In Europe

years ago, if only from the way the old men treat this bent and bowed Calliope.
    Fifty years ago: when they were still young, when Anogia was wiped off the face of the earth.
    When evening comes the moon rises at the top of the main street like a monstrous disc. Anogia lies on the flanks of the Ida range. The houses are white and square, the streets slope down with the hillside, there is a square with plane trees, and everywhere there are tourist shops with colourful weaving.
    Back behind the village is a museum displaying the naïve art of atalented shepherd, Chrilios Skoulas. The paintings are huge: pictures of the village with all its streets, and of the painter and his wife posing peacefully in front of their house; of the painter walking through the woods in a flurry of snow, a lamb draped around his neck; of para-troopers landing in green uniforms, the shepherds and other partisans shooting them as they descend, they fall, the green uniforms tumble, the dogs lick their blood; of the village with fire leaping from every roof, airplanes, dead people everywhere, old men being chased into houses that are burning like torches, women and children being led away and the partisans trying to rescue them. And then there is a huge tableau of peace, of the men and women who finally returned, of the church with the souls of the dead floating above it.
    The present-day mayor of Anogia was ten years old at the time. All he remembers is the smoke and the smell of fire. He and a group of young boys found a cave to hide in; then they roamed through the mountains with the partisans for three weeks, living on cheese and goat's milk. ‘When we finally came back to our village, there was not one stone on top of the other. There was this strange smell that we couldn't place. Then we saw the bodies everywhere, swollen bodies, soaked from the rain. No one said anything, no one wept, we stayed absolutely quiet. Talking about it now, my eyes fill with tears. But then we were petrified.’ He and his younger sister decided to go to a neighbouring village, to see if their grandfather was still alive. Along the way they saw a man lying under a felled tree, a little boy in his arms. ‘They looked as if they were sleeping.’ Weeping, they ran on. Their grandfather was still there.
    The massacre of the village of Anogia took place on 15 August, 1944. The monument to it consists of an engraved plaque bearing the text of the German order: ‘Because the kidnappers of General Kreipe passed through Anogia, we hereby order that the village be levelled to the ground and that every male inhabitant of Anogia living in the village or within a radius of one mile of the village be executed.’
    The general was the German commander Kreipe, who was kidnapped by partisans and British agents and smuggled off to Egypt. More than 140 people were murdered that day, most of them women and the elderly. Most of the men had already joined up with the partisans, the others had fled into the mountains. ‘But we got a lot of Germans too,’ the mayorsays.‘What did they know about the mountains around here?'The German reprisals were merciless: ten dead Cretans for every German killed.
    The people of Anogia are obstinate, the children's expressions are open, and the women know what they want: their men, after all, spend a large part of the year wandering through the mountains with their flocks, and are often gone for months at a time. All this makes for a rather different view of the Second World War than that held by most Europeans. Here no one crawled or licked the dust, here there were no ‘sensible’ mayors in wartime, here there were no compromises or guilty feelings; here the people simply fought hard, and on Crete the Germans never gained much of a foothold.
    Anogia was a typical partisan village, like Viannos, Kotomari and Myrtos, where the Germans committed similar atrocities. A few pictures have been preserved from Kotomari: the men of the village driven together into an olive grove; a man who tried to escape, a handsome, curly-haired young fellow talking for his life; the firing squad, the soldier out in front smiling as he aims; the corpses fallen across each other.
    When he came back sixteen years later to see how things were with ‘his’ Kotomari, the German soldier who took these photographs was nonetheless welcomed with ouzo. And the mayor of Anogia says today: ‘I saw Germans crying. I saw it when they shuffled into our ambush like sheep and