On Oxi Day, I’ll fly the Greek flag and celebrate sacrifice
Sometimes the most insignificant things can teach the most profound lessons.
Take, for example, the hearts game onmy Kindle. In hearts, the lowest score wins and, typically, you do your best to avoid taking points. But sometimes, the normal rules go out the window. When a player shoots the moon, they take all the point-bearing cards. Their opponents get sandbagged with 26 points while the moon-shooter gets zero. It’s a tough maneuver to pull off, but it can change the direction of the game.
The onlyway to stop someone shooting the moon is to take points yourself, points that normallywould be a liability. I play a lot of hearts onmy tablet, when I’m trying to fall asleep or settlemy brain, and I’ve found that computerized players often struggle to stop other players from shooting the moon. They can’t transition quickly enough fromselfishness (take no points) to sacrifice (take whatever amount of points necessary).
The computer just keeps dumping high cards, oblivious that one of the players is going by a different set of rules.
It takes creativity and spirit to sacrifice, I suppose. That instinct can’t easily be replicated by whatever algorithm is driving the other players in my computerized hearts game.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the deeply human nature of sacrifice a lot, as I prepare to fly the Greek flag outsidemy home for the 80th anniversary of OxiDay. Because whatGreeks celebrate every year on Oct. 28 is simply this: a sacrifice.
On Oct. 28, 1940, Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxaswas awoken
shortly after 3 a.m. by an ultimatum. Delivering the newswas Italy’s ambassador toGreece, fresh from a party.
He gaveMetaxas a choice: Accept a fascist occupation ofGreece, or go towar.
It’s unclear howItaly tried to persuade Greece, which had so far been neutral inWorldWar II, to take sides. Perhaps the specterwas raised of the Greeks sure to die while fighting occupation, or maybe the ambassador listed the other countries who’d already fallen to the Axis powers like tender shoots in a gale.
After hearing the offer, whatever itwas, Metaxas stopped, then said, “Alors, c’est la guerre.”“Well then, it’s war.”
The sentimentwould soon be translated, in Greek newspapers and in the shouts of Greeks who took to the streets later that morning, as a simple, one
word response: Oxi. O-hee. No.
The Axis invasion started the same day, and though Greeks would twice push back the Italians, eventually theNazis mounted their own successful invasion.
AfterMetaxas’ death in early 1941, his successor, Alexandros Koryz is, committed suicide rather than watchNazi troops occupy Athens.
But occupy they did, raising the swastika over the Acropolis and instituting harsh reprisals for resistance.
The Greeks, however, didn’t stop sacrificing.
In Crete, malaria-ridden Greek troops shot at German paratroopers trying to land on the island. Old men stabbedNazis with kitchen knives andwomen climbed on top of their houses, ripped off roof tiles and threw them at the invaders.
In Athens, meanwhile, two teenagers climbed the
Acropolis in the dead of night, under the noses of Nazi soldiers celebrating the German win in Crete, and ripped down the swastika flag flying there. The Nazis sentenced the boys to death, but they’d already begun to inspire the resistance.
The leader of the Greek Orthodox religion, Damaskinos of Athens, wrote a public letter calling for the end to deportations of Greek Jews. When the local SS commander threatened to haveDamaskinos executed by firing squad should he publish the letter, Damaskinos testily replied that Greek religious authorities, by tradition, are “hanged, not shot,” and insistedNazis followthe precedent. Damaskinoswas neither hanged nor shot, as it turned out, and he urged his priests throughout the occupation to give the Jewish Greeks in their communities falsified baptismal certificates.
In the mountains, village women, their feet wrapped in rags, shoveled snowfor passing Greek resistance fighters and carried 80pound packs of ammunition and supplies on their backs.
On the island of Zakynthos, the bishop and the mayor defiedNazi orders to list the 275 Jewish inhabitants of the town, instead hiding the townspeople and turning over a list that had only two names on it: the bishop’s and the mayor’s.
Greeks may not have been the first, or the most successful, Europeans to resist fascism andNazis, but theywere certainly the most spirited.
Though the Greeks failed to repel the Germans, were occupied and repressed, their Jewish citizens and resistance fighters deported, exiled and murdered, they also, in a great manyways, succeeded.
They succeeded, foremost, by saying “oxi,” “no.”
They sawthe rules had changed, that capitulation and collaboration led only to disaster. So they refused and denied, however outnumbered theywere, however futile their efforts may have seemed. They continued to say no.
Even in defeat— in death itself— there is victory, they discovered.
After thewar, a quote attributed toWinston Churchill goes, “Hence, we will not say thatGreeks fight like heroes, but that heroes fight likeGreeks.” Both Joseph Stalin and Hitler’ s field marsh al WilhelmKei tel credited the Greek resistance as a key factor in the Axis losing the war
Manolis Glezos, one of the teenagers who pulled down theNazi flag, died in April at age 97. Though the Nazis imprisoned him and killed his younger brother, he lived.
“No struggle for what you believe in is ever futile,” Glezos told TheNew York Times in 2014.
That’s what separates humans— at least those who sacrifice— fromcomputers, fromthe selfish and the short-sighted: They realize what is at stake, knowthe bad take us all down with them. They knowthere is only oneway to defeat evil, knowthat sacrifice is their onlyweapon.
So, when you see that flag in front ofmy house, knowthat it honors Greek sacrifices, but also the sacrifices others have made, and the sacrifices that are yet to come, from the beginning to the end of human kind. Whenwe honor Greece on OxiDay, we honor all of those who have fought and suffered and died for what is right, and what is good.