They passed into eternity because of the way they died. But knowing how they lived makes their defiance all the more moving. For before reaching the execution wall on 1 May 1944, the 200 executed at Kaisariani had been fighters who spent years in prisons and places of exile, unwavering in their humanity, solidarity, and belief in the ideals of social and national liberation, even in the harshest and most gruelling conditions.
Their biographies, brought together in this volume, give life to the steadfast gaze we saw in the recently published photographs of them. Overwhelmingly communists and activists in the workers’ and people’s movements, hunted by “democratic” and dictatorial governments, and later pursued even more mercilessly by local collaborators of the occupying forces, they remained a threat to the rotten world of self-interest and exploitation to the very end. That is why they were ultimately executed…
The carefully documented material in this book brings them back into the light, flesh and blood, with their strengths and weaknesses, joys and sorrows, families, loves and friendships, dreams and fears. It reveals what enabled them to endure and how they managed to put the collective above the individual.
So that they may be seen more fully—not only as timeless symbols of sacrifice, but as people caught in the currents of history, with lives that took specific paths, who consciously chose to take a stand, pick a side, and defend their values and choices with their very lives.
