Fofi Lazarou (1922-2015)

Her admission to the Law School of the University of Athens coincided with the declaration of the Second World War in Greece. During the Greek-Italian War (October 1940 – April 1941), Lazarou was actively involved in supporting the Greek soldiers at the front, and at the same time she began to join the illegal Communist Youth Organization (OKNE). At first, she was skeptical but as she recounts, she felt very comfortable with the expression “she is one of us”. According to her testimony, she was the first girl from the Law School who entered the Communist Youth. “I was the only one for a while. Yes, and we even made an excursion, and when I got up and danced, one of them shouted, ‘Hooray for the first girl!’. There was a Soviet novel called The First Girl. I didn’t get that right away, I got it later… We were in 1942”. 

During the Occupation and as the resistance movement began to spread, Lazarou became a member of the Student Office of the EAM’s Youth and at the same time, she contributed to the founding of the women’s resistance group Free Girl [Lefteri Nea], one of the first illegal youth organizations founded in May 1942. The Free Girl was the first exclusively female organization, which accepted young girls regardless of ideological and political views: “The important thing was the willingness to fight and then we took the initiative by doing things that were unthinkable before”. Within the same year, groups were also established among schoolgirls and neighborhoods, as well as in factories, etc. Free Girl appointed Lazarou as their leader.

As she mentions, she first heard about women’s rights and emancipation at the meetings of the Free Girl, where many students and schoolgirls gathered. Notwithstanding, she already shared these ideas. Additionally, she had read books dealing with women’s rights and was willing to accept these ideas, she liked them, and she wanted women to have the position they deserved, not to be inferior: “Through the Free Girl we were educated in empowerment, confidence in our strengths, etc. It was the first women’s organization that even marginally raised the equality of women in the family”.

Along with joining the Free Girl and being a student, Lazarou assumed an important organizational role in the coordination of the resistance movement of male and female students at the University of Athens. The basement of the University became the daily site of illegal student meetings. Lazarou tried to solve issues concerning the student’s daily life, the main one being the provision and improvement of student rations in a city where hunger had decimated the urban population. As she recounts, “We had a very busy life, that is, leaving home in the morning, going to the University, waiting for the food, making our propaganda, preparing a demonstration. And in the afternoon, we had meetings to write action bulletins. Do you know what that was? Every day writing a bulletin, not just me, everybody writing a bulletin every day…”

Her activity extended beyond the university as she took part in the demonstrations in occupied Athens, and despite the lack of trust shown by their male colleagues, Lazarou and other young girls went on to set up their crews and go around the city at night illegally writing slogans on the walls against the German and the Italian occupiers. The Occupation’s special conditions and especially her intense involvement with the Resistance resulted in her neglecting her studies: “I had taken my first exams at the end of ’41, and I passed the second year in ’46 because in the meantime I had other priorities…”

When the largest and most massive youth organization, the EPON, was founded in February 1943, it merged many of the earlier resistance movements and Lazarou joined the new organization. Apart from her activities at the University, from 1943 she was responsible for recruiting young working women into the resistance movement. Her field of action was mainly in and around the port of Piraeus. In this context, she contacted young women who worked in the factories of Piraeus, mainly in tobacco and textile factories where the female working population was particularly high, aiming to improve their working conditions (increase in wages, food distribution, working hours). The conditions for the recruitment of women workers were not easy. Along with the risk of arrest by the occupation authorities, the opposition of Greek employers to trade union demands, as well as the women’s reluctance were inhibiting factors.

However, the extreme conditions during WWII changed Greek society profoundly:

“War, Occupation, Resistance was a cosmogony. Life changed. People changed, minds changed, and perceptions changed. Young working women found the strength to change their destiny, they felt that they too had a responsibility to fight for freedom and broke the shackles and restrictions of home. They organized themselves, and they fought. And they gained knowledge, strength, confidence, and self-assurance. In the struggle, they revealed abilities that had remained unused, and they set out to catch up with everything as if they wanted to shake off centuries of slavery and backwardness all at once”.

However, as the resistance movement strengthened, the persecution also increased. Thus, when, in 1944, Lazarou undertook the organization of Resistance in the factories in another region, Nea Ionia, she was arrested twice by the Greek collaborationists. The first time, she managed to escape but the second time she was detained in a police station, where she was severely beaten. Eventually, she was released with the mediation of a relative. At the same time, her sister Demetra was imprisoned by the Germans in Haidari. After these incidents, unable to act in Nea Ionia, Lazarou took over as secretary of a district organization of the EPON in the centre of Athens, where she remained until the Liberation.

In October 1944, Athens was liberated, and slowly the whole country too. The people were in the streets celebrating. But a few months later, in December 1944, an armed civil conflict broke out in Athens with thousands of dead and wounded. With the retreat of EAM from the capital, Lazarou moved to another city, walking for days on foot. When she returned illegally to Athens, she heard that her brother died during the clashes.

During the short period of peace that followed the December events, she was chosen as the only woman in the EPON’s Bureau in 1946. From this position, she organized the Women’s Bureau, which was subsequently defunct, while she was also assigned to communicate with the political prisoners and the exiled. During the Civil War (1946-1949) –when the EPON was outlawed together with the EAM and the Communist Party (KKE)– Lazarou continued to be part of the leadership of the youth movement, working in the illegal organizations of Athens and Piraeus. She was a fugitive for a long time.

Being a fugitive since 1947, in January 1952 she left the country illegally after a party directive first to France and then to Eastern Europe. She recalls: “In order to leave I transformed myself into a modern young woman who had nothing in common with the EPON woman. In fact, during passport control, one of the policemen asked me to take a box of sweets with me and take it to one of his relatives in Paris, which I willingly did. I must tell you that I was fascinated by this trip, I was leaving with the expectation that I was going to a paradise, after a period of illegality of about five years”.

The trip turned out, however, to be another adventure for Lazarou, because when she was travelling from Paris to Berlin, she was arrested in Saar. She remained in the French prison of Metz for five months. However, the arrests and trials of Greek communists in France sparked strong protests by the French Communist Party (PCF). The PCF demanded their release and their non-extradition to the Greek authorities. Finally, the court decided that they should be released and not extradited but with the stipulation to leave the country within 48 hours.

Lazarou applied for political asylum in Poland and her demand was accepted. After living for a short time in Warsaw she traveled to Bucharest, where she arrived in November 1952. The Romanian capital was the home of the exiled Greek Communist Party´s leadership, and there was a large community of Greek political refugees –as in other Eastern European countries– who settled there after the end of the Civil War in 1949.

“I went almost immediately to the Bellogianni Party School, where, among other things, we learned typography and radio production, which we would need, as they said when we were going underground. After 8 months I returned to Bucharest and worked in the Party’s publishing house, first as a printer and then as a proofreader. […] In general, life as a political refuge was anything but idyllic. Especially for the people of the party apparatus. We only had communication with the Greeks. That is why our circle was limited and even narrower because restrictions and prohibitions were imposed by the Party.”

She returned illegally to Greece in December 1954, with the fake passport of a Belgian painter. She joined the illegal communist organization in Athens and from then until her arrest in June 1957 she lived in conditions of total illegality.

She was arrested and imprisoned in June 1957, and she remained in prison until March 1966. In 1960 she was sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of espionage. She was released from the Averoff Women’s Prison in 1966 and then, for almost a year after her release, she was employed in the Organizational Department of the United Democratic Left (EDA), the legal party of the Greek Left at that time, since the KKE was outlawed after the Civil War.

She lived only one year in liberty, since from 1947 to 1966 she was in prison or underground; her life was a relentless chase. Of that period of her life, she remembers: “I lived a lot of lawlessness and a lot of prisons, in reality, I did not have any life. When I was released from prison and I later worked for the EDA, it is not that I wasn’t me, I was me, but prison isolates you, makes you somehow… In the summer of 1966 when I got out of prison, we used to go swimming in Rafina by bus every Sunday morning. There I learned how to swim, I didn’t go into the sea at first, only the fifth time I felt that I wasn’t stepping into the sea. On Saturday nights we would go to a tavern and eat fish with that group of friends.”

Lazarou did not enjoy her freedom for long, as a year after her release, in April 1967, a military dictatorship was imposed in Greece. Having managed to escape arrest in the first days, she returned to illegality, participating in the anti-dictatorial struggle. She joined the ranks of the Patriotic Anti-Dictatorial Front (PAM) and for two years until October 1969, when she was arrested, she operated illegally in Athens. She was sentenced to 16 years imprisonment. Meanwhile, during the dictatorship, the Communist Party was split in two in February 1968. Lazarou followed the Eurocommunist part of the party.

She was released from prison in 1973 and at the age of 51, she decided to continue her studies at the Law School, which she had left in 1946. She obtained her degree in 1975 and started working as a lawyer. After the fall of the Junta in 1974, she continued to be involved in politics –in the KKE Interior– but not as systematically as in previous years. At the same time, she actively participated in the organizations of the resistance veterans and in the feminist groups that emerged from the mid-1970s onwards. She was one of the founding members of the “Woman in Resistance Movement”, through which women fighters demanded recognition for their role in the National Resistance, and at the same time sought to preserve the memory and promote the history of the Resistance. She died in Athens in 2015. In total, she spent 13 years in prison and 10 years as an outlaw.