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Return to Asi Gonia
what roads they followed, The few however who kept their morale unshaken,
inflicted great wounds on the Germans, saved many of our men, and did not
follow the way of corruption. In March 1942 the clouds of occupation were
blacker than ever before.
At that time it was no small thing to work with the Allied command, because
you took on yourself great responsibilities and you had to have the necessary
qualifications; with one frivolity or carelessness you could cause a catastrophe
in the area of your action or in your village. Thus not everyone was able to
work with our allies the English . . . for they were in a position to inflict wounds
on the occupier without giving him the right to take reprisals. If someone killed
Germans in a village, that neighbourhood would be destroyed, but if the
English signalled by radio the movements of the German army, and the Allied
planes bombarded, the Germans took no reprisals on us.
There follows an account of how Pavlos’s superior Petrakas, when
he had to go to the Middle East, left Pavlos as his substitute (‘You
must represent me until I come back. I leave to God and to you my
sacred struggle’); and a narrative of Pavlos’s part in the resistance
movement. Then:
Those days were hell in Kallikrates.
Most houses they burnt. The barbarians were not satisfied merely to burn
houses, they burnt four women inside their houses.
Whatever valuable they fancied they took. They collected all the men they
had taken – about 300 – and executed them in an old deserted house. They took
the women and little children as hostages.
Also they burnt the village of Kali Sykia and burnt a pregnant woman, in
her house too. They plundered Alones completely. Asi Gonia they did not
burn but they plundered it and left nothing but the walls. The area remained
without hope, like a corpse. . . .
At the end of September 1944 one night I dreamed a dream, as if someone
were saying to me that ‘the Germans are leaving, the Germans will leave’, and
when dawn came someone comes and tells me that squads of German cars
are moving from Rethymnon to Canea. . . .
And that was, one might have expected, the beginning of the end.
But in a way the worst time was still to come, for when the Germans
had left Rethymnon, the internal struggle with the communists came
to a head over the establishment of ethnophroures (‘national guards’),
which the communists resisted. Pavlos and his uncle, Pavlos Gyparis
the elder, a distinguished old soldier who had fought in Macedonia in
the early years of the century, were in Rethymnon during the struggle.
Pavlos the elder, standing on an elevated piece of ground, was wounded
in the left hand by a communist bullet.
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