DISPLACED CHILDREN
By C. M. WOODHOUSE
BEING materially a poor country, Greece needs to derive all possible strength from moral resources. One of them has always been her children. In western countries children are regarded merely as the hope of the future, but in a stricken country like Greece they have to belong to the present as well. They are not sheltered from the realities of life, as in western countries, up to a compara- tively mature age ; they experience them from the first day when, for. example, a stranger seeing them for the first time utters the trite formality: " May they live 1" and utters it in a tone which admits more than half a possibility that they may not. These are the con- sequences of history, which in Greece has not usually been, as it has at most periods in England, something that happens to other people or once happened in books to forgotten ancestors, but some- thing that happens in the immediate here and now to everyone, not excepting children.
Children in Greece did not, simply by being children, escape for the duration of childhood from four centuries of Turkish occupa- tion, nor from four years of German occupation ; nor do they escape today. To look at Greek children, in consequence, is not so much to foresee a promise of Greece's future as to see a symbol in minia- ture of. what Greece is today. What first taught me that lesson was an experience during the German occupation of Greece, when for the first time something happened that had seemed impossible—the first unmistakable symptom, out of many that had been sought, of the effect British policy was causing in Greece by supplying quan- tities of sovereigns to maintain the resistance movement. It was perhaps an inevitable policy ; but that it was also demoralising became clear to me on an autumn day in 1943 when a small boy followed me through a mountain village holding out his right hand, rubbing the fingers together, and asking for money. This echo of the cry for baksheesh, familiar in the ears of every traveller who has ever set foot on any Eastern Mediterranean quayside, had never before been heard in the mountains of Greece. It was a whole people's first cry of surrender.
In a country with such a history as Greece has been through in recent centuries, the qualities of the people can be read no less clearly in the reactions of their children ; they stand or fall together. But one example does not mean that they have fallen ; they have stood too long for that. Under the Turkish occupation, when Greece's masters were setting the present-day Communists their precedent by levying a tribute of Greek children to be brought up as Janissaries, it was the pride of the Greek people to preserve its integrity by educating every generation of children in the Romaic language and the Orthodox religion, even when the schools had to be conducted at night under threat of persecution. That the children's hearts were in this heroic intrigue is shown by its success ; without it Greece would never have survived to be liberated at all. The same spirit outlived a different threat under the German occupation, whose endeavour was not to suppress but to corrupt Hellenism and to harness Greek education to Hitler's New Order. The children of Greece contributed at least as much as their parents to the defeat of that endeavour.
One personal anecdote will be worth pages of argument on this point. In Crete in 590-2 a large number of British prisoners, who had escaped or hidden from the enemy, were roaming from village to village seeking shelter. They seldom sought in vain, but the penalties for givihg them shelter were brutal, and the Germans relentlessly pursued them. Because they failed to break the morale of the adult population, the Germans sometimes tried to extract the information they wanted about the movements of the British refugees from young children. Once when they raided a village hot on the heels of a British party, which had been smuggled away only half an hour earlier, the following dialogue took place, and was reported to me at first hand on the same day. A German officer asked a small girl if she had seen the British. Rather surprisingly she said at once that she had. " Where ? " he asked. " In Heraclion," she replied, naming the principal town of the island, some thirty miles: away. A little disappointed, the German asked : " When ? " " Before the war," she replied, thus entitling herself to a place in legend beside the young Cavalier who had seen his father " last night."
The child had no material inducement to loyalty. At the best of times her country was so poor that it was reputed to be made up of the stones left over after God had sifted out the earth for all other lands. Under the occupation it had grown poorer still ; so poor that children never had enough to eat, nor toys to play with, nor energy enough to play with them if they had. Even schools closed in many villages during the occupation, because teachers could not be paid and books could not be bought. Nor could desperate Allies on the run contribute much to solicit the loyalty of children. It was simply that, because the child's life reflected in miniature the life of her elders, her spontaneous reactions likewise reflected in miniature those instinctive qualities of cunning, stubbornness and mockery which centuries of occupation had selectively bred in the race.
So it cannot have come as much of a shock to children in the north of Greece to find themselves kidnapped in the course of their latest war. What is remarkable is that it does not seem to have been much of a shock to the world's conscience either. Some voices here and there have been raised in protest, but immediately. answered by louder voices representing a new and strange point of view. It would have seemed incredible ten years ago that the removal en masse of hundreds of children to a foreign country should become a matter of controversy between fair-minded men at all, because it was obviously and indisputably wrong. Yet it seems that in this year of grace there are arguments on both sides. It may be that all the facts adduced by those opposed to the abduction are wrong, and all the facts adduced by those who defend it are right. It may be that the former are all woolly-minded sentimentalists out of touch with reality, and the latter all trained experts in the problem of D.P.'s. It may even be that the children enjoyed being taken away. But behind all these contingencies what is certain is that one side thinks it necessarily wrong in all circumstances to take children away from their families to foreign countries, and the other side does not. The existence of that latter point of view is new and remarkable. The contrast between the two is a symptom, and not the only one, that accepted notions of morality are undergoing a profound change in the world today.
One of the most spectacular " sensations " in the newspapers between the wars was the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. One of the most significant events since the second war is the kidnapping of hundreds of children from Greece. The difference in the effect on public opinion of the abduction of one child fifteen years ago and the abduction of hundreds of children today is a measure of the numbness to which our consciences are succumbing. There could be no more striking or more terrifying verification of the moral stated by Chaplin in the final scene of his great film, M. Verdoux: that, if you do wrong on a small scale, you will be regarded as a villain, but if you do it on a sufficiently large scale, you may not.
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