Until September 1943, Magnesia had been under Italian occupation. The Italians had arrested hundreds of unarmed civilians, trade unionists, members of the Resistance, boatmen from the Sporades Islands who had assisted Allied soldiers to escape to the Middle East, as well as Greek Army officers captured on the battlefield. They were tried and sentenced to severe penalties or even death. Many were deported to concentration camps in Italy run by the fascist regime.
Most deportees (about 70%) were captured by the Germans and their local collaborators in 1944. After Mussolini's fall in 1943, the first wave of mass arrests under German occupation took place in March 1944 during the German reprisal drive on Mount Pelion. Others were caught at roadblocks in Volos and other locations. An explicit aim of these arrests was to capture slave labourers to be sent to Germany.
Those arrested were taken to the German prisons in Volos, where they were brutally tortured or executed. Those who escaped death were deported by train to concentration camps in Germany. Intermediate stops were the camps in Larisa and the Pavlos Melas camp in Thessaloniki.
Afroditi Koutrouli, member of the workers’ branch of the Resistance organization EAM, describes how she had been tortured by electric shock treatment
"And they hooked me up to the electricity, they had something like a little sewing machine, they connected one cable to your hand and the other to your foot, and once it started working, I fell down. And Christina [her daughter] kept saying to me 'How can you say that like that, Mom?' she said, 'as if it were nothing'. 'It was nothing, my girl, nothing compared to what others went through,' I said. 'What I went through was nothing,' I said.
The fear of execution accompanied the prisoners all the way to Germany. Paris Malokapis, a young partizan from Syki, recounts how he escaped execution at the Larisa camp.
“In Larisa, we stood in front of the firing squad. They brought in some more prisoners from various places. There were 38 of us in total... and we waited for them to kill us. They told us, "In five minutes, kaput... they're going to kill you." The Germans that held us there, a group of 10-15 men, they were soldiers, not human beings, but PIGS! They were waiting for the officer to come and give the order for the execution. As soon as he arrived, he announced that today was Hitler's birthday and that our sentence had been commuted from death to life-long forced labour in Germany. That was it. They spared our lives for Hitler's sake”.
After several months of detention in Greek camps and prisons, the prisoners begin their journey to the Third Reich from Thessaloniki. They are loaded like sheep onto freight trains: 40-45 people packed together in carriages designed to carry a maximum of “24 men, 6 horses”.
They travel with hardly any food or water for days on end, and under appalling sanitary conditions - half a barrel or bucket for their bodily needs. The first phase of their "adjustment" to the new order has been completed. Deeply traumatized and humiliated, separated from their families and the normality of their previous lives, the prisoners have learned to obey to survive.
The constant fear of execution and uncertainty about their fate made deportation to the Third Reich seem like a "positive development."
“There was a train, I don't know where it was, perhaps in Kordelio, I don't know where this train was. These prisoners had been there for days, waiting for us from Volos to arrive. And ‘where are you taking us, guys?’ but they didn't tell us. We said they were taking us to be executed. Pagona had some grapes, I remember, she gave us some grapes. So I experienced that too, that you were going to be executed. That's what we believed. But at some point, they told us we were going to Germany. Oh, we perked up. And we got into the carriage. We set off for Deutschland über alles.”
Yorgos Fokoulis: 10 July, 1944. They came and woke us up early in the morning. They took us outside, lined us up in pairs, and led us… they took us out of the camp, marched us down, and took us to the station. They took us to the station. In the meantime, there was a curfew on. To the left and right German soldiers, they had us in the middle and were dragging us along; they took us to the station and loaded us into the wagons. When they put you on the wagon, they’d take off your belt; if you had any spoons, forks, or knives, the German would take them and shove you inside just like that, to get in there.… and hatch your eggs (laughs). Once we got inside the wagon, in the middle of the wagon there was a… half a barrel.
Riki Van Boeschoten: The vat (vouta).
Yorgos Fokoulis: Yeah, uh, half a barrel. (laughing). 47 people now, crammed in there, you see, we were, what could we do but sit down, could we do anything else? Could you stay seated like that the whole time? You’d stand up for a while, just to move around a bit. Whenever the guy next to Christos stood up, he’d yell, “What the hell, you’re getting up again?” (laughing) It was funny, yeah. (laughs) They put us in there— when did the train take off? We got there in the morning; the train left in the evening. After sunset. After they put us on the train and locked us up, the women came… when the curfew was lifted and the outside world had woken up, the women came and started shouting: “Guys, don’t be afraid, further north Tito, Tito will set you free…”
Riki Van Boeschoten: Organized women, huh? Part of the Resistance?
Yorgos Fokoulis: Yes, yes, but not very sensible ones… (laughter)
Theodoros Ayiotis remembers not only the endless journey to the camps but also the ways in which resistance and solidarity developed between the prisoners and the "outside" world.
"In Yugoslavia, at every station we went to, the train had to wait for hours. Why? Another train went ahead and checked the line, and then ours followed. Because Serbian partizans were blowing up the tracks. They would plant explosives and blow them up. So the Germans would check the tracks and then we would go. And so we started going from one city to another, which is why the journey took so long. It took us many days to get there. I say 12, maybe it was 11 days, I don't remember exactly. Now, after we set off, there was a man from Epirus among us, [...] we called him Nikola. He says: 'Guys, listen to me for a moment. Please be quiet, keep silent for a moment, I’ve got something nice to tell you. What the hell can be nice, we asked ourselves, now that we are all together on this train, going to Germany? (laughter). So, we see him take a newspaper out of his pocket. 'Listen to what I'm going to read to you.' A Yugoslav newspaper, and he knew how to read it. That's why I'm telling you he knew... how did he know the language? I don't know. And he reads from the newspaper the exact date of the Normandy landings. And he tells us that Normandy happened, he says it was a success, they repelled the Germans, this and that... And we got excited... And we ask him: 'Where did you find this newspaper, Nikola?' 'Just now,' he says, 'when we were waiting at the station, a Yugoslav railway worker put it through a crack in the wall, I felt something bothering me on my back. I put my hand, he says, I saw it and I pulled the newspaper inside."
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