Eleni [antikvár]

The Path to the Ravine N AUGUST 28,1948, at about twelve-thirty on a hot, windless day, some peasant women with firewood on their backs were descending a steep path above the Greek village of Lia, a cluster of gray stone houses on a mountainside just below the Albanian border. As the women came into view of the village below them, they encountered a grim procession. At the front and rear, carrying rifles, were several of the Communist guerrillas who had occupied their village for the past nine months of the Greek civil war. They were guarding thirteen prisoners, who were walking barefoot to their execution on legs black and swollen from the torture called falanga. One man, too beaten to walk or even sit up, was tied onto a mule. Among the prisoners were five people from Lia: three men and two women. The older woman stumbled along with a fixed stare of madness. She was my aunt, Alexo Gatzoyiannis, fifty-six. The younger woman, with light-chestnut hair, blue eyes and a torn blue dress, caught the gaze of the villagers and shook her head. She was my mother, Eleni Gatzoyiannis, forty-one years old. One of the peasant women began to cry, seeing her brother among the condemned. A thirteen-year-old boy who had stopped to drink at a spring watched the prisoners climb the mountain; soon they disappeared over the horizon. A few minutes later there was a burst of rifle fire, then scattered shots as each victim was finished off" with a bullet to the head. When the guerrillas passed again on the way down, they were alone. The executed had been left in the ravine where they fell, their bodies covered by rocks. Sixteen days later, when it was clear that the guerrillas were losing the war to the Greek nationalist forces, they rounded up every civilian left in the village and herded them at gunpoint over the border into Albania. Lia became a ghost town, the crows descending on the corpses left behind. A village that had been inhabited for more than twenty-five centuries ceased to exist. I learned of my mother's execution twenty-three days later at a refugee