Following another tip, Elias approached a three-story stone house in a residential area somewhere between Irakleio, and Nea Ionia. It was now about 4 p.m., shortly before dusk would cast an eerie pall on his mission. Suddenly, armed sentries appeared from nearby shadows, stopped him, and took him inside the house to the commander in charge. After Elias presented his identification and told his story, one guard claimed to have known about his arrest, torture, and incarceration. The men did not treat him roughly. In a first-floor room in the darkening house, Elias saw his uncle and cousin sitting on wooden chairs, unshackled, with surprised looks on their faces.
The leader was middle-aged, heavyset, full-bearded, and had a mane of thick black hair—the caricature of a guerrilla from central casting. He was flanked by two scruffy associates, all seated at a table illuminated by a flickering hurricane lamp. The fighters exchanged mild pleasantries with the teenager, who was trying hard to mask his anxiety. After a short conversation during which both parties uttered anti-British diatribes cursing “perfidious Albion,” Elias seemed to convince the commander that holding his relatives served no purpose because they knew nothing of value and any allegations against them were baseless. Without much ado, the commander released the two men. As Elias and his relatives walked out, the captors, it appeared, had already turned to other business.
The three crossed the street toward Athens. But after they had walked less than thirty yards, someone shouted at them from the doorway to stop or they’d shoot. This time Elias’s instinct, the opposite from that when taken from Averof Prison, was to flee as fast as possible. Remembering the tales of Ivanof’s escapes, he yelled encouragement to his relatives and led them as they zigzagged away from the encampment, bullets whizzing near their heads. Then Elias stumbled. He’d been shot in the left leg, about six inches above the ankle. Fortunately, the bullet went all the way through, missing his tibia and fibula, wounding but not disabling him. They kept running.
After losing their pursuers, they caught their breath. Elias tore his shirt to make a bandage. Years later he reflected that being shot had been a blessing in disguise, forcing the threesome to decide that their return to the Anglo-royalist stronghold should not be a straight trip. If they had not been attacked they might have been less wary, taken a more direct route back, and been captured or killed. As night fell and it grew colder, the trio cautiously worked their long way back through the hilly outskirts of the city, their presence sporadically illuminated by the piercing brightness of flares dropped from Royal Air Force planes to expose ELAS troop movements.
When they got closer, they decided it was safer to spend the night at Uncle Costas’s house than to return to Dafnomili Street. The house was about a mile away, near the US ambassador’s residence at the American School of Classical Studies, which had been spared from the fighting. The accidental hero returned home the next day to tears of relief, words of gratitude, and medical treatment. He would later speculate that the interrogators’ change of heart may have come from their sudden realization that Elias’s OAG had royalist sympathies.
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IT DID NOT sit well in Western capitals, especially in Washington and in the House of Commons, that British forces were battling members of a Greek resistance movement that had so recently been lauded for its bold stand against the Axis.
Even FDR, who had earlier made it clear to Churchill that the British would have carte blanche in Greece, was taken aback. The US secretary of state told American representatives in Athens to remain strictly neutral. American newspapers excoriated the return of naked British imperialism.13 Even in England, the prime minister was attacked from the left and the right.
Churchill, seemingly obsessed with the Greek crisis, made a surprise Christmas visit to Athens, where he learned first-hand the importance of the King waiting to return until a plebiscite was held. Archbishop Damaskinos, who Churchill now realized was not the reprehensible “pestilent priest” he and some of the British command had disparagingly dismissed, was appointed regent.14
Eventually, the British prevailed. The new year brought a cease-fire. General Nikolaos Plastiras, an aging war hero and political moderate, became prime minister. In the preceding month there had been more Greek casualties than in the entire 1940–’41 war with Italy.15 On February 12, 1945, the different sides, meeting in the seaside town of Varkiza, reached an agreement to end the “second round” of the civil war.16 The peace would not last.
5.A Tubercular Education
DURING THE HARROWING WEEKS FROM early December 1944 to early January 1945, Panagiotis and Panagiota Demetracopoulos felt their lives were even more precarious than during the German occupation. And Elias’s recent experience rescuing his relatives seemed to prove he had as much to fear from Communists as he ever had from the Germans. The bloody fighting in the bullet-riddled streets of Athens brought to the city the full terror of civil war. The political assassinations and taking of civilian hostages by ELAS soured the non-Communist resistance on EAM and its leadership. Elias and his neighbors were terrified that the Communists might destroy their world.
When EAM/ELAS forces withdrew from the capital and the Varkiza cease-fire was signed, Athenians could begin to breathe more comfortably. Nevertheless, stories about the forced marches of hostages into ELAS-held territory in the north and the numerous casualties along the way cost the KKE the support of all but a small minority of their wartime allies. The December kidnapping of their relatives was still disturbingly fresh.
Elias’s father and mother were center-right conservatives, sympathetic to the monarchy and staunchly anti-Communist. They admired Churchill for his role in saving Greece from the Axis powers and regarded Britain as their bulwark against a Communist takeover. They also opposed the involvement of former German collaborators in positions of authority in the army and other parts of the Greek government.
Elias differed from them in his republican sympathies but leaned to the conservative side until well into the 1950s. He later reflected that, under other circumstances, he and his parents might have responded positively to certain leftist social-reform positions. Elias, in particular, had always supported voting rights for women. But the near-escape of Elias and his relatives during the Dekemvriana largely tainted their view of all left-wing programs. Certainly, they acknowledged, EAM had included moderate members. But they didn’t believe that EAM/ELAS could ever separate itself from its Communist leadership or that the Communists were honest in their promises. Their actions during the Athens uprising proved it: if the KKE ever attained power, they surmised, the Party would soon subvert any free and democratic government to ends determined in Moscow.
The heavily negotiated February 1945 Varkiza Agreement called for the demobilization of ELAS, creation of a national army, amnesty for political crimes committed during Dekemvriana, and purging Axis collaborationists from the civil and security services. It declared that within the year there would be a plebiscite allowing Greeks to choose whether they wanted a republic or a monarchy. Parliamentary elections would follow.1
These terms offered a reasonable compromise, but none of the parties fully abided by their provisions. ELAS surrendered many weapons but hid a substantial amount of their best weaponry in the mountains. The so-called national army, which had been purged of almost all liberal and republican officers, was anything but popular. And the amnesty provision protected only EAM/ELAS leadership, leaving many rank-and-file ELAS soldiers subject to harassment, arrest, and imprisonment.
As public opinion swung decidedly against the left in the wake of the December uprising, Nazi collaborators used their vitriolic anti-Communism to escape being purged from positions of authority and became the vanguard of a new terror campaign. Demobilized ELAS soldiers used this terrorism to mount their own attacks in “self-defense,” but the government and its British allies controlled the cities and major centers of power. Disproportionate revenge attacks against the left for real or imagined transgressions troubled Elias and his family, but personal security trumped their concern for civil liberties.
The post-Varkiza interlude was short-lived. The agreed voting procedure was to choose the form of government, then to elect members of a constituent assembly. But the British insisted that a government be formed first, followed by a vote on whether to allow the return of King George II from London. With right-wing gangs exacting “White Terror” upon left-wingers of all shades, and a policy of prosecution that rounded up even marginal former ELAS members, prospects for a fair vote were bleak. After the British refused demands from Communists, centrists, and liberals to postpone the March 1946 election until a less-tumultuous time, those parties urged their followers to boycott the country’s first election since 1936. Since the boycott ensured the absence of about half the electorate, the results gave artificial legitimacy to an unrestrained, hard-right coalition government.2
Elias and his parents welcomed the clear conservative electoral victory, but were dismayed by the left’s policy of organized abstentions. The absence of even a modest parliamentary opposition undermined Greek democracy and encouraged the opposition’s “extra-parliamentary” temptations. Several months later, a plebiscite restored the royal family. Throughout 1946, cooperation among the major wartime allies deteriorated, but Stalin maintained his hands-off attitude toward the Greek Communists. The KKE leadership, however, had a loyal supporter in Josip Broz Tito, who had consolidated his own rule in nearby Yugoslavia. Gradually they turned from strikes and demonstrations to organized violence, with guerrilla bands effectively targeting villages. In late 1946, the KKE reorganized ELAS as the Democratic Army of Greece, and the Greek Civil War entered its third and most atrocious final round. The rural northern and southern countrysides became killing fields, with peasants savagely victimized by both sides.
Once the fighting moved out of Athens, the Demetracopouloses and their neighbors were spared the terrorism and violence that beset their compatriots in Macedonia, Thrace, Thessaly, and the Peloponnese. But daily life remained difficult.3 The Germans had destroyed more than one-third of Greece’s national wealth and devastated its railways, roads, port facilities, power grids, and communications networks, and much of its merchant marine force. The decimation of livestock, poultry, and draft animals imperiled urban food supplies. Illness was rampant, and runaway inflation had wiped out many families’ life savings. While other parts of war-torn Europe engaged in reconstruction, Athens struggled. United Nations Relief and Rehabitation Administration (UNRRA) packages of food and basic necessities kept people alive, but barely.4
As conservative anti-Communists, Elias and his family avoided the discrimination affecting Greeks branded with so-called forbidden views, who found difficulty obtaining from the police certificates of national loyalty required to get driver’s licenses, passports, public jobs, contracts, and benefits. Panagiotis Demetracopoulos worked as an Acropolis guide, leading relief-agency VIPs and visiting military officers around the major sites, but business was far from brisk. Elias’s mother’s family lived in a peaceful region on the nearby Gulf of Corinth, and they replenished her dwindling supply of British sovereigns and provided vital foodstuffs, from olive oil to fresh vegetables. Panagiota strategically bartered away her family heirlooms piece by piece, often at bargain prices. This support buffered the Demetracopoulos family from the shocks of runaway inflation and the economic privations that beset most of their neighbors.
After recovering from his December 1944 bullet wound, Elias turned his attention to school. He had not wanted to return to Peiramatikon, from which his classmates had already graduated while he was locked up. So, he went to a general public high school, the 5th Boys High School in nearby Exarcheia, and made up the missing credits for graduation. He passed his examinations in 1946 and received a certificate for “Excellent Behavior.”
Elias next enrolled in the well-regarded Athens School of Economics and Commercial Sciences, the precursor of the Athens University of Economics and Business. He immersed himself in his studies and excelled early on. Soon, however, a nagging, intermittent cough turned into a persistent and enervating hack. An overwhelming fatigue forced him to drop out of school. Months later he reenrolled but dropped out again.
Already quite thin, the eighteen-year-old lost his appetite and with it still more weight. Then he came down with fever, chills, and night sweats. His mother gently palpated his neck to check lymph glands she hoped would not be swollen. He started coughing up blood and phlegm. Finally, blood samples and an X-ray confirmed a serious case of tuberculosis. The time he had spent in crowded, unheated Averof Prison and the Eginition Asylum had finally taken its toll.
He was ordered immediately to Sotiria, once the best sanatorium for TB care. Located near Neo Psychiko, with a pine orchard bathed in fresh air drifting down from nearby Mount Hymettus, Sotiria had been stripped by the occupying Germans and, because of the latest wave of civil conflict, lacked equipment and competent staff. The clinic represented hope more often than salvation. A TB survivor whose sister died there remembered that at that time there were no medicines or food save for what could be purchased at inflated black-market prices. “With little to eat, patients had to be provided [for] by parents or relatives, most trekking many kilometers on foot to do so, sharing what little they had and expending their own caloric intake in the process.”5
For months, Elias’s mother walked to the bus stop and waited for unreliable buses that dropped her near the hospital. On good days, the trip took more than an hour. On days when the bus didn’t come, she’d hike nearly three-miles, carrying her son’s homemade care package. Each afternoon she’d make the journey in reverse.
Panagiota would have continued this routine willingly, but she had her doubts about the quality of care her son was getting. Nurses were little more than well-intentioned servant girls, and she was afraid that, convalescing in an ill-equipped, ill-staffed medical warehouse, Elias would not get the treatment he needed. He might even get worse and die. The air on Dafnomili Street was unpolluted, with the pine trees on Mount Lycabettos wafting a fresh aroma. Panagiota reasoned that Elias could recuperate better at home, in his own bed, with her overseeing his care and feeding. She negotiated his release with the doctors and administrators. It did not hurt her case that the chief of the Sotiria clinic, Nikolaos Karditsis, had helped OAG obtain medicines and explosives during the war.
For more than a year, his parents organized Elias’s health care. But drugs were in short supply and, in mid-1947, when it seemed he was better, he tapered off and then stopped taking his medications. He suffered a relapse, became chronically weak and exhausted, and prolonged his recovery. After he was deemed no longer contagious, family, friends, and some of his current and former teachers home-schooled him. Individually and together they brought textbooks and works of non-fiction—particularly on economics, politics, and history—and discussed the different subjects with him. He also read and debated great works of literature, taking a particular interest in the works of Leo Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw. In coming years, Elias would have many opportunities to reflect on a line from the preface to Heartbreak House: “Truth telling is not compatible with the defence of the realm.” Elias had time to read omnivorously, not simply to prepare for examinations, but for the pure joy of learning. He regarded this time of recuperation and home schooling as the most intellectually stimulating period of his life. Economics, especially political economics, was his favorite topic.
His most steadfast link to the outside world during his convalescence came from newspapers, particularly Kathimerini, the highly respected conservative daily and, to many, the most influential publication in Greece. He devoured it daily, front to back. He thought often not just about the selection and ordering of the stories themselves but about how they must have been gathered and assembled. Elias was especially taken with the articles by two brothers working at Kathimerini as financial news correspondents, Evangelos and George Androulidakis. They had already distinguished themselves by secretly publishing and distributing the praised World War II resistance publication Fighting Greece and had become leading reporters and commentators on issues of political economics. Elias imagined himself covering stories, writing them, seeing them in print, and having an impact on shaping reader opinion. The outlines of a possible career were beginning to take shape.
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IN LATE 1946, Britain decided it was unable to carry the burden of Greek reconstruction.6 Widespread unmet Greek needs, enduring corruption, mounting inefficiencies, and the emerging insurrection in particular proved overwhelming. Economic problems at home and worsening finances elsewhere only made matters more urgent. London told Washington on February 21, 1947, that Britain’s program of military and economic aid to Greece (and Turkey) would stop on March 31 and requested immediate help.
On Wednesday evening March 12, 1947—early in his recovery from tuberculosis—Elias and his family listened to a live broadcast of President Harry S. Truman speaking in Washington to a joint session of the US Congress to announce what would become known as the “Truman Doctrine,” now seen as a landmark in the accelerating Cold War between Soviet-style Communism and the West.
Truman gave an “all-out speech,” a flamboyant, evangelical invocation designed to electrify an indifferent American public and win over a parsimonious Republican Congress.7 He began by telling this audience that he had received from Greece “an urgent appeal for financial and economic assistance” that was “imperative if Greece is to survive as a free nation.” The President warned that “the very existence of the Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists…The Greek government is unable to cope with the situation…. Greece must have assistance if it is to become a self-supporting and self-respecting democracy…There’s no other country to which democratic Greece can turn.”8
Truman conceded that the Greek government had made mistakes, that the United States did not condone everything it had done or would do. But the country was operating in an atmosphere of chaos and “desperately need[ed] our support now.”
The Demetracopouloses listened intently, wondering about the implications of the speech. The family had welcomed British aid and influence and was unprepared for the news that the UK could no longer afford to be engaged. United States involvement introduced a new unknown, but Elias’s father appreciated his earlier experiences in America and encouraged his extended family and neighbors to embrace US support. They hoped that a substantial American presence would crush the Communist insurgency and open the way to a Greece that would flourish economically, socially, and politically. For his part, Elias welcomed the change in Western patron from the royalty-loving British to a country with republican roots.
It was not until late summer of 1947 that the first shipments of American aid arrived. Meanwhile, eruptions of violence increased, and the central government lost control of more of the countryside, making major parts of the plans to rebuild the economic infrastructure “inoperative.”9
Initially, Greece’s Democratic Army leaders were firm believers in guerrilla warfare. This strategy of gradually wearing down the Greek government had served them well. But the influx of massive American aid made a marked difference. In May 1948, rebel leader Markos Vafeiadis, then in Belgrade, concluded that there was no way the insurgents could win and proposed a cease-fire. But Nikos Zachariadis, the secretary general of the Greek Communist Party and the power behind the insurgent struggle, refused to give in. Instead, he ordered Kapetan (Commander) Markos to abandon guerrilla strategy and operate in conventional small brigades of three or four battalions. This was a grave error.10 Setting up for fixed battles behind barbed wire and concrete barriers made the Democratic Army better targets, tipping the advantage to the larger, better-trained and -equipped government forces.
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In the spring of 1948, a high-profile example of the critical role played by journalists in shaping the course of events made a lasting impression on Elias. On Sunday, May 16, a grisly news report described a fisherman’s discovery of CBS correspondent George Polk’s bound, bloated, and barnacled body floating in Salonica Bay. He had been shot in the head at close range. The thirty-four-year-old American broadcaster had disappeared while seeking an exclusive interview with Markos Vafeiadis. There were few leads or clues, and fingers pointed in all directions.
