World War Two, 1940, George Kotsonis

From MemoryArchive

Who: George Kotsonis
What: World War Two
When: 1940
Where: Greece

Very early in the morning on October 28, 1940, I was woke up by an unusual commotion in my house. My father and my mother had a very animated discussion or maybe an argument. I was then three and one half years old and I could not quite follow their discussion, but every so often I picked up the words “war” and “general mobilization”. I started crying mainly because I got scared and I wanted to attract their attention. October 28th of 1940 was the faithful day when Mussolini invaded Greece as a first step to re-establish the ancient Roman Empire, and Greece entered the Second World War.

At first I had no idea what “general mobilization” meant, but the next few days I got a pretty good idea of the meaning when I saw train after train moving out of the railway station full of men and soldiers. Then I noticed a lot of my relatives, family friends, neighbors were gone and my home town became a ghost town. The Greek flags were flying all over the town, and the public radio stations were blasting military march music; that gave me the idea that “war” was an occasion to celebrate. I didn’t realize then, that faithful day of October 28th was the beginning of an eight year war that brought upon us untold sufferings and total destruction of my country in material, social, and moral terms. The first four years I lived under a brutal German occupation, followed by an even more brutal civil war between the communists and the nationalists.

The Germans did a pretty good job in introducing me to fear, terror, hunger, and untold atrocities. They degraded human beings to lower level than animals. The civil war was the same maybe even worse, because Greeks were killing Greeks, brother against brother.

October 28th marked the loss of my childhood: at three and one half years old I lost my child’s innocence and began an abnormal and premature maturity. The learning environment was grossly distorted by the atrocious and immoral behavior of the “Germanic Superior Race” and made it very difficult or rather impossible for me to be able to distinguish right from wrong and in general moral values. Total confusion and insecurity gave way to the instinct of self preservation.

The Greeks soundly defeated the Italians and pushed them back to Albania from where they had started the invasion. Mussolini was desperate and if you guess who came to his rescue, you are right. His old friend and buddy Hitler invaded Greece on April 1941, establishing thus one of the most brutal, atrocious and ruthless occupations for the next four years. The German army occupied mainly the urban areas including my hometown. A bitter pill to swallow for the Greeks was that the Italians who were so soundly routed by the Greeks, with the German support occupied the countryside.

In their opening act in the Greek drama the Germans gathered and stole all foodstuffs they could find in Greece to feed the German army. This act created the famous famine of 1941 that spread out all over Greece and especially in the urban areas. Thousands died of starvation especially in Athens where the garbage cars in some cases were picking up dead bodies from the streets. When I complained to my mother that I was hungry, she used to say “wet your finger with saliva, dip it in the salt, and eat it”. I am not quite sure whether that recipe worked out as intended, honestly I don’t remember.

There was naturally a resistance organized against the German and Italian occupation, but the Partisans were up in the mountains out of reach of the Germans. In any given incident of the resistance, the Gestapo would round up innocent people, (as a rule they were males from 18 to 60 years old) interrogate and torture them and execute them. They even went to the extreme as to burn whole villages and small towns.

The head of the diocese in my home town was Bishop Antonios. He was a very nice and decent man; he assumed additional duties as a mediator between the German Command and people arrested by the Gestapo. He managed to save a lot of fellow citizens from imprisonment or exile to the concentration camps in Germany or even death. The diocese was located across the street from my house, and I could easily see and hear women, some of them were mothers, others were wives, of people arrested by Gestapo desperately screaming, wailing, and crying and imploring the Bishop to intervene on behalf of their loved ones. Those scenes remain vivid in my memory even today sixty four years later.

The Germans left in 1944 and the communist partisans occupied most of the Greek towns and cities. In the ensuing battles brother will kill brother and neighbor will kill neighbor. The communists attacked and entered my hometown. There was a wholesale slaughter and they burned most of the center of the town including the city hall. They arrested, tortured and executed not only those who ostensibly collaborated with the Germans and Italians, but innocent people that they happened to have personal differences with.

In 1948 I was eleven years old when peace finally came upon my country. For the past eight years I lived through one of the most horrifying experiences that defined the most formative years of my life; Fear, terror, hunger, atrocities made me lose all kinds of moral values that we take for granted in our today’s society. To cheat and to lie was accepted; I lost any trust about everybody and about everything. Above all I lost my childhood innocence.