Being in Axis-Occupied Greece: Childhood and the Conceptualization of Crisis

This paper is concerned with social life in Greece under the tripartite Axis Occupation in 1941-1945 and it explores the ways in which the temporal limits of childhood were reconceptualized under that crisis. Although the official history of the Nazi occupation of Greece has been told exhaustively and effectively by Mazower and others, the social history of the time and the stories that comprise it has still to be told in any concerted, organized, and analytical manner. In this paper I will present the various Resistance organizations that included children and I will reference their organizational patterns and structures. I will give specific examples of the children’s unofficial “small acts” of civil resistance, including the saltadoroi (young boys, between the ages of 10 and 15 who jumped on and pilfered food and dry goods from the German transport lories that they either took to their families or used them as exchange commodities),  the kouvades (adolescent boys who wrote anti-Nazi slogans on the walls of the urban centers), and the syndesmoi (children of 10-13 years old and young men and women running messages between members of the resistance fighters). Their actions and the tortures that they endured when  captured have been referenced both in popular and high culture of and about the period, and still reverberate in narrations about that time as the time when “childhood disappeared”. Having collected material from various archives and from interviews with today’s adults who were children at the time I will present an anthropological account of this history that has only been confronted as part of art and literature. I will refer to the methodological difficulties that arise from this sort of microhistorical research and I will present the significance of that experience as part of the self-realization of people as current historical subjects.