The 34th Degree

23

A phrodite had been acquainted with the brutal realities of death and dismemberment ever since she joined the Greek Red Cross as a nurse, with her friend Princess Katherine, in the early days of the war. She had become a nurse because she was tired of serving no higher purpose in life other than being beautiful, a role her parents and others were content to let her play but which she despised. At that point in the war, the Greeks were whipping the Italians and morale was high, and the work helped crowd out her worries about her brother fighting at the front and her fiance far away in America. That was before the Germans invaded and she began to attend to the smashed bodies of British Royal Air Force men, Greece’s new defenders. Then came that fateful Sunday morning when the Herrenvolk finally entered Athens and hoisted the swastika over the Acropolis. The Germans ruthlessly began to clear the beds of major hospitals, throwing the wounded out on the streets to make room for their own.

She also had been familiar with the German troops, who soon filled the streets of Athens. Their gray-green uniforms were soiled, their faces harassed and hungry. They traveled in large groups and carried so-called occupation marks, Reichskreditkassenscheine, which shopkeepers were forced to accept. They grabbed everything in sight, emptying shelves and decimating what was left of the Greek economy. What they didn’t buy, they simply took, such as Aphrodite’s car parked at the tennis club; when she walked outside, her driver stood alone at the curb, arms raised in exasperation.

She experienced famine in the winter of 1941-42, when children with swollen bellies and the skeletons of old men and women haunted the streets of the city. More than three hundred thousand Athenians starved to death in two months, and whenever a lifeless body dropped, only the ration card of the forgotten soul was remembered by survivors, a means to prolong their own suffering. The city had become an extermination camp, and there was little she could do at the hospital except watch the poor and weak die.

What she had not been prepared for was a German like Baron Ludwig von Berg. For three days he lay there in his hospital bed, hovering between life and death, his face invisible behind the bandages wrapped around his shattered skull. The miracle was not only that he survived but that, through it all, he carried himself like the perfect German officer and gentleman. When the wrappings were lifted, he turned out to be younger than she had imagined, and better-looking, considering the silver plate in his skull. He also was obviously quite taken with her. Only his icy blue eyes betrayed a hint of ruthlessness and the sense that whatever charming things the Baron might say were not necessarily what was in his heart.

It was a Greek sniper who’d shot him. The Gestapo had rounded up some three hundred hostages in reprisal, according to one of the SS guards posted outside the private room. She later learned from the doctor, however, that the bullet dislodged from the Baron’s skull came from a Czech Ceska of the type favored by SS intelligence-he had most likely been shot by one of his own men. She could never confirm this, as the doctor disappeared shortly thereafter, along with the Baron himself.

When she told her family about the Baron, her father recognized the name as that of a wealthy German industrialist who came to Greece every so often to check on the supply of chrome and other raw materials. Her brother, Kostas, however, spat in contempt. “A ‘gentleman,’ you call him? Stupid girl. He’s as bad as that playboy fiance of yours in America. I don’t know why you still pretend that coward Andros loves you. He’s an embarrassment to his father and to Greece. Tell me, where was he when we were risking our necks against the invaders? Where is he now?”

Ever since he returned from the front, Kostas had been a bitter man, especially after the Italian Brenero Division under General Paolo Berardi “triumphantly” entered Nazi-occupied Athens. “We whipped these boys in Albania, this very division, sent them running through the snow and mountains to their mothers,” Kostas had said. “Now they dare return and call themselves victors!”

Then Vasilis Tobacco was obliged to accept the “Mediterranean drachmas” the Italians brought with them as payment for what little tobacco the company was still able to produce beyond what the Germans confiscated. An overconfident Rome had printed the currency before its failed invasion of Greece in October 1940.

This was the last straw for Kostas, who, with the first tobacco consignment, hid a bomb in one of the cases on the docks in Piraeus. The Greek stevedores who loaded the cargo aboard the Italian transport said nothing about the extra weight. The ship blew up at quayside, sinking to the bottom to the cheers of the Greek dockers. At the same time, when the first tobacco crop arrived in Germany, it was immediately confiscated by Nazi officials, who opened it to find neither tobacco nor explosives but sand and sawdust. Since that time Kostas had become even more deeply involved with the Resistance, to depths their parents did not care to probe.

“Mark my words,” Kostas told her. “That Baron is no gentleman, and your playboy is no son of General Andros.”

That night the sound of screeching tires woke the family. Aphrodite’s usually reserved mother burst into her daughter’s bedroom in her nightgown, making the sign of the cross, screaming, “The Gestapo!” Behind her mother, Aphrodite could see her pudgy father throwing on his robe as he hurried downstairs to answer the pounding on the door. When Aphrodite pulled the curtain back from her bedroom window, she saw three black Mercedeses in the drive and several men in black leather greatcoats and carrying machine guns.

With the commanding Gestapo officer was a Greek interpreter, wearing the yellow armband of collaborators. He said Kostas Vasilis was wanted in connection with acts of sabotage on the docks in the Piraeus district.

The Gestapo officer then presented two clippings from the Nazi-controlled Greek newspapers Vradini and Proinos Typos. The first reported a fire in a box factory in Piraeus. The second carried a story on a cotton mill in the same district that had gone up in flames. The damage was estimated at thirty million drachmas.

“These two fires destroyed supplies for German troops in Africa and on the Russian front,” the German said through the interpreter. “And then there are the robberies from the Piraeus electric company. We believe Kostas Vasilis was involved in all three acts of terrorism.”

Aphrodite’s mother was hysterical, her father speechless. Aphrodite came halfway down the stairs, listening while her father said he didn’t know where Kostas was. He had slipped out the back, in fact, through the gardens and over the wall. So when the Germans searched the house, they found only her and brought her downstairs.

“Ah, what have we here?” asked the Gestapo officer, fondling her long black hair. “Pretty Fraulein, do you know where your brother is?”

Aphrodite was blinded for a moment by the headlights of the cars in the drive, their white beams shining through the open front door like spotlights. She shaded her eyes and shook her head.

“In that case, we’ll take you.”

Her mother had begged for mercy, and her father had offered the Gestapo officer his secret stash of gold sovereigns, when the silhouette of a tall, dark figure suddenly appeared in the doorway.

“The girl goes nowhere, Standartenfuhrer.”

The Gestapo officer turned with a start and clicked his heels. “Herr Oberstgruppenfuhrer!”

Aphrodite blinked and saw Baron von Berg emerge from the light. The man whom she had tended in the hospital was now wearing the black uniform of an SS general. The wrappings around his head were still visible beneath his black cap.

“What seems to be the problem, Standartenfuhrer?”

“This family has been harboring the terrorist Kostas Vasilis. As we cannot find him, we shall take them to Averoff prison and lock them up as hostages.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said von Berg. “As of this moment, I am requisitioning this home as my own in Athens. The Vasilis family shall stay on to manage the estate.”

“But, Herr Oberstgruppenfuhrer-”

“That is all, Standartenfuhrer. This Kostas Vasilis, should you find him, is yours. Even so, he is not to be executed immediately but held as a prisoner. This will discourage his friends in the Resistance from future acts of sabotage. His family, however, will assume their place in the New Order by serving me.”

And so the Baron had requisitioned the house. He did so for her “protection,” at first from the Gestapo and later from the Greeks themselves, who labeled the Vasilis family collaborators even after her brother finally was captured and imprisoned. As for Aphrodite herself, the Baron anointed her his personal attending nurse and flew her to the Villa Achillion on Corfu to supervise his recuperation. The only health risk she discovered on the island was to her brother and parents. The Baron assured her that if she ever revealed the location of his secret retreat to anyone, they were all dead.

The only things that kept her alive were her visits to Athens to see her parents, her secret work of feeding and clothing the families of Resistance fighters through the Red Cross, and her hope that someday her brother would be freed and her fiance would return.