My mother has been in prison. My father too, my grandfather on my father’s side and also on my mother’s side. One of my uncles was condemned to death and escaped by a strange turn of events: he was very good at making things and he made an instrument for the son of a warder. Other close and distant relatives have worn prison stripes. All of them have had an indelible mark on their identities which allowed no one until my generation to aspire to becoming a public employee, at least not until Pasok arrived in Greece in the eighties and cleaned out the swollen shelves of the “civil” past in Greece. They called it civil war, or as they were supposed to write until twenty years ago, simmoritopolemos – war of the bandits. The history books say that it lasted from 1946 to 1950 or until 1960, or they have it starting in 1942…I know that it ended in 1974 with the fall of the military junta. Only then were the prisons and concentration camps really emptied and times changed and started again to follow the movement of the clock.

The Greek civil war was the bloodiest conflict of European history until the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The signs are in the genealogy of all Greeks born before 1974.

One of the ways of fighting the war was the use of massive widespread detention as a preventive weapon. Women, with or without their children, often finished up willingly behind the walls of the prisons. One of these places was the Averoff prison, built at the end of the eighteen hundreds to contain about 100 – 120 detainees, which at the end of ’47 held about ten times the number. Of these 99% were imprisoned for political reasons with long sentences or capital punishment and 119 were children.

On 13 April 1949 Manto Daliani crossed the threshold of the prison, imprisoned for 21 months on charges of subversive political action. She had hardly finished her studies in medicine and was the daughter of refugees from Asia Minor.

Public Prosecutor: “Is this a civil war or a war between Greeks and Bulgarians?”
Manto: “I don’t know. We will get the answer from History and research done in the future”
Public Prosecutor: “You intellectuals are the ruin of the poor Greek people”

Manto Daliani was acquitted after 21 months of all charges. On leaving the prison she was never to forget the women and children she had met during that time. In 1956 she left Greece, but in 1980 he went to find the mothers and children, now adults, to carry out one of the most extensive studies on the effects of the prolonged detention of minors. She interviewed 993 persons covering three different generations.

Vignette without caption: child sitting on the edge of a camp-bed.

Alexis was only eight months old when he first met Manto.
The children were not registered among the detainees and therefore did not receive daily food rations. They were kept inside for 16 hours a day like the detainees. (picture: camp-bed, wall, from the window small church and palm).

Half of the women were illiterate, some had attended elementary school. University education was the patrimony of very few including Arianna who was a voluntary teacher in the prison.

Many children were born in borderline circumstances: Aspasia had followed her husband when he chose to go to the mountains with their newborn baby.

The husband was wounded and all three sought refuge in a cave without food or water.
Aspasia: “I was going mad and started to scream. My cries echoed through the wood but I didn’t care if they found me or killed me. Finally I gave myself up and saved the baby. I later discovered that my husband had been executed in the cave, like an animal.”

More than once Daliani had the impression that some had abandoned their children. But this was a well-kept secret that no one wanted to reveal.
(picture of woman seen from behind)

The warders were monks dressed in black. They incited the women to sign the famous “repentance document” promising their milk rations for the children.
(picture of the monks in the courtyard)

Those who signed were then ostracised by the others. The signature was considered indelible proof of betrayal. Often the rejection continued in social life and the blemish of traitor remained branded on the social memory.

Tzeni was six years old when she stood before the judge begging for the liberty of her mother Iris.
“I remember that moment very well. I respect my parents for their dedication to the political struggle, but at the same time was unhappy that they joined their struggle for social justice with the fate of a child. They had no right to do this. I told them that if I had had a daughter I would never have taken part in any struggle.”

In 1950 children older than two were taken away from their mothers as punitive action for the protests of the women against the conditions of political prisoners. Many women were released only in 1960. Some of the children were entrusted to adoptive parents while others went to o rphanages especially set up by Queen Frideriki.
“Where are you from?”
“I am from the Averoff prison”
Prison at this point had become home.

The state nursery schools did not have calendars or clocks, and the progress of the day was marked by a bell. (picture of the bell).

Wherever they went, the children had to march as if on parade, even when they received visitors or went to the park.

A commission decided the return to the families. Often this was a very painful moment for the mothers.
Rea: “the word ‘mother’ did not exist for my children. At first they called me “communist” or “anti-patriot”. That was what they had been taught at the orphanage”.

On leaving prisons and the concentration camps spread over the rocky island of the Aegean, many women went from detention to the most extreme poverty. Until the end of the seventies public employment was denied them, their children and grandchildren.

In spite of all this, the data collected by Daliani informs us that the children of these women did not have significant repercussions from traumas and phobias and often they managed to reach good social positions, to study and benefit from the progressive growth of the middle class in Greek society. The reasons for this were many: one that interests me more is the role that the extended family had and the idea that everything happens to “improve the world”.

I am on the swing and I am nine years old. My relatives are speaking loudly as usual.

“Do you remember when we were at college?”
“Which one, Makronissos?”

I thought that everyone had studied in American or English colleges.
I was not yet aware that my grandmother had prohibited any open conversation in the home about the detention and used the word “college” to mean something quite different. I discovered this many years later. Nevertheless, knowledge is one of the most important assets that my family was able to pass on.

Published in Italian language inside inguineMAH!gazine no 7 Coniglio editore, Rome.

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