N°70 — 200 resistance fighters on eBay

Kaisariani, 18th March 2026, 

It was Saturday night, 14th February 2026, when I came across some images on Facebook that struck me in a very visceral way; they were said to depict one of the bleakest episodes of the Nazi occupation in Greece, the execution of 200 “antistasiakoi” (resistance fighters in Greek, ed.) on May Day 1944, at the Kaisariani firing range. This is the neighbourhood where I grew up, scarcely 100 metres from the apartment where I live today.

In eight gripping photographs you can see the group of men walking courageously, with their heads up and a stark clarity in their gaze, to their execution. They can’t be real, was my first thought. After eighty-two years? Surely it was a forgery. But soon historians were reposting the images on social media, noting that German soldiers frequently photographed their own atrocities and that such pictures have only begun to reappear in recent years, often through international auctions. The pictures had indeed recently surfaced on eBay, listed by a Belgian seller. Their authenticity would later be verified by specialists from Greece’s Culture Ministry, which finally acquired them.

For us in Kaisariani, the execution of the 200 is not just another historical event. It’s a collective memory, a crimson wound beneath the open shirt of our neighbourhood, which set the rhythm of his heartbeat.

Most of those executed were communists, political prisoners from Greece’s dictatorship. Dictator Metaxas (in power from 1936 to 1941, ed.) had handed them over to the occupation forces. The prevailing account holds that these men were executed in retaliation for the killing of a German general by the Greek Resistance several days earlier in the Peloponnese. But the late Manolis Glezos (a legendary resistance fighter who, among other things, took down the Nazi flag hoisted on the Acropolis in May 1941, ed.) argued that the execution was motivated by a broader desire for revenge—by that point, the Germans already knew they had lost the war—and they chose Kaisariani, a stronghold of resistance, to satiate it, selecting May Day for symbolic effect.

However right up until the fall of Greece’s military dictatorship in 1974, successive right-wing governments had suppressed the history of the left-led wartime resistance. In Kaisariani we grew up listening to the first hand accounts of those who had lived through that period. These stories quietly nourished our sense of human dignity long before we really understood what that meant, or saw those principles codified in international charters.

We grew up hearing about the execution until the war generation mostly passed away. We were told that the condemned men sang loudly as they were driven to the shooting range, that they tossed notes from the trucks hoping that somehow they would reach their loved ones, and that standing before the firing squad, they raised their fists in defiance. We were also told about a woman who watched the bloodshed from her balcony and subsequently lost her mind.

Yet, the story that marked me most was my grandmother’s. Until the day she died she spoke of how, afterwards, the Germans piled the bodies onto trucks and carried them away —and as the convoy passed, “blood flowed like a river, through the streets, and I ran after it, hiding so they wouldn’t see me.” She was very young then. Women scattered flowers over this bloody river as if in a litany. Every single time my grandmother told the story, she broke down in sobs —though they say time softens the pain. Such horror becomes bodily memory, our very breath.

Listening to these tales, we had drawn these men in our imaginations like giants walking into the light. And now, suddenly, on a random Saturday night, we saw their real faces at that very sacred moment as they were walking towards their sacrifice, upright, proud, well-groomed as if they were going to a feast; then standing with heads held high and fists raised before the firing squad.

With these photographs the myth became reality, they corresponded perfectly. The unflinching gazes and postures of the victims effectively turned the occupier’s camera against him, undermining the perspective he had intended to impose. Resistance is what makes these photos unique.

It’s an extraordinary coincidence that the “Kaisariani’s 200” chose this very moment in history to look us straight in the eye: precisely when the Geneva Convention and all international treaties humanity invented after the Second World War to prevent new atrocities, are collapsing; precisely when fascism is becoming a pandemic, and normalised worldwide. It is at this critical hour that the “Kaisariani’s 200” have chosen to talk to us, and they ask one question: “Will you vindicate our memory? Will YOU rise against fascism?”

Despina