Troubled Words (Paraponemena Logia)
On the desks of need
And in the school of poverty
We learned about society
and the feeling of old pain
Our songs contain troubled words
Because we've been treated unfairly
even from the cradle of our birth
Our place in the world
was not more than ten feet of land
the size of a house
and the wall of our yard
Our songs contain troubled words...
Giorgos Dalaras- Paraponemena Logia
To understand Greeks, one must understand the history that has shaped them. In 1942, 100,000 Greeks died of starvation. The famine in occupied Greece was the result of a number of factors. A German effort to plunder the country to support its own war effort and thus feed its troops, a British blockade designed to put pressure on the Axis, and finally an inability on the part of the Greek Quisling government to mobilize available resources to feed the urban poor due to incomptence and corruption. So many Athenians died that the dead did not even receive the Orthodox rites of burial. The deep wounds inflicted during this terrible ordeal radicalized and alienated many Greeks, setting the stage for the subsequent civil war which will tear at the very fabric of Greek society.
Excerpted from Inside Hitler's Greece by Mark Mazower:
"A world away from the fashionable boulevards of central Athens , it was the slums on the city's outskirts which bore the brunt of the famine. In the inter-war period, shantytowns had sprung up or been constructed at a convenient distance from the heart of the city to house thousands of the refugees who fled from Asia Minor after the 1922 disaster. Their inhabitants, who had arrived with a few personal possessions lived in shacks made of tin and boards which were difficult to heat or keep clean. Families of four or five people shared a single room; often, instead of proper plumbing, there were open sewers running behind the muddy alleys. Unlike other Greeks, these newcomers had no family home in the provinces to return to when times were hard. They were the country's first genuine urban proletariat, and they had been badly neglected by the state.
Before the war, they and their children had earned a living in the poorly ventilated factories for low wages; others work as street vendors or domestic servants. When the occupation began thousands of them lost their jobs as industrial plant and stocks were requisitioned and fuel shortages halted economic activity. Major prewar employers like the textiles and chemicals sectors were forced to reduce output to 10 to 15% of their usual levels. Desperate to earn money, people turn to peddling goods or begging. At the docks in Piraeus a crowd of odd job men occupied the quayside. 'Ex-clerks, workers, chauffeurs, and cashiers whose jobs have been scrapped, have become porters and try to earn their miserable daily bread carrying bags on carts or on their backs. Street vendors sold dirty looking pieces of carob cake figs and other fruit or matches, cigarettes, old clothes. Beggars lay on the pavement. In the center of Omonia Square stretched out on blankets above the warm air vents on the Metro there were people of all ages, holding out their hands to passerby.
There are no official figures for the extent of unemployment in the poorer quarters, but Marcel Junod of the Red Cross reckoned that over half of the working-class population was out of work. Two thirds of these families were enrolled in local soup kitchens but they were not fed more than two or three times a week and even then not all members of the family were catered for. Junod observed that women, in particular, tended to go without food to leave some for their children.
For many the only means of survival was to gather wild grass and other weeds from the countryside around the city. These were then boiled, if there was fuel available and eaten without oil. But these grasses had virtually no nutritional value: 5 kilos were needed to produce the daily dose of hydrocarbons required by the human body. Children searched through rubbish bins for scraps of food or waited in the service entrance of large hotels. Others clustered around the doors or restaurants. Some German officers tormented urchins by throwing scraps from balconies and watching them fight among themselves. Soldiers eating olives in the street attracted a crowd of children. As soon as one spat out an olive stone, the children rushed for it: the fastest would put it in his mouth and suck it clean.
Though malnutrition enfeebled the body and made work increasingly exhausting, working families have little choice if they wished to stay alive but to continue as though nothing was happening. Chyrsa P., a widow, went to work three days a week to earn food for her three tubercular children, even though she was ill herself. Gregorios M., who had been laid off work walked several hours each day to the hills to pick wild plants to bring home. He already showed the edemas that were signs of severe malnutrition but he had a mother, wife and child to feed.
To make matters worse the hot dry summer was followed by an unusually harsh and prolonged winter: there was snow on the streets of Athens and at night the temperature fell below freezing. Because coal and wood had become very expensive and sometimes unobtainable, houses were not properly heated and people succumbed to colds, flu and TB. After several weeks of malnutrition people weakened quickly. Vitamin deficiency caused tumors and boils to appear on their hands and feet and unless cured these spread onto the body and face. Around half the families in the poor quarters showed these symptoms by the beginning of 1942.
The final stage before death was a state of physical and mental exhaustion. This is the point at which people simply collapsed and were unable to raise themselves up again. A builder working on a house in the suburb of Psychiko suddenly fainted in the summer heat. A woman, who had been walking with her two undernourished children through central Athens collapsed in the street leaving the children to cry. Demobilized Greek servicemen, veterans of the Albanian campaign, lay in doorways or propped up against walls. One freezing December evening a young man collapsed on Skoufas Street. 'Get up get up or you're done for,' someone said to him. 'My God why have you brought me to such a state?' the young man whispered, ' Why am I not at home instead of crawling like a dog through the streets at night. Why my God? What did I do to you?' He was a conscript from the island of Zakynthos, one of many who had been unable to return home following the end of the fighting and now begged on the streets without any government support.
In a shack in the refugee quarter of Dourgouti, 40-year-old Androniki P. lay slumped by the door covered in an old blanket, having sold the rest of her possessions to buy food. Her husband, who had died several days earlier, lay inside. Her three children sat crying but she was too weak to help them. In another hut in Agios Georgios, an unemployed worker lay unable to move while his children clustered around his bed asking for bread. Many of the people enrolled in the soup kitchens were too weak to make the journey there. In the working-class district of Dourgouti which may be regarded as a typical example of the poorest quarters, 1600 out of the 2200 families need urgent medical attention and proper nutrition."
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