GREECE: Unwelcome Home

During the Greek civil war (1946-49). when Communists burned, looted and terrorized in northern Greece, the Reds kidnaped some 40,000 Greeks and carried them off to the satellite countries. The prisoners are now beginning to come back. The move began as a trickle from Yugoslavia (now Greece’s ally), then more came from Hungary, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria. By last week the number of refugees repatriated by the Communists had reached 3,600.

They presented an unexpected problem. Though in other parts of the world hundreds of thousands of refugees had chosen to live in squalor and misery rather than live under Communism, few of the returned Greeks seemed happy to be back in their own country.

For one thing, not many of the Greek repatriates actually went home. Most of their villages were destroyed in the war. They are billeted in Epirus and Macedonia, which are two of the poorest regions in a poor country. The repatriates have not enough to eat, and no employment. Under their Communist masters, they were adequately clothed and housed and fed so long as they worked hard and did not rebel. In advanced countries like Czechoslovakia, some had also learned trades which, in northern Greece, they cannot ply.

In Kastoria 217 repatriates, sent back last year from Rumania and Czechoslovakia, are living wretchedly in four ramshackle stone buildings. Each got 150 drachmas ($5) from the government the day he arrived in Greece, nothing since.

Last week in Kastoria, a worn woman of 55 cooked a pot of beans—a meal for eleven people—while unemployed men sat silently on crates and battered luggage.

The crates contained new bicycles, radios and sewing machines—presented to the departing repatriates by the Communists and carried into Greece as effective propaganda material. Some of the shiny merchandise had already been sold for food.

Two youths repatriated to a village in the Grammos Mountains have declared their intention of returning to Hungary.

Other young people have been talking about how good things were under the Reds. Western authorities are sure that Communist Party agents have been seeded among the repatriates, but so far the Greek police have not smoked them out.

At Salonika, regional headquarters for northern Greece, an official threw up his hands at the prospect that the stream of repatriates might steadily grow larger.

“Where will we put them?” he asked.

Premier Papagos’ government has been slow in working out plans. U.S. Ambassador Cavendish Cannon has kept an anxious eye on the situation, and Washington has been urged to absorb as many of the repatriates as possible under the Greek quota (17,000 a year), and to chip in with money if the Greek government can figure out a workable plan.