The 86 -year -old I survived her Slaughter of the KalavrytaIrene, Lechouritis shares her horrible experience on DW 80 years after the end of World War II. A testimony of our collective memory.

Reportage Diogenes Dimitrakopoulos, Kalavryta

One of the most horrible Nazi war crimes in World War II in Europe unfolds in front of the eyes of history in Kalavryta in 1943. Time does not heal everything and memories remain alive.

The 86 -year -old survived the slaughter or HolocaustIrene Lechouritis, shares her horrible experience at Deutsche Welle, 80 years after the end of World War II. A testimony of our collective memory.

The timeline of horror

“An Italian came and told us” in an hour, Foku Fokos, they would set fire and boom “that they will kill. The manula told me to my father, “Live, take our little kid and leave,” and my father replied, “I haven’t done anything, why to leave. I haven’t bothered anyone,” he says in a cinematic detail speaking to Deutsche Welle, 86.

The Italian helped her mother and whatever her dowry had her big sister, who was 17 years old, dug into the garden of her home and put her in.

The Holocaust of Kalavryta It was one of the most horrible atrocities committed in Greece during the German occupation in World War II.

On December 13, 1943, the Nazi troops carried out a mass massacre of almost all of the male population, plundered and set fire to the city, burning houses, schools and churches. The occupation forces transferred more than 2,000 sheep and larger animals on their bases and stole about 260,000,000 drachmas.

“I was four and a half with five years. I was also ill and my brother brought me here to school. From the outside there were Germans, one left and another on the right, and distinguished men from women. They took the men and took them to Kappis’ hill. They pouring a grenade, red, this was the signal to start execution. Here they set fire to school. A teacher, who was younger, began to throw away the kids out of the windows, so as not to burn, ”says Ms. Irene.

“Most were dead, somebody alive. Then the Germans realized that there were many alive and began to go to everyone and shaken him to see who they were alive. Among them was my brother, a 17 -year -old little kid, who failed to make the dead and gave him a graceful shot in his ear and his minds were thrown into the air, ”he describes the survivor of the Holocaust.

After the disaster – post -war years

Freight women went to the hill. River blood. They managed to survive just thirteen people. “Then the drama began how to take them to the cemetery. They had no digging tools to be buried. We had no food, heating, clothes, shoes, “he says. And so Golgothas, the struggle for survival with suffering and deprivation, began.

“Our men became women and men and tried to grow us up. We had a lesson in a home left, and we were given a little milk powder in the morning and at noon a rough meal. With the love of our manula, like the birds, we treated them and the trauma and everything. We always remember our dead and we were trying for something better. He worked very hard on the estates and we managed to send us to school and restore us, “she stresses Lechourite.

The search for justification

OR Slaughter of Kalavryta It is internationally described as a war crime. Only two officials were sentenced to crimes committed by Vermacht in the Kalavryta area in the subsequent Nuremberg trials, who were quickly released in the context of General Amnesty, while the protagonist of the slaughter Karl von Le Suire was not tried.

Munich and Bochum prosecutors suspended criminal prosecutions against the natural perpetrators of the slaughter in the logic of “permissible retaliation”. The Municipality of Kalavryta is at the forefront of claiming German remedies, with the mayor of the city being president of the martyred cities and villages of Greece, constantly updating his demands on the German politics of oral apology and law. No one in Kalavryta forgets the visit of the then German President Johannes Rau in 2000, who had expressed his sadness and shame, but neither apologized, nor referred to the issue of compensation.

A small bright exception is the initiative of German Professor Eragard Sram, who made sure to transfer 33 orphaned children from Kalavryta in the early 1950s to Germany for vocational training, but which divided the Kalavryta society for its expediency.

How does I survive the Germans of such a atrocity of 80 years later? “I say what happened, it happened. Our men, my father, my brother are not going to come back. If I feel bad for them, it doesn’t matter. The criminals, most of them, will have died. What can I feel about the Germans? Let God forgive them. I am not able to forgive them, “says Irene Lechouritis with disarming honesty. And when the kids come from Germany, they welcome them, because they “owe nothing”, as he says.

“Never War” says Ms. Lechouritis without a second thought every time she remembers what she experienced. Listening to the open war fronts in Ukraine and Gaza sends its own message to the leaders of the world: “To stop, to find each other to be calm and healthy, because if we have wars, it gets sick. To be loved, because life is short. So much innocent world is lost every day, ”he says.