The Interview
Dimitris Danikas: Who is Fotini Tomai? Why don’t most people know who she is?
Fotini Tomai: Oh, so they don’t know me. I am a historian, I served for 37 years at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
D.D.: In what service?
F.T.: In various services; I served at the Embassy in Sofia, I was a national representative in three international organizations, but my main post, after the office of Giannis Kapsis, was in the Diplomatic and Historical Archives Service, which had been leaderless for many years. I had to face an ocean wave of disorganized, unclassified files thrown on the floor in order to prepare position papers for the government.
D.D.: Under PASOK?
F.T.: Under PASOK, under New Democracy, I am above party lines, everyone trusted me.
D.D.: So you found files thrown on the floor.
F.T.: Imagine, when Pangalos wanted to speak in Parliament about Imia, I found on the floor—under the rotting skeleton of a large rat—a map from the Turkish Army General Staff, dated 1952, which showed Imia within Greek territorial waters. It was from the time when both countries were preparing to join NATO and our maritime borders in the Aegean had been defined. Pangalos was stunned when he saw the map. I had already written an article saying, “The archives contradict you, Ms. Tschiler.” Because we had never exchanged official communications about Imia in the past. We had exchanged communications about other points in the Aegean, but never about Imia. And this treasure of the Greek state was lying abandoned in the basement, with chairs, tables, old machines, and no one cared.
D.D.: When did you come across the rat?
F.T.: It was during the Imia crisis, in 1996. Meanwhile, we were preparing an edition—the first I did when I took over at the Ministry, followed by 37 others—on the integration of the Dodecanese. We conducted research in Soviet, Italian, and British Foreign Office archives. I had an incredible treasure trove of arguments to present to Pangalos, who was speaking in Parliament and defending Greek rights. What do I mean by this? That we, complacent and relying on ancestor worship, believing that everyone owes us and everyone wrongs us, never took care of our own house. A country’s diplomatic documents are its titles of ownership. The other side cannot believe you if you don’t come with documents just because you were born Greek and are God’s chosen on Earth. So we started the editions, and our next edition, in English, for which we were awarded at the State Department, was about Greek Jews during the interwar period. Then came the edition about Greeks in Auschwitz-Birkenau who were martyred in the death camps.
D.D.: Let’s move on to Nikos Zachariadis. General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece, he was arrested and imprisoned in Dachau. Not only did he survive, but he returned to Greece wearing a leather RAF jacket. What happened? How was he not tortured, not punished? The Nazis were fiercely persecuting communists.
F.T.: Zachariadis, of Adrianople origin, Catholic by faith—I saw this in the German archives—was arrested, held in Dachau, and had his own single room. He was allowed to have books on physics, geography, history, and dictionaries. At a time when if the Nazis found you with a leaf in your bed, they would execute you. The work he did in the camp was to lead, dressed as a British officer, the labor battalions outside Dachau. Why did they treat him this way? For one reason: the Germans—and this still holds true—have respect for leaders. Zachariadis was a leader then, and that’s why they treated him as they did. It wasn’t that they had him to inform on others; they treated him with the respect due to a leader.
D.D.: Yes, but a communist leader!
F.T.: Communist or not, it didn’t matter! I represented Greece in the ITS organization—Bad Arolsen Archives. With 30 million files, 17.5 million victims, which the Germans—who never believed the Berlin Wall would fall—instead of burning, kept in this small town in Saxony. They chose this location because it was very close to the largest NATO base in Europe, between Frankfurt and Stuttgart. Imagine, the main street is not even a kilometer long, with various shops and taverns on either side. So they put their archives in three different buildings there, and supposedly the International Red Cross, which was tasked with managing them, would provide answers to relatives about where their loved ones died or were found. What else did those old scoundrels do without shame? They did not respond to requests from prisoners’ countries in the former Eastern Bloc—they were that filthy. Meanwhile, they didn’t want to open the archives; I fought hard to get them opened. The American ambassador told me: “Fotini, they are afraid of the yellow archives.” I asked him what those were, and he said: “They are the archives of the big industries—Nivea, Volkswagen, Krups, etc.—that used people not only for forced labor but also as test animals. They don’t want to open these archives, that’s why they’re not giving the rest either.” So I went in and made a fuss. With the Bonn Agreement, the Bad Arolsen archives were opened. And there we saw things you can’t imagine.
D.D.: Like what?
F.T.: Even how many lice the prisoners had, we’re talking about such detail. Besides the prisoners’ character, what they ate, what they drank, they even counted how many lice each one had. For example, they found two lice on Vafiadis. I went before the archives were officially opened and told the German: “Son, will you do me the favor of giving me the file of a Greek prisoner?” Because not all Germans were literate—they even spelled the surname Schwarz differently when a prisoner was transferred from one camp to another—he said to me: “Write down the surname for me, maybe I’ll find it.” So I wrote “Nikos Zachariadis” with a Z and with an S. He goes down and searches, searches, searches… “Mein Gott, who was this you asked me to find?” He tells me: “Keep in mind, before the archives are officially opened, I don’t want you to write anything.” And he gives me Zachariadis’ file. I didn’t rush to write an article about what I read inside, but I waited for time to pass so that it would be clear that the archives were officially opened.
D.D.: When were they officially opened?
F.T.: The archives were officially opened in 2007. Let me tell you that a KKE representative in Parliament sent me a… buffoon to tell me: “How can you help restore Zachariadis’ memory?” I said, “In one way.” “How?” “By not writing. Because if I write, you won’t like it at all.”
D.D.: And what did the archives say about Zachariadis?
F.T.: That he was a leading figure, that he lived alone in his cell, that he was allowed to have books. It didn’t say that he collaborated with them, I don’t think it would go that far. The big issue with Zachariadis—whom Stalin laughed at and said, “This war is nonsense,” and let the Civil War unfold despite the Yalta Agreement—is that precisely because he lacked heroic credentials, he wanted to gain them through the Civil War. But he was truly a tragic figure. And this became apparent later, in the 1960s, when he desperately asked, through our embassy in Moscow, to be allowed to return to Greece and serve a life sentence in prison. Because he understood that the noose was tightening around him in the Soviet Union. And indeed, he was found dead. He did not commit suicide.
D.D.: They say he committed suicide. What do you mean, tell me.
F.T.: The Greek state did not allow him to return. He wrote letters to Karamanlis, to the head of the Athens Prosecutor’s Office, Menelaos Koutsakos, to the Russian ambassador in Athens, and to the president of EDA, Giannis Pasalidis, asking them to allow him to return. The only one who knew about this was Antonis Brillakis, but they kept it secret that he had asked to return to Greece. However, they did not grant him permission because there were many fears. One of them was that he might create a communist party like Mao Zedong and Enver Hoxha. While he himself said, “Let me return and stay in prison,” he basically wanted to escape from the Soviet authorities—until he was found hanged.
D.D.: He hanged himself, committed suicide.
F.T.: They say “they made him commit suicide.”
D.D.: Anyway, the official version is that he committed suicide because he couldn’t return and was accused of being an agent. They had accused him of being an agent.
F.T.: Look, another impropriety he committed, besides Plumbidis, was with Markos Vafiadis. Vafiadis said, “Don’t go against him,” and Plumbidis said the same, “We don’t want the party to split.” And yet, he betrayed both of them. Let me tell you what he did to Vafiadis. Markos Vafiadis was a brave man. First of all, when Germany was defeated, he came to an agreement with the German commander Richter, who was withdrawing from Chalkidiki, and told him: “I will allow you safe passage, provided you leave your weapons to me.” Because while he had many ELAS fighters to fight, he had no weapons. And Richter agreed. This remained secret; I have a photo of the chapel where this signature took place, in a village in Chalkidiki. The text exists, it was found at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The historian Hagen Fleischer, who has many question marks around him about what role he plays, says that there is no such agreement in the German archives. And then how do I have it? And what happens then? Suddenly, Vafiadis becomes the cover of Time magazine in 1948. And then Zachariadis loses it and says: “Is that how you are? To expose your agreement, to show that you collaborated with the Germans.”
D.D.: What is Vafiadis’ stain?
F.T.: Vafiadis was a patriot, not an internationalist. But unfortunately, in our time, you don’t dare to speak. You go to take Russia’s side that the Ukrainians came to power unjustly, they call you pro-Putin. When Kissinger and Shultz told them: “Stay away from Ukraine, from Moscow’s soft underbelly,” and the others went to place NATO heads 185 kilometers from Moscow, what was Putin supposed to do? Sit with his arms crossed? You go to say what’s happening and you find trouble! The same now with the photos from Kaisariani, where here one word prevails, as I wrote on Facebook: “They were all Greeks.” What does it matter to you if they were communists or not? They were Greeks and went proudly to their death. No other European would do that. For political parties to change, for one apostasy after another to happen, and to accuse them because they were communists and were lined up against the wall? That is a double execution. They were executed once and their memory is being executed again now. They come to tell someone who was executed and died with a smile on his lips that his life was not worth it because he was a communist. He was a life-loving man who believed in the Communist Party. Has none of us been deceived? Has none of us believed something wrong? Why this harshness towards people who were fighters? We must see in the historical context of the time how these people were executed.
D.D.: Absolutely right, I completely agree with you.
F.T.: Tzimeros wrote and mocked them. And I wrote to him below: “For me, there was one word: Greeks. And let me tell you something? I can’t imagine you standing against the wall to be executed and smiling at your executioners.” Of course, he didn’t answer.
D.D.: Let’s move on to today. First of all, you are the former wife of Nikos Konstantopoulos.
F.T.: You’re reading an old letter.
D.D.: What do you have to say about the current political reality in Greece?
F.T.: For me, it’s a state of national decline. The institutions have deteriorated, the politicians have deteriorated, and everyone is working for Mitsotakis. There is no alternative. And if you don’t want to vote for Mitsotakis, you say: “Who will govern me?” I don’t see anyone around, I don’t see the maturity that the old parties had to find solutions, to cooperate. Everyone says “no” and everyone wants to serve their own interests. The country has never been in such a political mess.
D.D.: What is your opinion on SYRIZA?
F.T.: The worst.
D.D.: On Tsipras and his return?
F.T.: Well, that’s something else. For me, he is an opportunist. And I had told Nikos (Konstantopoulos) from the time he was in the Youth. An opportunist, very smart, very good at unionism, has leadership skills, no one disputes that, but he is destructive. He is a politician and the only thing he cares about is his own gain. You saw now, he left Left and went to the Socialists, which Fofi Gennimata had forbidden him. There is nothing you can believe in. And it’s a shame because this people today have nowhere to turn. The politicians of old had a different weight.
D.D.: The case of Karystianou?
F.T.: Look, for a mother who lost her child, I cannot speak and say anything. Whatever she does, I forgive her. Of course, she is free to exercise her political right to be elected and to elect—I won’t forbid her and no one else can forbid her to run.
D.D.: No one is forbidding her, for God’s sake.
F.T.: But whether her decision is right and whether her ideas will prosper will be judged by time. I cannot, however, speak about a mother who lost her child because I am a mother myself and I understand her pain. Now she chose this path because she sees that if you don’t get into the system, you can’t find justice. As long as you’re outside, you’re outside. She chose this path, good for her. Those who want to vote for her will choose an honest person. The question is, can she engage in politics? That is, just because you lost your child and want to change the system doesn’t mean you’re ready to engage in politics and governance. These require other qualities.
D.D.: What impressed you all these years you were at the Ministry? You were at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under Nikos Kotzias?
F.T.: Of course I was under Nikos Kotzias.
D.D.: So tell us, what was it like?
F.T.: Fear struck and slavery reigned. Except for me, because no one dared to touch me. There was suffocating control over everything. There were ambassadors who avoided writing reports—on various issues—because they were afraid that if what they wrote didn’t please Kotzias, he would go after them. This was not the policy of a democratic country; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was a one-man show, and not a fly could land on his sword.
D.D.: On the Prespa Agreement?
F.T.: Of course, the issue had to be resolved at some point, but I was opposed to the Prespa Agreement from the start. And now you see how many mistakes we made. Now they are imposing the Macedonian language on us…
D.D.: Something terrible and memorable you encountered in the archives?
F.T.: Everything was memorable and very important, especially the Greek-Turkish and Greek-American relations. Where to start with Greek-Turkish relations… From the 1950s, when every day we had incidents at the maritime borders north of Samos and in the Dodecanese. Because they were trying—whether Turkish fishermen or their navy—to create a precedent of occupation. I experienced all this very intensely when I was in Giannis Kapsis’ office, who had been appointed by Andreas as the government’s representative to discuss the status of the bases, and of course there were the Greek-Turkish issues. What can I tell you, I didn’t come home before midnight or two in the morning. Kapsis had us all as little soldiers because we constantly had problems. At that time, I had not yet gone to the Directorate of Diplomatic and Historical Archives, as the service was called then. Later, I went there, and with all the experience I had from Giannis Kapsis’ office, I began to process the files of the Ankara embassy and the relevant political directorate. There I saw situations, what can I tell you now… From Averoff’s trip with Frederica and Paul to Ankara in ’52. The purpose of the visit was supposedly scientific, cultural, but in reality, it was about drawing the borders on the Evros. Imagine, we had not yet defined our borders on the Evros… There are so many things, I can’t choose which to tell you. Imagine two almost warring states for 6-7 decades after the war, what they have exchanged… Everything impressed me.
D.D.: Like what?
F.T.: Michael Cacoyannis entrusted me with 50,000 meters of unedited film from “Attila.” The State Department and the Foreign Office wanted to buy them for millions, and he gave them to us. With Pangalos at the Ministry then. And I remember that after a month, he asked to see some footage, and thus the first cinematographic archive of visual documents was established in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in an EU member state. I remember he came, and we invited the relatives of the missing in Cyprus, and he showed the interview he had taken from Denktaş, where Michael asks him: “And what about the missing?” And Denktaş turns and tells him: “There are no missing. They are executed by revenge.”
D.D.: Executed in revenge…
F.T.: And everyone was crying.
D.D.: Was this material removed from the film?
F.T.: This material was not included in the film by Michael, so as not to cause a problem, and later he tried to get it back to add it. I think he added it to “Attila.”
D.D.: You are not currently working at the Ministry, is that correct?
F.T.: No, I retired in ’19.
Epilogue: Portugal, Turkey, Switzerland, and Jewish Properties
D.D.: One big moment, something you can’t forget?
F.T.: If you want me to tell you one, I’ll tell you this. Pangalos used to tease me and say: “What the hell, do you read the stars or the coffee grounds?” Because every time I told him to do an edition, an international issue would break out and our country was ready to face it. As I told you before about the Dodecanese and Imia. So when I asked him for permission to publish the book “Documents on the History of the Greek Jews,” which I told you about earlier regarding Greek Jews, international conferences on the restoration of the memory of Jewish martyrs and their properties break out. They mobilized and were looking for Swiss bankers, what money they found in the basements of the banks, a big fuss.
D.D.: Who found the money?
F.T.: Representatives of the American Jewish lobby, the American Jewish Committee, the World Jewish Congress, began to demand from states that laundered Nazi gold—among them Portugal, Turkey, Switzerland—whatever they had in their treasuries from Jewish properties. Then we appear at an international conference in Washington, chaired by the permanent undersecretary Stuart Eizenstat—I was delighted because I had published the first edition on Greek Jews. And I go and put our edition in the mailbox of all the representatives of the 43 states. Amazing success. At one point, because of Greece, I was sitting between the Holy See, the Vatican, and Germany, and the cardinal who represented the Holy See of the Vatican comes to me and says: “Fotini, I saw the Turks removing the edition you put in our mailboxes and replacing it with theirs.” Written, if I’m not mistaken, by Robert So—an American who had been paid by the Turks to write this history and portrayed Turkey as an innocent dove. As soon as I hear this, I become Turkish. During the lunch break, Stuart Eizenstat, who really loved me—and still loves me, he’s alive—says to me: “Fotini, I see you sad.” I tell him: “Mr. Minister, I’m not sad, I’m tired.” He insisted, and in the end I told him: “Well, I didn’t want to create a new problem, for Greece to appear again as quarreling with Turkey. But what can I say? That’s what the director of Özal’s office did.” Behind me was the Turkish delegation as observers. Eizenstat says to me: “Are you serious? Then, write down for me on a piece of paper what you want me to say about Greece in the resolution of this conference.” So I kneel and write a text and give it to him. And as he stands up, he signals me to stand up from my chair, and he begins to praise Greece for its policy towards the issue of the Jews. The applause that followed… The only country that did not pass antisemitic laws was Greece. And we had a dictator, Metaxas.
Before we ended the phone conversation and before I wished her a speedy recovery, she told me: “I show things with documents, I don’t say them off the top of my head. So at one point, Stuart Eizenstat turns and tells me: ‘Okay, sit down now.’ And I tell him: ‘No, Mr. Minister, how many other times inside the State Department is Greece applauded and not Turkey, which is sitting next to me?’” And of course, there was a big laugh. And also, what marked me was my acquaintance with Shimon Peres. Truly a unique man, I have no words to describe him. A leader, a rare man. And especially the story of his father, who parachuted with the British RAF into the monastery of Chasia and was hidden there for a year and a half by the monks. An incredible story. I also narrate it in the book, and it’s enough to make you cry. His name was Persi, all Israelis had other names, then they changed them. For example, Meijer was called Meiersi, Peres was called Persi. Then they changed their surnames when they went to Israel—to make them easier, perhaps.
Unstoppable, uncontrollable, sweeping. And then I thought: “Just see what reactions these things she told me will provoke. Facts with documents—not made up.”
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