Free The Scapegoat by Sophia Nikolaidou

member of the communist insurgency. The last person to see Talas alive, according to witnesses. Of course the meeting only lasted five minutes, but no one cared about such details. A communist plot was an acceptable solution.
    Gris had no police record. He was a calm, quiet man, almost suspiciously so. He took care of his mother and supported his sisters. He didn’t spend money on things he didn’t need, apart from his four packs of cigarettes a day. Sometimes he forgot and lit a new one with the old one still burning. He would hold both between two fingers and inhale them together. As tough as they come, though he didn’t look it.
    Tzitzilis had no intention of wasting time on preliminary questioning, corroboration, modification. This version would stick, and it was high time they were through with the case,
for the good of the country
.
    All those who expressed doubt and distrust of the hurried proceedings—suspicious characters, the lot of them, and anti-Greek, in Tzitzilis’s estimation—quickly learned to hold their tongues. Military tribunals took place even on weekends. Blood flowed freely. Everyone on both sides of the political spectrum had seen enough death.
    The country’s citizens might have learned to keep quiet, but the numbers spoke volumes. On May 3, 1948, a total of 152 communists who’d been condemned to death were executed, a factthat seemed entirely logical to the side doing the killing. Some whispered that the executions were in retaliation for the assassination of Ladas, the Minister of Justice, by the Organization for the Protection of the People’s Struggle. Ladas had been the one who decided to revoke the citizenship of communists en masse. He was also the one who signed orders of execution. But the communists, too, killed indiscriminately. The two sides competed in harshness and barbarism: they burned people alive, decapitated corpses, stoned and bludgeoned and raped.
    There was no end to the evil. Some executed, and others executed the executioners. Heroes became traitors and traitors heroes, depending on who was speaking. No one escaped, the traps had been set. People were condemned according to what they believed, not what they had done. Of course everyone said it was a sad state of affairs. Yet the killing continued apace. In the end political neutrality became a dangerous position. The country was ruled by paroxysms of fanaticism and intolerance. Whoever had a dissenting opinion learned to keep his mouth shut.
    Those on the outside, even those who were bankrolling the slaughter, were revolted by the photographs that circulated abroad. Greece had become front-page news. One image in particular had been seen all over the world: a man on horseback with the heads of three female guerilla fighters hanging from his saddle, tied by their braids. The prime minister made some neutral comment about it being an old Greek custom, and promised the incident wouldn’t be repeated—at least not with the heads of women.
    The foreign journalists turned out to be some of the most easily shocked, and expressed their horror from a safe distance. Their mothers hadn’t been slain, their sisters hadn’t been hacked to pieces, their houses hadn’t been torched. They urged people to remain calm, rattled off declarations of human rights, promoted humanistic ideals. They wrote articles, took photographs. Andthen they boarded their airplanes and left, and flew home to sleep easily in London or distant Oklahoma.
    Perhaps it was just bad timing: the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. But now things were settled summarily and speciously. The case couldn’t be dragged out any longer. They were walking on hot coals, so they might as well dance.

SCHOOL YEAR 2010–2011
“WE’RE THE KIDS OUR PARENTS DIDN’T WANT US TO HANG OUT WITH”
    MINAS
    They won’t give me money for the class trip.
629 euros for six days is way too much
, Mom says. What she means is that it’s way too much for someone who