OVER 2,000 CHILDREN WERE SENT TO THE FRONTLINE

OVER 2,000 CHILDREN WERE SENT TO THE FRONTLINE

“I watched my father’s execution when he was shot by his co-fighters,” said Alekso Chachanovski, recruited as a DAG fighter at age 15

This is what Alekso Chachanovski said, “When we were told that we were leaving Romania and returning to our homeland to join DAG, we were proud and happy. We were finally going to return to our birthplace and see our parents, families and friends and, at the same time, fight for the freedom of our people. I never thought that I was going back to see my father’s execution by firing squad. That was the last thing on my mind. My father was executed by his DAG co-fighters because he came looking for us, for his own children, in the Eastern European countries…” Alekso Chachanovski was born in the village Zhelevo, one of the 1,500 Macedonian child refugees recruited from the boarding houses in Eastern Europe and sent back to Greece to fight on DAG’s side against the Greek government army during the Greek Civil War.

According to Chachanovski, “At the end of 1948, the taller children from the Sinaja children’s home were transferred to Tulgesh. At that point it became clear to us that the older refugee children from the children’s homes were being recruited to fight for DAG. Then, in the beginning of 1949, a group of 375 children from the Tulgesh children’s home were sent to the city Arad. An army unit was formed there. We did military exercises every day. We stayed in Arad for 30 days. We were given uniforms and military equipment that included a backpack, a flashlight, a knife, a first-aid kit and some other things. After that we were sent through Bucharest to Berkovica in Bulgaria, where many other children had gathered. Some of the shorter and younger children were sent back to where they had come from; the rest carried on and arrived at the military polygon in the villages Rudari and Shtrkovo, in Prespa, Aegean Macedonia where they resumed doing military exercises. Seven children escaped and fled to the Republic of Macedonia.” Chachanovski fell ill after surviving the trauma of watching his father being executed.

Historian Risto Kiriazoski, PhD, a participant in the Greek Civil War, and a researcher of its effects on the Macedonian people who experienced it, said that the Communist Party of Greece (CPG), in its pointless effort, evacuated the children not as a humanitarian gesture to save them but to solve its problem of reserves for DAG. In other words, the CPG saved the children in order to later use them as fighters. And it did. This is what Kiriazoski wrote, “In April-May 1949, DAG General Staff and the Provisional Democratic Government of Greece decided to recruit new fighters from the children that were evacuated in the Eastern European countries. Special representatives were sent on location with corresponding orders and directives to ‘convince’ the children through propaganda and pressure to join DAG. The children were recruited not according to age, but according to height. As a result, children aged 12 to 15 were recruited. After the children arrived in the free territory (a Partisan controlled area) the children were trained in the village Sktrkovo, in Lerin Region, where DAG had organized a training centre, and sent to the front lines to fight.”

Sokrat Panovski and Ilia Lafazanovski at the time were refugee children in the children’s homes in Romania and witnessed the events that took place. They said, “The visitors carried a notebook with them and went around and wrote the names of the children they wanted to recruit. The political propaganda to motivate the children to fight in the war was propagated on a daily basis by the Greek directors running the children’s homes. The first mobilization in Romania was completed in August 1948, during which 125 children were recruited. The second mobilization was completed in February 1948, in the Tulgesh children’s home during which 375 children were recruited. Those children were over 14 years old and included 5 girls.”

According to Kiriazoski, “…not a single child from a Greek ethnic background was recruited. That means that the Macedonian children were used as ‘cannon fodder’…”

This is what, in part, Paskal Mitrevski, leader of NOF (National Liberation Front), wrote to the CPG Politburo about the irresponsible attitude towards the Macedonian children of one particular Greek staffer in Tulgesh, “…his name is Timios. His attitude can be characterized as nowhere near good. He puts intolerable psychological pressure on the children and at the same time creates a difficult atmosphere. Here is what the children said to Malio, a member of NOF, when he was sent to visit them, ‘Timios assembles the children in the children’s home and, with a violent and unacceptable manner, yells at them and demands that they go down there and fight. He tells them that those who refuse to go will carry the stamp of a cross on their forehead, to differentiate them from the others, to let everyone know that they are bad people and should be labeled as such’…”

After finding out that children were being recruited, some “mothers”, the women responsible for caring for them, complained to the directors about the recruitment but were completely ignored. Then, when the time came for the children to leave, these women went them. One of those women was Sofia Tambovska-Kovachevska. This is what she said, “In March 1949, a Greek person named Papathanasiou arrived at the children’s home. He said that he had orders from DAG to recruit children aged between 14 and 16. We were strongly against that. We explained that the children were too young and this was done without permission from their parents. Given the fact that our children were well looked after and had good teachers, Kika, a woman from my village and I decided to sign up as volunteers to fight for DAG. We volunteered because we wanted to accompany the mobilized group of children and join DAG with them. We felt that the children fighting in DAG would need us more than the children in these homes. We also wanted to inform their parents of the new situation…”

According to Panovski and Lafazanovski, the total number of people recruited from the children’s homes was more than 1,500. According to Petre Nakovski, that number was around 2,000. At the same time Nakovski emphasized that the Polish government was the only government which did not allow children to be recruited from its children’s homes.

According to Panovski and Lafazanovski, “It was nostalgia for their homeland, a desire to be with their families during these hard times, as well as enthusiasm to fight that drove the barely tainted children to sacrifice themselves for CPG interests and for Greek interests in general. In this way Greece could homogenize its nation without using elements of physical torture to force out the Macedonians from their birthplaces…” Panovski and Lafazanovski also pointed out that of the 6 children from Zagorichani that were recruited from the children’s home in “Tulgesh” to fight for DAG, 5 were killed during their first day of battle. Most of the 11 children mobilized from Zhelevo were killed during the first days and of the 9 children mobilized from Bapchor 2 were killed.

Even Greek sources confirmed that it was an unequal fight where barely trained children were fighting a ten times larger and better equipped Greek army force. This is what Joanis S. Koliopoulou wrote in his book “The Macedonian Issue in the period of the Greek Civil War (1946-1949) in the Western Part of Macedonia”, published in 1995, “Fifteen year old, Boris Uzounous (Uzunov) from the village Dolno Kotori (Kato Idrousa), located near Lerin, was one of those children that was evacuated. Together with other children from his village and from the surrounding area, in May 1948, he found himself in Yugoslavia. In July the same year DAG mobilized his mother with the promise that they would let her visit her son in Sinaia, Romania. But then I met him carrying a long German gun over his shoulder on Mount Malimadi. I also met his mother in the same area. She was sent there to reinforce the battle lines. Later, from the information she gathered, she found out that her son Boris was killed in a very difficult battle near where she was fighting …”

According to Kiriazovksi, “The CPG’s and DAG’s decision to sent children into battle caused a great disappointment and sharp disapproval from parents...”

On May 18, 1949, 33 mothers from the village Konomladi, near Kostur, whose children were evacuated, sent a stern protest to DAG General Staff demanding that all the recruited children be returned either to the children’s homes or to their parents. This is what Kiriazovski wrote, “On May 22, 1949, under great pressure from

parents and from the public in general, the CPG stopped the mobilization of children younger than 15, and the already mobilized children under that age were returned back to the children’s homes. However, the order was not completely fulfilled. Most of the already mobilized children were thrown into battle untrained and were killed. In one tragic case, 130 children on their way to Thessaly were ambushed in Hasi and all of them were killed by the Greek government army…”