The massacres of Mesovouno, in northern Greece, were among the bloodiest mass executions perpetrated by the Germans during the Occupation of Greece (1941-1944). On October 23 of 1941 , Wehrmacht troops rounded up all the village’s men, and executed them by machine gun. They then set fire to the village. Ersaia, 11 years old, witnesses the events. Her father killed by the Nazis and her mother by guerrilla resistance fighters, she is left to survive torture and imprisonment, and to keep her younger siblings alive in the face of starvation.
Interviewee: Ersaia Tsartsianidou-Chatziioannidou
Interview by: Niki Fotiadou
Podcast creator: Maya Filippopoulou
Sound Designer: Iasonas Theofanou
Sound Editor: Michael Ikonomidis
Translator: Katherine Fleming
Voiceover: Eva Kesserling
Istorima is the biggest project of recording and preserving oral histories of Greece. Over 1,000 young researchers find narrators, listen, collect and save stories of people from all over Greece : Stories of their place, stories of love, stories that changed us or defined us, stories modern or old. Stories that are not recorded in the history books and that could be lost in time. Istorima is the co-creation of the journalist Sofia Papaioannou and the historian Katherine Fleming and is implemented with a founding donation from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) as part of his Youth Reboot and Empowerment initiative (learn more at www.snf.org). The more than 20,000 stories are being published in their entirety in stages at www.archive.istorima.org. Excerpts of the stories are published in the form of podcasts, videos or written stories at www.istorima.org