CRBETE—Six Years After

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 414, 30 May 1947, Page 20

CRBETE—Six Years After

TWENTY-TWO months in hiding among Greek peasants during the German occupation encouraged Kiwi Jim McDevitt to go back when the war was over to spend another two years helping his former friends as a CORSO volunteer. The week before last he came back from Crete and compared conditions during the war and now in an interview with "The Listener."

| "© CYOME minefields were still being slowly cleared up when I left," he = said. "There were wrecks of planes still scattered around Malemi ‘drome. You could still see the bones of the York and many other ships. And of course there were some villages that would just never be rebuilt. But, generally speaking, the country was strugback towards: pre-war productiveness. Why, in Herakleon before I left, they were even starting to export sul- — and things again." "And how were your. friends?" |. "Very glad to see me. In fact, merely getting a letter from New Zealand always caused a great flutter in any village or ‘town, The people would run -up to the lucky recipient from all sides and it would be read aloud and passed -round from hand to hand. As a matter of fact, in my own case, hospitality got a little too pressing and continuous. It forced me to join up with another fellow to take a house some distance out of Canea. It cost us more to live that way. But we’d never have had a moment to ourselves otherwise." "And were they really down and out and. needing your help?" "Well, that varied from family to family according to what you had lost during the war or what work you could do. But mostly it depended on what part of the country you lived in. In the far east of Crete, for example, where there had been next to no fighting, we reckoned that not more than 5 per cent. of the people were ‘indigent’-which was the technical UNRRA word for. those who needed free rations to keep them alive. At the western end, on the other hand, a good 50 per cent. were ‘indigent.’ Conditions varied enormously. Thére were places on the mainland, for example, that had been practically wiped off the map-1,600 villages, in fact-leaving 2,000,000 homeless to crowd into the cities, putting an unbearable strain on the water and power supplies. Yet on the other hand there were also towns with barely a house even buniped. If you saw only those parts in Greece you could come home saying that life was pretty good there -lots of tinned goods in the shops, lots of cake and eggs at meals, and lots of jobs for everyone." We were surprised. In a damaged country, we said, there must surely be plenty of work everywhere repairing the damage. ’ Tools for the Job "But not if the tools to work with had also been destroyed," he told us. "Island fishermen couldn’t fish if their boats had been sunk or requisitioned. City workers couldn’t produce if their factories were still scrap metal. And fields and orchards couldn't be ploughed up if the ploughs had been broken and the oxen or donkeys killed." That is what Crete and Greece had been likespeaking generally--when he got back there. But since then the tractors and

seed and manures which UNRRA had provided had given the country a bumper harvest. . The bread was still quite black, and contained all sorts of stuff beside flour: but there was lots more of it than there had been, And fishermen had .nets, and peasants hoes. and mules, so that they did not have to sit idle around the villages the way plenty of them had had to do in the last stages of the war and the first year of the peace. "As for those tinned goods," continued Mr. McDevitt, "the poor’ who had been given them among UNRRA rations, looked on them

as luxuries and therefore sold them to buy the necessaries they were used to-bread, mainly. And supplies tended to stay in the less damaged and better-supplied regions because there was not enough transport to get them in to the more distant and worse damaged places. That is why more than a third of what UNRRA spent in Greece was spent on gefting the transport to work again." "*Transport system’ in English translates into ‘donkeys’ in Greek, doesn’t it?" we asked. "In the mountains, yes," agreed Mr. McDevitt. "So UNRRA brought over mules soon after we arrived, thousands of them, from Texas and Brazil, and sold them at well under landed cost. But I don’t remember many transport animals in Crete even in the pre-invasion days before the German gliders started to arrive. When those of us who got left behind became sort of Greeks ourselves, they told us they had given their mules to the Government on the very first days of the war to be used fighting the Italians in Albania. I travelled a lot round Crete this last time as an ‘observer. So I know how inaccessible to anything but mules or mokes some of its odd corners are." "A tourist’s\ existence-just ‘observing!’ " "Not on your life! It: was not very recreational in spots. You see it really meant checking up to find out whether that village’s committees-meaning the mavor, the priest, the schoolteacher, and perhaps one or two others--were adding all their friends or enemies to the lists of ‘indigents’ and so getting them food and clothes for nothing. I -had some tough arguments and some tough interviews at times to make them stick to the rules." Village Diplomacy "But why should village officials want to benefit their enemies as well as their friends?" "Because they feared them," explained Mr. McDevitt. "After bitter experience in small communities where

some neighbours have been -saboteurs and otbers collaborationists, feelings run high. So villages tend to become either nearly all left wing or nearly all royalist. In those that remained mixed many mayors tried to give everyone a turn at being ‘indigent’ just to show there was no favouritism. ... "But a good part of my time I worked at the UNRRA orphanages and health camps-great institutions, their ‘plant’ supplied by UNRRA and their staff drawn from various voluntary bodies like CORSO. Later I was translating for welfare workers who were going round the towns and villages teaching the women to use the dried milk and so on that you people sent them. I could see the difference that these goods. made on the childrenchanging them from skeletons to healthy youngsters. All the same the Greeks had to be taught to use the new things. That’s why CORSO had to send people as well as supplies. Where there were not enough ‘relief workers’ to show what was wanted, villages sometimes did the craziest things-like the one that took all the rubber off its tractor -to make boot soles. But-provided you didn’t expect a mere five-minute talk all by itself to upset ways of doing things which were 4,000 years old, they would learn. Plenty of villages are doing fine cultivation to-day with UNRRA tractofs, cooperatively owned. And talking of supplies reminds me to say that they can still do with spinning wheels and wool. Every village home used to spin its own clothes, but the wheels mostly got burned by the Germans for firewood. And that’s why you’ve needed to send clothing, too." "Then New Zealand won't be forgotten for some time in Greece and Crete?" "Y’ll say it» won’t-neither for war, nor for post-war services. You should have heard all the offers of marriage I’ve had-not personally, I mean (though that’s most embarrassing), but girls’ parents asking me to find them a ‘Kalos Neozelandos’ when I got home, Any offers?"