Famine and Death in Occupied Greece, 1941-1944 (review)

This is the first book length study of the food crisis and famine in Greece during the Axis occupation. If the last twenty years have seen dramatic changes in the quantity and depth of histories about the post-Occupation Greek Civil War, the famine has been oddly "effaced from official memory" (p. 1). Hionidou's book is a response to the question of why this last European famine characterized by extreme mortality remains largely unknown. Starvation killed five percent of the Greek population: the harsh but instructive documentary photographs (some by noted photographer Voula Papaioannou) included in the book effectively illustrate the effects of mass food scarcity. The author argues that the famine has been obscured by national collective attention to the long-range trauma of the civil war as well as by the problematic dynamics of survival under conditions of extreme scarcity. The domestic significance of the experience of hunger was displaced to the domain of the natural and the exogenous (Axis food requisitioning). This book offers a strong corrective to this historical lacuna.

While Hionidou points to the "stark" contrast with the vivid public and historiographical memory of the Irish famine, an instructive comparison would be the more occult history of the Chinese Famine of 1959–61 during Mao's Great Leap Forward. As the anthropologist Stephan Feuchtwang has argued, the recollection and transmission of this trauma has been obliterated from public history not only by official blackouts and by the shame of the survivors (and the disinterest of their descendants), but also by the subsequent "greater calamity" (at least to the intellectual class) of the Cultural Revolution. Hionidou also notes strong analogies with contemporary African famines with regard to the political abuses of food resources, absence of systematic welfare support systems, intensification of civil conflicts by competition over food resources, etc. Famine during war, however, has its own unique profile.

Recognizing the tremendous local variation in the effects of the food scarcity across Greece, Hionidou grounds her analysis in three case studies (the islands Chios, Syros, and Mykonos), three distinct temporal periods, and the different strategies of German versus Italian occupation (the Bulgarian occupation is not addressed specifically). Hionidou demonstrates that the naïve notion of famine as the consequence of failed harvests has little persuasive force and she challenges the accepted notion of a decline in production during the war years. Her focus turns towards political and social issues revolving around the two central questions of who suffered, and who was to blame. The British blockade that lasted from the occupation until February 1942 was only the most obvious and immediate cause of the worst months of famine in a country that before the war had imported up to 45 percent of its wheat.

Hionidou's explanations cover the gamut from the biological (reduced mortality of women, she argues, is at least partly a question of biophysical resources; it was starvation, and not epidemics, that caused death) to the political. Agreeing with Amartya Sen's theory of entitlements that famine differentially affects different social and occupational groups, she emphasizes, however, that the fates of different occupational groups shifted radically both regionally and temporally during the war. The unemployed proletariat, refugees, and Jews were the most obviously and consistently vulnerable. Hionidou deemphasizes Axis requisitioning as a primary cause of famine and scarcity. More significant is the problem of mobility and access to markets and cash.

Two facets of Hionidou's argument are particularly insightful. The first is her emphasis on food as a weapon in the Civil War (as early as 1943); the second is her rich analysis of markets and the circulation of food and money. Attacks on villages destroyed crop production especially in Epirus and the Peloponnese. The anticommmunist government-supported Greek Security Battalions established by Rallis in the last year of the war interfered with the work of the important Joint Relief Commission and along with...