Haifa 12/12/02 FREEDOM OR DEATH: the Jews in the Greek Resistance Steven Bowman, University of Cincinnati Visiting Profe

Haifa 12/12/02 FREEDOM OR DEATH: The Jews in the Greek Resistance Steven Bowman, University of Cincinnati Visiting Professor, University of Haifa “Better one hour of freedom than 40 years of slavery and prison” Rigas Pheraios (1757-1798) Neither the Greek Government nor the Greek people accepted the surrender of their trapped and exhausted armies in April 1941. Nor did the people of Crete who fought alongside the remnants of the Greek army and the British Expeditionary Force accept the German invasion and subsequent occupation. Resistance continued from the victory over the Italians and was the Greek response to the Axis invasions. Resistance took many forms. Urban resistance emphasized gathering of information, refusal to volunteer for labor in Germany, occasional acts of sabotage, demonstrations and protests, sympathy with and assistance to British prisoners of war; even survival was an act of resistance. Rural resistance, in the main, consisted of hiding food and offering sanctuary and assistance to escaped British POWs and to resistance fighters. Eventually the rural population contributed its sons – and daughters – to the new vision of Greece imposed by EAM-ELAS. The mountains however have justly claimed the historical high ground for resistance. It was to the mountains, as traditionally among the klephtes of the Ottoman period, that men and women ran from the occupying authorities and planned their attacks. The mountains, as Leon Uris described them, were angry, indeed as angry as a swarm of bees whose pastoral life was disturbed by rabid wolves. The resistance in Greece began as a continuation of the war against the Axis forces that had invaded, conquered, and occupied Greece. Independent bands of andartes formed out of the remnants of the armies that refused to surrender. Other bands emerged out of the klephtic tradition that had been part of Greek mountain life for centuries. These two sets of fighting groups, each consisting of numerous and unconnected bands of desperate men and adventurers, committed acts of sabotage and ambush as well as lived off the land in traditional brigand fashion. In both cases the support of the rural population was generally forthcoming. At the same time a spontaneous urban resistance blossomed to assist stranded Allied soldiers and to gather information that was sent to Cairo and Istanbul where it was processed by British SIS and SOE. By the Fall of 1941 a coalition of Leftist parties formed under the rubric EAM to organize the urban resistance. EAM was a coalition of a range of parties that had constituted the passive opposition to the dictatorship of John Metaxas. It was to include many supporters of the Liberal Party, the Venizelist officers retired under the dictatorship, and the refugee quarters surrounding the main urban centers that were increasingly subject to growing Communist influence. Those Republican officers who eschewed Communism founded EDES at about the same time. Soon EAM formed an army – ELAS – that, after a series of campaigns to reduce the independent bands and incorporate them into its structure, ultimately came to control some 90% of the Greek hinterland. EAM-ELAS was secretly controlled by the Greek Communist Party and quickly began to establish its new order under the guise of laokratia -–people's rule – during the occupation. Later it clashed with the liberation government that accompanied the British at the end of 1944, a clash that devolved into open civil war that tragically lasted until 1949. The decade of the 1940s may then be best described as a Greek tragedy whose heroic opening scene and brave resistance formed the first act. The last two years of the occupation represented the formation of the opposing sides in the forthcoming civil war that completed the destruction of the old order initiated by the Axis occupation. Most of the Greek population was involved in some way or another in the resistance. Many Greeks among the non-combatant population, as well as among the fighters and those under the protection of the resistance, suffered from the vicissitudes of the larger political battle for the future of Greece. These Greeks, who constituted the mass of the population, were squeezed between the political leaders who fought against or collaborated with the occupiers and the myriads of victims of Axis reprisals and maladministration. How they responded to the challenge of survival under these conditions and their traditional reaction to foreign persecution is a major theme of the Greek resistance story. Our story of the Jews follows the vicissitudes of one of the many social and ethnic groups during this tragic period, namely the Jews of Greece who drank the bitter dregs both at home and in their final exile. The story of the Jews in the resistance is less known than their tragic annihilation at the hands of the Germans in the death camps of Poland and Germany. Even that story is treated seperately from the main themes of Greece’s history during the decade of the 1940s. Yet the Jews were Greek citizens and most of the youth were fully integrated into the culture and character of their contemporaries. Hence this paper will be an attempt to integrate their wartime resistance activities into the complicated history of the Greek resistance. During the war that chased the Italians out of Greece, some 13,000 Jews took part as officers, non commissioned officers, and enlisted men. They helped to defend the Metaxas line and stormed Italian defenses in the snow- covered mountains of Albania, occasionally led by their own junior officers. Jewish doctors served at the front and in central hospitals. Many others were involved in logistics and supplies. A few joined the air force or served in the Greek navy. The highest-ranking officer to die on the field of battle was Lt. Colonel Mordecai Frizis of Chaliks, the hero of the Battle of Kalamas that turned the Italian flank in Epirus. He was soon designated one of the two national heroes by Metaxas during the war. A number of these soldiers refused to return home after the surrender of the encircled Epirus Greek army and remained in the mountains to fight with the emerging resistance. They were joined by a handful of survivors of the Metaxas forts. During 1942, after Stalin’s call for Communists to fight the Fascists and Nazis, Jewish and Greek Communists went to the mountains where their organizational skills quickly led to local leadership positions among many bands in Central Greece, in Macedonia and in the Aegean islands. Royalist dominated bands (some with Republican junior officers) emerged in the Epirus, the Peloponnesus, Crete, and in Thrace. Jews could be found among these as well; the main criterion for their participation in a given band was more often than not proximity rather than ideology. One did not volunteer to the andartiko, except for the Venezelist officers and the Communists. Rather most of the people in the andartiko escaped to it. From June 1941 until late 1942 the major Greek contribution to the war effort had been the plethora of information collected by individuals and networks in the urban centers, which was forwarded to British intelligence [SIS and later SOE] centered in Cairo. A number of Jewish networks of this kind functioned in Saloniki. For instance, Reich officers were quartered among the middle-class Jewish families, some of whom spoke German and learned much from casual conversation with the officers. On the other hand, the network of Sam Modiano functioned through the Italian Consulate. Other groups existed in Athens where the Italian occupiers were even more slack in security. Urban women were particularly effective throughout the war in reporting troop movements and unit identifications, key information for military intelligence. Recent work has shown that British intelligence, inefficient at best, was overwhelmed with data from Greek and German sources that is perhaps of more assistance to historians than it was to the contemporary beleaguered clerks. The arrival of the British Mission under Brigadier Edmund Myers, a staff officer at the British War College in Haifa before being vetted to lead the mission into Greece to destroy the Gorgopotamos Bridge in November 1942, opened a new phase in the Greek resistance. Myers was assisted by two effective bands operating in Central Greece: EDES under the leadership of Napoleon Zervas, a sometime Republican officer who later became a royalist at British urging, and Aris Velouchiotis, a recanted Communist who was a kapetan of ELAS. Myers, by the way, was a Sephardi Jew whose family came to Britain in the 17th century. By curious coincidence he was the cousin of General Bernard Freyburg who led the New Zealand Division and had commanded the British show in Crete. These two Imperial Jewish officers directed two of the major British military adventures in Greece. Both were partially successful in their limited military objectives. After accomplishing his initial mission Myers was ordered to organize the Greek resistance. By the summer of 1943 he had negotiated the National Bands Agreement which was an attempt to stave off the internecine fighting between ELAS and the other bands. Shortly thereafter Myers was replaced by his second Christopher Woodhouse, who pursued a royalist and anti-Communist campaign dictated by the Foreign Office in London. Hence the earlier British military approach to the resistance changed into a political approach that further exacerbated tensions within the resistance movement. In the meantime thousands of Jews had been sent on forced labor to repair the railroads and bridges destroyed by British sappers during their April-May retreat. One group of those sappers was led by Captain William Hammond and consisted of Palestinian Jews whom he had personally trained. These Jews and others parachuted into the Balkans from 1942 to 1944 were part of the sustained cooperation between the Sochnut and British Intelligence Services during the war.

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