GREECE: Death and Inflation

Greece was free of organized German resistance last week—but not of the twin problems of inflation and the EAM.

Newly liberated Salonika was almost entirely in the hands of EAM’s combat group, the ELAS, and the EAM was almost entirely in the hands of Greek Communists. In the Peloponnesus, the Horofylaki (national constabulary) had ceased to exist. It had been ousted by ELAS members. At Kalamai, when the lights were turned on for the first time in three-and-a-half years, Greeks flocked joyously to the town square, found seven, men hanging, a dozen more stabbed to death. Among the dead: Kalamai’s mayor.

In Athens, too, corpses were on display. Into the square facing the Government’s offices flocked several hundred angry men, sobbing women, for another of EAM’s interminable demonstrations. But something had been added to the hammer-&-sickle pennants and sloganizing banners. The crowd carried three improvised litters, containing three bodies—still warm. Leftists charged the nationalist-royalist X-Battalion had killed the three men. The opposition charged that EAM members had disinterred three newly buried bodies, was using them for propaganda.

The EAM demonstrators shouted for Prime Minister George Papandreou to come and touch the bodies. But the Government had another corpse on its hands.

The Greek financial system lay prostrate. Finance Minister Alexander Svolos begged for confidence. Said Svolos: the country’s credit is fundamentally sound, its gold reserve is worth $175,000,000. But the gold reserve is abroad, and the home reaction to Svolos’ appeal was immediate: the British gold sovereign (U.S. value: $4) rose from ten trillion drachmas to 22 trillions.

Shopkeepers were closing their doors, unable to sell what luxury goods they had left (fine German cameras, handsome Swiss watches), unwilling to sell for drachmas what little food they had. A fish seller would refuse several billion drachmas, but jump at the offer of some fresh olives in exchange for a fish. Three cigarets would buy more than cash in a market where bread was priced at 11 billions a pound, eggs at 15 billions apiece.