A Challenge for All That is Greece

I hate the blame game.  It’s a favorite of the ideologue, demagogue, and bigot, used to convert into political power the natural instinct of so many to fault anyone but themselves for what’s gone wrong in their lives.  For some it’s a means of gaining power, for others of maintaining what they no longer rightly deserve.  

Which brings me to Greece and tomorrow’s elections. It’s the runoff round of municipal elections and the first chance in five years for Greeks to choose their representatives to the European Union Parliament.  Yes, I have views on what’s happening, but in light of my buddy’s very tight runoff election for mayor of Mykonos tomorrow, I think I’d best hold off on getting into any of that. Besides, from the way things have played out so far, there is such a terrific book in it—a crime for sure, but no mystery to any local—I might just leave it to Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis to work out.  To be honest…whoops, wrong word in this context…he may be the only cop in Greece even willing to try.

So, let me instead turn to what the Greek newspapers are saying about Greece’s European Parliamentary elections.  Most are perplexed as to whether the left or right will win, perhaps because all of the media’s elaborate pre-election and exit polling for last Sunday’s round proved very wrong.  It’s as if the Greek people didn’t want to tell the press what’s really on their minds.

But that’s not stopped the Greek press from telling it like they think it is.  Right or wrong, they have an opinion.  And in this case a very scary one.  

Four years ago I gave an interview to America’s largest circulation Greek-American Newspaper, The National Herald (ΕΘΝΙΚΟΣ ΚΗΡΥΞ), and said, “Perhaps its time for Greeks around the world to come to the defense of their cultural homeland…Fiscal blame fades, cultural stigmas persist.”  In Target: Tinos (published in 2012) the warning came from the lips of a fictional Greek government minister:

“But our adversaries would love to switch the focus of the debate from our country’s financial problems to our national character.  Paint us as indifferent to the plight of non-Greeks, an intolerant place where only Greeks are treated as deserving of protection, and all others be damned.  It’s a volatile, irrational, and emotional argument but one that could turn world opinion against us if it found traction in the press.  And then it would no longer be just a question of denying us further bailout funds, but whether or not to drum us out of the E.U.”

Eight days ago, the respected publisher of The National Herald wrote an editorial titled “Greek Election Forecasts” in which he referred to a “recently-published survey of the Pew Research Center” on views held by the Greek people.  He noted the survey found Greeks to be the most “negative” in the EU about the future, and in his final paragraph wrote:

The survey also revealed Greece to be the most anti-Semitic country in Western Europe, with an unacceptably high rate of 69 percent. Somewhere in all these figures a person can discern the “logic” that will drive the upcoming elections.

That paragraph stopped me cold. I personally have never had an anti-Semitic experience in Greece, something I can’t say for other places I’ve known.

But there’s no denying Nazis are here, in force, and violent.  Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) barely masks its veneration of Hitler and his blame-spewing hatred that brought such horror to the world. 

They seem to have forgotten, or choose to ignore in their rush for power, that Mein Kampf’s ethnic prejudices led to the utter devastation of Greece at Hitler’s hands.   

Yet despite all of that, and the serious criminal charges lodged against virtually every one of the party’s eighteen members of Greece’s parliament following the murder of a Greek by Golden Dawn supporters, its popularity continues to rise.  It drew 16% of the vote in Athens last week…enough to swing tomorrow’s runoff election.

And the concerns expressed over the rise of Nazism in Greece are not confined to Diaspora journalists.  The following unsettling editorial appeared this week in Ekathimerini, Greece’s equivalent of The New York Times; it’s title, “Serpent Alibi Doesn’t Hold Water”:

The excuse that “the serpent deceived me, and I ate” has been a part of the human narrative since the dawn of time, according to the Bible. Our homegrown Nazis would certainly throw the good book in the fire and not because they ostensibly get their learning from the ancient Greeks (and display it by holding up torches and attacking the helots), but because according to their “Mein Kampf” beliefs, anything remotely Jewish should be destroyed.

The ploy of consigning responsibility to the proverbial serpent neither explains nor justifies anything. If you don’t have the will power to stand up to temptation, if you succumb and sit on the serpent’s egg, it is not the reptile’s fault for trying to bite you. And just like that, after three electoral contests in which Golden Dawn scored high percentages, we can no longer talk about innocents who have been deceived. The first time, maybe; the second, not so much; but definitely not the third. And each time they were “deceived” was worse than the last because they knew more and had a better understanding of their decision. So the longer we hide behind the alibi that the Golden Dawn voters have been deceived by the serpent, the longer we shy away from the problem, not daring to look it in the face and call it what it is.

The possibility that some of Golden Dawn’s voters cast their ballots as they did to lash out against the system (blind to the fact that the party is itself an offshoot of the system) and not because they embrace the party’s ideas does nothing to acquit them. Those who vote for Golden Dawn but do not, for example, revere Hitler, are not free of political culpability, because by casting their vote they are legitimizing those who do indeed do. And anyway, it’s not as though they can write “Yes, but I have some reservations” at the top of the ballot before they put it into the box.

What has Golden Dawn’s record been so far? Dark and criminal, as ongoing judicial investigations are revealing and our experience as a society has shown. The party has succeeded in bringing together an element that already existed in Greek society and which embraced tyranny, chauvinism, racism, intolerance and anti-Semitism. It has never been small, just preferred to hide behind bigger parties. The junta was not that long ago and we can still vividly remember who served it voluntarily and who (albeit a small number) resisted it. The Nazi occupation is not so deep in the distant past either for us to have forgotten GD’s forefathers.

Voting for Golden Dawn is not an emotional overreaction, but an expression of ideological allegiance. It is clear that this is something we are ashamed to admit. We cannot confess that a large part our society embraces, openly and consciously, Golden Dawn’s prejudice. But if we keep refusing to talk about it, we will do nothing and have nothing left but our shame – which will just get bigger.

Extremist right views are gaining traction across Europe, yet many of Golden Dawn’s natural European allies shun any public association with them.  Or so it seems.  As reported this week in EuroObserver:

None of Europe's popular far-right parties has backed or sought to make an alliance with Greece's extremists, who are often labelled "neo-fascists" – something the party denies….

While many radical right-wing parties across Europe, led by France's National Front, have indicated they will club together in the next European Parliament, they are steering clear of Golden Dawn.

Late last year National Front leader Marine Le Pen said Golden Dawn had a "filthy image". In February she told a Greek journalist that far-right parties "have been very clear about not including" Golden Dawn in their alliance.

But some experts say the gap between them is not that wide.

Vasiliki Georgiadou, a political science professor at Athens Panteion university, believes the continent's leading far-right parties, including France's Front National, are not teaming up with Golden Dawn merely for strategic reasons rather than outright objection to their policies.

Jackboots are on the march again in Europe and Golden Dawn’s performance in tomorrow’s European Parliament elections is expected to shake up the EU.

The question is, will it shake up the Greek people?

I certainly hope so. 

Jeff—Saturday

Good Morning, Gytheio. Time to Wake Up.

Writer nearby the Entrance to Hades

Once upon a time in a far, far, far away land there lived a fair Queen.

Sorry, Mykonos, this isn’t about you.  I’m focusing on the Peloponnese, Greece’s southernmost mainland peninsula about the size of the American state of Massachusetts; though I guess these days it’s technically an island after the four-mile long (by only seventy-feet wide) Corinth canal severed it from the rest of Greece in 1893.

Think picture perfect harbor, nestled up against the Aegean’s Laconian Gulf halfway along the eastern coast of the middle prong of the trident-shape southern tip of the Peloponnese (make it easy, look at the map).  I’m talking about Gytheio, largest town in the southernmost Peloponnese region of the Mani and municipal seat of East Mani.

Twenty-five-hundred years ago this spot served as the port for nearby ancient Sparta, and during Roman times it thrived as an export center for such valuable commodities as the deep purple dye so revered by royalty that it gave rise to the phrase, “born to the purple.” 

But in the early Third Century BCE, Gytheio’s reign as a port center ended in a massive earthquake.  It remained abandoned, serving as but a small village, until refugees from Greece’s 1821 War of Independence escaping to the Mani brought with them the renewed growth that ultimately returned Gytheio to glory in the 1960s with its new port.

To the the ancient Spartans—and Greek classicists—this area wasn’t known as Gytheio but as Cranae, the name of a tiny, arrow-shaped island two hundred yards from shore at the southern end of Gytheio’s modern harbor.  From Cranae, ancient Sparta launched its ships (a bit of a hint for those who haven’t already guessed the soon to arrive punch-line).   

Today, Cranae connects to Gytheio by a narrow, two-hundred yard-long concrete causeway, is approximately five-hundred yards-long, east-to-west, by one hundred yards wide at its broadest point, and is made up primarily of dirt, rocks, and pine trees.

 

Aside from a couple of fishing shacks (and I do mean shacks), and a taverna and restaurant close by the island end of the causeway, only three structures remain standing on Cranae:  A lighthouse at its eastern edge, Saint Petros (Peter) Church on its western end looking across the sea back at the harbor town (a very popular site for weddings), and roughly equidistant between the two, a four-story stone tower built in 1829 later expanded to house the Historical and Cultural Museum of Mani (currently closed because of the financial crisis). [Cranae photos by Panos Kazanells]

Cranae Lighthouse

Mani Museum

St. Petros Church

So, where’s the Queen fit into all of this, you ask?  I’ll let Homer tell you.

NO, NOT HOMER SIMPSON, Everett.  The other teller of tales.   The Iliad names Cranae as the spot where Queen Helen of Sparta and her abductor, Paris of Troy, spent their first night fleeing Helen’s husband King Menelaus of Sparta, in the process giving Homer the story line for the world’s best known epic tale of romance, action, and intrigue, catchy phrases for advertising execs such as “The face that launched a thousand ships,” “Trojan horse,” etcetera, and Peter O’Toole the chance to make a movie with Angelina Jolie’s (not yet?) husband.

TROY

But there’s another story to Gytheio.  World War II took a great toll on this region.  In 1942 merciless bombing devastated the area—skeletons of bombed out buildings can still be found along some hillsides—and its villages were among the first wiped out by the Nazis in reprisals for partisan attacks on German soldiers.   Along the roadside between Gytheio and modern Sparti are monuments erected to the memory of those murdered Greeks

As one villager told me, “A lot of family trees lost entire limbs to the Nazis.  They did almost as much harm to us as the Turks, but in a hell of a lot less time.”

So, I have a question:  With so much suffering endured by their ancestors at the hands of the Nazis, why is there looming above Gytheio’s central harborfront square a banner proclaiming that location as The Mani’s headquarters for Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn), the neo-Nazi political party in Greece’s parliament openly praising the architects of Nazi methods that once brought so much suffering and death to so many of their countrymen and to Gytheio in particular?

I’m not going to suggest an answer. That’s too easy to address with a nod, a shake or a shrug.  No, I’d rather you think about an answer.  And to help get you started, here’s a story reported in the US by National Public Radio on September 4, 2013 on the impact the rise of Golden Dawn is having on the tiny population of Greek Jews that remains after 87% of their 67,000 population saw extermination by the first round of Nazis to take a shot at destroying Greece. 

It portends a future no thinking or remembering Greek could want.  For it is guaranteed to end in tears. 

Xronia Pola and L’Shana Tova.

Jeff—Saturday

Guest Author James R. Benn

We’ve guested Jim once before,  back in October of last year, when he contributed a post about Armed Services Editions during the Second World War.  If you missed that one, be sure to read it here: http://bit.ly/HNZI67

Jim, of course, is the author of the acclaimed Billy Boyle series, historical mysteries set against the background of the Second World War. The next book Death's Door is slated for September of this year. The most most-recently published was, A MORTAL TERROR, launched last September. My review is among the many you'll find here: http://amzn.to/H6433b

On Desperate Ground, with an entirely different cast of characters is just out -- and high-up on my TBR list. It's available in both print and eBook form, and can be found here: http://amzn.to/Hd1JYl

Leighton - Monday

How I became a writer.

Finally.

                It was my 50^th birthday, back in the year 1999. My wife and I were on a trip to Germany, visiting Berlin and the Harz Mountains. History and hiking. On my birthday, September 5^th, we walked up a hillside to a restaurant offering spectacular mountain views. As we dined on the deck, Debbie asked me about my life goals on this landmark half-century mark (she’s a psychotherapist, it comes with the territory).

                “Well, I always wanted to write a book,” I said. I’d been a reporter during college and still harbored a desire to see if I could write a novel.

                “Why don’t you do something about it?” she quite reasonably asked. It was then I realized I’d wanted to write for the past three decades and had done nothing about it. If I waited another thirty years, things might not work out. Another liter of German beer came around, and plans didn’t get very specific. But I’d made a commitment of sorts, and all I needed was an idea. It didn’t take long.

                In Berlin we took several sponsored walking tours. One was Jewish Life in Berlin, focusing on the past and present history of Jewish life in the city. The tour guide took us to the New Synagogue, built in the nineteenth century as the main Berlin synagogue.

Constructed in the Moorish style, it was architecturally and historically important; the Berlin government had granted specific permission for the synagogue to be built facing the street, an important distinction for the Jewish community. Their house of worship did not have to be hidden away. The document also stated that the synagogue had the right to exist forever on Oranienburger Strasse.

                Fast forward to November 9, 1938; Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass).  Synagogues and Jewish business all across Germany are being vandalized and burned.

A crowd of Brownshirts descends on the Neue Synagogue and begins to set torches to it. In the face of that state-sanctioned terror, a single Berlin policeman, Lieutenant Otto Bellgardt, draws his pistol and orders the crowd to disperse, citing the protected status of the building, adamant about his intent to uphold the law. One man against a mob. He won. The Nazis left, and the Berlin fire brigade arrived in time to put out the fire that had been started. A single person. It would have been so easy for Otto Bellgardt to stand aside, to give up in the face of impossible odds.

                His behavior addressed a question that had always troubled me; what can one person do in the face of unspeakable evil? Otto Bellgardt found his answer, and kept his honor, not to mention the New Synagogue, intact. Later in the war, the New Synagogue (now rebuilt) was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid. Otto Bellgardt, pictured below, disappeared in combat on the Eastern Front, another casualty of war.

                Our tour then took us around the corner to Saint Hedwig’s, a Catholic Hospital where Marianne Hapig was the chief social worker. As Jews from Berlin were rounded up for shipment to concentration camps in the east, many were temporarily housed in a building near the hospital. Marianne Hapig and a doctor from St. Hedwig’s began providing medical assistance for these Jews as they were awaiting deportation, living in cramped and unsanitary conditions. She came up with the idea of diagnosing some with contagious illnesses, and offering the services of St. Hedwig’s. The Gestapo, wanting to avoid an outbreak of disease, quickly agreed. A handful of lives were saved as the Jews were declared dead and hidden in the city. But Marianne Hapig’s crusade had just begun.

                At the time there were thousands of Jews in hiding in Berlin. Word spread through the underground of anti-Nazi sympathizers that medical aid was available at Saint Hedwig’s. Illness, malnutrition and injuries from constant Allied bombings took its toll on the health of these hidden Jews. As we stood on the steps of the main entrance to the hospital, pictured above, I wondered what it must have been like to emerge from hiding, sick, without identity papers, needing to trust rumors of medical care. While it took courage and daring for Marianne Hapig to do what she did, and it must have taken a brave determination for hidden Jews to take that step in blind faith.

                During the war, identity papers were more precious than gold. Without them, any spot check on the street would mean deportation if not instant execution. At some point, Marianne realized she had a steady source of valid Aryan identity papers; those of the victims of the bombings who died at the hospital. Instead of turning them in, she began to save them and then was able to provide papers to hidden Jews who fit the physical descriptions of the dead.

                As the war worsened for the Germans, the Wehrmacht finally took over Saint Hedwig’s as a military hospital, and ordered that all civilian patients be removed. It was the end of Marianne’s source of identity papers, but also the occasion of her greatest inspiration. She demanded that if the military ordered her patients to be released before they were healthy, they should provide transportation to the country for recuperation, and that each patient must be assigned a nurse’s aide as a companion. The Wehrmacht obliged, and before long a convoy left Berlin for safer ground, with hundreds of patients and their helpers – young Jewish girls, now armed with official identity papers.

                Marianne Hapig provided the inspiration for what would become my first novel. Fictionalized as Elsa Klein of Saint Ludwig’s, her story became a keystone of that book. Marianne survived the war, and there are several plaques and remembrances of her in Berlin today.

                I didn’t expect further inspiration for my foray into writing, but it came yet again in the Harz Mountains. We had left the wonderful, history-thick city of Berlin behind to hike in central Germany, an area that had seen some of the last days of fighting in World War II. One day, at the end of a long hike, we descended a path down a hill and came upon a small German military cemetery. It was secluded, and a fair distance from the main road. We detoured in, and were struck by the dates on the tombstones; late April and early May 1945, the last week of the war. The ages on the markers were young and old, sixteen and sixty, little in between; sad, useless sacrifices.

                In one corner of the cemetery there were other tombstones, all marked Unknown Russian. And unlike all the other grave sites, each of these plots held a pot of fresh geraniums. Who were these Russians? And why were they there? Military cemeteries are for the dead of specific nations, and enemies are never co-mingled. I recalled a news item from the year before, about a soldier in the Gettysburg National Cemetery having been identified more than 140 years after that Civil War battle as a Confederate. His remains were respectfully disinterred and returned to his home state.

                So who were the unknown Russians, and why did they lie with German dead in this small, out-of-the way graveyard of young boys and old men? And most mysteriously, why were there fresh flowers on the Russian graves?

                And who put them there?

                I came up with my own answers to those questions when I returned home and started writing On Desperate Ground. I had no reason to wait another thirty years; ideas and intent combined to show me I could conceive of and bring a novel to conclusion. Completion bred confidence, and the process gave birth to the Billy Boyle WWII mystery series. But this first novel is close to my heart, as is the memory of those real people who dared to act in the face of evil.

a Vichy past

Yrsa's at the Frankfurt Bookfair. Seems her hotel doesn't have Wifi - how unGermanic - but asked me to jump in for her today. Next week here at Bouchercon I'm looking forward to the bar and seeing fellow blogmates Yrsa, Tim and Stan and I hope some of you.

A few months ago I posted about meeting Serge Klarsfeld, the lawyer, historian and Holocaust survivor in Paris. We met in his office on rue la Boétie, as you see above. In this photo he's holding a newly discovered Vichy document titled "Law Regarding the Status of Jews" just days ago after it was donated anonymously to the Holocaust Memorial in Paris. The document marked "confidential," in many places shows what experts have authenticated as Pétain's own handwriting.
The really chilling thing, if you look closely, are the red pencilled notes in Petain's hand in the margins. In a section defining the professions and activities Jews were to be banned from, Pétain crossed out the exception for "descendants of Jews born French or naturalized before 1860." This, Klarsfeld says, proves Pétain was responsible for toughening up repressive legislation and ensuring it would be applicable to all Jews — a role that disproves the old arguments in France that Pétain and his Vichy government actually worked to mitigate the Nazis' anti-Semitic acts as much as possible.

"People have said Petain was just an old man who was manipulated as a figurehead of the Vichy state," says Klarsfeld, also president of the Association of Sons and Daughters of French Deportees. "This document shows Pétain not only intervened to push legislation against Jews further than proposed, but created an entire anti-Semitic outlook and framework that — in 1940 — was even harsher than what the Germans had adopted."

Now almost 70 years from the day it became law marks another major step in France's re-examination of its World War II history. For decades the world viewed France largely as a victim — and resistant — of Nazi Occupation, with only a minority of French people becoming collaborators, efforts to challenge that version of the past began in earnest in July 1995. Then President Jacques Chirac broke with long-standing contentions that Vichy was an illegal aberration that did not represent France and apologized to Jews for "the criminal insanity of the occupying power was assisted by the French state."

Chirac's address in 1995 came during a memorial service at the site of the former Vel d'Hiv, the bicycle racing stadium where thousands of Jewish familes, who had been rounded up by French police for deportation to concentration camps, were held for days. The stadium was torn down and now houses a branch of the Interior Ministry.
But Chirac's speech was the real landmark in the beginning of France's acknowledgment of it's shadowed past of collaboration.
Since then, France has worked towards returning real estate, artwork, and myriad possessions stolen from Jews during the Occupation. Last year, in an attempt to help with the process of paying damage claims to victims, France recognized the wartime state's responsibility for rounding up and deporting some 77,000 Jews from 1942 to 1944. Years too late, say some.

One of the families deported in the Paris 'Vel d'Hiv' roundup in 1942 were my friend Sarah's grandmother, grandfather and aunt. Family she never met whose only trace remains in their names carved on the wall of Remembrance at the Jewish Memorial.
I've walked on the street where they once lived and where they were rounded up in the early July morning by the French police. Imagined where the buses, Paris public buses comandeered by the police, waited to take them across the river to the Vel d'hiv. Then to Drancy, the holding camp outside Paris which you pass on the train coming in from Charles de Gaulle airport. Then the long train ride to Poland. I know their convoy number, the date they arrived in Auschwitz. After that the traces go up in smoke.


This touches me right now because that's the story I told in my first book, Murder in the Marais. Tried to. It hits even harder since I'm revisiting the book for it's reissue next year. My book came out in 1999 when collaborationist revelations were coming to light in Paris. Strikingly now, with even more of the lingering dark spots in France's memory of its Nazi history: the question of whether World War I hero Pétain was a figurehead who had been manipulated into representing the collaborationist Vichy regime or a firm believer and active player in its anti-Semitic activities alongside the Nazis.


Klarsfeld says "These October 1940 French laws prepared the ground for the deportations of French Jews as part of the German Final Solution. When you see documents like this showing Pétain and his colleagues had already adopted a clear and harsh anti-Semitic outlook beforehand, it isn't surprising that Vichy provided the police that were needed to round up and deport French Jews when the Nazis requested them."
Pétain — who was in his mid-80s when he took the top Vichy post — was tried and sentenced to death for collaboration after the war. That sentence was commuted to life in prison by de Gaulle — in part due to his WWI heroism, and arguments that the elderly Pétain had little real influence in the Vichy regime. Pétain died in 1951. In prison.

Cara - Wednesday