Kevin Andrews (1924–1989) was an American philhellene, writer and archaeologist. After graduating from Harvard in 1947 he entered for a travelling fellowship in Athens. He spent the long summers of 1948 to 1951 travelling around the Peloponnese studying of the castles and fortifications built by various rulers of the Peloponnese and the winters writing up in Athens. His journeys and the people he met are described vividly in his book The Flight of Ikaros. Returning to the US, he moved back to Greece in the 1950s and was living in Athens in November 1973, where he had first-hand experience of the Polytechnic student uprising.
In this gripping account, published in Michael Barlow (ed.), Events, Greece 1967-1974 (Athens: Anglo-Hellenic Publishing, 1975), Andrews gives his account of the uprising, which included him being beaten severely by the police.
Transcription using Google Docs by Damian Mac Con Uladh.
GREECE IS A COUNTY that commits suicide – a fact appreciated in the Foreign Ministries of other countries genuinely interested in Greek affairs, and usually ready to provide the knife.
Today, however, many of the younger generation in Greece are fighting to outgrow the habit of twenty-five centuries. The question remains: How will they?
How – when an educational system embodying an ancient jealousy of growth, diversity or change, teaches an outsize national mystique and not much else? How – when a seven-year dictatorship has sealed them off into an unhealthy isolation from the youth-revolution round the globe, and they are now mortally divided over strategy? How – when many others of their age (as abominably taught in school and just as hungry, only more unscrupulous) sell their guile and muscle indirectly to one or other of those foreign Powers either dominant in Greece by military presence, or divisive through their rival business interests, or else magnetic through a carefully staged absence? How, in particular, when some of the bravest and most desperately serious efforts of the young only provoke violence and savagery among their elders?
Forces such as these were unleashed in Athens on a collective scale during the days and nights just after mid-November, 1973: hate beyond the logic of revenge, jealousy surpassing the Tables of the Law or the policy of governments. A nation’s armoured might called out – upon no battlefield against invaders but in one public building and the streets of its own capital, killing off its children. Hatred practised, blind, autonomous; directing operations, fouling operations; closing the ring; singeing the air of squares and shopping-districts once familiar; blocking escape-routes; choking the perilous channels of existence. The culmination of a force long nurtured in the body politic but also a dying organism’s hatred of life, youth, intelligence.
Such, after three days, was the end to the vertiginous uprising at the Athens Polytechnic School, that began at 11:00 in the morning of Wednesday, November 15th, 1973, when an unarmed populace followed the example of a few thousand students and declared their refusal to be shamed or corrupted any longer by the lies, terror, brutality, timeserving, and illimitable boredom of oppression.
And because the ferocity was exercised by trained gunmen in a minutely calculated and heavily mounted attack, and also because the target represented something spontaneous, irrepressible, constructive, reckless of the danger, and totally defenceless, I am driven to speak of Evil versus Good – not to mention an intermediate condition more insidious than atrocity, and more carefully defended.
The full story can’t be told. The number of those killed will never be known. Many who are in a position to reveal names of the dead have refused to do so, thereby hindering the work of the Public Prosecutor, whom they mistrust. Relatives of dead and wounded have been silenced by anonymous telephone calls, by visits from plainclothesmen, or by a word from the gendarme in this or that home-village: – all either threatening the livelihood of the survivors or the lives of their remaining children. These factors should also be taken into account in any evaluation of the Prosecutor’s official number of 1,103 wounded. All we may ever know is a partial chronology of events and a compendium of separate experiences, plus certain reports so horrible as to strain belief, though mostly true.
The present narrative charts only one experience, microscopic in comparison to the fate of many, insignificant beside the urge and the responsible and conscious choice of many others, comparable nonetheless to the experience of thousands more.
I make no apology for hesitation, fright, helplessness, the stupid noseyness of the outsider, the vagaries of this personal report, or even for the banality of the chance that brought one ineffectual observer to the scene.
As a matter of fact I was just going to a movie.
Trying to make the 8 o’clock show on the Number 3 trolley from Omonia Square, down Patissia Boulevard.
Past the Polytechnic, where the explosion had begun several hours earlier without most of Athens knowing anything about it, now in full progress in the dark.
Several thousand young people were clinging to the iron railings around the buildings, massed behind the railings, massed along the pavements out in front, perched on the pillars of the entrance-gate already placarded with slogans; all shouting out the words nobody in Greece had dared speak in public, far less shout, except on certain few occasions when the Police moved swiftly.
I got off at the next stop. Trolleys and cars were moving up and down two lanes kept open in the middle of the boulevard, slowly through crowds packed in it for several blocks.
In front of the Polytechnic someone gave me a clap on the shoulder – a high-school boy, the son of a friend. “It’s happening at last!” he cried above the hot roar of voices, and then vanished. For a minute I wondered what I was doing here, was this my place? But the feeling passed quickly, although I was twice the age of the demonstrators, and they had reason not to want foreigners among them.
Everything was orderly, the crowds themselves directing traffic, and the Police – -still in control of themselves that night-were nowhere to be seen, though an entire area of town was resounding to the cry of “Down with Papadopoulos – Americans get out – Down with the Junta – Tonight will be the end of them – A new Thailand tonight – Allende – Education, freedom, bread…” Now loud and clear the voice of a stifled generation, and of a race repeatedly insulted and betrayed. The demonstrators, all students, were pasting leaflets onto the windows of every passing car. One boy next to me was scribbling slogans at top speed in a school notebook. I was well placed: as he ripped the pages out I snatched them from him and passed them through the windows of a trolley to a few outstretched hands. Some of the passengers looked down in amazement, others flashed the victory sign. Then he tore the last pages out of his book and slipped away.
My turn now. It was safe, nobody here knew me. I pushed through to the nearest kiosk and bought a copybook for seven and a half drachmas. Back in the middle of the avenue, dashing off slogans and flipping the pages over, I felt someone looking over my elbow – a fourteen-year-old – and was beginning to edge away when he said, “What’s that number you’re writing there, Sir?” I stayed put. Number 114, the final article in the constitution abrogated by the colonels (“The safeguarding of this constitution is entrusted to patriotism of the Greeks”) – a rallying-cry at the two student demonstrations fiercely suppressed by the Police at the beginning of the year.
“What’s Thailand?”
Then, after I told him how a student uprising – ”something like this around us here” had recently toppled a Far Eastern military government, neither of us had need of words. Both of us were busy, I writing off slogans (suggestions coming to us now from every side) and he stuffing them through car and trolley windows.
I quickly emptied a thick book. As I tore out the last page my cohort handed me a ten-drachma coin and said, “Please buy another.”
“Not with your money. But you can get one yourself if you want. Seven and a half drachmas.”
Soon he was back at my side. I went on writing, “Down with the tyrant – Six years enough CIA come out into the open,” and other phrases echoing the message of the demonstration: Let Athens know that Athens had come out into the open and was demanding now the immediate end to a dictatorship that will go down in the history of Greece as possibly its worst humiliation, to the disgrace of most of Europe and to the shame of the United States.
While I was scribbling someone gave me a thwack on the back (he was jumping up and down, his face sweating with exultation), and a moment later a young man tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, “Look out, they’ve noticed you. They’ve caught two girls already.” A sign to get away. Off to the cinema – an easy refuge.
The last trolley back after midnight was diverted by the Police off Patissia Boulevard onto Third-of-September Street toward Omonia Square.
Next morning the Number 3 didn’t make its normal stop at the Polytechnic but one block further, at the National Museum.
The avenue was twice as packed. The Police – quite politely still – were turning everybody back who tried to cross over to the Polytechnic pavements. Thousands of demonstrators (by no means only students, and some of them must have been there all night) were chanting more slogans from the railings, all of them rhyming and in the same fierce tetrameter rhythm: “We haven’t got enough to eat, today it’s them we’ll gobble up – People, don’t you know you’re hungry? Why do you bow down to them! Wake up, People, move yourselves, they’re eating up the bread that’s yours! – Down with Papadopoulos, a lunatic is ruling us.” Two other cries, “Greece for Greeks in torture-chambers, Greece for Greeks in prison-cells!” parodied the senseless monotony of the Dictatorship’s favourite motto, “Greece for Greek Christians.” Now we seemed to have got beyond that point; Christian or otherwise, something else had come out of a long hiding – something that could not be fitted back into Papadopoulos’ morbid image of Greece as the patient in a plaster-cast.
In a few minutes some five thousand people were taking up the cry in front of the Museum, where pullman coaches were unloading tourists as usual at the entrance steps. The demonstration had spread to the next block, the wide area of curving drives, lawns and open-air cafés, loud now with the chant of “Education, freedom, bread General Strike, General Strike – Let us not bow down to them! All of us together – Out with NATO bases,” and other slogans scribbled on bits of paper by the thousand littering the streets of all of central Athens.
At 11 o’clock five policemen made their appearance; five thousand of us scattered. As we ran somebody beside me wailed, “Only five of them!…” Five policemen only, walking rather rapidly in our direction, were enough to chase the lot of us away.
But I ran into a friend, with his sister and three of her fellow-students from the University; we drove in their car to Canning Square and bought eight big loaves of bread, then back into Patissia Boulevard, slowly past the crowds of students isolated on the Polytechnic pavements, and handed out the loaves.
“Faster, Manoli, they’ve had time to write down Daddy’s license-number!”
***
By 8:00 that evening the crowd of demonstrators around the School had swollen to a hundred thousand.
Between dark cliffs poked with light the avenue was one great river of faces bright under street-lamps against black distances. And the rhythmic roar of voices never stopped. One group would sing the National Anthem, Solomos’ Hymn to Liberty, another the rizítiko ballad from the White Mountains of Western Crete: “When will the season of starry nights come round again, that I can take up my gun!”
More placards appeared along the Polytechnic railings. The megaphones at the gate gave out a loud hush, then announced that Salonica and Patras Universities had both closed down, and their students demonstrating in support of Athens.
People pushing past each other said, “Excuse me, please,” which one doesn’t usually hear in an Athenian crowd: it was a courtesy that belongs to the generation in their early twenties and younger. Every so often somebody would call out, “Down, sit down!” and forty or fifty people would sit down in the middle of a street empty now of traffic, their arms around each other’s shoulders, singing still.
A man fainted, and there was a cry of “Make a circle, give him air!” and in an instant there was a wide space around him lying flat on his back on the asphalt, and someone fanning his face with a newspaper. Then he was carried away, followed by calls of “You’re a hero!”
The avenue belonged now to people who could do without public transport or the formalities of introduction. Everyone knew everybody else: the feeling was stronger than its own inherent danger. What about the spies, the plainclothesmen, the members of the EKOPH, or National Social Organization of Students, those indistinguishable few (most of them quite busy studying as well as drawing a little secret pay to help them through their college course), always there, in every quarter of the national life, in every school, to watch, report, betray? “How many of them must be packed in here among us!” I said riskily to one teenager, who replied, “If I notice a single one of them I’ll kill him on the spot!”
I didn’t see him again. For a moment we knew each other well – that was enough.
After midnight as I was leaving someone handed me a sheaf of leaflets and said, “Distribute these. Anywhere you can.”
Walking up my own street, anxiously slowing down my steps until the occasional passer-by got out of sight and I was sure there was nobody else coming, I slipped twenty-odd leaflets under the windshield-wipers of parked cars. Let there be a few surprises next morning in at least one sleepy residential area.
***
The third day, Friday, November 16th – people call it now Good Friday.
From early morning the euphoria and excitement in the streets around the Polytechnic kept on mounting, to a degree that seemed to have no limit. It was unlike the frenzy that gripped Athens for several hours one afternoon in 1971 when the Panathenaic football team scored its victory over the Yugoslav Red Star, that promoted Greece to the European Cup Finals at Wembley. The release of pent-up steam that day was useful to the Dictatorship, which badly needed to provide a circus, and that had the Police out in full force to keep the multitudes moving fast along the streets, and the Army alerted in case of some change of wind. Today however one of the slogans was “No more football!” The population had seen through that trick also.
Meanwhile the megaphones kept the crowd of demonstrators in touch with what was going on inside the School: the meetings and discussions (to their supporters old and young a lesson in maturity, open-mindedness, moderation, strength of purpose); the thorough organization of the student-body and of the daily communal routine; the bar and restaurant already operating; the surgery in preparation for emergency; and the receiving and distributing centre for the donations – food, money, throat medicines – now pouring into the building from a grateful people.
All through the daylight hours groups of farmers, builders, actors, paraded before the School with the banners of their trade; lanes would open for them suddenly through the cheering crowd. Toward noon a band of countrymen arrived with a tractor, from Megara, followed by a chanting of “The land belongs to us” echoing a line from Ritsos’ Romiosyni, and the rage of some hundred farmers at the uprooting of nine thousand olive trees seven months before, the destruction of pistachio orchards, wheatfields, market gardens and poultry farms, and the compulsory expropriation of their two thousand five hundred acres by the Junta’s richest backer, Stratis Andreades, head of the Commercial Bank and prospective builder of yet another huge and environmentally dangerous oil refinery on the Saronic Gulf, at Megara. And then the news that the offices of the Nomarchy of Attica, in Stadium Street, had been taken over by construction-workers.
Periodically there came a warning to the crowds: “Placards with extremist slogans have been planted on our railings; this is the work of agents provocateurs. Do not let them alienate you from us. Be careful what you read. One word in particular will awaken bitter memories among some older of our supporters….” Laokratia, ‘rule of the people’, had been a Communist rallying-cry in the streets of newly liberated Athens at the catastrophic end of 1944. “This word, and all extremist slogans, we reject as having no connection with the student-movement.”
Meanwhile the students had set up their own radio station. Through most of the next twenty-four hours Athens listened to the voice of a young man or woman reading news and proclamations, with every few minutes the urgent feverish refrain: “Radio Polytechnic, Radio Polytechnic, the station of the free and fighting students, the voice of the free Greeks in their struggle.”
Noon, neither overcast nor altogether sunny. A friend appeared in front of me someone I hadn’t seen for months – and I picked her up and tossed her in the air, and the people around us laughed as if they knew us both.
Then a curious sight: students on top of pillars and railings twisting back and forth broad strips of sheet-iron to sweep flashes of reflected light up and down the apartment buildings opposite to blind the cameras plainly visible in windows; if you couldn’t distinguish policemen in the street you knew they were up there diligently making their photographic record of innumerable identities. One high balcony was spared, where the students recognized the best young film-director in Greece, and shouted his name triumphantly. My friend and I went up to say hello to him. The person who opened the door to us asked for our names and waited for an answer from the balcony before he let us in. Back in the avenue, where you could hear the slogan “ESA – S.S. vasanistés!” likening the torturers of the ESA, or Greek Military Police, to the Nazi S.S., there passed through the sea of human beings swaying, chanting, raging, laughing and embracing, a soldier with the well-known blue band around his cap and the ESA insignia on his left arm. There was a murmur as he went by not quite a growl, nevertheless enough to make him turn round and say, “Is it my fault? They put me in this job.” And he smiled, as at some rather bad joke of Fate, and everybody cheered him.
My friend and I went off to get some lunch.
How long could it go on, the exultation and the solidarity? The students had been calling for a general strike, but the general strike had had not occurred. Both of us were uneasy. True there was no danger, the crowds were too big.
At 5:00 I was exhausted and went home, past the side-gate on Stournara Street where somebody behind the railings called and handed me a list of surgical instruments.
This I gave to a doctor-friend on my way down again at 8 o’clock. Hostilities, he said had broken out, and the Police had begun to use tear-gas.
Something I had never smelt.
I ran down Sólonos Street, no buses here now either.
People were hurrying back up the street with crimson eyes, wet faces, handkerchiefs pressed to gulping mouths. I asked one boy what time the tear-gas started. He croaked, “They’re doing it-all-the time.”
Time now to wet a handkerchief. Someone in a café gave me a glass of water.
A hundred or more students at the Stournara gate were still shouting slogans hoarsely through night air grey with gas and acrid with the smell of bonfires. The megaphones on the pillars were broadcasting instructions: “Lemon-juice on the eyes. Or vaseline. Don’t use water. Keep fires burning in the street.”
Behind the gate they shouted, “Doctors – we need doctors!”
I ran to Exarcheia Square, with someone running beside me, to find a telephone booth. The two of us phoned till our stock of coins ran out, then continued in a coffee-shop where money could be changed. The shopkeeper got angry with us for taking so long, and then with someone else trying to relay the same message. The shopkeeper told him to stop; the man called him a stooge; the shopkeeper chased him out and grabbed him by the lapels and shouted, “Stooge? Do you dare call me a stooge!”
Back at the Stournara gate I passed on the word that two doctors were already on their way.
As it turned out however, both of them tried in vain from 9:00 to 11:00 to get in by the main gate; it was the students themselves who wouldn’t let them through. Already men in long white hospital smocks over their police uniforms had made their way in and begun to suffocate the place with tear-gas.
Radio Polytechnic was now broadcasting appeals for priests as well as doctors. No priests came.
I was on my way back to the square to phone more friends and get the word around when I felt that familiar clap on the back in the dark: three friends of mine running to their car. “Come with us, Niko’s buying food.”
Halfway up Stournara Street a band of demonstrators were trying to set up a barricade with pieces of wooden crates and anything they could pick up in a vacant lot near by.
Soon we were driving back with bags of provisions. Some of these we passed in to the students at the side-gate, the rest I shoved in through the small grilled window near pavement-level on Patissia Boulevard that for three triumphant days had been functioning as the receiving-centre for supplies.
Someone shouted up through the window, “Not any more food, we need throat-medicines.”
There was no longer one massed crowd out in the street but separate groups of demonstrators tending the bonfires and shouting slogans still, in unison with the young people gripping the railings. Now, some time after 10:00, there was one huge new placard on the gate: WHEN THE PEOPLE AREN’T AFRAID THE TYRANT GETS FRIGHTENED.
The first ambulance arrived. (It took a long time coming.) Wounded students were carried out through the gate and hustled in. I caught a glimpse of one bandaged head with a big red blob in the position of the eye-socket.
I had lost my friends in the side-street; I was alone now, not responsible to anyone I knew it was better that way. Just a wide avenue full of fires, and a kind of freedom in the dark.
I crossed to the corner of Averoff Street. Some fifteen young people were huddling there behind a corner shop. Bullets began to spit and crackle on the pavement a few inches from our feet. Someone cried, “They’re trying to get us from above!” Government snipers had installed themselves in rooms on the fourth floor of the Acropole Palace Hotel across the narrow street.
There were a few minutes of absurdity – perhaps when the individual is without a weapon absurdity takes over. None of us in any case had seen the killing further down Averoff Street about forty minutes earlier. Still those young people found time to shout a four-beat slogan, “Do-lo-pho-ni! Murderers, assassins!” as if words could matter now. Somebody on a motorcycle charged down the boulevard; we shouted to him not to cross the line of fire (bullets were hissing past from down the street); I think he made it, though perhaps not at the next intersection. And then for all our shouting five out of our group tried, one after the other, to dash over to the other side.
The first got a bullet in the eye; three drew him back, picked him up and rushed him across the avenue. Another stepped out and was shot in the stomach; three days later I learned he was dead. The next fell, with a bullet in the wrist. And yet a fourth, for all our pulling, would run out; he was shot in the throat: three-quarters of an hour later Radio Polytechnic announced his death inside the surgery.
The pavements gleamed with blood – how much of it can empty out of a human body in a space of minutes! Now three of us were left. And still one – the fifth-witless, confident, or panic-stricken? – put out his leg to dash across, and a bullet hit him in the ankle. As he collapsed the other one and I hoisted him up and, slithering on the asphalt, with the hot gush of his blood pulsating over us, lugged him across the boulevard to an ambulance where he was stuffed in on top of a lot of others.
Again through the tiny window a dizzy glimpse of bloodstained bandages, figures writhing and groaning, and others in white smocks shifting bodies into place. I didn’t know that the drivers of certain ambulances also had white smocks over their uniforms, and that they drove the wounded and the dying not to hospitals or to the First Aid Station but to the cells and torture-chambers of the Military Police.
Out in the street here now the tang of combat in the nostrils, the smell of smoke, gas, gunpowder, and no more alternatives. Years of collective boredom had given way to a few minutes of individual responsibility: a fierce, wild, quiet concentrated feeling of release. It would have helped if I had a weapon, or could have saved someone the way many people did that night. All I could do was move quickly, perhaps reach someone in the Foreign Press, to get the word out of the country fast.
Who? How? And where could I find a telephone? The buildings on the avenue had all blacked out.
On Stournara Street (still some demonstrators there!) one lighted window shone.
I ran into the building, went up in the lift, pounded on a door. It opened a crack on the safety chain and an elderly man poked his nose through. I asked for his phone. “No,” he said, “but give me numbers and I’ll do the calling.” I scribbled some names and numbers – three well known Athenians, on purpose to impress him. It worked. “Ah! Mr – ? And Mr –? Yes, certainly,” he said, and closed the door. But he made the calls.
One floor down I pressed the buzzer of another flat. The door opened wide. Somebody cried, “Your leg!”
I was wet from the waist down with the blood of the man shot in the ankle. “I’m all right, let me phone!”
Someone else in the hallway said, “But who are you!”
I risked telling my name.
“Not possible!” the man exclaimed. “I’ve known of you for years! From. And was going to bring me to your place once. Here, telephone!”
I called one friend. He recognized my voice and gave me the number of a foreign correspondent. The man was out, but as I told the story to his wife I could hear her telex sizzling like fried eggs underneath my narrative.
“What can you see?” she asked, and I shouted her questions to the others standing in the window, looking down onto the Polytechnic area out of the darkened room.
“How many ambulances have come?”
“Twenty in the past twenty-five minutes.”
“Do you see signs of Police or Army formations massing for a raid?” “Nothing at the moment.”
“I’m asking because we were out on Alexandra Boulevard half an hour ago, and we definitely saw troop formations.”
“All we can see is a few groups of demonstrators.” “Are the Police obstructing the movement of the ambulances?” “Yes, they’re throwing tear-gas into some of them.”
I asked where I could reach her husband, and she gave me the name of a hotel. “You’ll find his cameraman there in any case.”
I called the cameraman and urged him to get as close as he could. “But surely it isn’t possible to go out into the street now!” “There are still people in the street and I’m going out myself,” I said. Just then a stout, bearded, theatrical-looking man walked past me out of the flat, exclaiming angrily in English, “Why do you talk so long!”
I went to say goodbye.
“None of us are going out of this flat tonight,” said the man who had recognized my name, and, in a lower voice, “These are all relatives of my wife business people.”
A bit of useless perversity kept me there a moment longer. “A thousand thanks for letting me use your phone,” I said to the young lady who had opened the door to me.
“That’s quite all right,” she said.
“And do please excuse the inconvenience.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
As I hurried out I saw, in the next room, framed between sliding panels, four older people seated round a table, playing cards.
So down into the street again. Out into the thick stinging air, under the streetlights grey with the smoke of bonfires burned out. Stragglers in the avenue, no longer shouting. Shouts still coming from the thousands massed inside the Polytechnic forecourt. One husky voice still frantically calling news and proclamations over the megaphones against a distant roar.
A bunch of teenagers clustered at the corner of Stournara Street called out, “Tanks are coming!”
Over the top of an empty bus barricading the avenue at the next intersection the floodlights of the tanks fanned up in stiff white rays criss-crossing, fingering the surfaces and windows of the apartment blocks, to drive people from a ringside view.
There seemed to be time: all of us at the corner ran to push another abandoned bus further out across the boulevard. We pushed and heaved. Somebody jumped in to let the brake off but we couldn’t move it. We ran back to cover; tanks, or it may have been armoured cars – diverted off the avenue – were hurtling along Third-of-September Street one block down. Then the farther bus was rolled over like an empty bottle. The Polytechnic megaphone called into the street, “Friends, supporters, do not abandon us now!”
After that everything was noise. The tanks came thundering and rattling and squealing down the avenue. The young people around me cried, “There is no danger! They cannot fire on us, they’re our brothers soldiers, children of our people!”
And one last innocent called out, “We’ll win them over with truth and justice!”
I lost my temper and shouted at them, “Idiots! They’re not your brothers. Why should they care for truth or justice! Six years they’ve been trained to kill. Run!”
Not one of them moved, nor did I; I had to see what the tanks would do at the final moment.
We didn’t get the chance. The tanks roared past us fast and steadily – deafening, immense, black blunt interruptions, one after another. The soldier standing in the eighth turret waved to us. From round the corner a cataract of troops – helmets and lifted clubs – fell on us.
Panic swept us in one body straight round into the first apartment block.
Into a small bright-lit corner between lift and stair. One or two may have struggled up a few steps before they were caught backwards under the lightning web of clubs that knocked us to the floor, down low where boots could aim directly into faces, kicking from far back, stamping from above on necks, and the clubs a zigzag crackling of brilliant yellow varnish down, up, down, up, down, onto immobilized and tumbled bodies.
Little faces, dark under the helmets, barely recognizable as human. I tried to duck and shield my head under one arm, but the first blow broke a bone in my hand. The other arm flew up over my head but was immediately wrenched aside and clamped outstretched; then the clubs came crashing on my skull: – thunderclaps, regular, methodical, uninterrupted.
Now me at last. Not just that picture in the newspaper. Not just me looking at a newspaper. And no pain either. Nothing compared to the flesh-tearing humiliation of all those canings back in school. Marvel at the hardness of this bone, this brainpan, marvel at what it’s possible to bear!
Then one fist grabbed me by the hair and yanked my head far back, and after that clubs swinging, smashing against my throat…
No sensation; vision blurred: where were others? I was alone. Lowering myself down three steps toward the door.
Outside in the middle of Stournara Street again a bystander – still a few last bystanders in the dark, before the gates were opened for the exodus said, “Blood’s running down your head.”
Yes, fingers wet with it. At this time the tank was getting into position before the Polytechnic gate, but I was heading in a different direction.
In another street a car was driving very slowly past – a taxi! I got the words out, “Take me with you!”
“Hop in front!”
There were others in the back. The taxi drove on, then slowed down as we approached the corner of Exarcheia Square. About fifty police officers were standing there under the dim light, badges of rank in silver bars on their black uniforms.
The taxi stopped. The front door opened, a police officer tugged me out by the arm.
“Where were you! Where! Where! Where were you!” Raging voices close up to my face. “Where were you!”
The taxi was driving quietly away, mission accomplished.
A moment’s indecision: the terror of choice. What could I pretend? I was covered with blood.
They were already emptying my trouser pockets, punching me in the face. One officer snatched away my purse (there’s a comic side to everything), while out of the other pocket fell – tucked inside my residence permit – a leaflet marked “Down with the Lunatic.”
I reeled back from a sock in the jaw and tried to play a role. “But what have I done to you?” – quite gently. Someone gave me an upper-cut but it didn’t hurt, and once again still gently, in the tone of somebody respectable caught in a case of mistaken identity, I said, “What sort of behaviour is this!”
Between the punches (yes, the fists were human but my face was wooden) I warned them I had epilepsy and it wouldn’t go well for them if. But now two groups of officers had me by the elbows: others were knocking me on the head and giving knee-blows in the genitals, until the pavement rocked and hit me in the face, and they picked me up again and threw me from one to the other (middle-aged, with looks distorted by memories of the civil war and all of that so long ago) and forth and back, socking and spitting the two words, “Bugger! Peasant! Peasant! Bugger! Bugger!”
Luckily I was too weak already from concussion to put up a resistance to the knuckle against the nose and the boot smashing my lip against the teeth, or the grinding of my teeth into the asphalt, or the crash of the boot on my neck-vertebrae, or the hot showers of spit and lick of phlegm hawked over my face out of the officers’ mouths, or the same boot pounding in the groin.
People have asked, “Why didn’t you tell them you’re a foreigner!” The fact is I had forgotten.
When you take part (no matter how briefly) in an event of a particular size in a particular place, you belong to that place – what else is there to say? Except to add that not once during the three days in question did anybody ask me, “Are you a foreigner?” or “Where do you come from?”
Finally the policemen flung me out into the middle of the street – (thud of asphalt on the shoulder) – yelling, “Out of here, you filthy bugger!”
Splutter and cough of shooting in the distance: – this would have been the time the machineguns on the roof of the Acropole Palace and the rifles of the Police converging opened fire on the students clinging to the Polytechnic railings and still crowded in the forecourt shouting, “We are unarmed! Don’t fire on your brothers!” and the tank was breaking down the entrance-gate, crushing someone underneath it, and a few Commandos, it is said, helped some students to get out fast before the Police and troops (Military Police? Marines?) entered in force, driving the students out, to be killed and wounded in the streets.
Across Exarcheia Square, as I was picking myself up, a group of Police were knocking somebody to pieces while another band (one of them had his revolver out) were chasing people into a dark street, shouting, “Don’t let them get away, the swine! Kill them!”
Behind me I heard a clatter of boots approaching.
Panic again. I broke into a run, stumbling. Someone else escaping caught up with me; I tried to outrace him to a street across the square where an old couple in the door of their apartment block were letting themselves in fast. The two of us shoved in before they closed the door. They turned the light out. I fell against the stairs in the dark, something had happened to my leg.
“Shelter me, for God’s sake, they’re killing people!” I cried. “Hush, please, don’t wake the neighbours.” The old couple were pressing the button for the lift.
“I can’t go out, I’ve been beaten up, they’re firing. Please take me in!”
The other person in the dark said, “Come with us. We’ve got a car.”
And the two old people said, “If you need anything, this young man can can help you,” as they backed into the lift, shut the door on us, and floated up to their own private safety.
I ran up five flights of stairs, trying on every floor to find where they had gone. The other person came after me, grabbed my hand so as not to lose me, and drew me down again, helping me not to fall, while I protested senselessly, “Look after your own life. No, let me go, I’m not going out into the street again!”
“Come – come – we can get you out of here in a car. We’ve got a doctor,” and when we reached the ground floor: “Wait here.”
He went to the door and looked out. Twenty metres away stood a policeman with a tommygun, facing in our direction.
A few minutes later he looked out again. Two policemen stood at the corner with their guns facing the other way, toward the Polytechnic. “Come now. Quick!”
We crept out, hugging the wall, he leading me by the hand, as far as a parking lot where his friends had been waiting in their car.
“Here’s someone wounded,” he said, lifting me into the back seat on top of another man and two girls, who burst into tears.
We drove off at full speed. On the other side of Lykabettos Hill, as we went past the Naval Hospital I began to get frightened (where were they going?) and told them to drop me off, I had friends living near by. “You’re in no condition,” they said, and we turned down Làchitos Street toward the American Embassy. There, at the corner of Queen Sophia Boulevard, were thirty policemen, but the car had a foreign license plate and they didn’t halt us. We drove past the Hilton Hotel, which was a risky operation also, but finally reached their quarter where they helped me up into a three-room flat.
Here one of them, a doctor, clipped the hair off the gash in my head, washed it and covered it with sticking-plaster: dark, so as not to show. “Come to my clinic when it’s day, you won’t have to declare your name,” he said. “Now you must lie down. We’ll make up a bed for you.”
But I was curious to get a better look at my rescuers. They were all Cypriots. Returning from the Polytechnic earlier that night, they had seen tanks stationed along Mesoyion Street, near the Odeon Cinema. Between midnight and 1:00 they had heard the student radio appealing to the foreign embassies to send observers. They themselves had telephoned to several embassies, but none had answered; the Cypriot Embassy too had closed down for the night. They heard the tanks rolling down Mikràs Asias Street from the direction of the Goudi Army Camp while the radio was broadcasting more appeals for hospital supplies. Then they filled the car with medicines and bandages out of the doctor’s store, and at 1:00 drove off. Two tanks were racing down one street in front of them; watchers on balconies shouted down, “Shame! Murderers!” Finally in a vacant lot they left the car with the medicines still in it, but as they came down Valtetsiou Street students on the run said, “Don’t go further. They’re firing to kill.” Nevertheless they continued to Exàrcheia Square, and there had seen me being beaten up on the other side. When I was running into Valtetsiou Street a band of police had sprung at them out of the darkness. Four reached the car; the last one made it into the block of flats with me.
Now, far away and in comparative safety (the Police were attacking in many parts of town, and light through the shutters could attract attention) I couldn’t stop talking.
But they were listening to the radio: a second student station operating in the vicinity of Plateia Amerikis had gone on the air the moment the Polytechnic fell.
“…Calling Polytechnic, calling Polytechnic. Will Polytechnic Radio please answer?…”
While yet another programme, pretending to be the voice of students, was emitting provocative extremist slogans, this second station continued broadcasting till well into the day when the survivors of the holocaust – those who didn’t reach the private flats and secret clinics (some ready ever since the armed assaults against the University in February and March) – were rounded up now and shut into football stadiums. There they went on shouting, “More of it! Give us more! The struggle’s not over, this isn’t the end!”
The less the others now were listening to me the more I was obsessed with the need to tell my own misadventures to the reporter’s wife who had said over the phone they could be reached till 5:00 a.m.; for security reasons, they would then have to be inside the Government Offices waiting for the Premier’s press conference. It was now 3.30. Yet calls to foreign journalists, with their well tapped lines, could be traced straight here. One of the boys went out to a public booth to see if it was safe.
He was back quickly. “They’ve caught three Cypriot students in the next street. You can’t go out looking like that.”
Then, still thinking cloudily, not realizing to what extent I was exposing others for a matter of no great importance, I got them to phone a friend of mine: someone who had signed a page of history during the German Occupation, whom I knew could be called on in any need or danger.
“Don’t stop at the door to ring the bell. Someone will let you in immediately,” they told her, and she was there in half an hour with a taxi.
Twenty minutes later, driving through a black and silent city, we were in the quarter of the foreign embassies, where it was unlikely the Police would be shooting indiscriminately, and I was able to telephone my story, propping myself against a kiosk miraculously open at 4:30 in the morning.
After that, on a high floor and behind doors locked on any more excursions, it was possible at last-having thrown my clothes into cold water to soak out the blood-in a darkened room and the abandon of collapse (no more hard emotionless concentration on survival), to meet the devil face to face: the hatred that had penetrated deeper than anything I had breathed in with the bullet-streaked air, or slid on or rocked under. Early experiences of combat, night-reconnaissance and enemy artillery were as nothing compared with the forces that had been abroad this night. No way now to prevail against convulsive sobbing until sleep filtered thickly through it with daylight showing through the blinds.
Later that morning I noticed the pain and swelling in my hand. Below us, in the sunny autumnal streets, rifle-fire; some of it to keep people indoors, away from the killing that was going on a little further off. Yet my friend’s daughter walked with someone else from twelve blocks away to bring me medicines. Together we listened to the final broadcast of the second student radio: songs of Theodorakis-dirges now – and finally a young but drained and broken voice announcing, “We say goodbye to you. For the last time.”
Toward noon came the announcement by General Zagorianakos, Chief of Staff: martial law, a state of siege, censorship, and a curfew beginning at 4:00 in the afternoon. As in April, 1967, a long night was needed for arrests to sweep the city, and for the wounded to be dealt with (in some cases not by doctors or by nurses) in the wild congestion of the hospitals, and for the bodies of the dead to be transported to cemeteries under close military guard.
Certain noteworthy news items and Government bulletins would now and again interrupt the martial music. We learned that Markezinis, briefly Prime Minister, had called off his dawn press conference; he had reason to be afraid of questions. He went later to the Athens Pentagon to congratulate the Armed Forces in a tone similar to one of the Government communiqués: “The enemies of the nation are unrepentant and do not want elections. The Ministry of Public Order called on the assistance of the Army. This assistance resulted in the bloodless evacuation of the Polytechnic.” Kapsàskis, the Government Coroner, announced nine dead. Zournadzis, Press Minister, praised the “lofty virtues of martial law.” Then, “Whoever is discovered harbouring anyone not of the immediate family will be court-martialled.” Then, as to be expected, Papadopoulos: “In profound awareness of my responsibilities toward the nation and to history – ”
We turned the radio off.
Past 3 o’clock; my hand swelling fast.
But to have it X-rayed at a hospital meant giving information wounds, circumstances of infliction, the name and address on my residence permit. Which had vanished in the night.
A series of telephone calls all carefully worded led me to a radiologist who, I was assured, would ask no questions. He drove a long distance to meet me in his consulting-room, while the minutes ticked by.
The X-ray showed a diagonal break across the hand I had tried to interpose between skull and clubs. “But it’ll take time to get the picture ready. When you get home just take a piece of cardboard and bend it round the wrist and tie it up with string. It should be all right till Monday.”
It was a long pull back to my own district on foot. Not a taxi in sight. Two cars only, and when I hailed them they zoomed by at top speed. The clothes I had on were dry but they were someone else’s and obviously didn’t fit.
When I began to think I wasn’t going to make it I rang several bells along one fashionable street. None answered.
I got back with three minutes to spare – just time to buy provisions for tomorrow, Sunday. I asked the grocer (who does live next to me) to give me credit until Monday.
“No, no, no, we give no credit.” He was fluttering around his shop in dismay at the sight of me in a condition that he could guess the cause of. But I did have fifty drachmas: enough to cover the expenses. At home I bolted the front door and closed the shutters quickly.
A Gael in Greece 