On October 17, 1941, Kerdyllia is leveled by the Nazis. 238 souls were lost, but they live on through the accounts of the last survivors. DW report. In the autumn of 1941, Ano and Kato Kerdyllia, two small villages in the prefecture of Serres, were erased from the map. 238 men between the ages of 15 and 60 were executed by German occupation troops in the first mass slaughter of civilians on mainland Greek soil. Today, the memory remains indelible through the last survivors and the inhabitants of the village.

Anastasia Goula remembers

“Take this down,” says Anastasia Goula immediately upon seeing the Nazi swastika sign in the Museum dedicated to the massacre of the Kerdyllians. He was not even four years old then. “They came, in the morning they knocked on our door and the whole family woke up. My dad got up. He didn’t put on a shirt because of his haste, threw his jacket over it and left. We haven’t seen him since. No one knew what would happen. Everyone said their “garlic and onion” as they say in the villages.

A German is coming. “Laos Efkarpian,” he said, holding a box of matches. He pointed to the school, showing that it will burn,” he says speaking to Deutsche Welle. At 9 a.m. at the signal of a flare, the men of the village were executed en masse by the Nazis, led by Captains Wedler and Schreiner. The burning of the houses followed. The women and children were driven out, leaving everything behind.

“As soon as we reached Rema, the gusts were heard. We heard it all there. Then, they took out the old men who spread the word that people were killed and then smoke everywhere,” survivor Ms. Goula describes. A few days ago the Nazis were searching the village for guerrilla groups. “Do you have partisans?” the Germans asked. We had no rebels in the village, not even heard of them. And if he had one with an ideology, who knew. They were all right-wing,” emphasizes Mrs. Goula.

And after that? “How can I be. To the lost. Not knowing where dad is, where grandpa is, where uncle is, not having anyone. We had nowhere to stay, eat, or wear.” On the way back to the village, they removed the stones and apokaidia, building one-sided roofs with sheet metal and stones. “He was catching a burini. The sheets were falling and the stones were tickling. And my mother was shouting “My children will be killed”. Then the Germans returned to the village. They were stealing chickens. They were shouting. They were swearing.

The why still vibrates her soul. “We wonder why? For the spoon. Anyone who says otherwise is lying,” he replies disarmingly. Seeing the wars raging in this era, she gives her message with simplicity. “I think about what we shot. Let someone come out to match them, which will never match. I wonder where we’re going? I have children in the future. I don’t want them to experience what I experienced.”

“A mute death knell over the village”

Giorgos Galios, president of the local community of Neo Kerdyllia, carries within himself the shadows of that day. “Among the victims were my two grandfathers,” he says. “I did not live through the massacre, but I grew up in its shadow. My grandmother used to live in the house, she always gave obituaries. She was crying silently, under her blanket. We, children back then, didn’t understand, we just felt the sadness hovering,” he says speaking to Deutsche Welle. The massacre, as he says, was done to “set an example”. The first sabotage by the rebels in the surrounding villages alarmed the Nazis.

The identification of the name of the villages with the Kerdyllion mountain, where the rebels were active, gave them the occasion to apply the horrible reprisals. The residents had tried to convince the Germans that they were not related to the rebels. “They went all the way to Thessaloniki to explain to them. But when they came back, the damage was already done,” he says. The voice as he speaks to us breaks for a moment.

“For years, the history of Kerdyllia was unknown. A mute doomsday hovering over the village. It wasn’t until the 1980s that people began to cast a spell on silence.” He remembers with emotion the first time survivors and descendants visited the newly built village museum. “They were sobbing. Some fainted. It was like reliving the moment. But the students have also heard that “something happened here”, they come and ask”, he says.

The story that was not written

“When I was teaching, I remember that in the history book there was not a single line about Kerdyllia”, says Ioannis Papasymeon, retired philologist and author of the book “The memory of the survivors”. “What happened here was the “Kerdyllia model”. It was the first implementation of the order to execute all the men of a village as an example.

Shortly after, the Germans applied the same tactics throughout Greece”, he says characteristically. “Kandanos in Crete had preceded it, in the summer of 1941, but there the Germans did not execute all the men of the village. In Kerdyllia, on the contrary, there was a clear order: ‘No male, no one’,’ he points out.

Papasimeon remembers the testimonies of the women he met: “It was the crying that I lived with them, the trembling hand that lit the candle, the black veil that came down to the eyes.” Some of the children who spoke to him then, he says, were carrying a deep inner pain.

“One woman had said to me: ‘All the hardships we went through were forgotten, but one thing remained forever — the absence of father. I never called out ‘father’ in my life.” And another girl remembered: “We gathered the children on the slope, opposite the village, and shouted loudly, so that the souls of our own could hear us”.

He emphasizes that the memory of Kerdyllia must be passed on to the younger generations. “It is necessary to cultivate a historical education that will transfer the feeling and memory of the place to the new generations. However, I find it difficult. We live in a digital age, where young people have moved away from historical memory.”

In Kerdyllia every October, the earth breathes differently, as if it remembers. The honor events and the road race organized for the sacrifice of their fellow villagers are a history lesson for the younger ones. They are not asking for revenge, they are asking for memory so that this pain is not just a name on a stone.