Distomo – a War Crime that has not been Atoned for until Today

Documentary film by Stefan Haupt, 2006

eg. Distomo. A small farming village, at a stone’s throw from the sea, situated at the road from Athens to Delphi. On 10 June 1944, the little boy Argyris Sfountouris, at that time only four years old, survived a massacre committed by German occupation forces. It was a so-called “expiatory measure” by an SS division reacting to a partisan attack. Within less than two hours 218 villagers were killed in Distomo – women, men, doters, infants and babies. Argyris lost his parents and 30 relatives. In his film, “A Song for Argyris” Stefan Haupt outlines the history of Argyris Sfountouris’ life. This life entails  the fate that hundreds of thousands of people had and still have to endure as a result of war atrocities. The film is therefore also dedicated to all those children worldwide, who experience a similar fate today.

Loss of family and homeland

Some time after the massacre, the little Argyris together with 10 000 other children was taken to an orphanage in Piraeus; because he did not eat, he was later taken to a smaller home outside of Athens. The situation was difficult, the country in the middle of a civil war. At the age of 9, Argyris’ weight was that of a 5-year-old child. But then a delegation of the Red Cross visited the orphanage and selected a set of children, who were to be given new hope in the Pestalozzi Children’s Village in Trogen, in the Canton of Appenzell in Switzerland. So the Greek orphan arrived at the newly founded Pestalozzi village, where war orphans were taken care of. Here they were to receive help to heal the wounds of war. The idea of the children’s village was to realize humanitarian commitment and to facilitate coexistence and reconciliation between people from different nations  in the heart of Europe.
In Trogen, Argyris lived in the Greek House together with children, who had suffered a similar destiny. “We did not speak about our past. From time to time, but only when we told each other fairy tales, before we fell asleep in our dormitory under the roof, we would slip in some of the things we had experienced.”
Argyris was taught in Greek language and culture and read everything in Greek that he could get hold of: Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens and much more. “I absorbed everything at that time.” Arthur Bill, the director of the Pestalozzi village at that time, who introduced the young fosterlings into life with a lot of educational skills and human commitment, was formative for Argyris.
After his High School exams at Trogen, Argyris Sfountouris studied mathematics and astrophysics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Afterwards he taught at several High Schools and soon he began to translate the works of famous Greek poets such as Katzantzakis, Kavafis, Seferis or Ritsos into German. The time of the Greek dictatorship was particularly difficult for him, because he was definitely rejected to enter Greece and he could fight injustice in his homeland only from a distance.

Commitment to more humanity

At the age of 40, Argyris Sfountouris dedicated himself to a completely new task. Arthur Bill, the former director of the Pestalozzi village, had been asked to establish the Swiss Disaster Relief Unit and asked his former protégé whether he wanted to become active in this humanitarian task. “I did not want to remain a well-paid civil servant until the bitter end”, Agyris said. In Nepal, Somalia and Indonesia he was active in developmental aid projects, also for the Swiss Disaster Relief Unit. He wanted to help, above all those children, who had experienced a similar destiny as himself. His humanitarian commitment became increasingly serious. All through his life he was concerned with good and evil, war and peace. He could not simply resign to the traumatic experiences of his childhood. He wanted make use of them for a good cause, arouse the public, campaign against injustice to make sure that such crimes would never happen again.
So in 1994 he organized a conference about war and peace in Delphi, 50 years after the massacre. Under the heading “Memory – Mourning – Hope” the questions of compensation, of overcoming hate and of reconciliation were to be discussed. The speakers came from Greece, Switzerland and Germany. A representative of the German administration was not present.

Legal Marathon

With the reunification of Germany a new highly-explosive legal situation had come about. For the first time, nearly 50 years after the end of the war, it might be possible to claim compensation and redress  for the sufferings of war. In 1995, Argyris Sfountouris together with his three sisters submitted a claim for compensation. It was rejected. When the Federal Constitutional Court, the highest instance, rejected the claim as well, Sfountouris addressed the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. There the complaint is still pending. Above all Sfountouris is indignant about the fact that the German government called the massacre of Distomo a “measure in the context of war”, although it is a war crime without any doubt. Now he hopes for the decision from Strasbourg.
The film deserves wide attention and is suitable for history lessons in higher grades (starting from 14 years). In a moving and sensitive manner, it outlines the destiny of a person, whose life was marked by the terrible effects of war. Beyond that, the film raises these issues in a very subtle way pointing to the future and trying to tackle the question, how such atrocities could forever be prevented. Thus, in the long run it is a manifestation of what Argyris Sfountouris did throughout his whole life: committing himself to humaneness and to the fight of war and cruelty.

Source: www.swissfilms.ch, www.salzgeber.de
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