On the Road of Time – Chapter 18

On the Road of Time – Chapter 18

Even though we were told that the road to Bureli was dug up and bad to drive on, we decided to go there anyway. We arrived at night. Bureli was a quiet town, nestled in picturesque surroundings in a remote place located about one hundred and forty kilometers north of Durres. The place was unforgettably beautiful and left the traveller with a desire to return. But it was not the beauty of the place that attracted us. We had not come here to specifically enjoy the charm of the place. Our long journey to visit this place on the dug up makadam road was hardly a tourist curiosity... We came here, as we had visited other places earlier, for the purpose of tracing the path we had taken in the past, sixty years ago, that had brought us here and placed us in the now abandoned shelters and barracks. While the hills of Gramos were still burning, defeated, disarmed and fleeing DAG (Democratic Army of Greece) military units were brought here by truck. It was here in Bureli, one hundred and forty kilometers north of Durres and twice the distance from the Greek-Albanian border, that five or six people from the political and military leadership attempted to investigate what had gone wrong with their campaign. Five or six people demanded, of the thousands of defeated DAG fighters, what had gone wrong and who was to be blamed for their own failure. Here was where fingers were pointed and here was where the guilty were found. Before going on the road of time and tracing the footsteps of our past, I had discussions with many former Partisans and DAG fighters about what had really happened at Bureli. In fact the word “Bureli” was well-preserved in their memories, not because of the bloodshed and the pain of defeat, but because of what happened later. More painful than the physical wounds and the bitter taste of defeat were the events that took place there. These painful events were engraved in the deepest recesses of their minds. The mere mention of “Bureli” brought them back to crazy times. Very few and very rare were those who were willing to open their mouths, hearts and souls to reveal the “secret” that took place in that dreadful place. Their stories were often interrupted by heavy sighs, disappointment, bitter questions and resentment. “Morning and evening for days and for weeks,” a woman, then eighteen years old, began to tell her story, “they were telling us that we did not lose the armed struggle, but we temporarily suspended it due to Tito's treachery. According to our top leaders, Tito had placed his agents and spies among our ranks and then closed the border. They continuously and methodically made such claims inflaming and spreading collective hatred for the man for whom we sang songs, celebrated and thanked for his country being the first country to offer its hand to us, to feed us and to treat our wounds. But the truth is we never did such things. Almost a year before, in the name of the party, our political secretaries had badmouthed Tito. They badmouthed him in the trenches and bunkers and before going or after returning from combat. The word ‘traitor’ always made us turn our weapons and keep out fingers on the trigger. The things that the Party Secretary and the Political Commissar said were the ideas of the Party. Things which we accepted without question, things that we considered to be sacred. They spoke in the name of the Party, to which we were unconditionally devoted and trusted. So it was difficult for us to believe those returning from the hospitals in Jatsenovo and Katlanovo. But we needed to know so we asked in secret and in confidence, ‘okay let it be that way, that Tito closed the border and that he was a traitor, but how did you find yourselves in Jatsenovo and Katlanovo, if the border was closed? Did traitors heal your wounds?’ Truth or lie about the border being closed or not was not a great concern but the damage caused by it was tremendous. A lot of damage could be done even with a small lie. But that lie then was huge and the damage it caused was horrendous.

That lie struck at us, the Macedonians, the most because we, at some point or another, were the ones accused of celebrating and singing songs about Tito. Then suddenly he was a traitor and an American agent. The damage was huge. One needed to be very crafty to be able to destroy one belief and create another just like that. The lie is very dangerous when it becomes truth. Earlier we had heard from our political commissars that Tito had turned his back on us, but this time the charges were even more severe. The language the top leadership used to describe the situation was very convincing, so convincing in fact that it caused massive hysteria and anger amongst us. They needed something like this and got it very quickly. So when it came to Tito and Yugoslavia, they left no stone unturned. When they were done with that, they quickly turned against the leadership of NOF (National Liberation Front) and AFZH (Women’s Anti-Fascist Front). They singled out the twelve of them and brought them out every day on a makeshift stage. That’s when we found out that they, the twelve of them, were Tito’s imbedded agents and spies. They pushed them to go on stage and say something but we couldn’t hear what they were saying above the angry voices swearing and cursing at them. It seemed like the top leaders had no need for the twelve to explain themselves, all they needed them for was to make us angry, to rile us up and bring us to a boil. There they were right before our eyes, Tito’s agents and spies, the culprits who had maimed our democratic movement and who had disabled our people’s revolution from the inside. They, the top leadership and Party officials said, were the reason for our defeat. They, the Party said, were the people who had stained the honour, pride and dignity of every fighter. And they, the top leadership said, needed to be cleaned out. We, the crowd, on the other hand, demoralized and suffering from a humiliating defeat needed revenge. The speeches of the Party leaders, the gestures in their voices and their choice of persuasive words, all fuelled our desire to be rid of the culprits as soon as possible, to punish them by the most severe punishment deliverable. We sought revenge and we made our demands known vocally. We demanded that they be executed immediately. ‘Death!!! By hanging!!! Three meters under the wall!!!’ we all yelled and demanded… This was our answer to their every attempt to speak or try to explain. Nobody listened and everyone wanted their heads. When someone talked to you about struggle, about victory, about courage but you had never seen them on the front lines or in long and exhausting night marches in the rain or in severe cold weather, then you didn’t like them. You didn’t like them because they had never slept in a damp and moldy bunker, never stepped in a muddy trench and had never bruised a shoulder from carrying a machine gun and ammunition. You couldn’t bring yourself to like them if they had never carried a wounded person, never visited a hospital, never ate moldy bread, never drank muddy water from a mud puddle and never ate raw flour muddied in water… You didn’t like them because they had never eaten grass, swollen buds, or leaves. You didn’t like them because they had never seen a wound, never mind being bandaged in dirty rags, festering and full of pus. These kinds of people you just didn’t like… When we went on brief leave in frontier villages in Kostur or Prespa, people like that used to show up and give long speeches and we, sleepy, worn out and exhausted, frozen, hungry and dirty, were forced to listen to them… ‘Death!!! By hanging!!! Three meters under the wall!!!’ we cried out at the top of our lungs while swearing and shaking our fists at them. Not one, from the thousands of fighters gathered at Bureli, spoke on behalf of the accused. Why? Why did not one of us get up and say something to those people accused of being traitors and spies? Why did no one say something like ‘comrades, you were the leadership so where is your responsibility?’ Unfortunately we were all blinded by our so-called Party obedience and loyalty and by the Party leader...

Yes, we were blinded. That’s how they taught us simple village children to be. We were so brainwashed that there was no place in our brains for our own thoughts and opinions... They told us that our friends were our enemies, spies and agents of Tito and the Americans and we believed them. It was the same as throwing gasoline on the fire. And if we had had guns, then our fingers would have been at the trigger. ‘Death!!! By hanging!!! Three meters under the wall!!!’ We did not stop to look for evidence, or proof, we were ready to immediately do our duty… And those at the very top sure knew how to fuel our fires.

Every one of us wanted to see the accused dead. We wished to see them hung; we wanted to see them three meters under the wall and to be shot by hundreds of bullets. And while we all shouted at the top of our lungs, demanding death, they, the top leadership, arranged themselves on the stage, accusing, yelling, spitting and pointing with their fingers. ‘Death!!! By hanging!!! Three meters under the wall!!!’ is what we were calling out, not because they were our thoughts, others had thought about that for us, but because we were performing exactly the way they wanted us to perform. It was not for us to question the arguments put before us, we were soldiers, a large number of us were Party members and those at the very top, pulled the strings that made us perform. Those from NOF were saying something but we could not hear their voices. Their voices were lost in our cries calling for their heads. And again they said, ‘we are not traitors’, but at the same time, they did not say who the traitors were… And why did they not say that? Did we stop them from saying it? Did we say a single word in their defence? If anyone told you that we did they would be lying to you. We did not come to their rescue. And why did we not come to their rescue? Because at Bureli Zahariadis and his cohorts tossed an apple of discord at the Macedonians. The poison of the discord wiped out our thinking processes. And were we ever capable of independent thought in the first place? Unfortunately not because he always made sure that we had no independent thought. He didn’t do that personally but through his cohorts. And included among his cohorts were those who he fingered as being agents and spies; the ones who actually listened to him and obeyed him without question. The ones who celebrated him and spread his name far and wide turning him into a star that could do no harm. We, the embittered, angry, humiliated and defeated DAG fighters, with our pride and dignity wounded did not want to, or had no desire to listen to those who the Party, i.e. Zahariadis and his aides, pointed fingers at and blamed for our defeat. It was like that. Whatever the Party said we did. The Party’s word stood above all and for us this was ideal. The lie, they say, does not tolerate the truth. Lies were transformed into truth and the truth was turned into lies. One had to be very crafty to be able to do that. According to Zahariadis, the very top leadership was clean, but the Macedonians were not clean and because of those dirty Macedonians, specifically because of the twelve Macedonian leaders, we suffered our defeat. Zahariadis was quick to also point out that ‘the twelve standing on the stage cared only for themselves because they only defended themselves and cared nothing about those who gave it their all. The twelve never stood behind those who sacrificed everything and all the twelve said was I, we, I, I, and we.’ We in the crowd however could not hear anything they were saying above our own loud voices judging them and finding them guilty

over and over again. No one in the mass of fighters lifted a finger or spoke in their defence. In Bureli our silence was a powerful weapon in the hands of Zahariadis and his company which they used to not only condemn the twelve, but all of the Macedonians. Even though the Greeks were incapable of carrying out the struggle even for a month without the Macedonians, according to their own accounts, they still blamed the Macedonians for their defeat. For three long and miserable years the Macedonians bled for them, gave them food and shelter, gave them their homes and beds, their belongings and even their children… and this was how these Greeks repaid them… Those twelve Macedonian people that the Greeks found guilty of treason were very loyal to the Greeks, especially to Zahariadis. It was they who went from village to village informing the people and speaking on his behalf saying that no Macedonian should be left out of the formations. It was they who attracted the Macedonians to the struggle and who built Zahariadis’s army. It was they who convinced the heads of the households to donate their meagre possessions voluntarily. It was they who convinced them to empty their homes, send their sons and daughters to battle, give their children away and donate their furnishings and properties… That’s how it was. And now, after all these years, it seems to me that we unconsciously sought death, the gallows and three meters under the wall for those who led us... We were young, inexperienced and misguided. We were big dreamers. We dreamed a lot and we wanted so badly to believe and we believed that we would win. We believed in our dreams. We believed in hope. That’s all we had... But ... some seemed very keen to rob us of our dreams, of our hopes and of our desires. Someone wanted it that way. Someone wanted us to want things badly but to not think for ourselves. Someone wanted us to allow others to think for us… (D. Vlandas memoirs) If those closest to us who led us, if they had had their own thoughts then we would not have gone to hospitals in Korcha and Elbasan. We would not have heard the screams and moans of our mothers when we passed through Prenies. We would not have gone to Bureli and other distant foreign lands... Our hopes and dreams were replaced with promises, big promises. And we believed in those promises. Our beliefs were very useful to some but unfortunately we were unable to see what it was, to figure it out and to measure the damage it was doing to us. Years later one of them wrote the following in their memoirs: ‘We knew that we would be defeated but we wanted to deal a larger blow to our opponent so we continued the conflict to the bitter end.’ You ask me about those in our leadership? Had we seen them? We were in the mountains, in the forests, in the trenches, in the bunkers, in the dugouts, on constant night marches. We marched only at night because the day belonged to the military aircraft. They pursued us from the sky and buried us into the ground. The night was ours… We were constantly on alert and in constant battle mode. Our leaders on the other hand were always in the villages in Prespa Region. If you did not find them in German, then look for them in Ppli. And if they were not in Ppli then look for them in Shtrkovo or Nivitsi. And if not there then they would be in Grazhdeno… They went to all the Prespa villages. Where you would not find them was in the night columns carrying ammunition to Gramos. You would not find them at the battles for Mali-Madi, Kostur, Voden, Negush, Lerin… But they were quick to condemn us and put us to death for the slightest infraction. Fighters found themselves ‘under the wall’ (put to death) for such small infractions as taking a loaf of bread from the villagers. But among us the highest infraction of them all was to be accused of being a traitor. That accusation carried the highest penalty. We killed our own friends for such accusations. And in Bureli when we heard the words ‘traitors’, ‘agents’, ‘spies’, our blood boiled and we sought revenge.

This was what we were taught in the trenches, in the bunkers, on the short rests after long night’s marches and in the wet dugouts... Even though we were losing battles everywhere we were fully committed to the belief that we would win. I can say that we only saw those who led us, from head to toe, here in Bureli when they were accused of being Tito’s agents and spies. Imagine that, being accused by Zahariadis, the very same man whom they worshipped, venerated and celebrated. Zahariadis paraded them on the stage, then, in front of everyone, made harsh accusations against them. The accusations were especially harsh now because in war time they were brought before a military court and the harshest punishments were delivered. They were accused of ‘treason’ and pointed at with a finger that said ‘these are the culprits for our defeat’. And we, with our bruised pride and wounded dignity, called for: ‘Death!!! By hanging!!! Three meters under the wall!!!’ Was it for only that, that we wanted their heads or was it for something more?...” I sat silent listening to this eighty year old woman who was once a Partisan and fighter of DAG, and who unexpectedly and with a bitter tone in her voice, asked me: “What do we call the time to which our memories have returned? They brought us to Bureli after the last bloody battles at Gramos and housed us in barracks where the top political and military leadership, the five or six of them, ordered an investigation to find the reasons and the culprits for our defeat. And they found them. They found them in our people (Macedonians), the leaders of NOF and AFZH. They arrested them in Bureli and sent them to Moscow where they tried them, found them guilty and sent them to Siberia. The twelve were sent to

Siberia while the rest of us, numbering in the thousands, were sent to Tashkent... Well, I said much of what I wanted to say and now I want to tell you this. If someone avoids answering questions about that time and swings their hand at you, then you need to have some understanding for their silence. It is certain that much has changed in our convictions and beliefs in the last sixty years. We were young then and full of enthusiasm, faith and courage. We were dedicated to our ideals and we were always ready to make self-sacrifices. You need to understand that. But you also need to understand that these people carried their pain with them all these years. The pain of defeat, of being lied to and of the loss of their youth. As for myself, I didn’t agree with those who acted illegally and, like thieves during the night, inducted us into the struggle. Who gave them that right? And there in the camps, hidden in the dense forests of Gramos and Vicho, they took advantage of our innocence and brainwashed us. I didn’t want to understand nor do I agree with those who took it upon themselves to take ownership of our young and exploit their enthusiasm to their detriment. They do that even now and think that it is their right to do so. Even today under certain circumstances, they act in the name of a supposed greater good, calling on nations to rise. And do they care when people get robbed, are displaced and exiled? No! I have no need or understanding of the vanity of those who do that and I never will... I have no respect or understanding for those who took advantage of our youthful courage, enthusiasm, heroism and faith and turned it into something ugly... There are still people out there, like me, who in spite of their troubles, regrets and bitterness, who would like to talk about those times. Yet there are also those who like to keep silent and for them I have no understanding. Why do they still remain silent? Why have they not broken the seal of silence and spoken out publicly and openly about who is to be blamed and at whom the finger of blame should be pointed? Perhaps they feel better if things are left alone and forgotten? That would certainly be of benefit to some… Do they want to send their memories to oblivion so that they themselves can forget them? If there are no memories of yesterday and if there are no memories of today then there can be no memories for tomorrow…. Well, the same goes for people… We are the self-igniting and defeated generation who measured time with hope. Unfortunately time has caught up to us and our memories are slowly beginning to be erased, but we need to, I emphasize, that we need to be remembered and to be recorded in time, in our time…”