Nice as it is to have a political film again, and one, what is more, that does not offer radicalism as an earnest of its humanistic commitment, I have to report that Eleni is a dreadful mess. The nonfiction book by Nicholas Gage, a former reporter and foreign correspondent for the New York Times, concerns his quest for vengeance on the man who, during the civil war that raged in Greece after World War II, caused the murder of his mother, Eleni. Christos Gatzoyannis had emigrated to America to make his fortune and then have Eleni and their five children—including nine-year-old Nikola, the future Nick Gage—join him. Meanwhile back in the northern village of Lia, Eleni found herself in the midst of savage conflict between the royalist forces and the Communist guerrillas who captured Lia, dispossessed her in order to make her fine house their headquarters, and proceeded to put everyone to soldiering or hard labor. They made things especially tough for the Amerikana, as they called Eleni, for being what they considered an enemy of the people.
The book tells both what happened back in the late Forties, and also how thirty years later, after the political amnesty, Gage tracked down the judge who ordered the execution of Eleni (along with a good many others) for engineering her children’s escape to America and their father. Hers was, of course, a rigged trial, with her fellow villagers intimidated into silence and, in the case of one woman, into bearing false witness. Nick became the Times’s, Athens bureau chief and was able, after much detective work, to unearth the still living judge, who had used the nom de guerre Katis. But he could not bring himself to kill him, only to spit at him.
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