Tales of the Unexpected: Part IV
… the old castle
Part IV
The Germans are coming! The Germans are coming! The Germans are coming. The Germans came
When the church bell of the town would chime six, indicating the hour of 6PM, my father would come to his feet walk over to me and assisting me to rise he’d point the way home and I’d led and Tsika well fed and swollen certifying her satisfaction would follow.
Those were the two characters of my father, the one in triumph, the other in punishment and sorrow. When we were alone the subject of me behaving was avoided and he confined his conversation to such topics as might teach me and amuse me.
It was the middle of the year; and that was the memorable year of 1941 and it was the memorable first Tuesday of the month of August.. The sun was sneaking up from behind the mountain to rule the town once again, to drink the morning dew which worked all night long quenching the thirst of the flowers that had blossomed everywhere and to ripen the green grapes that were waiting as they hung from their vine. Soon they were to be picked, carried home on the donkeys, placed in a huge wooden round tub, to be smashed by the family and neighboring feet and be made into the best wine that anyone had the good fortune could drink.
The small town of Astakos was still sleeping, white and silent stretching between two mountains that embraced and kissed gently the deep sea. The touch of the orange sunlight had awakened the town roosters and all began to blow their trumpets commanding their hens to go to work.
It was time of the morning, when the peasants would slowly follow their donkeys and mules loaded with field tools passing by our house heading for the fields. But that morning I clearly remember I became a little alarmed for not hearing the usual noises, but I heard heavier footsteps and carts rolling and smashing the gravel on the unpaved road with heavy horses pulling them. I heard my mother and father in the next room whispering with alarmed tones on their voices. I remember that I heard my father jumping from the bed on the floor shaking the whole house. The closest footsteps stopped outside of our house and silence lived for one whole moment. That long-lived silence was killed by a violent pounding on the front door. I heard my father rushing there and opened it, the heavy footsteps of two people as far as I could tell from my room, came in. One said something in a foreign language, which I couldn’t understand. Their voices were harsh and stern. I heard my father replying very slowly in the same language. I rushed to the door of the bedroom and I saw two soldiers, shorter than my father, fully armed and helmeted, stood before him and looked at him calmly. My father raised his hands arms high, after one of them spoke and the other began to search him rather gently.
A few seconds later I could hardly see them, through the tears that stood in my eyes, but more blinded by anger than with tears I rushed and grabbed my father’s hand and held it tightly in mine, while one of them pulled me and held me away at arms length. Standing a few steps behind us was my mother who was crying silently and pulling at her hair as if trying to remove something that had stuck on her head. Some more words were exchanged between my father and the soldier, “Athina,” said my father, turning to her as he let his arms down, “These are Italian soldiers they have taken over the town. A whole battalion arrived during the night, something I was expecting.”
“Do something! Killed them!” uttered my mother with the thoughtlessness of an angry child.
“Shh! Shame on you. These are the troops of occupation. There is a war going on, haven’t you heard? Have you no heart?”
“Don’t please say that,” implored my mother very distressingly, “ I have many defects but, Elia, and I am not a heartless woman. I just don’t want to loose my man.”
“These soldiers as much as I can understand, are only two of the five hundred who have landed in town during the night by ships. Their commander ordered them to take me down to their headquarters, he wishes to speak with me, and evidently they need me for something. They have done their home work,” said my father calmly as if he were trying to sooth her visible pain.
“But we haven’t heard anything,” said mother.
“They are soldiers not carnival performers. They move fast and swiftly.”
“I am scared, Elia, and when I am scared I make no sense,” returned my mother getting closer to him.
“Don’t be scared. I heard that the Italians are occupying a lot of towns around Greece and are not violent army. So, I will be back soon,” said my father, turning to leave after motioning to the soldiers to move out.
When my father left, I stood there and thought, if it were possible among the possibilities of hidden things in my father’s character that he was attracted to danger or he was playing a game with them to get them away from us and then he would make his attempt for freedom or matters were as simple as he had said. I do not say that the thought lasted long, but I remember I asked myself a question, whether matters would have been better if I would have created a fuss, a young child’s fuss, to give him the chance of escaping and I answered yes, then I quickly ran out of the house faster than a released young hunting dog, but evidently my thoughts had lasted longer than I thought because all three had disappeared down the street.
Hours later my father returned and said that the Italians assigned him to be their supply purchaser without pay, that was the same assignment he held in the Greek army for a little while. I then realized that they had done their homework before entering the town.
The Italian army of occupation remained in the town for a little more than a year with no serious consequences. The freedom fighter killed some Italian soldiers and the Italian army retaliated accordingly. Four or five of the surrounding villages were burned and a few civilians died but there were no scheduled executions like the German had done in other areas of Greece.
On December of 1942 the Germans arrived. They snuck upon the town like a bad cold. The discipline thrived in every corner, the ‘Hi Hitler’ greeting echoed in every street and alley, the Hitler salute was seen for miles around and every Greek man, woman or child became the victims of hate, German pride and arrogance. There were many stories about the performance and conduct of the German soldiers about the town and they certainly very far from being cheerful ones.
Even though I was a young boy, I felt the difference between the Italian army and the German army.
Upon entering the fishing village of Astakos, the Italian soldiers, who had come by large ferryboats across the Ionian Sea from Italy, brought along heavy weapons that were pulled by Clydesdale horses. The weapons were deployed on the outside of the town in and old Turkish fort facing the nine mile long and two mile wide gulf and the horses were kept in a stonewall seven feet high stable a few hundred yards across from my house. In the early morning hours the Italian soldiers would stretch the troughs in the middle of the street fill them with grain oats, enough for two dozen horses, bring the horses out of the stable tied to one another with thick ropes and allowed them to feed. We, the young neighborhood children, about a dozen or so, were waiting a few feet away from the horses with small homemade brooms and dusk pans in hand for the horses to finish their feeding and then we would rush and scoop up, what ever oats the horses had spill or left in the troughs, and would take it home for the chickens. The soldiers seeing us standing there barefooted with skinny legs and sunken in faces, would pull the horses away, pretending that the animals had enough food, so we the youngsters would take home more.
When the Germans came and the Italians were send away to some prison camps, after a brief battle between those two armies. The German soldiers followed the same procedure in feeding the horses, but they allowed the horses to finish all the oats and whatever was left in the troughs or spilled on the ground they would kick it away and mix it with the gravel. We still sped and fell on our knees to pick up what ever we could. The German soldiers would stand back laughing at us and mocking our feeble efforts.
Eventually, as young as we were, out of pride, we stopped attending their horses’ feeding, allowing them to live with their misery, we thought. We the youngsters befriended the Italian soldiers and some of us learned their language. We kept away from the Germans. We’d only look at them with grimacing looks on our faces. We lost our country, we thought, but not our pride.
Gradually, I became used to seeing the German soldiers. I liked them no better than at first, and I had the same uneasy feeling of them. I had a reason beyond a child’s instinctive to dislike them and I would have created many more problems for them if I were only a little older. Those feelings pushed me into disliking the Greek grown ups for not doing something to free us and to kill those uninvited loathsome anthropoids.
The hate that I harbored in my heart for those unkind soldiers and the dislike for the Greek grown ups was a secret and I felt my secret would be known soon. I do remember that I loved to hate those soldiers. I could not hide from myself the wild sensation, which boiled within me. When I went out and saw those soldiers who kicked the oats into the gravel, knowing that they had done it out of spite, I felt that I could have rushed among them and torn them to pieces from limb to limb, but I only grinded my teeth, tightened my fists and drove my sharp nails into my hands.
I realized in my early years that it’s a grand thing, to be mad at the world. That madness raised the terror that used to come to me, sending my blood hissing and stinging through my veins, till the cold dew of fear stood in large drops upon my skin; but because I kept on going, made me feel that I was one of the brave.
Life for young children was relatively easy, because we never made any plans for the future. I don’t remember any of us thinking beyond the end of the season we lived in. We had neither any books to read nor any toys to play. We had no shoes to shine or cloths to fold and put away. The Germans looked to us that they had come to stay and had no intentions of ever leaving. They roamed our streets armed and firm as if they were looking for a reason or cause to punish us. The first remarkable thing I had observed in them was that they were constantly haunted by a suspicion that the townspeople were out to get them. Under the influence of that belief they had the right, and exercised that right, to go into any house and at anytime day or night search and destroy anything that, according to them, presented even a hint of danger to them.
I remember one afternoon, while were the neighborhood kids playing two soldiers entered the house, where a poor fisherman and his six children lived. We stopped playing and waited with more curiosity than fear. Among our playmates four of the fisherman’s children were with us. After a little while the soldiers came out holding the fisherman firmly from both sides and we ran a little farther away from them. They placed that man against the wall of his house and one of them who was an officer and had long gasp on the right side of his face walked backwards with his hand on his pistol holster and his eyes pegged on the poor man. He stopped, pulled out his pistol and shot the fisherman. I remember the bullet made a small hole on his forehead and the man slid down leaving a wide line of blood on the white wall and the soldier walked away as if nothing happened. His kids rushed screaming to their father, shook him violently, urging him to stand him up but his face turned white, his head tilted on his shoulder and his body startled for a little while and he then died with his eyes open. All the neighborhood gown ups rounded up their young ones and hurriedly took all of us inside our houses and locked the doors and talked about other subjects in order to depart themselves and us from thinking of the event
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