A little known fact of British history is its 4 year war fought
against the Greek people in 1945/49. The left-wing resistance fighters in Greece fought a bloody and brutal guerrilla war with the occupying Italians and Germans throughout the entire occupation period. However our “revered” wartime
leader Winston Churchill, had no intentions of letting the more
numerous and powerful left-wing guerrilla movements form a communist
government in Greece, when the Nazis withdrew. So as the war neared
its end in Greece, British aid was poured in to support the royalist,
militarists and other smaller right-wing groups, some who had been Nazi collaborators. With the Nazis out of Greece in 1945, the British
turned their guns on their once wartime allies, the Greek resistance
fighters. The battle was brutal and thousands of Greek anti-fascists fighters died
at the hands of the British forces. Not all resistance fighters were
men, thousands were women, though most of the men were put to death, thousands of women and children were simply taken and from 1949 to
1953, imprisoned on the Greek island of Trikeri. The island became
home, though a very unpleasant home, to more than 5,000 anti-fascist women and
hundreds of children, their crime, fighting the Nazis and being left-wing.
There is a play based on the stories and diaries of these
women and children, “A Thousand Murdered Girls” written by
Liverpool based poet and writer Darren Guy in collaboration with
Greek writters and poets, Elani Fourtounia and Rita Boumi Pappas.
