THE LOST BABY OF THE CIVIL WAR
THE LOST BABY OF THE CIVIL WAR
Description
In the Pierian mountains, during the Civil War, two young guerilla fighters get married and have a baby. When their unit is chased by a detachment of the opposing army, the baby’s crying risks betraying their position.
Part of Collections
12 Podcasts
THE 1940S
Tags
Credits
Field Reporter
- Kallioph Tsakpounidou
Interviewee
- Paylos Aetopoulos
Podcast Producer
- Stayros Blaxos
Sound Designer
- Alex Retsis
Sound Editor
- Dhmhtrhs Papadakhs
Video Director
- Stefanos Mpertakhs
Voiceover
- Steve Lever
Pavlos Aetopoulos, and I was born in the mountains of Pieria. Literally, as they say. In a hut.
My mother was a farmer from a village in Pieria. My father was the son of a teacher. In the war, he joined the fight against the Germans, and he joined what we call the first guerrilla war, on the side of EAM [National Liberation Front]. My mother was also involved in the national resistance. In 1947, during the Civil War, the second guerrilla war, she also took to the mountains. And somewhere there, at the end of ‘48, she met and got to know my father.
It was a relationship that was love from the start and it progressed into marriage; the wedding was at Old Panteleimon in Pieria. Along the way, came the fruit of this love, which was me. A baby that was born during guerilla warfare, literally on a mountain, in a hut. Just imagine, they collected the dew from the leaves of trees to collect a little water, and with the water they had collected—they had powdered milk—they made milk for me to drink. Of course, there were many minor adventures. The rebels felt an almost excessive affection for me. Each of them tried to build a special relationship with me, to play with me, to tell me stories, fairy tales, etc... They thought of me like a precious ornament, I could say.
This situation in the mountains went on for about six months—from June to December—and it was now winter. The Civil War was reaching its end and the rebels basically had to find a way to get to the socialist countries of the time.
On one march, they came across a squad of National Army soldiers; the distance between them was very close. They were afraid that, as a child, as an infant, I’d start to cry and give away their position. That would mean, at the very least, that they’d be arrested until they were executed. And so, the decision was taken very hastily to leave me in a specific spot and then get out of there.
And then the army came, and they found me, an infant, wrapped in a fleece. They forgot their goal of finding the rebels and began to look after me. This squad was based in Larissa. So, upon finding an infant, the officer in charge had to hand it over to his unit, of course, not as loot or an object, but as a curious event.
The officer there, a colonel, took me to the hospital in Larissa. He himself became my godfather and, after a while—after he had tried to adopt me himself, because he had his own family, or to give me somewhere else for adoption, which didn’t happen—he gave me to a foster family.
I was given to a family of gypsies, Roma. Of course, they weren’t those Roma who are constantly on the move, like some do even today. They had stable jobs, their own house, and they got some financial assistance for the expenses involved in raising an infant. And that’s how the foster family happened. The child, me, was now called Pavlos, after the king, with Elassonitis as a surname, from Elassona, the name of the city where the officer who found me first stopped in Pieria.
My father later died from gangrene. He got a wound on his leg while in the Epirus mountains heading towards Albania or Yugoslavia. My mother was on her own: the whole group of rebels had left. And, through instinct or fear, she had this thought at the back of her mind: ‘Should I stop here, not leave, and go and look for the child I left? To see if he is alive or not.’ She surrendered to the state authorities in Ioannina. There, in Ioannina, she was convicted as a rebel.
After three years, after prison and all the rest of it, my mother started the process of looking for the infant she had abandoned in 1949. And she actually began to find ways, means, people, information, going as far as the queen of the time, Frederica. She sent her a letter telling her the whole story, how she had abandoned a child, and all the rest of it. The Queen sent her a reply, which said: ‘I will look into this, to learn what I can.’
And, indeed, after a short time, she got a letter from the Greek Army officer who had become my godfather, and he said: ‘Yes, I know this story, it happened in Pieria.’ And: ‘He arrived in Larissa, I became his godfather, and I gave him to a foster family. Of course, I don’t know the foster family.’
So, my mother reached Larissa, now through lawyers and all that, to submit papers and files. Bear in mind, we are talking about immediately after the Civil War, and everything was ‘overshadowed by threats’ [lyrics from Greece’s national anthem] for every sensible and ideological leftist. Despite this, she had the courage to keep going. And, at some point, she found the family.
And there was a problem. The family did not want to give up the child. The foster family said: ‘No, we are not giving you the child. We love him and want to keep him’, etc. And this forced my mother to go to court, for the court to decide whether the child should be returned to its biological mother or not. And how could this be proved? We are talking about a time when there wasn’t DNA, and all that, which we have today.
My mother tells me that I was also in the courtroom. And that I chose my mother. And that was one reason why the judge said: ‘This is his natural and biological mother; we are giving him back.’ What is important is that I was returned to my biological mother, and I lived with her from ‘52.
At that time, I had the name Pavlos Elassonitis, but officially no father, no mother, like I didn’t exist. And the Greek State said: ‘Now you have to choose the name of a father and mother, because your parents are officially unknown.’ My father’s surname was Konstantinidis. But my mother, despite having had a formal wedding in a church, couldn’t produce the witnesses who were at the wedding, because the witnesses were rebels. In the 50s, who would dare go to a Greek court and say: ‘Your Honour, I was a rebel, and I was at these people’s wedding’? So, the matter had to end there. The procedure was that my mother had to agree that my father was unknown, so I became the child of Zoe Aetopoulou. And I have lived with that name, the new name. The Pavlos remained, but Elassonitis became Aetopoulos. And so, as the song says, I am a child: ‘Without a father, but with a mother.’
From what I’ve heard, I’ve always been proud of my father. I don’t remember him at all, not even what he looked like: nothing. The only thing I have is a photograph. But every time I happened to hear things from other people, they spoke of someone who was very giving, something my mother stressed many times. I have no personal experience of my father, and this whole story is very vague for me.