Wall Street Journal
November 6, 2010
As a boy in 1940s Greece, my friend Costas, now a retired banker, had a pistol shoved in his face by a communist guerrilla screaming that he wanted to requisition the family mule. Knowing that the animal meant his family's survival in desperate times, Costas refused. He might have been shot then and there if the guerrilla had not been restrained by more compassionate comrades. Many years later, attending his nephew's wedding in Athens, Costas was stunned to recognize the best man. It was the very fellow who had nearly killed him over a mule.
Such stories are common in Greece, where a merciless occupation by Germans and Italians during World War II, violence between left and right, and foreign meddling during the civil war (roughly 1945-49) and the Junta years (1967-74) left Greeks living cheek by jowl with people they could never forgive.
Kevin Andrews experienced the dangers of the countryside during the civil war. The Flight of Ikaros, the book he produced from his travels, remains not only one of the greatest we have about postwar Greece—memorializing a village culture that has almost vanished—but also one of the most moving accounts I have ever read of people caught up in political turmoil. (It is richer than George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia because Andrews spent more time getting to know the people he wrote about.) Flight was first published in 1959 and last reprinted by Penguin in 1984. For too many years, this rare account has languished out of print.
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