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12
'u/ini
June. 194S
gan where they thought law and order had last existed. They were prepared to go back, even in the case of Italy, to institutions which had existed before.
In each case, there were millions of people who were not. In fact, there were movements which fought the Axis, not only to defeat Germans and Italians but also to gain a life very much different from that which existed before. There is the case of the Jugoslavs. They fought Italians and Germans and they fought among themselves. One of the factions, that of Michailovic, fought for the Serb king against the Partisans. To millions of Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Montenegrins, the Serbs had been dictators in control; nonSerbs were second-class people.
There is the case of the Greeks. The pre-war government of Metaxas and King George was fascist; it came to power by suppressing all the democratic groups.
Constantine Poulos, American correspondent, gives us some Greek background when he tells of his visits to Kaiseriani, the great workers' section of Athens.
He writes: "My first visit was on Thursday night, October 12. The Germans had not completely withdrawn from the city, but the last of them were to leave the next day. The Kaiseriani was celebrating. Bright bonfires blazed on the main street and in the neighboring squares . . . Around the fires the young people were dancing Greek folk dances. The
old people sat around chatting gaily. On the steps of their church, a goodsized group of older young people were singing folk ballads. They invited me to sit with them, and they sang to me . . .
"We talked of the Germans. A hundred voices proudly told me that the Germans had called the Kaiseriani the "Stalingrad" of Greece. The greatest strength of the Athens underground resistance movement was concentrated here. Acts of sabotage against the occupation forces were planned from here, and the individuals who carried them out came mainly from the ranks of the Kaiseriani workers."
Poulos tells how he reviewed 2,000 stalwart young men of the Kaiseriani after the Germans had gone. Those were the workers' sons of the Greeks of Asia Minor, who had come to Greece as destitute refugees in 1922.
"We are the children of those people who were pushed around and exchanged like cattle by the great men of the world 22 years ago," a young commander of the Kaiseriani brigade announced. "We grew up in a bleak world of poverty, misery, and fascism. We fought that fascism, both domestic and foreign. Now we are free from foreign fascism, and for that freedom we paid dearly. But we know that the fight against domestic fascism, which wants to keep us in poverty and misery, is not over."
Today the people of Kaiseriani are sullen and bitter. Their houses have been levelled. Foreigners came in and