THE BALKANS: Liberation & Desperation

Last week British troops jimmied open Greece’s back door, found the inhabitants starved, malarial or missing, and a desperate political situation throughout the country.

Almost every village had stories to tell of German torture chambers, narrow boxes studded with nails in which men were forced to stand until they fell exhausted. At Kalavryta the Nazis had machine-gunned the entire male population —700 men and boys. Some 1,300 women and girls escaped only because an Austrian soldier let them out of a burning building. The Germans shot him.

Side by side with the German terror flourished a Greek terror. The British had expected to arrive as liberators. Instead, since the bulk of the German forces had been withdrawn, they found themselves playing the role of policeman to a country on the brink of civil war — and sometimes over the brink. The Greek resistance forces wore the insignia of E.A.M. (leftwing National Liberation Front) or E.L.A.S. (E.A.M.’s fighting arm).

From the lines at Patras, the New York Times’s A. C. Sedgwick wrote: “The E.L.A.S. holds sway through force of arms. . . . Undoubtedly there are many in the E.L.A.S. who are hardly conscious of the aims of the party’s innermost core, but those who profess to know them see endless complications in store from a new type of tyranny that, they say, has already been manifested. Some say that the people suffered as much from the excesses of the E.L.A.S. in browbeating them into Communism as from the Germans.”

Panayotis Kanellopoulos, first minister to return from the Greek Government in Exile, met the new force when he stepped on the balcony of the former U.S. Consulate at Patras. Repeatedly he was interrupted by shouts of “We want rule by the people.” Sternly the former University of Athens professor replied: “The Government will do all in its power to satisfy your wishes. First, however, we want obedience to the Government. “The church bells rang out thanksgiving for liberation, but King George’s royal crown was conspicuously missing from the flapping Greek flags.

Said one well-informed Greek: Premier Papandreou “won’t last six weeks once the Government gets to Athens, and if he does, woe betide poor Greece. She will be bathed in blood.” He added: “Watch young Venizelos (liberal Vice Premier, who recently left the Papandreou Government in a huff), and keep a weather eye on the shadowy figure called Rendis, who until recently was minister without portfolio in the Papandreou Cabinet.”