NICHOLAS GAGE

Eleni

1983

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT EVIL, specifically an act of evil particular to Greece in the twentieth century. The relating of what happened further raises the more general and indeed abiding question of how the individual to whom evil is done should rightly and properly respond. There are ambiguities. To do nothing might be to follow the biblical injunction to turn the other cheek, but it might also leave the victim to internalize the evil and blame himself for what another did. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, but the avenger will almost certainly have to be as morally defective as the evil-doer.

At first glance, Nicholas Gage looked like a Brooks Brothers type of American. He was reputed to be one of the best investigative journalists on the New York Times, specializing in stories about cops and robbers. In person, he was soft-spoken, self-effacing. It seemed all of a piece to learn that his name was an anglicized form of Nikola Gatzoyiannis. Investigating in professional style the life and death of his mother, Eleni, however, he is not dealing with identity but touching the heights and depths of human emotions.

Eleni lived in Lia, a village in the Grammos Mountains just on the Greek side of the frontier with Albania. According to a very summary sentence in the book, she was “an ordinary peasant woman, subject to all her doubts, fears and prejudices planted by her upbringing and her primitive world.” A day came when fifteen heavily armed men turned up in the village. Communists were taking over the region. The world war was giving rise to a civil war on the issue of who would rule peacetime Greece. At the Yalta conference, the great powers decided which countries were to be in the Soviet bloc and Greece was not one of them. Preparing for a long-term militant future, the Greek Communist Party then organized the unprecedented atrocity known as the Paidomazoma. This was the effective kidnapping of as many as 28,000 children between the ages of three and thirteen and their transfer to the Soviet Union or to the new People’s Democracies in Eastern Europe. Eleni could not submit to such an affront to her instincts and beliefs. She enabled her children to escape without her and rejoin their father already in the United States since before the war. The Communists accused her of treachery, tortured her, held a kangaroo trial and finally put her before a firing squad. “My children!” the unfortunate Eleni screamed as she died.

Safe in the United States, Nicholas Gage was tormented by the injustice of it all. Out of fear for themselves, some in Lia had denounced Eleni and some had borne false witness. Communist ideology shut out morality. With a bit of luck and a lot of detective work he tracked down the Communist judge, one Achilleas Lykas, who had presided over Eleni’s judicial murder. Nicholas had a handgun tucked in his waistband and knew “absolutely” that he wanted to kill Lykas because, he says, it would give him relief from the pain that had filled him for so many years. When the opportunity at last came, “I couldn’t do it.” So complex is human fate that retribution repeats and extends the evil it was supposed to redress. All Nicholas can do in the face of this reality is spit all over Lykas. The murderer pays a small price, the victim is not freed from suffering. Eleni has as much insight into tragedy as the ancient Greek classics.

Postscript. In 1980 the trial took place in Cologne of the so-called Paris Gestapo, three SS officers guilty of deporting Jews from France during the German occupation. Day after day, I found myself sitting next to Michel Goldberg, a Frenchman. His father had been arrested in Lyon, tortured, deported and finally murdered in Auschwitz. The head of the Lyon Gestapo was the infamous Klaus Barbie, and Michel held him responsible for his father’s death. He told me (and repeats in his memoir Namesake, published in 1982) how posing as a journalist he had traced Barbie, a fugitive in Bolivia, and contrived to have a rendezvous with him. “All I need is the will,” he observed, but in the event, like Nicholas Gage, he too could not bring himself to press the trigger of the revolver he had brought.