Sixty years ago a number of
teenage Jewish girls joined the general exodus of the Greek Resistance to the safety of the
mountains. Many of them left their extended families that were soon herded by
Germans and Bulgarians to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka.
During my recent sabbatical in Israel I had the
opportunity to read a number of their memoirs. Even more exciting was to visit
with several of these feisty women now in their 80s and still sharp enough to
relive those dramatic days when death stalked them at every
moment.
It is
somewhat strange that their stories, as well as those of Jewish males who went
to the mountains, have been mostly neglected by scholars. The reasons for this
neglect are rather complicated, but they do not justify the paucity of published
memoirs, let alone scholarly inquiry. In general the Greek story during WWII has
been somewhat ignored. Even more so the story of the resistance
movement.
Jewish girls
served in a number of ways that belied their rather genteel urban upbringing and
high level of education. Also they came from a patriarchal society that
protected its women from too much contact with the harsh realities of Balkan
public life. Nevertheless the girls received excellent educations whether in
Spanish, French, Italian, German or the national Greek culture. Many of them
were polyglot with a keen interest in the outside world into which they
increasingly entered during the inter-war
period.
One young 85
year old – Matilda B – told me she became interested in nursing after seeing the
film version of Florence Nightingale. She subsequently left Salonika to visit
her uncle in Athens who helped her enter training. Many Jewish nurses served
with the Greek Red Cross during the war against Italy in 1940-41. A number of
them later served with the resistance, whether EAM in the cities or its military
wing ELAS in the mountains.
In the cities
of the Italian zone where Jews were not persecuted they acted as runners,
contacts, and smugglers of weapons and propaganda. Others were able to
communicate with the occupiers and so assist in the rescue of threatened
resistance activists. Some joined the resistance women who acted as escorts for
Axis officers and so contributed to the flow of information that flooded British
intelligence centers.
Matilda B worked in the Elpis Hospital in Athens until she was
threatened with arrest by the Gestapo after the Germans took over the Italian
zone in September 1943. She was rescued by none other than the king’s personal
physician and aided to escape to the mountains above Thebes where she assisted
at a resistance hospital. When German patrols threatened to overrun the site,
the nurses moved their patients higher up the mountain, each one carrying a
wounded man on her back for several hours. To this day Matilda B still suffers
from back pains and rheumatism from her mountain adventures the medals from
France and Greece notwith-standing.
Many women were part of the fighting units of ELAS that preached a
liberation of the female from the bonds of patriarchalism. This revolutio-nary
message was reluctantly supported by the Greek villagers along with the new
society that EAM/ELAS had introduced into the mountains it controlled. They
would quickly reject this particular heresy only after the war. The Greek Right
and the British condemned the Leftish resistance as Communist and so made it
easier for the villagers to regain control over their
women.
Tens of thousands however refused to give up their beliefs in the
liberation of women and many spent a decade or two in prison by refusing to
recant their partici-pation in the resistance and its
revolution.
WWII opened a new chapter in warfare with the appearance of women
fighters, particularly in the Communist dominated partisan movements. While
there were some hard-core Communists among them, most of the women were
socialist leaning educated girls who recruited village girls or were themselves
refugees from Axis persecution. Morality was more than strict. The army
protected their virtue by threatening violators with death. However, it did
allow partisans to marry each other and a provided a village priest for that
purpose.
Several Jewish women are particularly interesting, especially
since Jews do not appear in the general literature about the resistance or in
particular in recent studies about the women of the andartiko. Dora B
fought in the mountains of Macedonia and was known as ‘Tarzan’ to her fellow
fighters. Another was part of a female fighting unit of 30 women. At the end of
the war in Greece she was rescued from this group by a Jewish
MP
who had
learned that the Communist leadership had decided to ship this unit to Korea as
a sign of solidarity. Dora was fortunate; all of them were killed in
Korea.
Sarika is one
of the most interesting women that I interviewed. At the age of 14 she became a
nurse in her native Chalkida, the capital city of the island of Euboea, where
wounded soldiers and amputees from the Albanian front were sent. In 1943 she and
her mother escaped the German roundups and went by mule to the mountain
villages. She taught for a while until the Germans burned the village for
harboring Jewish refugees.
Sporting
bandoliers she went higher to the Resistance Command Post where she worked. When
it was decided to form a women’s unit she was the natural candidate and so, at
the age of 17, she became a kapitanissa and recruited a squad of 12 girls from
those she had recruited.
Sarika and
her squad functioned a diversionary unit. Armed with Molotov cocktails, they
attacked outlying sites to draw the Germans away from the main target. When the
Germans arrived all they found was a bunch of girls playing. They also aided in the capture of
collaborators. And Sarika herself was granted permission to hunt down and kill
an informer who had sadistically tortured and murdered another young Jewish
teacher who was hiding in the same village as she who was the intended
target.
Sarika is
from a family of heroes. A statue to her uncle stands in her native Chalkida; he
was the highest-ranking Greek officer to fall leading his men in the successful
counterattack that turned the flank of the Italian invaders. In 1991 when Saddam
Hussein responded to the American attack by sending SCUDS to bomb Israel, her’s
was the first house to be destroyed by a direct hit. Fortunately she was with
her son, a decorated but invalid veteran of the 1973 was that had produced so
many heroes.
The
variegated story of the women in the Greek Resistance during WWII has much to
teach and more to inspire as recent scholarship indicates. But much has to be
done, not only on the theoretical level but primarily on the practical level of
uncovering the deeds and the ideas that motivated them to rebel against an
age-old system and embrace a revolutionary ideology aimed a liberating not only
their country but especially themselves.