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BROKEN BONDS AND DIVIDED MEMORIES: WAR TIME MASSACRES RECONSIDERED IN A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
by Riki Van Boeschoten
This paper discusses the emergence of divided memories in the aftermath of war time massacres in Greece and Italy. Based on ethnographic research in the Greek community of Drakeia, it focuses on an apparent ethnographic enigma: the formation of a strong anti-partisan memory in a community previously organized in the resistance movement. Using comparative material from Italian communities, the paper describes the variety of responses to war time massacres and reflects on what seem to be important factors in shaping such memories: the political context, the process of transmission, social structure, local politics and cultural patterns.
WAR ATROCITIES AND DIVIDED MEMORIES On 18 December 1943, SS soldiers massacred 116 men in the community of Drakeia, located on Mount Pelion (Thessaly). This mass execution was carried out in retaliation for a minor incident which had happened the day before: local partisans had attacked a group of German soldiers and killed two of them. Although the village was guarded as usual by the partisan home guard, at dusk a group of SS soldiers managed to slip through and made their way to the main square. They killed some people in the streets or in their homes, and then gathered as many men as they could find in the coffee shop. After midnight they released seven boys, but at dawn they executed all the remaining men by firing squad. Two men had managed to escape, while seven were wounded but survived. Reprisal actions such as this were applied ona massive scale all over Greece by the Axis in its attempt to break the powerful communist-led resistance movement of EAM-ELAS. By the end of the war more than 1,000 villages had been burnt down and over 20,000 civilians had been killed or wounded by the Wehrmacht.1 But, contrary to what happened in other European countries, the Greek victims of German or Italian war atrocities were largely forgotten for most of the post-war period. This public amnesia is closely linked to the turbulent postwar developments and the contested memories it generated: from 1946-49 a bitter civil war was fought between left-wing partisans and the conservative government backed by Britain and the United States. After the defeat of the Left, former members of the resistance were stigmatised and the whole resistance period was

ABSTRACT
KEY WORDS: Greece, Italy, World War Two, massacres, memory

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turned most of the victims relatives against the partisans and their local supporters. After the massacre bitter hatred took a hold over us. A ghastly hatred, unimaginable. Half of the village hated the other half.2 Other villagers, however, blamed the German soldiers and celebrated the victims as martyrs fallen for freedom, as in the following song composed immediately after the event. They killed them all without exception Then the barbarian enemies left by the river Mothers and sisters came running down Tearing their hair in despair Mothers wept with their orphan children It is not one or two, neither three or five More than a hundred are buried in the churchyard As martyrs and as heroes they will be praised forever And celebrated in this church Yet the dominant memory shaped in its aftermath and still persistent today tells a different story. The question of who was to be blamed for the massacre is the central pivot on which most narratives turn, but the German perpetrators are almost removed to the background. Survivors blame not only the partisans who provoked the retaliation, but even more so the resistance leaders of their own village. This anti-partisan memory comes in different gradations, varying from statements such as they knew [the danger] and didnt tell us3 or they knew and fled to save their skin4 to a more vicious and politicised discourse: they provoked the attack in order to get rid of their opponents.5 Such representations of events are contradicted by other recollected facts, usually acknowledged by the narrator when challenged. For example, the fact that the man who was supposed to know more than any other in the village, the local leader of the partisan home guard, was the first to be killed. In these anti-partisan narratives, the SS soldiers who perpetrated the massacre are almost represented as a force of nature, and exempted from any political responsibility. The Germans dont bother you, if you dont bother them. The price was one [German] to fifty [civilians].6 This conception of the German enemy was a common motif in occupied Greece, yet in a village that lived through such a tragedy and had supported the resistance movement until that very day, this memory presents us with an enigma. This paper tries to explore some aspects of this puzzle and suggests we can improve our insights by adopting a comparative approach.

Drakeia: coffeeshop where the men were rounded up. The square now renamed as sacrifice square.

blacked out from public memory. Official commemorations legitimated the anti-communist Right in power and ostracised supporters of the Left as traitors of the nation. In this context, the victims of German war atrocities could not be represented as freedom-fighters, as in the rest of Europe, but were instead portrayed as innocent victims of the Left. This situation changed only in 1974 after the end of the military dictatorship (1967-1974), created conditions for a normalization of the past. One of the first measures taken by the socialist party PASOK, which came to power in 1981, was to recognise officially the resistance and to legalise the Greek communist party. In official discourse the resistance was now celebrated as a united struggle of all Greeks and past divisions were simply pushed under the carpet. As important as this new context was to advance the process of democratic transition, it was unable to tackle the more profound cleavages left by the civil war, as it imposed reconciliation from above. During this period of democratic revival Greek historians engaged in re-writing the history of the 1940s, but left out the issue of war massacres from their research agendas. The rediscovery of this memory, together with that of the Holocaust, is a development of the last few years. For nearly half a century the massacre of Drakeia had been forgotten even in local memory and it was only in 2002, on the initiative of the then left-wing mayor, that the village was officially recognised as a martyred village. However, this public recognition did not put to rest the conflicting memories and the political cleavages which had divided the community ever since that cold December morning of 1943. Whereas the village had been organised in the left-wing Resistance movement, the massacre

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MARTYRED VILLAGES AND THE DISCOVERY OF DIVIDED MEMORIES The case of Drakeia is not exceptional. All over Europe martyred villages destroyed by Nazi war atrocities are still trying to come to terms with the traumatic memories of events which happened half a century go. Recent ethnographic research among the survivors and their offspring has shown that collective mourning has often produced a fractured memory centred on the guilt question and that in many cases, as in Drakeia, the responsibility for the massacre is shifted from the perpetrators of the crime to the partisan movement or to local collaborationists. But what is a martyred village and why are some loci of war atrocities recognised as such, while others seem to have been forgotten? In the context of institutionalised public memory, this term is not an innocent one, but conveys a subtext containing elements of a master narrative on the meaning of the war period in national history. The notion of martyred village was coined in the immediate post-war period for the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, in which the whole population of more than 600 inhabitants was exterminated by German troops in June 1944. The massacre at Ouradour 7, as well as that of Lidice in Czechoslovakia, came to symbolise Nazi barbarism at a European level. The image of total destruction nourished a rhetoric centred on the notions of martyrdom, sacrifice and political innocence. Post-war official commemorations have produced a national memory of the event, in which the specific historical context of the massacre is forgotten and the victims are presented as representatives of the whole nation. This public memory served to legitimate post-war governments and to repress more disturbing memories of internal conflicts and collaboration. Whereas in Greece the legacy of the civil war prevented the creation of a national memory of the war, in other European countries, especially France and Italy, historians have started since the end of the Cold War to puncture the master narrative of the patriotic war by focusing on internal divisions and on the memories of ordinary civilians not directly involved in the political issues at stake.8 Some have even claimed the resistance was in fact a civil war in disguise.9 In Italy, local memories of war massacres and the discovery of a divided memory played a significant part in this new research agenda.10 The first and most important research developed in this context concerns the massacre of 95 civilians in the Tuscan village of Civitella,Val di Chiana on June 29, 1944. The insights of this work can help us to put the riddle of Drakeia into a comparative perspective. As in Drakeia,

in Civitella the mass execution was triggered by a minor incident, in which local partisans killed two German soldiers. The discovery of a strong anti-partisan memory in this community initially sent a shock wave to the Italian public, not only because the exculpation of the German perpetrators seemed irrational, but also because it called into question the very foundations on which post-war historiography of the resistance had been based. This new research has revealed common patterns in the memory-structuring process among the survivors of war-time massacres, but also important variations. It is now clear that the divided memory was not an exception, as it was initially believed, but occurred widely either as a dominant feature or as a single strand of communal memory. It is also clear that the way in which a community of victims remembers its traumatic past is not linked only to the traumatic event itself, but is also patterned on cultural models specific to the community in question. It is especially in this field that an anthropological approach can contribute to a better understanding of the memory-structuring process in a cross-cultural framework. Against the background of the Italian context, we may formulate a number of initial hypotheses regarding the variation of social and cultural response to war time atrocities. We may find a divided memory centred on an anti-partisan rhetoric, as in Drakeia and Civitella, but in other villages most of the blame may be put on the Nazis themselves or on their local collaborators. Elsewhere, we may note the total absence of a divided memory and find instead a strengthened sense of solidarity. Finally, memories of war atrocities may change over time: in the earliest testimonies on the Civitella massacre recorded in 1946, as in the song mentioned above on the Drakeia massacre, the dominant theme was not the partisans guilt, as it is today, but resentment against the Germans.11 Thus local responses to war atrocities may be diversified in terms of time and space, but also by pre-existing socio-cultural patterns. The Russian sociologist Sorokin compared the social texture of communities

New road sign to Drakeia martyred village.

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affected by a major calamity to a tattered spiders web, in which old loyalties and social ties are either weakened or destroyed, and new ones not yet established. But calamities can also form a favourable ground for the emergence of new social forms. Society then becomes like half-melted wax, out of which anything can be moulded.12 In which direction the reconstruction effort will go, depends to a large extent on the pre-existing culture of the society in question. Referring more in particular to the effects of war, Sorokin pointed to the existence of two opposed coping mechanisms: either an egoistic stimulus of self-preservation gains the upper hand, or a social stimulus directed towards the preservation of or loyalty to the community.13 The question posed by the enigma of Drakeia is thus: what factors shape memories of war atrocities, apart from trauma and grief over personal loss? In this paper I will approach this issue from three different angles: 1. Reintegration of social memory into its specific historic and cultural context, with a special focus on the interplay between social structure, cultural practices and political processes.14 2. A focus on the transmission process, exploring in particular modalities of mediation between local communities and local and/or national power structures.15 3. Combining the analysis of the global context of remembering and forgetting with the role of individual agency.16 THE PROJECT Initially, my interest in the memory of the massacre in Drakeia was triggered by Giovanni Continis work on the case of Civitella.17 In 2002 and 2003 I set up an oral history project with undergraduate University students in order to find out to what extent the two communities have structured their memories in comparable ways. The presence of a divided memory was brought home to me during my first exploratory visit to Drakeia village, when the local priest stressed that the hatred [to misos] which has lacerated the community was even worse than the massacre itself. We collected 27 interviews with survivors of the massacre and their relatives as well as with villagers who were not directly involved in the massacre. Our interviewees included former members of the resistance, individuals who could be considered representatives of the anti-partisan mnemonic community and people who took a more neutral stand. In each interview our first aim was to establish what kind of memories would emerge from a spontaneous retelling of events. Therefore our opening question was simply to ask what people remembered about the 17th and

Continis book on Civitella. On the cover British soldiers visiting the site after the massacre.

18th of December 1943. In the second stage we asked them to tell us about their experiences before and after the massacre. From this free account it became very clear what our interviewees chose to remember and what to forget. It became also clear in what ways they referred spontaneously to the guilt question (nearly all did). Finally, in the last stage of the interview, we questioned our informants about issues they had not mentioned and sometimes openly challenged some of the silences. In this stage we also tried to open up the interview towards politically innocent issues, such as village festivals, marriage practices, gender relations or childhood memories, with often very revealing results. Contrary to our expectations, the people of Drakeia, regardless of their present political views, welcomed our research. They were not only willing to be interviewed, but also responded positively to our efforts to involve the community into a process of reflection and healing of the wounds of the past. A significant moment in this process was a public lecture we organised at our University, during which the students and I presented our readings of the interviews. We had invited the whole community to this event, including the former Left-wing mayor and the present Right-wing mayor, and villagers turned up in great numbers. This positive response may be partly explained by the changed political context, but also by the identity of the researchers. The fact that the local University took interest in their ordeal was valued positively by those villagers who felt that they had been neglected by official instances. The second important factor was that I, as a Dutch woman, and my students, because of their youth, were considered as impartial observers not involved in the wider conflicts that had divided the community. However, such high expectations which push the researcher into the role of judge or healer create important ethical dilemmas an issue to which I will return in my conclusion. PATTERNS OF DIVIDED MEMORIES In spite of the different political context in which memories of the massacre were structured, there are some common elements in the oral memories recorded in Drakeia and Civitella, at least in those testimonies belonging to the dominant anti-partisan memory. In both communities narratives are clearly structured in three parts (the massacre, before and after), where the massacre is presented as a watershed in the history of the community. In both communities the time before the massacre is recalled as paradise lost, a time of innocence, prosperity and social harmony. In both commu-

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nities all subsequent social changes (depopulation, change of social structure) are attributed to the massacre. In both communities narratives focus on the guilt theme, where political responsibility is attributed only to the partisans and their supporters, the German perpetrators are represented as a force of nature and the victims as politically innocent. Finally, in both communities we can find a number of quasi-mythical tales, which seem to belong to a universal stock repertoire of stories retold by survivors of war time massacres and conveying an underlying message. One of these stories is that of the good German, in which one German soldier among the others warned the villagers of impending danger, showed his emotions, refused to pull the trigger or offered candies or cigarettes.18 Other stories include the presence of a traitor among the German soldiers (a man speaking the native language but dressed up as an SS soldier or as a blackshirt fascist) or the unexpected visit of a German officer after the war to ask for forgiveness. The presence of these common patterns in communities which tried to cope with a traumatic past within a different political context can mean two different things: either that this is a universal human response to war atrocities, or that it is linked to other common elements in the pre-existing culture of the two communities. The ethnographic evidence presented in the next section argues in favour of the second explanation. The anti-partisan memory of Drakeia was most evident among those relatives of the victims who were not involved in the resistance movement. Former members of the resistance adopted a rather defensive discourse which appeared as an explicit response to the antipartisan memory. They justified the attack carried out by the partisans which provoked the massacre, claimed they had tried to protect the village, but too late, blamed the German soldiers (or the war) for the massacre, but also assumed some of the guilt, implying they should have tried to evacuate the village in time. But they also accused the political Right (including people of their own village) for the persecution and the violence suffered by former resistance members during the civil war. The survivors and some of those not directly involved in the massacre covered a middle ground between these two opposed memories. The survivors focused more on the traumatic aspects of their own experience, blamed no one in particular and seemed more ready to involve the village in a reconciliation effort. They enjoy high esteem in the village as they are seen as the living link between past and present. If we focus instead on the way in which the two main mnemonic communities have struc-

tured their memories (left and right, partisan and anti-partisan memory), we can see that in both mnemonic communities historical time is presented as a more or less linear process, but it is structured differently, leaving important gaps at different points along this line, and building different bridges to the present. In the anti-partisan memory, the pre-war period is presented as a mythical time devoid of social and political conflicts and the main focus is on the massacre. In these stories the massacre functions as a threshold to the present:19 It was followed by a timeless period of hatred, covering the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the liberation, the civil war and all other developments until the present day. Only one other event is singled out as significant: the earthquake of 1955 which destroyed half the village and led many residents to settle elsewhere. All the rest is condemned to oblivion, but in particular the war period before the massacre, the activities of the resistance movement in the village and events leading up to the massacre (the surrendering of Italy in September 1943, partisan battles in the neighbourhood, the funeral of a partisan killed in action attended by nearly all inhabitants). In the partisan memory the massacre is important, but it is not the main focus. Two other periods emerge as central to the narration. First of all, the pre-war period, presented as a period of relative harmony, but also of intense social and political conflicts. It is also presented as the matrix of the resistance movement, as in this period the first communist organizations were set up, whose members would play a crucial role in organizing the resistance at the village level. These stories also restore the visibility of events during the resistance period prior to the massacre. The second important period is the beginning of the civil war, the so-called period of white terror and the persecution of the Left. For this group it is this period that functions as a threshold to the present. In fact, most of the former resistance fighters were obliged to leave the village, to settle in urban centres or to live abroad as political refugees. The periods that are blacked out in these memories are the immediate aftermath of the massacre and the hostility they experienced from their covillagers, the period leading up to the liberation, in which the partisan army ELAS adopted a more aggressive policy towards their political opponents (including even summary executions) and the rest of the civil war (especially incidents of left-wing violence). RESTORING THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF DIVIDED MEMORIES The evidence presented so far seems to suggest

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that divided memories are a question of political power, where social groups, influenced by the wider political context, form mnemonic communities to exercise control over the memory of crucial events in order to legitimate their authority or to seek recognition. That does not explain, however, how communities that developed within a different political context (such as Civitella and Drakeia) may respond in similar ways to war atrocities, while communities that developed within the same political context (Civitella and other Tuscan villages) responded in different ways. As Confino has argued, there is a danger involved in reducing memory to politics or to ideology. He suggested we should think of how the term memory can be useful in articulating the connections between the cultural, the social and the political, between representation and social experience.20 The crucial issue in the history of memory is not how it is represented, but why it was received or rejected. For every society sets up images of the past. Yet to make a difference in a society, it is not enough for a certain past to be selected. It must steer emotions, motivate people to act, be received; in short, it must become a sociocultural mode of action. Why is it that some pasts triumph while others fail? Why do people prefer one image of the past over another?21 In the case of the divided memories of war atrocities, if we want to understand how memory can become a socio-cultural mode of action we should get back to the specific history of the community and explore the interaction between social structure, cultural practices and political processes in the past and then examine how the transmission of memory up to the present day was grafted upon that particular past. The ethnographic evidence on the Italian and Greek villages suggests that both communities were already divided before the massacre. This division was based on pre-existing social and political conflicts, but was also inscribed upon the actual space of the village. In the case of Civitella, the anti-partisan memory was transmitted by the dominant group of the community: urban settlers who lived within the townships walls, belonged more or less to the middle class, were good Catholics and politically conservative. They were socially and politically opposed to the sharecroppers living beyond the walls, to the supporters of the Left who lived in the upper part of the village and to outsiders who settled there after the war.22 In the case of Drakeia, our research revealed similar patterns of division at the social, political and cultural level.

Social structure Although the village of Drakeia seemed to be in 1940 a large and fairly prosperous community, with 1,700 inhabitants and a flowering cash-crop economy (the main products being apples, oil and olives), there was a lot of social tension and we discovered various signs hinting at a pending crisis. To understand the social structure, the first thing I set out to explore was who the massacre victims were. The death registry of the community proved to be an extremely useful document23 which I then cross-checked with the former secretary of the community, who, now in his late seventies, had a formidable and most accurate memory. This was like a magic moment in the research process: suddenly, like looking into a crystal ball, the dead names on the monument came alive and reconstructed before my eyes the community at the time of the massacre. It also revealed how the massacre had swept away the social texture and transformed it into a tattered spiders web, to use Sorokins words. Not only had families lost their fathers, sons and fiancs, but the community had also lost its best shoemaker, its carpenters, the chanter who sang mass on Sundays and the only man who knew how to operate the local electricity plant. After I corrected the data contained in the death register with the help of the secretary, it appeared that the men lost in the massacre represented a cross-section of the local society, thus disproving two distorted images transmitted through local channels: that the majority of the victims were members of the resistance, or that all victims belonged to the elite (the cornerstones of the village). The data revealed a clearcut social stratification with important social differences and a significant degree of dependent labour relations. There was a top layer of fairly rich landowners, who employed others as day labourers and sometimes also served as middlemen, a large middle layer of self-sufficient peasants and craftsmen, and a lower stratum of poor who had insufficient land to sustain their families and mainly worked as wage labourers within the village. Among the 108 victims who were from Drakeia there were thirty-eight landowners, twenty-six peasants, fifteen wage labourers, twelve craftsmen, six shop owners, five muleteers, three merchants, two shepherds and one tax-collector. The data also revealed that Drakeia was a rather closed village which kept its property only for indigenous residents: the few families which had resettled there from elsewhere either had no landed property at all or owned insufficient plots and were confined to the outskirts of the village. They belonged to the poor and mainly earned their living by working for others. Their position was similar to that of the sharecroppers in Civitella.

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Political processes The results of the pre-war elections from 1928 to 1936 showed that Drakeia had been traditionally a conservative village.24 Votes were divided between supporters of the right-wing and royalist Peoples Party and the Liberal Party, but the majority voted for the former (50-60%). Both parties maintained strong clientelist ties with the villagers, mediated through the local elite, the group of landowners, who also held local power (the mayor usually belonged to this group). But in 1936, just before the advent of the Metaxas dictatorship, there was a major breakthrough of the Left. It obtained nearly 25% of the votes, a score higher than that of the whole province (22%) and much higher than the national score (5.76%). This result was linked to the development of a strong trade union movement in the nearby industrial town of Volos, especially among the tobacco workers. Some of the young men of Drakeia had worked in Volos and brought back some of the new ideas and experiences they had learnt through their involvement in the trade unions. It was in this period (early 1930s) that a communist organization was set up in the village. The members of this organization read texts by Marx and Lenin about social injustice and exploitation and applied these ideas to the situation in their own village, denouncing in particular the role of middlemen in the sale of agricultural products and the role of local power-holders who maintained certain privileges (especially in watering their lands). But most of all, this small group gained considerable appeal among the young by their social and cultural activities: they set up a football club, and they organised excursions, picnics and dances for boys and girls, thus introducing a modern habit in village culture.25 For all these reasons, during the period leading up to the Metaxas dictatorship a considerable amount of tension arose both between this politicised youth and the local notables, and between generations. These data suggest that until 1936 there was an incipient social and political crisis, which was however delayed because of the Metaxas dictatorship. It seems plausible to suggest it left certain traces in village culture, which came to the fore during the 1940s. Cultural practices As most of the interviews dealt with the massacre, the area of cultural practices is still quite underdeveloped in my ethnography. The available data suggest, however, that there was a certain tension between modernist and traditionalist attitudes. The modernist view was conveyed by the Left, but also by other social actors, such as the village youth or people that

had lived abroad or in urban centres. In the 1930s, the village of Drakeia, in spite of its closed character, was in many respects a modern village. During saints festivals, for example, people used to dance not only to traditional folk tunes, but also danced European dances, such as the tango and foxtrot. On the other hand, gender relations, marriage practices and relations between the generations conformed largely to traditional patterns. Women were subdued and daughters were rarely allowed to continue their education, while marriages were usually arranged by the parents. One of the most surprising facts that emerged from my discussion with the secretary was the great number of bachelors. Nearly half of the victims were unmarried, many of whom were already over thirty. There were many men in the village who were in their fifties or sixties and had never married but lived and worked with their brothers. This abnormal demographic structure seems to hint at a developing social crisis. It may have been a strategy aimed at avoiding the fragmentation of plots, but it seems clear that in the long run the very reproduction of the community was at stake. Another aspect of traditionalist attitudes in the cultural field was the important role attributed to saints, either as protectors or as avengers. For example, the man who managed to escape from the coffee shop before the massacre ascribed his salvation to the intervention of Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of the nearby church. 26 Other villagers see the massacre itself as a revenge of Saint Modestos, a rather marginal saint who is supposed to protect animals and is usually worshipped by pastoral communities. The 18th of December was his name day, but he was a stolen saint: his icon was brought in secret from another village and so people believe he wanted to punish the people of Drakeia and oblige them to bring his icon back to its original location.27 The human agency attributed to saints in traditional village culture seems to form a cultural script on which certain responses to the massacre were coined: historical events are not produced by consciously reflecting human beings with a political agenda, but by the forces of nature or by supernatural or mythical figures (Saint Modestos and the good German). I left the most important aspect of the prewar social organization for the end, for it is here that all three dimensions of the communitys history (the social, the political and the cultural) come together. I mean the spatial division of the village in two parts, a factor which also played a crucial role in some of the Italian communities. The village of Drakeia was divided between a lower and an upper part, each with its own

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Walking up to Upper Drakeia.

Conservative Lower Drakeia square renamed after dictator Metaxas.

square, coffeeshops, schools and churches. Lower Drakeia was located around the main square and the coffee shop where the men were gathered before the massacre. It was politically conservative and most of the notables and better-off peasants used to live there. The community council and the mayor were also usually elected from Lower Drakeia. Upper Drakeia was mostly inhabited by poorer peasants and wage labourers and was politically more progressive. In the 1920s most of its votes went to the Liberal Party and later support for the Left was particularly strong in Upper Drakeia. Nearly all leaders of the pre-war communist organizations, who subsequently organised the Resistance movement in the village, were from Upper Drakeia. This spatial division, as well as the fact that the round up and massacre occurred in conservative Lower Drakeia was a crucial factor in the memorystructuring process and its control by the dominant elite residing in this part of the village.

TRANSMISSION: THE ROLE OF PUBLIC MEMORY AND INDIVIDUAL AGENCY The interplay between local and national power, as well as the broader anti-communist political context developed in the aftermath of the civil war, played a crucial role in the transmission of divided memories. In Drakeia, the first post-war mayor belonged to the notables of the lower part of the village. He had lost two sons in the massacre, while a third one was nearly executed by the partisans. His personal influence, rooted in his social and political power, but also in his personal history as a father of victims, played an important role in the shaping of an anti-partisan memory. On a broader level, in the aftermath of the civil war being anti-partisan was a safe option, which opened multiple social pathways closed to former members of the resistance. The mnemonic community formed in this process has never accepted the new discourse on the resistance developed since 1981. Its memory still reflects an older master narrative created after the war and used to legitimate the authority of those in power. In the families of the victims, distorted versions of history may be carried over right into the next generation, unaffected by the changed political context. In one interview a man born in 1949 and whose fatherin-law had been killed in the massacre, claimed that the monument to the victims of the 1943 massacre had carried an inscription according to which all of them had been killed by the bandits, whereby he meant the partisans. In fact, as we soon found out, he conflated the massacre of 1943 with an episode of the civil war in which six young villagers had been killed by left-wing guerrillas. According to other villagers there had been a second inscription nearby commemorating this other event, which had, however, been removed in the 1980s. This instance of distorted memory brought home to us that even the monument had become a locus of contested memories in the present. In the case of Civitella, a corporate group of memory-bearers, restricted to the survivors who belonged to the original intra-muros inhabitants, seemed to have played an equally crucial role in the transmission process. 29 Equally important was the role of the catholic church, as a national institution, with its emphasis on the notion of sacrifice, peace and political innocence, while one of the local priests, who survived the massacre, played a similar role of significant individual as the mayor in Drakeia. In both Drakeia and Civitella, individuals with considerable social or political power seemed to have operated as political entrepreneurs of a divided memory and as mediators between national and local institutions. And yet, in both communities the changed

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political context has begun to affect the transmission process, both at the community level and in individual memories. In Drakeia, it seems that the memory of the massacre has entered a transitional phase in which some stick to the hard core of anti-partisan memory inherited from the past, but others begin to remember forgotten details which contradict that version and many seek in daily conversations to overcome the hatred of the past. A very telling example of how the changing political context affects individual memories is the following. The very first man I interviewed gave a quite moderate version of events and I therefore placed him in the category of neutral observers. He had not been present at the massacre and lost nobody of his own family. Later he spent a lifetime abroad as a sea captain and married a Dutch woman. In April 2003 he sent me a letter together with newspaper clippings of 1946, during the first period of the civil war, containing two articles he had published in the local press. In the first article he adopted the anti-partisan memory blaming local resistance leaders for the massacre, while in the second he reported on a row in the local coffee shop the day before which resulted in the death of one man. Although the two men who provoked the row were known to belong to a right-wing gang, his report ascribed the row to drunkenness, claimed the victim had died of instant pneumonia and denied any political motivations. In the letter of 2003 which accompanied the newspaper clippings he revisited his earlier interpretations in a critical mood: he wrote that those pieces were written in anger and that today he has learnt to be less monolithic in his judgments. On the piece regarding the killing in the coffee shop, he now implicitly recognised it was a political murder. I took good care to make the victim die of instant pneumonia!!! In reality it was well known the perpetrators were clear thugs: other times, other thoughts and ideas.30 RECONCILIATION AND THE ROLE OF THE RESEARCHER Whereas in Drakeia until very recently the divided memory and the hatred were slowly burning underneath daily social interactions and were kept within the community, our research seems to have accelerated a process which had been maturing over the last decade. The positive response with which our research was met by people of different social and political backgrounds, the massive presence of the villagers at the lecture we organised at our University, and the fact that in 2003 I was invited to present the chronicle of events at the annual commemoration in the church (instead of the usual schoolteacher), all confirm my

impression that many people are ready to reconsider the past and overcome half a century of hatred. The main obstacle to this process seems to be the social mechanisms through which the memory of the past is controlled by a social group with considerable power and prestige within the village. When people say our generation has to go to overcome the hatred, they may just mean they have to get rid of this political control. And yet, the reconciliation with the past may imply a different control of local memories. The awkward position in which I found myself when I took the floor in the church of Drakeia, after the archbishops homily, to present my version of events (even though my chronicle was largely based on their stories) made me realise the dangers involved in this new role assigned to me by the local authorities. The relationship between the researcher and his subject is never an innocent or neutral one. But what if the researcher, instead of listening and learning from his or her subjects is called upon to teach them a certain version of their own past? Here, too, there is a parallel with the Italian situation. The most extreme example is that of Paolo Pezzino, who was invited by the mayor and a group of villagers of Guardistallo to act as

Drakeia monument to the 1943 massacre with victims names.

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arbiter in the conflict over an extremely lacerated memory. The task assigned to him was to establish the facts, so that the community could finally decide who to blame for the massacre and, possibly, turn the page and to begin to look at the future. Before accepting this formidable challenge, Pezzino had to answer the excruciating question with which he begins his book: can the historian become a judge? The main reason why he decided to answer yes to that question was his belief that in the case of war atrocities the reconstruction of events is not only a matter of historiography. It also has implications for the establishment of responsibilities, including those of the perpetrators.31 In short, the main question is that of accountability.32 And, as my research in Drakeia
NOTES 1. Mark Mazower, Inside Hitlers Greece. The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44, New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1993. 2. Giorgos T., former secretary of the community of Drakeia, interviewed on 13 June 2004. 3. Interview with Tryfonia S., 10 November 2002. 4. Interview with Argyroula S., 10 November 2002. 5. Interview with Tasos T., 14 October 2002 6. Interview with Argyroula S., 10 November 2002. 7. Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village. Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Ouradour-sur-Glane, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999. 8. Riki Van Boeschoten, Little Moscow and the Greek Civil war: Memories of Violence, Local Identities and Cultural Practices in a Greek Mountain Community, in Francesca Cappelletto (ed), Memory and World War II, An Ethnographic Approach, Oxford, New York: Berg, 2005, p 39. 9 Claudio Pavone, Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralit nella Resistenza, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 1991. 10. See for example Giovanni Contini, La memoria divisa, Milano: Rizzoli, 1997; Francesca Cappelletto, Memories of NaziFascist Massacres in Two Central Italian Villages, in Sociologia Ruralis vol 38, no 1, 1998, pp 69-85; Alessandro Portelli, The Massacre at Civitella Val Di Chiana (Tuscany, June 29, 1944): Myth and Politics, Mourning and Common Sense, in Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia. Oral History and the Art of Dialogue, Wisconsin: The University of

showed, the demand for retributive justice has been for many decades as important a component of communal memory as the divided memory itself. Survivors of traumatic events often feel that, until and unless justice is done, their traumatic memories will haunt them forever. Thus, justice as intended by authors such as Pezzino and John Borneman, may be an essential part of the mourning process and may open up new pathways to a real reconciliation. Yet historians and anthropologists who are prepared to walk those pathways should realise that it is a road full of dangers. By becoming an authority in local history, they might deprive the community of memories it cherished very dearly and of alternative ways of coming to terms with the past.
the present as the last of a series of interpretative turning points in life stories, which separate the present from the non-present. Rosenthal, Erlebte und erzhlte Lebensgeschichte, Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 1995, p 143 20. Confino, 1997, p 1388. 21. Confino, 1997, p 1390. 22. Cappelletto, 1998 and 2003. 23. For each victim it indicated name, age, profession, place of birth and place of residence, date and cause of death, his parents names, the profession of his father, the date on which his death was declared, and the name, age and profession of the person who declared his death. 24. Even today the village main square carries the name of right-wing dictator Ioannis Metaxas, who ruled the country between 1936 and 1940. 25. Interviews with Giorgos S., (10 November 02), Giorgos P. (9 January 2004) and Giorgos T. (7 June 2003), all former members of the communist youth organization. 26. Interview with Giorgos S. 10 November 2002. 27. Interview with Spyros K., 25 April 2004. 28. Green, 2004. 29. Cappelletto, 1998, p 74. 30. Newspaper, Enosis, 18 February 1946. Letter Tasos Tzamtzis, 17 April 2003. 31. Paolo Pezzino, Anatomia di un massacro. Controversia sopra una strage tedesca, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997, p 20. 32. For an anthropological approach to the notions of accountability and retributive justice, see John Borneman, Settling Accounts: Violence, Justice and Accountability in Postsocialist Europe, Princeton University Press, 1997.

Wisconsin Press, 1997; Francesca Cappelletto, Long-Term Memory of Extreme Events: From Autobiography to History, in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol 9, no 2, 2003, pp 241-260. 11. Contini, 1997; Portelli, 1997, p 145. 12. Pitrim Sorokin, 1973 [1942], Man and Society in Calamity. 2nd ed. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, p 120. 13. Sorokin, 1973, p 180. 14. Cf. Alon Confino, Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method, The American Historical Review vol 102, no 2, p 1388. 15. Confino, 1997, p 1395. Michael Frisch, The Memory of History, in M. Frisch, A Shared Authority, New York, SUNY, p. xxii; Confino, 1997. 16. Anna Green, 2004, Individual Remembering and Collective Memory: Theoretical Presuppositions and Contemporary Debates, Oral History vol 32, no 2, pp 35-44. 17. Contini, 1997. 18. Cappelletto, 2003, p 247, Portelli, 1997, pp 154-156, who claims this story belongs to a broader mythical narrative found all over Europe. Portelli has sought the meaning of this myth either in an attempt to confirm our faith in the remnant of humanity that survives even in the most cruel torturers, or highlight through the humanity of one the inhumanity of all (p 154). In Drakeia the story seems to serve two different purposes. It may be used to show that our people were even worse than the Germans (because they did not warn). Or to show that the narrator was not linked to the Resistance movement and consequently was not warned by them in secret. 19. Gabriele Rosenthal considers thresholds to

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