could face reprisals.
On Sunday morning, December 3, the streets were still wet, but it was bright and sunny.6 Well over 100,000 demonstrators of various classes and political shades poured into Syntagma (Constitution) Square in the heart of Athens. Along with Greek flags, marchers held aloft the colors of the United States, the Soviet Union, and even Great Britain.
Accounts differ as to who fired the first shot, with pro-government writers blaming police panic. Others noted that police and members of the extreme-rightist “X” organization, both positioned strategically high up in surrounding buildings, opened fire. Some witnesses remember a man dropping to one knee and shouting: “Shoot the bastards!”7 Nikos Farmakis, then a 15-year-old gun-wielding member of “X,” said the signal to open fire was given by then–Athens police chief Angelos Evert, who waved a handkerchief out of a police headquarters window. Fourteen years later, Evert admitted that he had directed the forceful breakup of the demonstration, according to orders he said came from Churchill by way of Scobie and Papandreou.8 In the end, more than two dozen people were killed, including a six-year-old boy,9 and 148 were injured. George Papandreou offered his resignation to General Scobie, but Churchill would not let his chosen Greek leader off the hook, and instead of a government of national unity, Papandreou found himself presiding over several weeks of urban warfare. Those weeks of intra-Greek carnage became known collectively as Dekemvriana (the “December events”), a series of bloody confrontations, fixed battles, and outright massacres involving diehard political enemies—the Liberation Army, the Greek government, and the British forces. The goal of the British: to wrest control of Athens from the ELAS fighters.
A general strike and mass rally were called for the next day, Monday, December 4. Participants were peaceful until dispersing demonstrators were violently attacked by a variety of right-wing bands, including notably those of “X,” led by Colonel Georgios Grivas, who would later play a pernicious role in the Cyprus conflict. More than one hundred people were killed. In retaliation, ELAS overran police stations, inflicting casualties and taking weapons. Scobie proclaimed martial law. Churchill took charge, ordering: “Do not hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress…This is no time…to imagine that Greek politicians of various shades can affect the situation.”10
For about two weeks, EAM/ELAS refrained from attacking British troops directly, and even proposed an armistice. The response from Churchill was unequivocal: “The clear objective is the defeat of EAM. The ending of the fighting is subsidiary to this.”11
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IN THE WEEKS after the mass demonstrations, it became risky just to step outside, let alone travel between neighborhoods. The Demetracopouloses lived on the outskirts of the only section of Athens effectively protected by the British. However, Dafnomili Street and the rest of Athens, its environs, and most of the country was essentially controlled by ELAS.
Blocks from Elias’s house, street fighting raged, with snipers on rooftops targeting those below and people running for cover. British tanks rolled through city streets. Bursting shells seemed to be everywhere, and RAF planes, trying to take back territory, dropped ordnance and caused serious civilian casualties.
About a week into the battles, the war hit home. Mid-morning, Panagiota’s oldest sister, Angeliki Handrinos, who lived in the next house, banged on the Demetracopouloses’ heavy wooden front door. Distraught, she explained that her husband Vassilis and son Spyros had been picked up late the day before by what she believed was one of the local Communist groups and taken to some unknown location.
Uncle Vassilis was a small merchant. Cousin Spyros, five years older than Elias, had been an honor student at Peiramatikon. Although both were conservative, neither had been actively political, not even from the sidelines. Around the neighborhood, stories had been circulating about Communists recruiting foot soldiers off the streets or randomly picking people from whom to extract useful information. More serious were reports that ELAS and OPLA (Organization for the Protection of the People’s Struggle) had been exacting revenge on those they believed had betrayed their cause, had made disparaging remarks, or, as members of the Athenian upper class, could be useful hostages. Many of those unsympathetic to the left were deemed “traitors,” and hundreds were said to have been executed with sadistic passion. Some victims were shot in the head and dumped ignominiously in fields, street corners, or alleys. Others were dismembered alive, then killed.12 Lucky ones were kidnapped and, in stages, moved out of the country, to Albania and Bulgaria.
Angeliki, the anxious wife and mother, did not want to believe that any of this could be happening to her family. She didn’t know where to turn, but thought that Elias, now known in the neighborhood as a “war hero,” might be able to do something. Without knowing what he was getting into, and somewhat cocky because of his local-celebrity status, the teenager assured his aunt that he would go search for his relatives.
He didn’t trust using the telephone, but, even if he had, electric power was shut off. From the Hotel Grand Bretagne’s beehive of political gossip and intelligence, Elias learned more about the street snatchings. But it was largely speculation, and, if he made a mistake, he might not only fail in his mission but be taken captive himself.
Under the curfew, civilians were allowed to cross sectors only from noon to 2 p.m. to fetch water and food. Valuable time ticked away as Elias dug for more reliable information. Finally, he was told his uncle and cousin had been taken by Communists to a particular building in Nea Ionia, a suburb in the north of Athens, northeast of Patissia. Approaching one o’clock, a safe time to cross neighborhoods, Elias left the relatively secure British-controlled area for the nearby “no man’s land” and beyond. The December sun was bright, but the air was chilly. With a heady mix of swagger, fear, and excitement, Elias worked his way on foot through the expanding battlefield of his hometown.
Unarmed, he walked for about two hours on a secondary road. But when he got to the identified place, no one was there. He made further inquiries, was pointed in one direction, then another. For more than an hour, he trudged farther north, in the direction of Lykovrysi, over rolling hills, past farmlands and groves of pines and fruit-bearing trees, but found few dwellings. Elias didn’t want to return home empty-handed. More than a day had passed since the abduction. He didn’t know if his uncle and cousin were dead or alive.
