“All those collaborators went into the system”, says Manolis Glezos, “into the government mechanism – during the civil war, after the civil war and their sons went into the military Junta. The deposits remain, like cells in the system. Unlike France, or even Germany, there was no de-Nazification. In fact, just the opposite: While other countries purged their Nazis, Greece promoted them, because although we liberated Greece, the Nazi collaborators won the war, thanks to the British. And the deposits remain, like bacilli in the system”.
But there is one last thing Glezos would like to make clear, that we have failed to raise during our three conversations. “You haven’t asked: why do I go on? Why I am doing this when I am 92 years and two months old?” he says, fixing us with his gaze. “I could, after all, be sitting on a sofa in slippers with my feet up,” he jests. “So why do I do this?”
And he answers himself: “You think that the man sitting opposite you is Manolis but you are wrong. I am not him. And I am not him because I have not forgotten that every time someone was about to be executed, they would say: ‘Don’t forget me. When you say good morning, think of me. When you raise a glass, say my name.’ And that is what I am doing talking to you, or doing any of this. The man you see before you is all those people. And all this is about not forgetting them.”