As the Twig Is Bent

Give us the child for eight years, and it will be a Bolshevist forever.

--Lenin

In the bleak city hall of Kozane, a northern Greek mountain town, 13 peasants stood before a U. N. field team. The peasants had been hostages of General Markos Vafiades' Communist Andartes. In the mixed Greek-Slav-Albanian dialect of the Macedonian border people, they haltingly told their story.

Black-shawled Athena Papalexiou, 50, spoke first. "All children between 3 and 14 are being registered by the Andartes," she said. The rebels had told the parents that the children would be sent to good homes in the Slav "democracies." "Would the children come back again?" asked'an investigator. "It was forbidden to discuss the matter," replied Athena.

John Natsis and Zagarus Voiliotis had been billeted with a widower in Kranies, in the rebel-controlled northwest corner of Greece. They had watched the widower give the names and ages of his three children to a rebel officer and a clerk. "They told him he must be glad that his children would be taken away to the safety of other countries," said the two peasants. "They said soon the Monarcho-Fascists would bomb Kranies, and in Rumania his children would receive a good education."

When Athens newspapers blared forth the story of "mass kidnaping," some foreigners were skeptical, at first. But a sensitive Greek nerve was touched. Greeks never forget that for centuries the armies and government of their conquerors, the Turks, had been manned by children of Christian families, caught young and trained for their jobs.

Were Greeks to be ruled again by their own children, kidnaped and alienated? Confirmation came from the rebels themselves. The Communist radio in northern Greece bluntly announced that 12,000

Greek children had been "recruited for educational purposes." Markos agents were already negotiating with Balkan members of the Cominform, including Rumania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, to provide homes for the recruits.*

Said an Athens spokesman: the plan "was intended to destroy Greece by destroying Greece's future--her youth." The Greek government hurried off a sharp note to the U.N. Balkan committee in Salonika, charging the Reds with "genocide," and asked for immediate action. Two committees were appointed and the issue labeled "top priority."

As the U.N. committee waited for the report of its investigators, the Markos radio went on the air again. From 69 villages of "free Greece," a broadcast reported, 4,884 children had already been transported across the frontier into Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria "for maintenance and education."

* Historian Arnold J. Toynbee points out that the Turks transferred to human administration a great invention of their Caspian steppe home land: the use of domestic animals to control other animals. As they had trained dogs to watch their herds, "the Ottoman Padishahs maintained their empire by training slaves as human auxil iaries 'to assist them in keeping order among their 'human cattle.' " The most promising of the children were taken into the court as pages, oth ers were farmed out temporarily as slaves. In struction in the Mohammedan faith, hard labor, savage punishment, meticulous education and an unceasing appeal to ambition developed a gov erning and military class of "human watchdogs" that kept the Ottoman power flourishing through four centuries (1371-1774).

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