Friendly Chats on Bouboulinas Street

ONE-FOURTH of the Human Rights Commission's 1,200-page report is devoted to verbatim testimony spoken in halting, sometimes disjointed phrases by Greeks who either underwent torture themselves or witnessed the cruel treatment of others. One of the witnesses was an Athenian housewife named Anastasia Tsirka, who was arrested late in 1967 after police agents in a midnight raid found three pamphlets from underground political groups in her home. To find out who had given her the documents, Asphalia (secret police) agents took Mrs. Tsirka, then two or three months pregnant, to their headquarters on Bouboulinas Street for questioning.

As Mrs. Tsirka recalled it: "I say to them, 'I am going to have a baby.' They answer, 'Who cares about that? It will be another person like you; it is better not to have it.' When I was laid out in the terrazza, I told them again, 'I am going to have a baby. Be careful of my stomach, please.' But they do not care at all about my stomach. Mallios [an interrogator] ordered Spanos [a security agent] to give me 15 falanga [whacks on the feet]."

With a dirty rag stuffed in her mouth to stifle her screams, Mrs. Tsirka testified, she was given some 21 blows. Then she was pushed downstairs to a filthy basement cell. There was barely room to breathe. Holding up the palms of her hands, she described the cell as "eleven palms long and nine palms wide."

Continuing her account: "At about 5 o'clock in the morning, blood started to flow. I never saw it because there was no light, but I felt it all over my feet. So I start to scream, 'I lost my baby, I lost my baby!' Then the guard comes and says, 'What is the matter with you?' Then I show people, and they let me out of the cell." After an hour's wait, Mrs. Tsirka, who is now in exile, was driven in an ambulance to a hospital, where she was given medical care. The commission's team of consulting physicians reported that she had apparently been rendered sterile as a result of the miscarriage.

Another witness was Petros Vlassis, a member of the far-left Lambrakis youth movement, one of the junta's special targets. After being beaten on the feet in the shower room on the roof of the Bouboulinas Street building where the tortures usually took place, he was forced to stand up. "They made me run around in a circle in that same torture chamber," recalled Vlassis. "They had moved the bench to one side a little, and I was in the middle of a circle made up of ten people. Each one of them held something--a stick, a metal piece, a rope. So in order to protect myself against their beatings, I had to run. When I went away from one person who had hit me, I approached another person, who then hit me. I think the purpose of this was to make me run so that the circulation should come back to my feet and my feet would again become sensible to pain, because I think I omitted to tell you that after one has received a certain amount of beating of the feet, the pain is no longer felt by the person tortured. It is as if the body had become saturated with pain."

In October 1967, police grilled a young Athenian named Andreas Lendakis, who was also a member of a left-wing youth group. A woman prisoner named Marketakis, who had been in the next cell in Bouboulinas Street, described his ordeal. One night the guards took him to another room. Even so, Miss Marketakis heard the sounds of torment. "It was a loud hard noise, like one stick hitting another. But as there was always a cry afterward, we knew that the blows were not falling on wood." The next morning, Lendakis was back in his cell. Miss Marketakis described him to the investigators.

"It was dreadful. He had difficulty in breathing. I asked him, 'How are you?' He said, They hit me on the head a lot of times, and I must remain lying because I have head injuries and may have a hemorrhage, but I cannot lay down because my head is sore when I put it on the ground.' Then he dragged himself on his knees because his legs had been tortured and he could not walk."

Lendakis testified that his ordeal left him with a condition diagnosed by the commission's doctors as "posttraumatic epileptic symptoms." Athens Police Inspector Basi Lambrou, whom Lendakis and others named as their chief tormentor, was asked if he had spoken with Lendakis. Yes, said Lambrou, "just for a friendly chat."

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