Victoria Theodorou (1926 - 2019)

The poet and resistance fighter Victoria Theodorou was born in Chania in 1926. Her mother, Maria, was Cretan, but she met in Athens the Serbian street painter Traiko Oroftsanof and they married in 1920. In Greece he changed his name to Stathis Theodorou. The couple settled in Chania, where Victoria’s father worked illustrating churches. However, a serious illness of him put the family in a very difficult position and due to poverty, her mother was forced to send little Victoria to an orphanage in Heraklion for a period of time. “By tricking me with sweets, little gifts and promises, they took me to the institution,” she said. During her absence in March 1936, the young girl was devastated by the untimely loss of her father, which coincided with the death of the important Greek politician Eleftherios Venizelos. It was “the March when Crete was in mourning and the city of Chania was dressed in black kerchiefs”. Years later, as an author, V. Theodorou will reconstruct in a book the memories of her father: “I was enchanted by his art and I would crouch by his side, as a child of eight years old, watching how he brought beautiful female figures to life on the board”.

Returning to Chania, she continued her studies and with the declaration of war in October 1940, she tried to reinforce the Greek troops by collecting supplies and knitting clothes. She recounts “I was a high school student when I heard the declaration of war. The bells of the victories of the Greek army in Albania, the lamentations from the homes of the victims”.

In 1941, at the age of 15, she experienced the Battle of Crete, the airborne operation for the capture of the island by the Nazi air force. “The schools are closed, the blockade begins, the bombings, the expulsion of the inhabitants”. In order to protect Victoria from the bombing and starvation, her mother sent her to relatives in her village (Topolia, Kissamos). “Whether we wanted to or not, we helped our tormented uncles in the olive picking and in many field chores […] the planes were flying scratching the cliff and shooting every form of life. Our cave [where they had taken refuge] was shaking, we the older children had lost our speech. We could only see and count the explosions.” When the occupation was completed and “the fighters [Cretans] came back bloody, sunken, silent” they received from the occupation authorities the order to return to Chania. The teenage Victoria saw on her way back ‘wreckage of planes, burning forts, half-buried bodies and limbs. My eyes were filled with fright and horror. I didn’t want to see, but the horrible sight pierced me. It gave me nightmares for the rest of my life…”

In 1943, while many guerrilla organizations had been formed in Crete, at the age of 15-16, as a student in the second grade, she joined the EPON. “Some [old] classmates talked to me, I was a very cowardly and weak child, they told me about the organization that the young people had formed and I was touched by this and I asked if I could help. I was always an ideologue.” In the first period, in Chania, she did nothing “militant”, as she says, she took care of food collection, the breadlines and assisting families who had lost their loved ones. “We did mainly companionship, hanging out, some small feasts and talking about the programs and tasks of the organization.” Then her activities expanded, the EPON entrusted her, together with other members, with the supervision of some villages (Akrotiri Chania and Riza White Mountains areas). There the young fellow collected supplies for the partisans, delivered messages, talked about the purpose of the organization and tried to convince the young people to integrate. “Now how persuasive we were then at that age of 18…” she would later ask herself.

Although she had left home at a young age, “my mother actually lost me, but the climate was such that we had to leave to help” the resistance by going out at night and in secret, on EPON duties and in communication with the free areas. Eventually young Victoria was advanced into the mountains where the partisans were hiding. As she mentions “We were 3-4 young people, they were waiting for us, it was evening and we saw them high up on the cliffs, young men with guns in their hands and they called out to us. I will never forget that sight”. In the guerrilla groups, Victoria took on auxiliary work to support the armed sections (collecting food and medicine, cooking, cleaning, etc.). She recounts “…I woke up to pick out two sacks of legumes, where they were throwing upside down lentils, chickpeas in the wheat, whatever they were given in the villages… The next day a kettle was set up and food was made… the smoke should not appear and give us away…”.

Low-key about her own actions, V.T. chose to talk about her experiences, indirectly, through literary writing. In her novel Gamilio doro [Wedding Gift], a story with many autobiographical influences, she reflected through her heroine: “If in the second great war we women took a rifle and climbed the mountain, it was more to gain independence from fathers and brothers. To defend our honor as we perceived it. […] Then in a way they recognized our rights. But as soon as the struggles were over, the liberation and social fights, they disarmed us.”

Because of her refusal to sign a statement (of repentance) to Security, a long cycle of deportations began for Victoria Theodorou. In early 1948 “fortunately we were put on the ships at Piraeus. It was really, I say now, a relief that we escaped from that cell [of the Security], we saw the sea, the people in the harbor. They never told us which way we were travelling; it was also a way to scare us. We crossed the whole Aegean Sea, the journey was very bad because they always put us in the holds of the ship, so we wouldn’t be seen. They took us to Chios,” she recalls in an interview. On the island of Chios, the exiled women were confined to empty barracks as the soldiers had left to fight in the Civil War. The camp had no substantial infrastructure to accommodate 1,000 prisoners, the majority of whom were elderly, who later became 2.000, as well as some children. The wards accommodated several times the capacity of the exiles. Without beds, they slept on the concrete, while some lived in the open air. The rations were unhealthy and the sanitary conditions were poor, combined with the confinement (21 hours a day) and the constant guarding. “The worst punishment was the deprivation of water”, Victoria recalled.

In March 1949 she was transferred from Chios along with 1,200 other women to Trikeri, “a very small island that had only one monastery and a few local cottages, a small island covered with vegetation, with many olive trees, but without water and with many difficulties”. They settled in tents, but the conditions were extremely difficult and in order to survive the exiles took initiatives for their living conditions in the camp. “The women began to collect stones to make a wall around the perimeter, with branches and other means to raise the tents to fit upright, they did a lot of work and especially the Pontian women, strong and robust women, made everything, even quilts with dry leaves”. But “we were on a desert island and had no way to defend ourselves, a bleeding, a scorpion bite, a fall”. “Amenorrhea was very common in young girls, a clear sign of deprivation, hunger and exhaustion. Several women suffered unimaginably from severe pains that overwhelmed them and threw them on the bed every month,” she said in another testimony. In November 1949, the administration of the camp passed from the Gendarmerie to the Army “which was now the winner [in the Civil War], had wiped out the partisans. We could feel it from the machine guns that we could hear from Pelion, the crackling had quieted down”. Conditions deteriorated and exiles were faced with military discipline, censorship, prohibitions, chores and restrictions, and above all physical and psychological pressure. Conditions deteriorated and the exiles were faced with military discipline, censorship, bans, prohibitions, chores and restrictions and, above all, physical and psychological pressure to sign a declaration (of repentance).

“In the first days of January 1950, word spread that we would be taken to Makronissos. We didn’t want to believe it. Just the name of the island was enough to make us tremble.” Indeed, at the end of January, the exiles landed on the island of Makronissos, a desert island that served exclusively as a camp for the reformation of male and female communists under particularly harsh conditions. “There were about a thousand of us women. They put us on the line and started the loudspeakers, “Greek women, women of Greece, don’t get carried away, come back to the bosom of the homeland. … here is the swimming pool where you must be baptized…” terrible and funny slogans together […] When they settled us in the tents, at night some hordes of Alphamites [soldiers] appeared with torches and bamboo sticks. They came in with cursing, shouting, screaming, a hell of a lot, and started beating. They were beating the young women a lot, searching them with torches, and then, I never forget, many of the old women gave us their kerchief [to wear] to hide us.” At Makronissos, the physical and mental torture to force prisoners to sign a declaration of repentance for their political ideas was inhuman. “They took us to the theatre, which the prisoners had constructed, [….] the officer came up, terrible, and said ‘Look at the sun for the last time’ for those who insisted and did not sign the declaration, because machine guns were set up at the entrances of the theatre,” said Victoria Theodorou.

She remembered being taken one night to a tent that had a table with pens and pencils in the middle so she could sign a statement while 2-3 soldiers held wands. They beat her on the head with their hands, but at some point an order was heard and she managed to escape by starting to run towards her cage. However, the blows to her head, at the age of 22-23, caused her serious damage for life. After constant vertigo, she later had to have surgery, having also lost hearing in one ear and had a hearing aid fitted from a young age. Despite all forms of torture, Victoria Theodorou did not sign a statement. “I did not make a statement. I did not have the KKE or the resistance organizations in mind. It was something deeper, you didn’t want to do the other guy any favors, you didn’t want to bend over, bow your head to this bully. You resisted the monster that was beating you, you gained strength, you remembered your story. It was one human being’s resistance in the face of a monster, a subhuman”.

Eight months later, Theodorou returned to Trikeri, along with 500 other women. Conditions were more favorable. To be more protected, the prisoners set up their tents around the isolated monastery on the island and the sick women were placed in the cells. They collected wood, a boat brought the supplies and a few parcels from their relatives, and there was also help from the Red Cross (clothes, medicines, etc.). During their residency in Trikeri in 1950-1951, some prisoners, having experienced years of persecution, decided to confess their experiences in the camps, illegally, for fear of the gendarme. Although ink and paper were hard to come by, they wrote down their testimonies in notebooks, and those who were illiterate dictated them, read them in secret in the tents for any omissions and kept them. “They felt that what they had lived, should not be consigned to oblivion and should be written down now, before they become faded memories”.

At the end of 1952, Victoria Theodorou was released as a “licensed exile” after the actions of Haridimos Spanoudakis. Spanoudakis (Crete 1917-Athens 2001) was a member of EAM (district of Gyzi) and for many years exiled for his activities. He had returned to work in the Ministry of Justice in the 1950s and “never ceased to help the relatives of prisoners and exiles, who from dawn to dusk stood at the gate of the ministry, asking for clemency and salvation for their […] An example of his offer was my own dismissal from the Trikeri camp,” describes Victoria. Their acquaintance would lead to marriage in 1955. Victoria had returned to the University to continue her philology studies, which had been forced to be interrupted by exile. At the same time, she was working as a night nurse to pay her tuition fees. But she was devastated by the loss of her supportive mother. “It is true that we suffered, we lost years, we lost lives. And I also lost something else, something very, very expensive, as soon as I came [from exile] my mother died, she couldn’t stand it, she suffered all these years, and not only my mother. In Chania, the mothers of exiles gathered and told each other news”. After her marriage, “I was perhaps in a hurry, but I was so exhausted and I needed a person to help me” and the pregnancy of her twin children, she was again forced to leave the University.

A woman of great sensitivity took up writing. “It was a way of forgetting that I was unemployed, that I couldn’t be appointed anywhere, even though I had studied. It was the famous certificates of social competence”. In 1957 she appeared in the literary world with her poems in the Art Review. Her first collection of poems (Encomium), a tribute to her mother, was published in the same year. This was followed by 12 poetry collections and 4 prose collections, as well as translations of French and Slavic poetry, with her works translated into over 5 languages. Drawing her subject matter from her personal experiences during the turbulent 1940s, she transformed her experiences through her unsung companions into her poetry. The voice of ordinary women on the islands of exile spoke through the poet’s mouth, while simultaneously recounting their sufferings during the Occupation and the Civil War.

After the fall of the Junta, Victoria Theodorou, and as her children had come of age, returned to the University, where she managed to get her degree in Philology. “I found my fellow students at the University, now professors. I took the paper and kept it, I couldn’t teach because of hearing problems [from the beating in Makronissos], but it was a gratification,” she says. She continued her literary writing based on her experiences while contributing to highlighting the history of resistance and displaced women. Her contribution to the Association of Political Exiled Women and the publication of a photo album with testimonies (Gynaikes exoristes sta stratopeda tou Emfyliou [Women exiled in the camps of the Civil War], 1996) from her imprisonment in Chios, Trikeri, Makronissos and Ai Stratis (1948-1954) was decisive.

Victoria Theodorou passed away on 16 February 2019. As author Maro Douka remembered her, “their pampered, orphaned, tortured little girl, the fighter, the talented, the unyielding. From the years of exile. A good poet, sensitive, thoughtful, tireless. Smiling, kind, gentle, good-natured. And beautiful. And elegant and ethereal. I loved and admired her.”