American writer Kevin Andrews’ first-hand experience of Students’ Uprising

Transcription using Google Docs by Damian Mac Con Uladh.

Past the Polytechnic, where the explosion had begun several hours earlier without most of Athens knowing anything about it, now in full progress in the dark.

Several thousand young people were clinging to the iron railings around the buildings, massed behind the railings, massed along the pavements out in front, perched on the pillars of the entrance-gate already placarded with slogans; all shouting out the words nobody in Greece had dared speak in public, far less shout, except on certain few occasions when the Police moved swiftly.

*****

Not one of them moved, nor did I; I had to see what the tanks would do at the final moment.

We didn’t get the chance. The tanks roared past us fast and steadily – deafening, immense, black blunt interruptions, one after another. The soldier standing in the eighth turret waved to us. From round the corner a cataract of troops – helmets and lifted clubs – fell on us.

Panic swept us in one body straight round into the first apartment block.

Into a small bright-lit corner between lift and stair. One or two may have struggled up a few steps before they were caught backwards under the lightning web of clubs that knocked us to the floor, down low where boots could aim directly into faces, kicking from far back, stamping from above on necks, and the clubs a zigzag crackling of brilliant yellow varnish down, up, down, up, down, onto immobilized and tumbled bodies.

Little faces, dark under the helmets, barely recognizable as human. I tried to duck and shield my head under one arm, but the first blow broke a bone in my hand. The other arm flew up over my head but was immediately wrenched aside and clamped outstretched; then the clubs came crashing on my skull: – thunderclaps, regular, methodical, uninterrupted.

Now me at last. Not just that picture in the newspaper. Not just me looking at a newspaper. And no pain either. Nothing compared to the flesh-tearing humiliation of all those canings back in school. Marvel at the hardness of this bone, this brainpan, marvel at what it’s possible to bear!

Then one fist grabbed me by the hair and yanked my head far back, and after that clubs swinging, smashing against my throat…

*****

moment’s indecision: the terror of choice. What could I pretend? I was covered with blood.

They were already emptying my trouser pockets, punching me in the face. One officer snatched away my purse (there’s a comic side to everything), while out of the other pocket fell – tucked inside my residence permit – a leaflet marked “Down with the Lunatic.”

I reeled back from a sock in the jaw and tried to play a role. “But what have I done to you?” – quite gently. Someone gave me an upper-cut but it didn’t hurt, and once again still gently, in the tone of somebody respectable caught in a case of mistaken identity, I said, “What sort of behaviour is this!”

Between the punches (yes, the fists were human but my face was wooden) I warned them I had epilepsy and it wouldn’t go well for them if. But now two groups of officers had me by the elbows: others were knocking me on the head and giving knee-blows in the genitals, until the pavement rocked and hit me in the face, and they picked me up again and threw me from one to the other (middle-aged, with looks distorted by memories of the civil war and all of that so long ago) and forth and back, socking and spitting the two words, “Bugger! Peasant! Peasant! Bugger! Bugger!”

Luckily I was too weak already from concussion to put up a resistance to the knuckle against the nose and the boot smashing my lip against the teeth, or the grinding of my teeth into the asphalt, or the crash of the boot on my neck-vertebrae, or the hot showers of spit and lick of phlegm hawked over my face out of the officers’ mouths, or the same boot pounding in the groin.

People have asked, “Why didn’t you tell them you’re a foreigner!” The fact is I had forgotten.

When you take part (no matter how briefly) in an event of a particular size in a particular place, you belong to that place – what else is there to say? Except to add that not once during the three days in question did anybody ask me, “Are you a foreigner?” or “Where do you come from?”

Finally the policemen flung me out into the middle of the street – (thud of asphalt on the shoulder) – yelling, “Out of here, you filthy bugger!”

*****

Somebody on a motorcycle charged down the boulevard; we shouted to him not to cross the line of fire (bullets were hissing past from down the street); I think he made it, though perhaps not at the next intersection. And then for all our shouting five out of our group tried, one after the other, to dash over to the other side.

The first got a bullet in the eye; three drew him back, picked him up and rushed him across the avenue. Another stepped out and was shot in the stomach; three days later I learned he was dead. The next fell, with a bullet in the wrist. And yet a fourth, for all our pulling, would run out; he was shot in the throat: three-quarters of an hour later Radio Polytechnic announced his death inside the surgery.

The pavements gleamed with blood – how much of it can empty out of a human body in a space of minutes! Now three of us were left. And still one – the fifth-witless, confident, or panic-stricken? – put out his leg to dash across, and a bullet hit him in the ankle. As he collapsed the other one and I hoisted him up and, slithering on the asphalt, with the hot gush of his blood pulsating over us, lugged him across the boulevard to an ambulance where he was stuffed in on top of a lot of others.

Again through the tiny window a dizzy glimpse of bloodstained bandages, figures writhing and groaning, and others in white smocks shifting bodies into place. I didn’t know that the drivers of certain ambulances also had white smocks over their uniforms, and that they drove the wounded and the dying not to hospitals or to the First Aid Station but to the cells and torture-chambers of the Military Police.

The full testimony of Kevin Andrews is to read here