Word: kalavryta
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When the Germans came back, they found the graves and demanded to know who had killed their men. Most of the people of Kalavryta did not like the ELAS Communists, but they would not betray fellow Greeks. Infuriated, the Germans burned down the houses of five men known to have joined the guerrillas. Then for good measure they burned the hotel...
...wintry dark and the mud of Kalavryta's streets was frozen, when the bells tolled that morning-Dec. 13, 1943 -and the 2,400 men, women & children of Kalavryta gathered obediently at the grey stone schoolhouse. A few mothers who had left their babies sleeping at home were ordered to return and get them. "You may be gone for some time," an officer explained. Women and girls, boys under 13 and men over 80 were sorted out and locked in the schoolhouse...
...Communist guerrillas came back to Kalavryta too in 1948, during Greece's bitter civil war and for a month held and looted the village. Again there were cries for help. The King and Queen came; so did General Van Fleet. Athens granted $40-a-month pensions to the widows in black. But soon Athens forgot; three years ago the pensions were stopped, and important officials no longer thought to come. "It is the'way of governments to forget," said a widow of Kalavryta...
Last year Frau Ehrengard Schramm, a German historian, arrived in Greece to write a war history. She wanted to visit Kalavryta, but was warned not to; she went anyway. She met hostility but no harm. "They were simple in their sorrow," she said, "not fanatical. They had no self-pity, but their faces expressed so much sorrow my breath stopped." She talked with one woman whose husband and three sons had been killed. "Her figure," she said, "seemed to have turned to stone...
Frau Schramm returned to Germany determined to arouse German women to the plight of Kalavryta, and to raise funds to buy machinery for some simple industry. "This is a matter for women," she said. "We must not let it get into the hands of men, who would spoil...