Undoubtedly, the person who stole the show at the presentation of the SYRIZA Euro-ballot is the Polytechnic campaigner, Melpo Lekatsafor which the Stefanos Kasselakis he told his colleagues that he was particularly proud of this nomination…
As a student in Pharmacy at the time, Melpo Lekatsa, together with other students, set up a makeshift pharmacy for the wounded. After the suppression of the rebellion, he was arrested and tortured in the detention centers of the ETA-ESA.
“My ears are still ringing. They had something like a rubber band that was something made of electricity, that had a wire at the bottom… They put you down and step on you, a lot of wood. Think I saw a man in the toilet being carried by four. His color was black,” she said about the days she spent in prison.
“The toilets were open and once I was allowed to take a bath with cold water, no soap, everyone was looking at me… Everyone was looking at me. “Their eyes were like arrows falling on” he had revealed in the recent past.
“Until I gave birth to my first daughter, I didn’t sleep at night. Nightmares were a terrible thing. I always had the same dream. I could see that we are – think of a West German landscape destroyed, where the allies are coming in and where the buildings are huge – I was running naked and there I was walking around with a stone statue. I believed that with all that had happened I would never become a mother and that perhaps this child, the stone one, was the child I would never give birth to. With many difficulties I became a mother twice. Of course I sat in bed for eight months because every time I lost a child, then I had to sit in bed for the child to be born. This is also my victory against torture, because it took several years to heal my internal and spiritual problems, but the physical ones followed me for many years.”
When she met her tormentors
She herself spoke a few months ago about her tormentors whom she met by chance after many years.
The first, who was one of the majors who gave the orders for the tortures, he saw by chance in the public market of Nea Ionia. “He was with his wife and carrying her groceries, being the good Christian and the good family man.” It was the man who called her a whore in the torture cell…
The second, who was a jailer and torturer, was met by chance when he entered her pharmacy one night when he was spending the night:
“I saw him after ten years at the pharmacy. I had an overnight stay and he asked me for an antibiotic, probably, for his child. He told me that he works for OTE on an island in the Aegean and is a very good family man and person”, describes Melpo Lekatsa and continues:
“What are you telling me these things? I will serve you because I am in service for public health. Take it and disappear.” “He didn’t want to apologize to me, but to tell me what a good person he has become” he said…
“I do not forgive my tormentors. Forgive the wood. I do not forgive when 48 students have died at the Polytechnic. I can’t forgive. I believe in the justice of life,” he told OPEN.
“We didn’t realize we were making history”
Melpo Lekatsa describes what she tragically experienced on November 17, 1973:
“At the Polytechnic I didn’t have time to shake. It was as if Leonidas’ 300 were getting ready. You felt like you were in the small threshing floor. No one expected it. Friday noon they notify the organizations that we have information that we will strike with tanks. The army will intervene. “Leave, save the executives”. I was not in any organization. I was the spontaneous little sparrow who went from here, from there, wherever I could help. And no one left. I felt like I was a part of a very big group fighting for our rights. I didn’t see the tank, I left the back half an hour early to avoid arrest. I could see the tank opposite. We told a few people to leave through the back door, to save ourselves, to get lost in Athens because there is no other way. Invulnerable. We had no understanding of reality. We didn’t realize that we were going to make history. If blood had not been spilled, we would not have had dead people… Dead, dead, because they are about to drive us crazy that there were no dead people. And there is one dead, the blood, wants revenge. Blood makes history. If the junta hadn’t intervened, this crack in the regime wouldn’t have happened either…”.
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