4,314 words
New Delhi
31 August 1974
Dear young comrade A,
My heartfelt congratulations to “Dieter Donetz” for the letter to the editor of that contemptible paper. Maybe it was written in haste and that the style — strictly speaking — could be improved upon, as you say, but it is good, very good indeed. D. D. calls the fellow that he really is: a “male prostitute” — selling his pen, and his capacity of putting sentences together, instead of selling his sexual organs. One is no better than the other, and of the two, much as I am the least qualified to write about sex, of which I know nothing (even through books — such books when forcibly lent to me by college girls of my age, because it was “fashionable” to read them, and considered “backward” to ignore them, always bored me stiff, so I put them down after the first page) of the two, I believe, I should still prefer the commercialization of the physical. (The best, if it has to be, would seem to me to be the “sacralization” of it, as in Babylonian and Greek antiquity, the “holy servants” of the Aphrodite Temples.) But anything rather than write what is shameful, for money or any material profit. Not only writing, but any participation in activities one despises. I remember the Greek Counsel in my native town in France (who — they say — had made pots of money during the war, selling false birth certificates to wealthy Jews for them to escape fate) offering me in 1946 a well-paid job at the U.N.O. I replied I’d never work for the organization, for any price, and even added I’d rather be “the doorkeeper in a b . . . [brothel]” — much to the indignation of my interlocutor, even though he knew me from the days I was a student and should have expected such a reaction on my part.
There is a funny story to add to this memory. The secretary of the Consulate — who bore the famous name Sokrates, but yet was anything but a philosopher — had also had a part in the lucrative traffic — they say — and also the Greek priest (delivering false “Christening certificates”). Sokrates had left his virtuous, hard-working wife, and taken as a keep a pretty naughty young Greek girl named Pho???, and called by everybody Phopoho. But he was not divorced — his wife refused to get a divorce — and had to maintain two households. He confidently told me of his trouble and asked for council. I advised him to become a Mohammedan and urge the two women to do the same, so that he might, if desired, add another two to his harem. The joke was bitter. And he told me I should not make fun of him for he was really in trouble, “in spite of all the money he had got from the Jews” — i.e., shared with his two partners. He was quite brazen, for this was in Feb. 1946. Nothing could happen then.
But Phopho met in the market another Greek woman (who repeated the conversation to me). She told her that her “husband” had met me and talked quite openly to me. And the other woman, in earnest — and this is the real funny side of it — replied, “What! Maximiani!” (That is my name under which I was christened. It is a Byzantine name.) “But don’t you know she is one of them Nazis? She won’t forget what he did during the war, you can be sure of that; and ‘next time’” — oh dear, “next time,” uttered in Feb. 1946!! — “you’ll all find yourselves landed in some camp!” (By the way, the three fellows would have landed somewhere, had I but known of their doings in time. We could communicate with Germany via Japan. But I only came to know on my revisiting France in 1946 — too late!!)
And now, as I am talking of Greeks, I may as well tell you what I think of the Cyprus conflict. Years ago, I would have gone to Cyprus and joined the resistance in favor of “Henosis” — Unity (with Greece) had not I believe that the Greeks were fools and deserved no better. Why? Well I shall now tell you “why.” It is a long story and goes back to 1915-16: When I was a kid, and a Greek nationalist long before I became (in 1929) conscious of “having been a Nazi all the time.” (One of the things I liked so much in Mein Kampf as soon as I opened the book for the first time was our Führer’s endeavor to bring “all Germanic people under one state.” “Gemeinsames Blut gehört in gemeinsamen Staat.”) I told people I could really not find anything to criticize in this, when I had all my life lived for the “Megali Idea” — the “Great Idea” of all Hellenic people, those of Constantinople (from where my people originally come, on my father’s side; it seems that there are still some Portassis there; related to us, I don’t know) and those of Asia Minor, to be gathered together in one state. The point of view was the same.
I was also very conscious of the fact that all through the Middle Ages, the Greeks of the Byzantine Empire had been the bulwark of Europe against both Arabs and Turks. The “Akathistos Hymnos” — the non-sitting — i.e., standing — hymn to the Virgin Mary, Lady of Constantinople, was composed spontaneously and sung in the Cathedral Church of St. Sophia just after a “narrow escape” from an Arab invasion. I never was a Christian at heart — never accepted the Christian “values” — but looked upon the Orthodox Church as an inseparable part of “Greek culture” of yesterday and today. (Taormina, last Greek town in Sicily, fell to the Arabs in 900 AD.[1] [1])
As for the Turks — the Seljuks first as early as the eleventh and twelfth centuries — Emperor Romanos Diogenes (1067–70) fought against Alp Arslan, the fierce Seljuk Turks overran Asia Minor, until slowly the Ottoman (another batch of Turks) sacked Constantinople in 1453. Mind you, this would probably not have happened if the Byzantine Empire had not been dismembered for the first time — in 1204-05 by the Western Europeans (French and Venetians) of the IVth “Crusade.” It was re-put together by Michael Paleologos in 1261 but was never the same as before. (Athens, among other places, remained under domination of Westerners — under the French Family De la Roche, 1205–1311 — under the “Catalan Company,” 1311–1387 — under the Florentine family Acciajuoli, 1387–1456 — at which time the Turks took it, so that it was in bondage from 1205 to 1830 — over 600 years.)
While in France, to speak only of one Western country, Racine was writing his beautiful plays with mostly subjects drawn from Greek ancient history — Andromaque, Iphigenie, Phèdre, etc. — living Greece was cut off from the world, under the Turks. The first Greek school where the language was openly taught was opened, not in Greece, where learning was clandestine, but . . . in Venice, in 1637. In 1669, two years only after Racine’s Andromaque was played for the first time (1667) in Versailles, a Frenchman named Guillet visited Greece — a rare “tourist” in those dark days. Athens had a military Turkish governor — a “disdar,” quartered on the Acropolis (his harem lodged in the Erechtheion — all the monuments of Periclean times were then still intact; a Venetian bomb was to turn them into ruins only on 26 September 1687) and the civil administration was let to 24 “demogerozes”; the same received the foreign visitor Guillet, and answered to the latter, who was astonished at their ignorance of ancient lore, “We may now not know our own history. But we do know it was great. And we do know, too, that ‘one day’ we shall again be a great people.” That in 1669 — some fifty years (roughly, if I remember well) after your Pilgrim Fathers settled in America.
Now, in spite of a little “unredeemed” Greek territory (in Epirus and Macedon) won back during the Balkan War (1912-13 — I remember it well), Greece was a very small country, in surface, in 1916; and along with her King, Constantine I — universally beloved, and the Kaiser’s brother-in-law — wanted to keep out of the war. But the king had an intriguing prime minister, Eleutherios Venizelos (a Freemason; I learned that later on) who wished (was it on order of the Lodges?) to push Greece into the war on the Allied side, against Germany (and Turkey, then Germany’s ally — Turkey, governed since 1908 by a triad of Jews, formally converted to Islam: Enver Pasha, Talat Pasha, and a third one).
In school I was told, from 1914 onwards, that the Germans were the worst of barbarians for “marching into poor little Belgium,” a “tiny country.” When, a mere year later the French landed in Salonika (Thessaloniki, its real name; Salonika is the Turkish shortening for it). I wondered why they were not to be called “barbarians” too, and when I was told it was because they were fighting “to make the world safe for Democracy” (which I had no time for, being as I was, as a child and as an adolescent, a royalist) I went and stole a piece of chalk from the classroom, and in the evening, when it was pitch dark, went and wrote on the back wall of the Brotteaux railway station, near my parents’ flat: “A bas les Allies! Vive l’Allemagne!” — “Down with the Allies! Long live Germany!” My protest against the French landing in Salonika while calling the “invaders” of Belgium “Barbarians.”
The whole story of their dealing with Greece — against the king, in complicity with Venizelos — from 1915 to 1917, is a disgrace to the Allies. Greece was blockaded for ten months, and blockade means famine to Greece. It produces only olives, raisins, and tobacco. Must import wheat. And Greeks are big bread eaters. That by the British and French fleets. Athens was bombarded by the French. (A shell fell right into the royal residence. The king, then talking to M. Joanart, the French envoy, took a piece in hand, once it was cold, and showed it to him: “And what about this? Is this your way to “discuss”?) The Allies wanted the king to go. The people, massed before the palace, were shouting, “Bread and olives alone — we don’t want more — but our king Constantine!” He had the prestige of the one who, on 26 October 1913 — on the Feast of St. Dimitrios, the city’s patron saint — had entered Thessaloniki.
The king was forcibly dragged away from his people and sent in a boat (under the command of the Frenchman Dartiges du Fourmet) off to exile. Greece was pushed into the war, by Mr. Venizelos.
(It is from this that I “fell out” with my father. He was for Mr. Venizelos — alleged to be the one who would bring back the Greeks of Asia Minor and Constantinople to the coming state. I, who saw in the king the embodiment of the nation, was for the king.)
Right. The war ended. Next to the infamous Treaty of Versailles, was signed (over a year later, namely on 10th August 1920) the just treat of Sèvres. Smyrna — taken by the Turks in 1419 — was reoccupied by the Greek Army in May (2/15 May) 1919, to the cheers of its overwhelming majority Greek population. The coast of Asia Minor (the Aegean coast, old Ionia, still called Ionia in modern Greek) was again Greek land. When Venizelos in the Boule (the Assembly) displayed the twenty maps of Greece — 1913–1920 — I practically forgave him for his participation in the war. After all, it is against the Turks — not the Germans — the Greeks had fought. I liked the Kaiser, for he had insisted in 1913 that Thessaloniki should be given back to Greece and not Bulgaria and replied to a contradictor: “Do not play with the edge of my sword.” I was grateful to him for that. Still, but for Constantinople and the Greek towns on the Black Sea Coast (including Trapezonde) the “Megali Idea” had become, through the man my father pompously called “The world’s greatest diplomat” — E. Venizelos — a reality.
But Mustapha Kemal opposed the Treaty of Sèvres. And there was now (1920–22) a Greco-Turkish war going on in Asia Minor — an atrocious war, on both sides. The Greeks who burnt out Turkish villages as reprisals, for the shooting of a couple of Greek soldiers by “partisans,” have nothing to say about the Germans doing as much in Russia, Poland, or France — or Greece — during World War II. And the Turks, whose atrocities are nobody’s business, have nothing to say about any country’s war horrors.
There were three Greek offensive movements from Afioun-Kara-Husar along the railway line running from there north, via Kutalia, to Eski Shehir: one in January 1921 — one in March 1921 (both failed) and one in July 1921 (which ended by Eski-Shehir falling into the hands of the Greeks).
In the meantime, in November (1 November 1920) elections were held in Greece, and Venizelos — in spite of all his success in diplomacy, and his “doubling” the surface of the map of Greece — was overwhelmingly outvoted. The Greeks loved King Constantine and wanted him back. On the 5th of December, he landed in Piraeus from exile, and was carried in triumph on the people’s shoulders, the six miles that separate the port from Athens. It was a delirium of enthusiasm.
But the French press (How I remember it! I was now fifteen!) was ranting against the “treacherous Greeks” that had “thrown off their benefactor to take back that friend of the Germans, that brother-in-law of the Kaiser.” In a paper Le Progrès of my native town, the French writer Cl. Farrire wrote (I can see the letters as though they were before me), “A rectification of frontiers, that Greece would have to pay for, will secure us peace with the Turks.” And in fact, the French, who had a “mandate” of the League of Nations over Syria and Cilicia, withdrew the 100,000 strong garrison is Cilicia, gave back Cilicia to the Turks, enabling the latter to send all their soldiers formerly in Cilicia to the Greek front in the west of Asia Minor. Not only that. French officers went as “volunteers” with the Turkish Army, and in March 1921, M. Franklin-Bouillon, the French envoy, signed with Ismel Pasha (later Ineuna Pasha) a Franco-Turkish treaty, to Greece’s damage.
That’s why, later on, as I became 21, and went and claimed Greek citizenship at the Home Ministry in Athens and was warned (by the Greeks themselves) that I was “cutting the grass under my feet,” meaning my material future, for I could have had a very good job in a French university. I then had a “license” [Master’s Degree] and was going to take a doctorate some years later. While in Greece there would be no hopes for me (unless I had got married, of course, and for that I should have had a fat dowry; moreover, I did not want to marry anybody). That’s why, I say, I replied, “Anything — teaching private pupils from door to door, in fact, even doing household work — rather than be the ‘compatriot’ of Mr. Franklin-Boullion!” To which the Greek authorities replied to me, “Congratulations, but — at the same time — condolences!”
The British encouraged the Greeks to march beyond Eski-Shahin, direct to Ankara. But gave neither financial nor military aid. The march ended with the disaster (September 1921) on the borders of the Sangarios (Sakharia) river. How I remember that, too! It took a year for the Turks, aided by Soviet Russia as well as by the French, to break through and take over the whole of Asia Minor. Of the 2,000,000 Greeks there, half a million were massacred and 1,500,000 came and camped in Greece — whose population at the time was 5,000,000 only. They camped in the schools, in the churches, in the streets. I saw numbers and numbers of them still on the pavement, along the main avenue of Athens, in August 1923, when I first visited Greece (stayed till 5 December 1923, then came and resumed my studies in France).
In October (12 October exactly) 1922 — a mere month after the fall of Smyrna in flames (9 September 1922) — there was an international conference at Moudania (Asia Minor, on the Marmara Sea coast). Nathaniel Curzon (for Britain), Aristide Briand (the notorious “pacifist,” for France), Ismel Pasha (Ineum) for Turkey, and Mazarakis (sent by the Plastiras Military Government who had taken over, for Greece) met there. The “Powers” — wishing to please the Turks — insisted that the whole (untouched) province of Eastern Thrace from the Maritza River to the outskirts of Constantinople (occupied by Allied troops under General Harrington) and the Marmara Sea, be given back to the Turks — and Adrianople with it. (Adrianople, the capital.)
Mazarakis pointed out that the Greek Army, evacuated from Asia Minor, could still defend that rich corn land; that, moreover, if it were handed over to the Turks, to the 1,500,000 Greek refugees from Asia Minor, one would have to add a new i???? of half a million from Eastern Trace, which would make 2,000,000, for a country of 5,000,000 inhabitants ???? people extra in a few days. The “powers” — Curzon and Brian — were adamant. They threatened Mazarakis with “a new blockade of Greece by the British and French fleets” if Adrianople and the whole of Eastern Thrace were not evacuated by the Greek Army at a very early date. A blockade of a country of 5,000,000 inhabitants, with an extra 1,500,000 refugees — can you imagine that on the part of those whose governments were, one day, less than 25 years later, to stage the Nuremberg “war crime” trials? Fine ones to speak of war crimes! Full of bitterness, the Greeks were ordered out of Eastern Thrace. And the inhabitants of the province poured across the border — new refugees added to the Asia Minor ones. This under the threat of blockade.
Then was that abominable “exchange of populations” — the few “Turks” (the Muslims) of Greece, mostly perfectly Aryan types, but once converted to Islam, had to leave, and all Greeks of Turkish-owned territory had to go to Greece, quite a number not Aryan at all but once — in Byzantine days — converted to the Greek Church. I met a few such ones in my native town — Lyons — in France, where a whole Greek colony sprang up some twelve miles outside the town in Pont-de-Cherry, where a clever factory owner saw an opportunity for cheap labor. (He used to pay the refugees ½ if not less than ½ the salary given to French workers, even unskilled. The women, less still. But the Greeks accepted — what to do? — and prospered. Pont-de-Cherry was long the only place to have a Greek Church — where a ceremony was held on 25 March, the national day — while in Lyons there was none yet. And shops with Greek letters above them — Pantopoleion (grocers), Kaffeneion (coffee shop), etc. — sprang up from everywhere. One felt oneself in Greece there (save for the climate, of course).
Time passed. Things “settled down.” The “old people” — even those young at the time of the Asia Minor disaster, like I — never forgot. The young ones grew up in new surroundings and were less and less conscious of the awfulness of the treatment meted out in Greece by the “powers.”
There were gatherings in the Lyons Greek colony, where I grew up. And songs were sung there. One ran thus:
Smyrna, thou wast not Turkish,
Thou wast not Kemal’s
It’s only that the French
And the British betrayed thee.
From 1923 onwards, I followed the struggle of that German nationalist (who dreamed of a Germanic “Megali Idea”) — Adolf Hitler — with utmost sympathy. And bitterness at the memory of the 1920–22 war, and especially at the behavior of the “two great ones” at Moudania (12 October 1922) made me hate the West (which owed its very existence to the Greek’s resistance to alien people all through the centuries, and went and sided with the Turks — for promises which [serves them right!] Kemal never kept.)
Time passed, and World War II broke out. The words of the old song came back to me:
Smyrna, thou wast not Turkish
It’s only that the British and French betrayed thee.
Those “British and French” had just waged war on that Germany, whose citizenship I gladly should have taken in 1933 (had I been in Europe still), had I not already taken Greek citizenship at the age of twenty-one — that Germany in whose Leader, I now (for the last ten years) had been venerating the “Leader of all Aryans.”
The best time to take revenge for the cowardly threat at Moudania, October 1922!
Would to God the Greek Government of the day — Metaxas government, friendly to Germany by the way — had sent someone to Berlin and told our Führer: “We stand with you, against those who treated us so badly after the First World War, and during it — 1915-1917. Cyprus is in British hands — win the war and give us back Cyprus. The Twelve Isles (Dodecanese, Rhodes and the others) are in Italian hands. Ask your partner Mussolini to let us have them back too!”
Had the Greeks done that, I should have felt proud of them. In case the war had turned wrong (as it did) I should have been the first to join the resistance in Cyprus. But the war would not then have turned wrong. There would have been no British bases in the Aegean Sea to help the Allied troops in North Africa, no three weeks would have been lost in 1941, during the Russian campaign — three weeks to “put things right” in Greece after the silly conflict Mussolini had started there, three weeks fatal to the plans in Russia.
Our Führer loved the Greeks — as his Reichstag speech of 4 May 1941, after his forced intervention on Mussolini’s side. He would have welcomed Greek participation against the “Powers” in 1939.
But no. Instead of offering a friendly collaboration to the Leader of all Aryans, and their own natural Leader, what did the stupid Greeks do, but again ally themselves with those who “betrayed Smyrna” and all the Greeks of Asia Minor — who (during World War!) had promised Constantinople both to the Greeks and the Russians — as they had promised Palestine both to the Arabs (via T. E. Lawrence) and to the Jews.
The present events in Cyprus never would have occurred, had the Greeks done as I just said. As they did not, let things take their natural course. The salary of silly attachment to unworthy, Jew-ridden foreign “powers” is disaster. I have no time for silly fools — much as I might resent Turks taking over Cyprus. The Greeks should have thought of Cyprus — bought (not even conquered) by the British from the Turks — in 1939. Now it is a bit late.
To my horror, I just became conscious, now, that I have omitted to thank you from the depth of my heart for the twenty-five dollar cheque, your kind present. Do forgive me. But when I start on the subject of grievances against those Freemasons (slaves of Jews) such as Clemenceau and, I believe, Briand, and all those of the Allied governments who treated Greece so shabbily during and after the First World War — and after that had the impudence of staging a “tribunal” against Germany, after World War II — I could talk for hours — without a break.
Of course the worst one was the Freemason Venizelos. Had he stood by his king, the 2,000,000 Greeks of Asia Minor could still be there, living in peace. (My father did not see that. He blamed the voters for calling back the king — instead of waiting.)
More next time.
I must now go out and post this letter — unless it be already too late (it is Saturday). In which case I’ll have it registered on Monday.
H.H.!
Savitri
The receipt I have is not from the USA, but from the Post Office here, to say the parcel (book post, surface mail) was taken up. I showed it. Was told that indeed it has been mailed on the day indicated on the paper (sometime in January 1974, for it to reach you not too long after 6 March 1974).
I am losing hope too as time goes on. And especially as an acquaintance of mine, Miss MacLeod, a Scotch woman, had told me she has not received a parcel sent to her this year, surface mail, from London. The parcel was reported to her having reached the port of Bombay all right. But no more was heard of it between Bombay and Delhi — on the train journey. It contained edibles and was probably “pinched” on the way. Mine contained only the two books I mentioned — one (Gold in the Furnace) which was covered with thick drawing paper on which was painted, by me, a large gold Swastika in the midst of flames. There is (officially) no censorship in India. But I am told that “occasionally” books and magazines “might be” examined. If this glaring Swastika covering ever fell under the eyes of some Yid — there are some, everywhere; even in the public services; or Indian married to Jewesses and made conscious of the “danger” of Nazism — then, I presume, he would like to read it and (distasteful as it may be, with its chapter on “The Chambers of Hell” — the Allied post-war concentration camps, for Nazi inmates) keep it! I can imagine no other explanation of its vanishing.
I wish I had sent it “air mail” in spite of the cost (some 50 rupees or so).
Again thanks for your twenty-five dollars. As one of the colleges I used to teach at has closed its morning French class (for lack of pupils) I only have now the fifty dollars (about) I earn — outside the holiday period where I earn nothing — at the Alliance Française.
Do not regret earning a little less if your work is more interesting. Useful as it is — and don’t I know that, with prices rising daily (price of bread doubled! Price of milk too) — money is not everything.
With the everlasting greeting of the faithful,
H. H.
Savitri
My home address:
Sm. Savitri Dêvi Mukherji
C 23 South Extension II
New Delhi 49
(India)
Note
[1] [2] Correction: 902 AD.