20th Century Odyssey

For 84 years, before the Communists came, Stamatia Moschou never once left the mountain village of Vavouri that was her home. There her ancestors were born and died; there her children grew up to bear and bring up children of their own. But in the years just after World War II, when Communist guerrillas roamed and pillaged at will in the mountains of northern Greece, whole villages were often kidnaped as hostages. An estimated 40,000 Greeks, mostly civilian women and children, were rounded up from farms and firesides and taken behind the Iron Curtain. The villages that had been their homes were burned behind them.

The village of Vavouri was no exception. One day in 1948 the Red raiders aimed their guns at 84-year-old Stamatia Moschou and her family, and ordered them to march toward Albania. Along with 300 of their fellow villagers, the Moschou family -grandmother Stamatia, her daughter Alexandra, her grandsons Christopher, 15, and Evanghelos, I, her granddaughters Dimitra, Maria and Spiridoula -were driven across the mountains for five days and most of four nights. For close to a year they were herded from camp to camp, between Albania and Yugoslavia. At last they were thrown into the hold of a Russian freighter. "Like so many animals." said Alexandra Moschou.

To Live at Peace. Once when the freighter tied up at a wharf at one port, young Christopher managed to steal a look out of the fetid hold. The ship was in a British harbor, but no Britons were permitted aboard to see the human cargo she was carrying. In the face of the Communist guards, the Greek prisoners kept quiet. Soon afterward the freighter tied up at a Polish port, and the human cattle were transferred from its hold to sealed railway boxcars. Dragged, pushed and prodded from town to town over many months, the Moschou family were finally settled in a Hungarian village whose name had been changed from "Peace" to "Beloyannis" in honor of a Communist spy executed in Athens.

In Beloyannis the Moschous and 3,000 other Greek hostages worked at slave labor and studied under the constant supervision of Greek Communist secret police. The children were sent to "vocational school" to learn the principles of "good citizenship." "They had only one objective: to change our opinions and beliefs," said Christopher Moschou. "First, they would be sweet. Then they would become hard and they would threaten. They told us that jail and torture awaited us when we got back to Greece." It was their fellow Greeks who did most of the threatening. "The Hungarians," said another captive, "left us pretty much alone. But our own Greeks -it makes me ashamed."

To Die in Peace. Since the Moschous and the 40,000 others like them were first snatched away, only a handful have been returned to Greece, including 500 adults and children from Yugoslavia after Tito's split with Stalin. The Greeks asked in vain for the return of the others. Last fall Hungary, falling in with the Soviet peace offensive, offered to return some 600. Knowing that the Hungarians held at least 3,000, the Greeks tried to raise the figure, and succeeded at last in getting Hungary to promise the return of 1,200.

Last week, for the first time in close to a decade, 1,172 hostages to Communism set foot on Greek soil at the port of Egoumenitsa. Among them was Stamatia Moschou, now 90, her daughter and her grandchildren. "Now," said hardy old Stamatia as she stepped ashore, "I can die in peace among my own people." But another grandmother, Fotini Skenhis, a nonagenarian like Stamatia, had not been so lucky. The returning hostages told her story to a soldier grandson as he stood searching the wharf in vain for her face. After waiting in hope all these years, old Fotini had died of a heart attack when told she was to go home at last.

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