Cruel World (56 page)
Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
Mikhail did survive, and in early 1943 was evacuated to Novosibirsk, in Siberia, along with his aunts. They departed Leningrad on a ship that was bombed during the journey. Once ashore they continued for four weeks in a packed, two-level cattle car. One aunt, stricken with dysentery, was removed from the train at Tyumen, where she died. Once in Novosibirsk, the skeletal Mikhail spent two months in a hospital gradually bringing his food intake back to normal.
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Mikhail’s experience was far from unique, but at least he had his aunt; thousands of other children were left totally alone. Teams of Young Communist workers and many others went out to help those who could no longer leave their apartments. What they found was terrible beyond words:
The door to the apartment was open.… My eyes met a frightful sight. A half-dark room. Frost on the walls. On the floor a frozen puddle. On a chair the corpse of a fourteen-year-old boy. In a child’s cradle the second corpse of a tiny child. On the bed the dead mistress of the flat … beside her, rubbing the dead woman’s breast with a towel, stood her oldest daughter.… But life had gone, and it could not be brought back.
Another worker, who saved more than a hundred children, recorded in her diary in January 1942:
To the 17th Line, House 38, Apartment No. 2…. Yuri S., 9 years old. His mother was dead. The youngster slept day and night with his dead mother. (“How cold I got from mama,” he said.) Yuri didn’t want to come with me. He cried and shouted. A touching farewell with his mother (“Mama, what will happen to you without me?”)…. Prospekt Musorgsky 68, Apartment 30. Took a girl, Shura S., born 1931. Father at the front. Mother dead.… Little girl dirty, scabs on her hands. Found her in a pile of dirty linen under the mattress.
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To Russians, the most famous such case is perhaps that of Tanya Savicheva, who, between December 28, 1941, and May 13, 1942, recorded the names of seven family members who had died on the appropriate pages of her alphabetized notebook, ending her entries with the comment “All die. Only Tanya remains.” Like Mikhail, Tanya was eventually evacuated, but for her it was too late; she died of chronic dysentery in the summer of 1943.
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Watching the demise of relatives was devastating to young children, who witnessed their hallucinations and often dreadful death throes and who sometimes lived for weeks surrounded by frozen corpses that could only be taken to the icy cemeteries with great difficulty. During the spring and summer of 1942, the large number of deaths, continued evacuations, and ever improving imports of food, plus a huge gardening program on every square inch of open ground, would finally ease the situation. But by then, the U.S. mission in Moscow reported, some 650,000 people were said to have died of starvation in Leningrad and its suburbs.
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By the time the siege ended, the total deaths are estimated to have been nearly twice that number: more than in any other city ever devastated by war.
Little Tanya and Mikhail and the thousands of others starving in the Soviet Union did not know it, but they were not alone in their suffering. In his preparations for the invasion of the USSR, Hitler had, since the fall of 1940, been trying to forge partnerships in the Balkans, which would protect his southern flank. Alliances with Bulgaria and Yugoslavia were to be negotiated, and a takeover of the northern provinces of Greece was planned. As is usual in the Balkans, things did not go smoothly. Mussolini, who had unwisely attacked Greece in October 1940, had not been able to
prevail against combined Greek and British forces, and Serbian elements in Yugoslavia had staged an anti-German coup.
Outraged and impatient with all this, Hitler ordered yet another invasion, which after only ten days of preparation was to conquer Yugoslavia and Greece with minimal losses. German forces crossed into Yugoslavia on April 6, and by April 27 were in Athens.
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There, in an act of extraordinary arrogance, the Germans raised the swastika flag over the Parthenon. Tony Lykiardopoulos remembers that his mother cried when they looked up and saw the banner “against the blue, blue Athenian sky.”
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Eleven-year-old Athena Lagoudaki, staying with friends in Salonika, peeked through shuttered windows as the ominous German tanks rolled by. On the radio she heard an archbishop wish the people luck and warn of hard times to come. The national anthem then began to play, but was suddenly cut off when the Germans captured the radio station. Little did Athena know how hard the times would soon be. She and her family were lucky. Taken in by relatives who owned wheat fields in Larissa, one of the most productive agricultural areas of the country, they would survive by bartering their surplus grain, soon to be as precious as gold, for such nourishing items as beans and honey.
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This was not the case elsewhere. On November 17, 1941, an official of the Agricultural Bank of Greece pointed out that the total disruption of maritime communication and land transportation had made the normal distribution of olive oil in the country impossible. That fact, combined with the requisitioning of commodities by Italy and Germany plus the consumption of reserves in many locations since Greece had been invaded in April, had eliminated the only source of fat for most of the people and would, he declared, “have sad, if not fatal results.” Indeed, if the situation was not remedied before the winter, “mass catastrophe” would be the result.
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Olive oil was not the only thing lacking. The foreign food imports on which Greece depended had ceased when the invasion began. Here too German forces, for the most part billeted with Greek families, lived off the local economy. Soldiers were also given the right to send weekly packages weighing five kilos each to their relatives back home, a practice that encouraged all sorts of pilfering. Warehouses were sealed up and their contents seized. The German Army paid some entrepreneurs well for supplies, thus helping food prices, already rising due to shortages, to skyrocket, and undermining the chaotic efforts of the Greek puppet government and the Italians, who were occupying most of the country outside the big cities, to stockpile and ration supplies. Greedy farmers
even sold their seed stocks; corruption and profiteering were rife. Meanwhile, Thessaly and Macedonia, the major grain-producing areas of Greece, had been taken over by the Bulgarians, who were doing their own exploiting. In the fall of 1941, at the urgent request of their own envoys to Greece, the Germans and Italians sent sporadic shipments of grain to Salonika, but the distribution was left to the German authorities, who controlled the fuel supplies, the railroads, and most major shipping, and it is not clear just what happened to these provisions.
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It did not take long for the predicted effects of the disruption of the normal food production and distribution system, fragile at the best of times, to appear. A chain reaction began. Lack of fuel led not only to lack of food distribution, but also to unemployment as industries closed. By May, in Athens-Piraeus, most people’s reserves were gone. The more affluent, of whom there were fewer and fewer, for a time lived off the booming black market, but by the autumn, prices were fifty to sixty times what they had been before the invasion, and only the very rich or well connected could buy what little there was for sale. The legal bread ration in Athens was below that of Leningrad, hovering, after July 1941, between 100 and 160 grams a day, or between four and six ounces. There was essentially no meat at all: butchers sold dog and cat until these too vanished, and by late October, as one International Red Cross official put it, starvation had “appeared in all its horror.”
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In December, the wife of the Swiss consul in Salonika, back in Switzerland for Christmas, reported: “Starvation stalks the streets of Salonica. Famished men and women collapse on the pavements and their bodies are later on trundled away on open carts drawn by gaunt horses staggering in their traces from the effects of hunger.”
She also noted that the Greeks were now convinced that the Germans (whom she refers to as “anti-Semitic military bag men”) were using hunger for the purpose of “deliberate extermination.” This idea, she wrote, should be “viewed as the logical appraisal of German behavior in Greece since the invasion of Russia.” News of the horrible conditions in the Soviet Union had begun to get around, and everyone wondered who would be next. The consul’s wife observed that “Salonica is full of wounded and frost-bitten Germans from the Russian front.… The terrors of the winter war in Russia for the Germans are so great that officers and men frequently break into fits of violent weeping when ordered to return to the Eastern front.”
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German behavior in Greece, and indeed in all the other non-Slavic countries, was ruled by indifference rather than racial principle; nevertheless, the result was much the same. Some months later, Göring would bluntly define Nazi policy toward the conquered peoples, at a meeting of the Nazi heads of government of the countries occupied by the Reich, all of whom faced eventual problems similar to those of fragile Greece, and from whom he was demanding ever larger quotas of food:
A soup kitchen in Athens, 1941
.
(photo credit 11.2)
In all the occupied territories I see the people living there stuffed full of food, while our own people are starving. For God’s sake, you haven’t been sent there to work for the well-being of the peoples entrusted to you, but to get hold of as much as you can so that the German people can live.… This continual concern for the aliens must come to an end once and for all.… I have the reports of what you are planning to deliver in front of me. When I contemplate your countries it seems like nothing at all. I could not care less if you tell me that your people are collapsing from hunger. They can do that by all means so long as no German collapses from hunger.… I am only interested in the people in the occupied territories who work producing armaments and food. They must get just sufficient so that they can do their work.… It does
not matter what happens to the French.… Belgium is a poor country.… They won’t need to deliver bread grains, but they won’t get any.… Norway: They’ve got fish.… You must give me some meat.… I haven’t time to read letters and memos in which you tell me that you can’t do what I ask of you.
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The food situation continued to deteriorate in the large urban setting of Athens. A few days after the Swiss report, a British informant reported from there that he had “seen complete starvation … in one single day there were 1,200 corpses for burial,” most of them children whose bodies were taken to the cemetery in batches of ten to twenty at a time in “small hand carts.”
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By Christmas the number of corpses had so far outstripped the burial facilities that the Medical Society of Athens asked the Orthodox Patriarch to waive his church’s prohibition of cremation.
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Under the auspices of the International Red Cross, soup kitchens and a few shipments were allowed in from Turkey on the small steamer SS
Kurtulus
, which came to be a symbol of survival to Athenians; but these supplies could save only a few. Milk sent from the Vatican kept some babies alive, but none of this was enough. To the despair of all, after five trips the gallant
Kurtulus
sank, but in any case, there were as yet no more supplies for it to bring.
In December 1941, International Red Cross official Alexander Junod saw firsthand the “hell in which the Greek people are now living.” He described scenes in Athens that might have been taken from the notebooks of the Leningrad workers. The winter was unusually cold in Athens too; it even snowed. No less passionate than the Baltic doctor who had reported from Russia, Junod, the proper bureaucrat, wrote:
This country which nature has endowed with such beauty … this country blessed by the Gods … which has illuminated and kindled the greatest minds in its incomparable expression of art and wisdom, is today a true country of hell, a valley of the worst suffering and the blackest misery in which death mercilessly reaps innocent lives. It is impossible, even for the most daring imagination, to conceive of the extent of this suffering, all the horror of famine, all the savagery of the martyrdom of this population. One has to see the people falling dead of hunger on the sidewalks, one has to see the garbage trucks taking masses of cadavers to the cemeteries, one has to visit the neighborhoods where those near death sleep next to the dead that the carts and trucks have not yet taken away. When one sees all these things, one will be able to have a small idea of the whole tragic situation.
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And Junod did visit the neighborhoods. The train station was full of gaunt people selling and bartering every possible object for food. Outside, “ragged beggars of all ages” held out their hands. He saw “little children, very thin, very pale, glassy-eyed, crying and asking for food.” Others crowded around restaurants hoping for leftovers and pawed through garbage piles. Women and children sat and slept in doorways; they died there in the freezing nights. In middle-class neighborhoods people wasted away slowly and died with dignity in their empty houses, having sold everything possible and not wanting to beg.