Free Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend by Arianna Huffington Page A

their house, tore up the “occupation money” the Germans had issued and tossed the pieces to the street below, singing Greek anti-German songs. In the background the tension between ELAS, the Communist resistance group, and all the other resistance forces was growing, until at the end of November it boiled over. General Scobie, commander of the British troops, ordered the dissolution of all guerrilla forces; ELAS refused to disband and prepared to fight.
    In a few days Maria would be twenty-one. Her father wrote a letter enclosing a hundred dollars but no address. It was the first sign of life from him for six years, and the letter arrived at a time when his younger daughter was at her most confused and uncertain. What should her next step be? A few times she tried to get an answer by reading the cards or even the coffee grounds; she would finish her Turkish coffee, turn her cup upside down and then try to determine what all the different lines left by the grounds meant. Her aunt Pipitsa, who spent hours every day predicting her own and everybody else’s fate, had told her once, but, hard as she tried, she could not remember all the elaborate details.
    The day after her twenty-first birthday, on December 3, 1944, fighting broke out in Athens. ELAS and its ancillary Communist groups rose against the government, and in the bloody struggle that followed, Athens nearly fell into Communist hands. The Civil War turned out to be much more bitter and violent than anything Greece, let alone Maria, had experienced during the occupation. Thousands were killed, including Evangelia’s younger brother, Filon. Jackie was staying with Milton when it all happened; Maria was alone with her mother in their apartment, and they lived there in a state of siege for twenty days. It was by far the worst ordeal they had been through, and the solidarity born of misfortune brought them a little closer to each other. They had no way of heating the apartment, no light and very soon no food except for a big box of dried beans that they found in one of the cartons containing their Red Cross rations. All they could hear day and night was the sound of explosions, sirens, the rattle of machine guns and the screams of dying men. For the first time in the last seven years, Maria could neither study nor even sing to herself. They were fast running out of beans and fear was beginning to paralyze her will. Suddenly help came in the form of a small boy with a letter from an officer of the British forces assisting the government against the rebels. A devotee of Maria, he was asking her and her mother to come to the British embassy in Constitution Square. It meant risking stray bullets and jumpy partisans, but they had no option. They took nothing with them except their icons and they made it to safety the day before Christmas. The day after Christmas, Maria and Evangelia, together with all the embassy personnel, stood outside the embassy to see Winston Churchill arrive to thank the staff for their fortitude, before he set off in an armored car for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a meeting with the Greek cabinet.
    In the New Year, Maria and Evangelia were taken to the Park Hotel to join Jackie and Milton, and they stayed there until a truce was negotiated on January 13. The task of reconstruction could now begin. And it was awesome: whole towns and villages had been destroyed, tens of thousands had died in the fighting or from starvation, and the currency had collapsed. Back in Patissiou Street, Maria longed to leave Greece, to leave behind the mother who seemed determined to run her life and career, to leave Jackie and Milton, to leave her resentful colleagues at the Athens Opera, to leave the memories of sirens and machine guns. She wanted to start again, but she had no idea where and, still less, how to begin.
    The decision was made for her when the Athens Opera announced that it was not renewing her contract. “She has played too active a part in the last