‘If we forget, we are guilty’

On November 29, 2023 an opulent “Memorial of the Nation’s Immortals” was inaugurated at the Ministry of National Defense. Its core is a large altar with an eternal flame for the country’s fallen since it became a nation. On each side of the altar are a series of panels that converge on the 16-meter pole bearing the Greek flag that stands at the head of the altar. The panels of the memorial, which is being relocated to the Military Academy in Vari, feature the names of the 121,692 Greeks who gave their lives for their country in national conflicts from 1830 to 1974.

But the panels do not contain any of the names of the 15,628 Greek government forces killed in the Civil War from 1945 to 1949. The very ministry that called these men to duty now appears to want to erase their sacrifice from the collective memory of the Greek nation.

Yet who did these men die fighting – Communist insurgents who wanted to establish a Stalinist dictatorship in the land that created democracy and to give away Macedonia to Yugoslavia in exchange for its support of their insurgency.

And why did they sacrifice their lives? To keep their country free and whole.

These young men did not volunteer to put their lives on the line. Their government recruited them to defend the nation, and they answered the call. They did not rush to battle seeking glory but laid down their lives to save Greece from dictatorship and dismemberment. They fully earned an honored place on any list of “immortals” who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

What a betrayal then of these brave young soldiers and officers, 15,628 of them, who never got a chance to live out their lives, to be erased from the honor rolls of the very ministry that sent them to their fate.

To have their sacrifice ignored even by a left-leaning government like SYRIZA or PASOK would have been deplorable. To have it happen at the hands of a supposedly center-right New Democracy government is a disgrace.

Why, then, were the names of the government forces killed during the Civil War omitted from the “Memorial of the Nation’s Immortals” created by the very ministry that conscripted them? The answer is obvious – if the ministry listed the government forces killed, it would have felt compelled to list the Communist insurgents killed as well for they too were Greeks, or face protests from the left. So the ministry chose to include neither in the interest of political correctness.

But in so doing the ministry betrays the very goal for which the monument was created – to honor the armed forces who died to preserve “the freedom” of the nation, as a monument bulletin states. Government forces in the Civil War sacrificed their lives to do just that and succeeded while the aim of the Communists was to establish a dictatorship. Fortunately, they failed, but they inflicted on the Greek people untold violence (at least 157,000 killed), massive destruction (800,000 civilians displaced), and national privation (a 10-year setback in the country’s postwar reconstruction). That is hardly a record to earn the insurgents a place in a hallowed memorial for those who gave their last full measure of division for their country.

Greek mercenaries fought with the Persians at Marathon but none of them were buried in the tomb of heroes who died in the battle in defense of freedom. They did not deserve that honor and neither do Communist insurgents deserve to be recognized in the same monument with government defense forces who died during the Civil War.

But the desire of the Defense Ministry to appease the left in the creation of its monument does not stop with the omission of their names but extends even to the fallen from other wars that are listed in the Defense Department monument. Unlike the Normandy and Vietnam memorials, the names of the fallen listed in the Defense Ministry monument do not provide their rank and insignias, apparently to avoid charges of elitism from the left.

On June 26 Defense Minister Nikos Dendias held a press conference to announce that the Monument to the Immortals would be replaced by a new memorial designed by sculptor Konstantinos Varotsos and the plates with the names of the 121,692 fallen in the nation’s struggles would be relocated to the Military Academy. But he made no mention of the 15,628 Civil War dead that were not included in the monument and their sacrifice will continue to be ignored in the memorial’s new location. Dendias once proposed that Greece build a statue of Ho Chi Minh in Macedonia on unverified reports that the Communist Vietnam leader may have fought for the French there during the Balkan Wars. Yet the defense minister is allowing the only memorial in Greece built to honor all of the nation’s “immortals” to completely overlook 15,628 of his fellow countrymen killed fighting for freedom during the Civil War. 

No one suggests that we should encourage past ideological hostility to poison current political discourse but ignoring the sacrifice of thousands of young Greeks to secure freedom for their homeland is a betrayal of the core values that we Greeks as founders of democracy should hold most dear.

The Defense Ministry monument is not the only place Civil War victims are denied official recognition. On September 29 a group of about 40 men and women will gather before a small marble memorial on a hill outside the village of Tsamantas in the Mourgana mountains, whose summit forms the border with Albania. They will go there to honor the memory of 120 Greek soldiers captured by Communist guerrillas in the spring of 1948 and later executed by them.

The victims were Greek soldiers in their late teens and early 20s conscripted to protect democracy, and the executioners were insurgents committed to replacing it with a dictatorship. Yet there will be no government officials, no orators, no journalists, no poets to mark their sacrifice as there are every year at Makronisos to honor the Communist sympathizers imprisoned there during the Civil War.

Captured soldiers were not the only victims of the red terror that engulfed the Mourgana mountains in 1948. In all of the villages along the flanks of the Mourgana massif five to eight people were executed by the Communist rebels occupying them – simple men and women who struggled all their lives to eke out a living from the unyielding mountains. One woman, Olga Bourdouki from the village of Kostana, who was taken by the Germans to Dachau, survived that horror, and returned to her village only to be executed by her fellow countrymen.

Greece has created an alternate universe from other countries whose democracies have come under armed attack. It has chosen to ignore, and try to forget altogether, those who sacrificed their lives to secure democracy during the Civil War and instead tries to recognize and honor those who tried to destroy it.

There is a museum in Athens illustrating the suffering of those imprisoned at Makronisos during the war. But where is the museum for the countless victims of the red terror in the mountains of Epirus and Macedonia?

Every year on November 17, there are demonstrations in Greece against the military regime that ruled the country from 1967 to 1974. I understand the enduring resentment against the junta, and, in fact, I wrote more articles against the regime in American newspapers than any other journalist in the United States at the time because I have always believed that the people who created democracy should find abhorrent any form of dictatorship. But where are the demonstrations against those who fought to establish a Stalinist dictatorship in Greece and killed thousands of their own people trying to do it?

Next to the American Embassy in Athens is a street that bears the name of Petros Kokkalis, the man who helped initiate the pedomasoma (the forced evacuation of children from Communist-held parts of Greece in 1948/1949 to Eastern Bloc countries) as a minister of the rebel government in the mountains and brought such misery to so many families.

My mother, Eleni Gatzoyianni, was executed for defying that policy by sending her children beyond its reach. Where is the street in Athens named for her? I’m not calling on the mayor of Athens to name one for her. Eleni Gatzoyianni doesn’t need a street named after her, doesn’t need a statue, or a monument. The book that bears her name is the only memorial she needs. It is a portable monument that records her life and martyrdom and the death and destruction Greek Communists brought to our country from 1946 to 1949.

But what of the thousands of soldiers and civilians who lost their lives to save Greece from becoming another Stalinist dictatorship like its northern neighbors? Who honors their sacrifice? No one representing the Greek state, that’s for sure.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis went to Normandy on June 6 to honor those who lost their lives in the allied attack to free Europe from Nazi fascism in 1944, and rightly so. But what Greek government official, let alone a prime minister, has gone to Gramos or Vitsi or Mourgana to honor their own people who perished fighting Stalinists in the mountains of their own country? They sacrificed their lives in defense of freedom just like those who perished on Omaha Beach in Normandy. Shouldn’t the Greek state honor their sacrifice?

The justification for ignoring those who died fighting the Communist insurrection in Greece is that we should not open old wounds and revive animosities that divide us. Elie Wiesel faced the same arguments in dealing with those who want to forget the Holocaust. His response is mine as well to those who want to forget the red terror of the Greek Civil War. “If we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices,” he said in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. “We could not prevent their deaths, but if we forget them, they will be killed a second time. And this time it will be our responsibility.”

Nicholas Gage is an author and investigative journalist. He is the author of the award-winning autobiographical memoir “Eleni.”