Troubled Words (Paraponemena Logia)

On the desks of need
And in the school of poverty
We learned about society
and the feeling of old pain

Our songs contain troubled words
Because we've been treated unfairly
even from the cradle of our birth

Our place in the world
was not more than ten feet of land
the size of a house
and the wall of our yard

Our songs contain troubled words...

To understand Greeks, one must understand the history that has shaped them. In 1942, 100,000 Greeks died of starvation. The famine in occupied Greece was the result of a number of
factors. A German effort to plunder the country to support its own war
effort and thus feed its troops, a British blockade designed to put
pressure on the Axis, and finally an inability on the part of the Greek
Quisling government to mobilize available resources to feed the urban
poor due to incomptence and corruption. So many Athenians died that the
dead did not even receive the Orthodox rites of burial. The deep wounds
inflicted during this terrible ordeal radicalized and alienated many
Greeks, setting the stage for the subsequent civil war which will tear
at the very fabric of Greek society.

Excerpted from Inside Hitler's Greece by Mark Mazower:

"A world away from the fashionable boulevards of central Athens , it was the slums on the city's outskirts which bore the brunt of the famine. In the inter-war period, shantytowns had sprung
up or been constructed at a convenient distance from the heart of the
city to house thousands of the refugees who fled from Asia Minor after
the 1922 disaster. Their inhabitants, who had arrived with a few
personal possessions lived in shacks made of tin and boards which were
difficult to heat or keep clean. Families of four or five people shared a
single room; often, instead of proper plumbing, there were open sewers
running behind the muddy alleys. Unlike other Greeks, these newcomers
had no family home in the provinces to return to when times were hard.
They were the country's first genuine urban proletariat, and they had
been badly neglected by the state.

Before the war, they and their children had earned a living in the poorly ventilated factories for low wages; others work as street vendors or
domestic servants. When the occupation began thousands of them lost
their jobs as industrial plant and stocks were requisitioned and fuel
shortages halted economic activity. Major prewar employers like the
textiles and chemicals sectors were forced to reduce output to 10 to 15%
of their usual levels. Desperate to earn money, people turn to peddling
goods or begging. At the docks in Piraeus a crowd of odd job men
occupied the quayside. 'Ex-clerks, workers, chauffeurs, and cashiers
whose jobs have been scrapped, have become porters and try to earn
their miserable daily bread carrying bags on carts or on their backs.
Street vendors sold dirty looking pieces of carob cake figs and other
fruit or matches, cigarettes, old clothes. Beggars lay on the
pavement. In the center of Omonia Square stretched out on blankets above
the warm air vents on the Metro there were people of all ages, holding
out their hands to passerby.

There are no official figures for the extent of unemployment in the poorer quarters, but Marcel Junod of the Red Cross reckoned that over half of
the working-class population was out of work. Two thirds of these
families were enrolled in local soup kitchens but they were not fed more
than two or three times a week and even then not all members of the
family were catered for. Junod observed that women, in particular,
tended to go without food to leave some for their children.

For many the only means of survival was to gather wild grass and other weeds from the countryside around the city. These were then boiled, if
there was fuel available and eaten without oil. But these grasses had
virtually no nutritional value: 5 kilos were needed to produce the
daily dose of hydrocarbons required by the human body. Children searched
through rubbish bins for scraps of food or waited in the service
entrance of large hotels. Others clustered around the doors or
restaurants. Some German officers tormented urchins by throwing scraps
from balconies and watching them fight among themselves. Soldiers eating
olives in the street attracted a crowd of children. As soon as one spat
out an olive stone, the children rushed for it: the fastest would put
it in his mouth and suck it clean.

Though malnutrition enfeebled the body and made work increasingly exhausting, working families have little choice if they wished to stay alive but to
continue as though nothing was happening. Chyrsa P., a widow, went to
work three days a week to earn food for her three tubercular children,
even though she was ill herself. Gregorios M., who had been laid off
work walked several hours each day to the hills to pick wild plants to
bring home. He already showed the edemas that were signs of severe
malnutrition but he had a mother, wife and child to feed.

To make matters worse the hot dry summer was followed by an unusually harsh and prolonged winter: there was snow on the streets of Athens and
at night the temperature fell below freezing. Because coal and wood had
become very expensive and sometimes unobtainable, houses were not
properly heated and people succumbed to colds, flu and TB. After several
weeks of malnutrition people weakened quickly. Vitamin deficiency
caused tumors and boils to appear on their hands and feet and unless
cured these spread onto the body and face. Around half the families in
the poor quarters showed these symptoms by the beginning of 1942.

The final stage before death was a state of physical and mental exhaustion. This is the point at which people simply collapsed and were unable to
raise themselves up again. A builder working on a house in the suburb of
Psychiko suddenly fainted in the summer heat. A woman, who had been
walking with her two undernourished children through central Athens
collapsed in the street leaving the children to cry. Demobilized Greek
servicemen, veterans of the Albanian campaign, lay in doorways or
propped up against walls. One freezing December evening a young man
collapsed on Skoufas Street. 'Get up get up or you're done for,'
someone said to him. 'My God why have you brought me to such a state?'
the young man whispered, ' Why am I not at home instead of crawling
like a dog through the streets at night. Why my God? What did I do to
you?' He was a conscript from the island of Zakynthos, one of many who
had been unable to return home following the end of the fighting and now
begged on the streets without any government support.

In a shack in the refugee quarter of Dourgouti, 40-year-old Androniki P. lay slumped by the door covered in an old blanket, having sold the rest
of her possessions to buy food. Her husband, who had died several days
earlier, lay inside. Her three children sat crying but she was too weak
to help them. In another hut in Agios Georgios, an unemployed worker
lay unable to move while his children clustered around his bed asking
for bread. Many of the people enrolled in the soup kitchens were too
weak to make the journey there. In the working-class district of
Dourgouti which may be regarded as a typical example of the poorest
quarters, 1600 out of the 2200 families need urgent medical attention
and proper nutrition."