Krisanthi's War: In Hitler's Greece

.Krisanthi was born to privilege in Athens just after the end of the First World War. Her father is a prosperous gold merchant, and it seems she wants for nothing important as she grew up. She was sent to England for higher education, and even fell in love with one of her classmates. Then her culture and background begins to pull her in. First she is called back to Athens because her family wants to arrange a marriage for her. She bows to her family and marries a slightly older man also from a prosperous family only to discover on the day of her wedding that he had a child by another woman.After a year or so she learns to love her husband, and then history steps in further enmeshing her in events. Greece becomes embroiled with a war with Italy. It slides towards defeat in that war and Italy occupies Athens and the mainland peninsula. She is invited to move to Rhodes and Lindos by a childhood friend, but declines the invitation. Then Germany becomes the occupying force. They are much harsher towards the Greeks. Wholesale killings of Greek men are carried out partly in retribution for the death of any German, and partly just to establish their domination. Krisanthi hears a Greek child being killed by having its head bashed in. Krisantha’s husband has become a soldier and is fighting with the resistance. He invites her to meet with him at her aunt’s home a ways outside of Athens.Starting out to see him she is stopped by a German checkpoint where she encounters a German Lieutenant who wants to take advantage of her. She is able to prevail on his superior officer to protect her and is able to meet with her husband. After an evening together he has to flee and she returns to Athens. With the German occupation things have gotten much more brutal and she decides to escape to Rhodes with her mother and Children. She dresses as a nun to avoid being noticed by the Lieutenant.Initially Rhodes town and Lindos are better. She is reunited with two childhood friends Maria and Kalliope in Rhodes. They are all drawn into the turbulence of the war, watching friends and relatives killed and brutalized. As the Germans are displaced from North Africa they end up on Rhodes and Lindos. There seems to be no end to the gratuitous evil they carry out.The book starts out with Krisanthi in conversation with her dead husband and son, forty years after the end of the war. They are urging her to tell her story so that by putting it to words she can escape her memories from the time of the war. The book starts with an excerpt from a poem by a Greek woman written in 1948 about walking with her dead friends.References to Greek tradition, and frequent use of Greek words provide a Greek tone to the story. Perhaps the climax comes at a summer festival the Germans apparently allow the Greeks to celebrate with dancing, merriment and food. Krisanthi’s joy is interrupted by the appearance of the German Lieutenant at the festival and things go from bad to worse for her.The reader knows that the allied victory over Germany expelled the Germans from Greece. The tension between the Greeks and Germans remains very real despite that omniscience on the part of the reader. The impact of the story on characters the reader has come to like means the ultimate outcome of the war doesn’t represent simple closure for the characters. Maria and Kalliope are also used as narrators demonstrating the breadth of the burden borne by the Greeks.Krisanthi’s story demonstrates that we can’t truly escape our origins and surroundings, but can remain human in responding to challenges.

In her novel, Kristanthi’s War, Ida Egli takes us to Greece during WWII, through the military junta years and the 1980s, when Krisanthi looks back on her life, her memory flawed, “a postcard lost in the mail.” The horror of war is always near. Images flash by in shocking detail, a dead woman hanging from a lamp post, “her nylon stockings glinting in the sun, the dark seam at the back still straight.” Yet, for all the horror, there’s also beauty, the white fishing boats, the limitless blue, the creak of the piers, and food appearing on doorsteps at dawn, as “those who have the least share the most.” Jorgoes, Krisanthi’s husband, seems to have risen out of the sea itself, a human Poseidon, lusty and tender both. He woos his young bride by taking her sailing, until at long last she gives in and they make love, “basking, stroking, rocking in the warm Mediterranean night.” When he leaves to fight for the underground, Krisanthi stays behind, first in Athens, then in Rhodes, where the Germans install “tight half-circles of sea mines floating like dead black flowers in our bays.” Egli writes about the war with terrifying realism, making it impossible for us to look away. Catharsis, the Greeks have taught us, resides in the stories we tell, but Krisanthi’s story remains incomplete, her experience too brutal to recall. When her friend at long last reveals the truth, Krisanthi resists, before reminding herself that her story is also her friend’s. Thanks to Egli’s gripping novel, it now belongs to us all.

When I first picked up and looked at my wife’s new book, Krisanthi’s War: in Hitler's Greece, I thought it looked like it would be a real slog: A historical novel about 3 Greek women in the time of Hitler’s invasion of Greece in WWII?? Give me a break.But I opened it up and started it anyhow, and was quickly transported, carried off to Greece and the unfolding events of WWII. I found it to be a beautifully rendered, intensely immersive experience: Startling, immensely painful and simultaneously suffused with grace. The horrors of war: ever-present terror, hunger, violence, rape, death. But also, spaces of tenderness, stolen moments of exquisite love and love making, the strength of family and the bonds of deep friendship.The 3 main characters, friends since childhood, suffer the losses of husbands, sons, daughters, lovers, parents, friends, neighbors; of the easygoing rhythms of life as they’d always known it; of the carefree Greek days and evenings, the smells of ocean and tomatoes and olives and bouganvilla wafting in gentle breezes.And then, through all the depredations of the occupation, these 3 women emerge with their huge losses now woven into the fabric of their lives; but also with wisdom springing up inside them and, most surprisingly of all, with the ability to connect with and affirm each other and life itself.John L. Grahm, Ph.D.