It was a fabulous October morning and I was quite happy, for once, to run errands. I went to the bookstore just to buy a notebook and a pen but wound up buying a couple of “vacation from myself” books as well. One was The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman. It’s another “coming of age” for the elderly books that have become popular in recent years.
Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, and Ron are pensioners living in Kent. Close friends, they’ve started the Thursday Murder Club so that they can solve murder mysteries together. It helps to keep them fresh while growing old.
The book is easy to read and flies by quickly. It’s not very realistic but it’s meant to entertain and to present the elderly in a context that is not boring and obsolete. But the purpose of this post is another. Outside the bookstore where I bought The Man Who Died Twice, there’s a stand with free book review newspapers. The first review I saw was The Woman Who Died Twice. I didn’t know dying twice was a thing.
The Woman Who Died Twice is by author and lyricist Manos Eleftheriou. It’s the story of Eleni Papadaki, a famous Greek stage actress who was executed in 1944. She’d been accused of collaborating with the Germans so now, post war, it was time for retribution. Eleni was taken to the woods with other presumed Nazi sympathizers and shot twice. Her body was then dumped in a communal grave.
Although based on a true story, in Eleftheriou’s book Eleni is only grazed by bullets and left for dead in the snow. Her brother, too grief stricken to think beyond his emotions, identifies another woman at the morgue as his sister. But Eleni, although she had fallen unconscious after being shot, was still alive. After she comes to, Eleni manages to make it to a nearby farmhouse. Here, while listening to the radio, she realizes that her friends now reject her. Ostracized, Eleni understands that, if she wants to continue living, she must hide for the rest of her life.
No doubt Eleftheriou felt the need to write this book trying to make sense of what had happened to Eleni and to offer the martyred actress some form of atonement.
War is lethal. And it kills more than just bodies. Even after the departure of Nazis from occupied Greece, the brutality continued. In December of 1944, the tension between various political factions was so extreme that shooting broke out in Athens. Around 250,000 Greeks from the political left, while demonstrating in Syntagma Square, were shot at by police hiding on the rooftops. Many people were massacred including a six-year-old boy.
Because this took place in December, these events are referred to collectively as the Dekemvriana (December = Δεκέμβριος).
Years later it came out that Katina Paxinou, a well-known actress, was responsible for the accusations against Eleni. Katina and Eleni were professional rivals. Katina couldn’t stand the competition, so she accused Eleni of having an affair with the Greek prime minister who was collaborating with the Germans. As a result, Eleni was kicked out of the Greek Actor’s Association and executed without a trial. But not much time after her death, Eleni’s accusers admitted that they’d made a mistake and shouldn’t have killed her. Even Greek partisans called her execution “an idiocy”. In fact, the truth was that Eleni had helped to save and not destroy many Greeks lives.
This malformed desire for vendetta is an accessory to war and happens all the time. Women, subjected to wars created by patriarchal needs, are often accused of “horizontal collaboration” and subsequently subjected to humiliating punishments such as with the tondeurs and tondues:
“At the end of WWII, over 20,000 French women were accused of having had “horizontal collaborations” with the Germans. Even prostitutes, who sold their bodies to the Germans in the same way bistrot owners had sold their wines, were singled out and publicly humiliated by having their hair shaved off then paraded in public semi-naked often with swastikas painted on their foreheads. This punishment was obviously misogynistic as it was restricted to women. Furthermore, because of a war instigated by men, many French mothers of young children had husbands in German prisoner-of-war camps. Without pleasure, they slept with German soldiers simply to feed their children.”
War is proof that man is not as intelligent as he thinks he is. War creates a fiction that one side is right and the other side is wrong. Thus war implies that we do not consider others equals because we consider our side superior and the other side inferior. Furthermore, the side that feels itself superior also feels the right to impose itself on others and these “others” must be complacent or die.
And it doesn’t matter whether or not you consider yourself superior because you’re not—war turns us all into slaves.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower
There is no democracy in war.
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Related: Coco Chanel and Tondeurs and tondues +
Eleni Papadaki (1903-1944) + Για τη δολοφονία της ηθοποιού Ελένης Παπαδάκη + Eleni Papadaki’s tomb and info (1903–1944) + Dekemvriana: Ground Zero in the Greek Civil War + Dekemvriana + The TV series Astheneis kai odoiporoi (2002) is actually based on the last few years of her life(her name was changed to Theano Galati for it though).
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman is being adapted into a movie by Steven Spielberg
The Narrative Within 