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The Real Captain Corelli
The massacre of 9500 Italian Soldiers by German troops during WWII on Cephalonia, (A Greek Island in the Ionion Sea, but then you knew that) memorialized in Louis de Bernières book "Captain Corelli's Mandolin", is now being thrust back to centre stage with the release in England in May of John Madden's film by the same name, starring Nicolas Cage and Penelope Cruz.
Scheduled to be released in the US on August 17.
I believe an Italian version of this same episode, and by some considered superior is: "I Giorni Dell'amore e Dell'odio", not yet scheduled to be seen outside of Italy.
Guardian Unlimited
Wednesday April 11, 2001
Philip Willan From RomeTHE REAL CAPTAIN CORELLI
The retired Italian car enthusiast, Amos Pampaloni, who provided part of the basis for Louis De Bernières' music-loving second world war officer has been reminiscing to the press about his ordeal on Cephalonia, says Philip Willan
In recent days the world's press has begun beating a path to the Florentine home of a retired director of the Italian automobile club. The reason for their interest lies in the wartime adventures that made him a model for Louis de Bernières' character of the music-loving Italian artillery officer Captain Antonio Corelli.
With the film of Captain Corelli's Mandolin - starring Nicolas Cage and Penelope Cruz - about to be released in Britain on May 4, events that have been obscured for almost 60 years have been thrust back to centre stage.
The "real" Captain Corelli is now aged 90 and enjoying his moment in the limelight. Lucid and courteous, Amos Pampaloni vividly recalls the days in September 1943, when he participated in the tragic revolt of Italian soldiers against their former German allies on the Greek island of Cephalonia.
Some 9,500 Italians, of a garrison of 11,000, lost their lives in the fighting that followed Italy's withdrawal from the war on September 8. Five thousand of them are believed to have been executed by the German army after surrendering.
Mr Pampaloni speaks in a husky whisper, the result of a recent operation for throat cancer rather than of his own failed execution. But he still bears the marks on his neck where a German officer shot him from close range with a pistol.
His memories of the fighting can now be compared with the accounts of two German Alpine soldiers, whose war diaries came to light in Germany last month, as well as with the film version and de Bernieres' novel.
Alfred Richter, a corporal in the inaptly named Edelweiss division, describes the wholesale execution of Italian prisoners. In the town of Frangata he witnessed the extermination of two companies of Italian soldiers, hearing bursts of machine gun fire that continue uninterrupted for two hours: "Everyone is shot, without regard for rank or role, even the medics and the chaplains."
In a scene that might have been invented by De Bernières, Richter tells of an Italian soldier who saves his life by breaking into song. "A prisoner cuts a tragicomic figure by getting onto an improvised podium before us and singing opera arias with a beautiful voice and the appropriate gestures, saving his life, while his compatriots are being shot," he wrote.
The man went on to work as a cook for the Germans. In an entry dated September 23 1943, Corporal Richter registers the execution of Italian soldiers in Argostoli harbour, in full sight of Greek civilians and with the bodies left to rot in the autumn heat. "In one of the small streets the smell is so bad that I can't even take a picture," he reports.
Two days earlier, the corporal was fighting at Dilinata, the village where Captain Pampaloni's 80 gunners were slaughtered. Outnumbered and suffering under accurate mortar fire, Pampaloni decided to surrender. The captain protested that it was against the rules of war when his men were systematically robbed of their wallets and watches, only to be told by the German commanding officer that those rules applied to prisoners, not to traitors.
The officer then shot the captain through the back of the neck, and the rest of his men, including the wounded, were mown down with machine gun fire. Miraculously still alive, Pampaloni remained conscious as a German soldier removed his own watch from his apparently lifeless body.
Captain Pampaloni was not, in fact, the only soldier from his company to survive. "The mule handlers were spared, because every mule responds best to his own master," he said. "Ten minutes after the massacre the German soldiers left, singing."
Captain Pampaloni went on to fight for a year with the Greek resistance on the mainland. Having witnessed the brutality of the conflict on Cephalonia, he was still shocked by the sight of partisans slitting the throats of German prisoners with their daggers - ammunition was too precious to be wasted on executions.
The decision of the Italian troops on Cephalonia to refuse to hand over their weapons to the Germans after their government signed an armistice with the allies is sometimes cited as the first act of the Italian resistance.
It was taken after an extraordinary democratic consultation among the soldiers, rather than being imposed from on high, and ended in a tragic sacrifice of human lives. It has been virtually eliminated from Italian remembrance, swallowed up by cold war imperatives that discouraged the recollection of atrocities committed by the German army - as opposed to those of the SS - so as to avoid embarrassing one of the pillars of postwar western defence.
Today Mr Pampaloni hopes that the controversies over De Bernières' novel, and now John Madden's film, will serve to remind the world of one of the most savage passages of the war and of the courage of his lost comrades.
www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,471762,00.html
CAPTAIN CORELLI'S CRISIS
By Seumas Milne, The AgeSunday, 6 August 2000 - - For countless enthusiasts, Captain Corelli's Mandolin is an enchanting literary tour de force, an epic wartime love story with the authentic flavor of Greek island life, still the ideal beach accessory for the discerning holidaymaker. Compared to the work of Charles Dickens and hailed as "absolutely brilliant", the book became a publishing phenomenon of the late '90s.
It has sold 1.5 million copies, making its author, Louis de Bernieres, a rich man and sending an electric current through the tourist industry on the island of Cephalonia, where it is set.
Now Captain Corelli is about to become a $US70 million ($A115 million) Hollywood-backed movie in its own right, starring Nicolas Cage, Penelope Cruz and John Hurt. When the film is released next year, the de Bernieres tourist boom on the island seems likely to turn into full-scale Corellimania.
But for all the extra income, large numbers of Cephalonians are deeply ambivalent about the Corelli phenomenon, and far from being as grateful for their new-found celebrity.
The problem is not so much the downside of the expected tourist invasion, or the occasional traumatic flashback triggered by the sound of gunfire from the film set. For many of the older generation, who lived through the events described in de Bernieres' book, his story is a slur on the record of the Greek resistance to the Nazis and a mish-mash of distortions and untruths about their island's wartime history. For the Cephalonian resistance veterans themselves, and for one uniquely placed Italian officer and survivor of the Nazi terror on the island, Captain Corelli's Mandolin is a travesty - an inexcusable attempt to rewrite the story of their lives.
Dionisis Georgatos - the elected governor of Cephalonia, who negotiated carefully framed terms for the Corelli film to be made on the island - dismisses de Bernieres' book as "reactionary and wrong". Nobody, he says, wants to benefit from the film "if it distorts our history - we had many deaths, houses were burned, people hanged in the streets. It is very sensitive. De Bernieres clearly used British sources from that time and, of course, they had the role of invaders".
Gerasimos Artelanis, mayor of Sami and, like Georgatos, a member of Greece's ruling socialist party, Pasok, has threatened to take the film-makers to the International Court of Justice if they include de Bernieres' most controversial claims, thus breaking an undertaking not to inflame political and national sensitivities.
"We are at war with Louis de Bernieres," explains Lefteris Eleftheratos, a 72-year-old former Cephalonian journalist and unofficial leader of the Greek campaign against the novel. "It is a defensive war because it is a war he declared on us."
Such reactions can come as something of a surprise to foreign readers for whom the novel's historical backdrop has little of the neuralgic resonance it has for Greeks. Set against the background of an Ionian Arcadia, Captain Corelli's Mandolin is the story of an unconsummated love affair between Pelagia, the daughter of a patriotic Cephalonian doctor, and Antonio Corelli, an amiable, mandolin-playing artillery captain in the Italian army of occupation.
The relationship flourishes when Pelagia's fiance, Mandras, traumatised by the Greek-Italian war of 1940-41, goes off to fight with the partisans on the mainland. The opera-loving Corelli befriends a "good Nazi" from the German garrison, but is then engulfed in the conflagrationary events of September 1943, when - after Italy declared an armistice with the Allies - Italian troops on the island refused to surrender to the Germans and fought desperately for 10 days. Overwhelmed, more than 9000 Italian soldiers on Cephalonia were either massacred on Hitler's orders or drowned as they were deported by ship.
In de Bernieres' novel, Captain Corelli, of the 33rd artillery regiment, Acqui division, is one of those who first open fire on the Germans and later miraculously survives the mass executions, his wounds successfully treated by Pelagia's father...The lovers are not reunited until their old age, in modern-day Cephalonia.
But woven into this human drama is a one-sided account of the history of the period, and a crude and unremittingly hostile portrayal of the Greek communists in particular, who led the resistance against the Italian and German occupations and later fought British and American-backed forces in the civil war of the late '40s. In a series of jarring interludes, de Bernieres offers a notably sympathetic portrait of the pre-war Greek dictator Metaxas - a man responsible for the torture, imprisonment and murder of thousands of left-wing political opponents - while Mussolini's occupation army,... is presented as a collection of harmless, fun-loving rogues.
By contrast, the main Greek resistance organisation, ELAS - which, according to the German Army's own records, killed more than 8000 German soldiers in little over a year, tied down tens of thousands more and controlled four-fifths of the country when Hitler withdrew - is depicted as a gang of torturers, ignorant demagogues and cowards, who spent the war "doing absolutely nothing" except stealing food from peasants and murdering guerillas from smaller rival, British-backed resistance groups. Of the three communist characters in the novel, Hector is a sadistic monster, Mandras a rapist and Kokolios a penitent who swiftly abandons his political foolishness before being shot by his former comrades.
Until the '70s, it was still a crime in Greece to have fought against the Nazis in the main wartime resistance movement, while Nazi collaborators received pensions. The role of the ELAS andartes, or guerrillas, in the liberation was formally recognised by the state only under Andreas Papandreou in the "80s. But, in case any reader might have mistaken his own view, de Bernieres included an author's note in earlier editions of Captain Corelli's Mandolin to berate "disconnected intellectuals" for regarding the Greek communists as "romantic heroes", adding, "when they were not totally useless, perfidious and parasitic, they were unspeakably barbaric".
Makis Faraklos, now the 76-year-old president of the resistance veterans' association in the Cephalonian town of Lixouri, remembers witnessing the fate of some of those whom de Bernieres insists spent the German occupation doing nothing.
"On June 5, 1944, the Germans hanged five resistance members in the main square because the andartes had killed a collaborator. They forced everyone they found on the streets to go there and set up four machine guns around us. One of the five, Dionisis Ratsiatos, was my teacher - I loved that man. There was a father and son, Gavrilis and Vasilis Rallatos, and the father was forced to watch his son hanged twice, because the rope broke the first time they strung him up. They hanged them from two trees. The youngest to die that day was Spiros Analitis, in his early 20s. The German commander announced through an interpreter that he would be freed if he gave information about the resistance. Analitis didn't reply, but called to the crowd, `You, tyranny-fighting youth, will avenge our deaths'."
Another of de Bernieres' "barbarians" - a retired theatre director, the 83-year-old opera-singing Spiros Fokas - keeps a pair of Wehrmacht jackboots by the bar in his hotel. They belonged, he explains, to a German soldier he shot in an ambush of two troop carriers.Fokas, who spent almost a year fighting with ELAS on the mainland during the war, had been sent back to Cephalonia with three other andartes as a scouting group in the last phase of the German occupation. He went on to take part in other attacks on German forces as they retreated from the island. For his pains, he was persecuted and imprisoned in the "50s and "60s, and his son, now a professor at Imperial College in London, was forced to study abroad.
But of all de Bernieres' disparaging claims about the Cephalonian resistance, perhaps the most deeply resented by the island's veterans is his insistence that the movement refused to come to the aid of the Italians when they turned on their former German allies at such terrible cost in the autumn of 1943. It is "certain", the British soldier-turned-author declares in the novel, that the "communist andartes of ELAS took no part, seeing no reason to shake themselves out of their parasitic lethargy". Later, he even has the heroine, Pelagia, hearing that the partisans have been "killing off" Italians who came to fight alongside them against the Germans.
From the islanders' point of view, no charge could be more wounding. The Italian-German confrontation and subsequent massacres were a defining moment of modern Cephalonian history. The only resistance force on the island was ELAS and its political wing, EAM, though neither organisation was exclusively, or even predominantly, communist. Both Greeks and Italian survivors testify that not only did the resistance give practical and armed support to the Italian troops, but also 15 andartes lost their lives in the fighting. Far from killing Italians who escaped the German slaughter, the resistance - including the parents of Dionisis Georgatos, Cephalonia's present-day governor - hid them and helped spirit them off the island.
The backlash against Captain Corelli's Mandolin was a slow-burn affair. When the novel was first translated into Greek, the communist paper, Rizospastis, accidentally gave it a glowing review, lifted in haste from a news agency. But by the time the film-makers came to recce the island two years ago, the campaign was already up and running. By the time the shooting of the Corelli movie began in earnest in Cephalonia this year, the film-makers were having to issue public assurances that they would not be re-opening the wounds of the civil war or repeating what the island's resistance veterans regard as de Bernieres' defamation of their movement.
Most critics on the island have accepted the undertakings that the film will be a straightforward love story and avoid the controversy surrounding the book. They have also been mollified by the fact that the scriptwriter is Shawn Slovo, daughter of Ruth First, the murdered anti-apartheid heroine, and Joe Slovo, former communist and African National Congress leader in South Africa.
-Guardian
The Age: Captain Corelli's crisis
www.theage.com.au/entertainment/20000806/A50714-2000Aug4.html
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