The calendar showed May 15, 1970. Giorgos Bakalios, a social worker for Greek immigrants in West Berlin, was carelessly walking with his elderly father through the streets of East Berlin when two cars with conventional number plates stopped in front of them and from inside jumped two husky men who, after glancing at their passports, forced them into the cars in an unknown direction.
This kidnapping was to mark the beginning of an incredible adventure for Giorgos Bakalios, since it turned out that these men were Stasi police officers, who led him to the detention centers of the notorious secret service of the Honecker regime, from where he was released for six years and eleven days then, having suffered physical and, above all, psychological torture.
Such was the magnitude of the pain of his soul, that when the Berlin Wall fell some years later, Giorgos Bakalios found himself with a sledgehammer in his hand furiously pounding the concrete. “I began furiously tearing down the remains. The satisfaction cannot be described in words [...] I felt that with each blow I drove a nail into the coffin of a barbaric system that had destroyed my life and now lay dead in front of me. It was my revenge", he will say later, recounting his adventure in his fascinating book "Six years in the Stasi prisons" (published by Epikentro), which was presented, last night, in a café-bistro in the center of Thessaloniki.
There, the author of the book, the speakers at the event - the journalist Stavros Tzimas and the theologian, philologist and writer Dimitris Demirtzis - and the publisher Petros Papasarantopoulos told how Giorgos Bakalios fell into the tentacles of the Stazi in May 1970 and went through the most inhuman torture in her hell, Hohenshausen, for 27 months and 11 days.
What if Giorgos Bakalios told them again and again that "I was neither a spy nor am I a spy. I am an employee of the Ministry Project of the Evangelical Church, who from the beginning of July 1966 until today has been helping his compatriots to solve the problems they face in their daily lives and not, as you claim, on behalf of some intelligence agency. The answer he received from his tormentors was the same:"We know that you are coming to our capital on behalf of the Western Intelligence Services and not, as you tell us, to serve your countrymen."
In the prisons he suffered physical and psychological torture, reaching the verge of madness... He managed, however, as if by a miracle to endure and when the communist regime collapsed, he searched the Stasi archives and found his file that numbered 11,000 pages. However, what shocked him was the fact that he had been slandered as a KYP agent by some Greek immigrants, sympathizers of the East German regime, whom he had, in fact, helped in the past. They were the ones who claimed that Giorgos Bakalios was working to undermine "socialism" and put him on a terrible multi-year adventure which, as he himself wished in his brief introduction to the book yesterday, no one should live through, ever again. .
His release and release came as a result of the continuous and multifaceted efforts of the Evangelical Church, for which he worked, "the unyielding struggle of Angela and towards the end, with the restoration of democracy in Greece, the intervention of the Greek diplomatic mission in East Berlin ", he writes in the book, through the pages of which jump out, in a narrative - a river of shocking moments from what he experienced both during his torture by the Stasi and afterwards.
Like the hammering with a sledgehammer on the "corpse", as he characteristically mentions, of the Wall, but also his return, years later, to the place where he suffered the most, the Hohenshenhausen hell. It was in 1993, when Giorgos Bakalios was walking through the door of his prison and, as he describes, "... at some point facing hell, the volcano woke up in me and began its eruptions. Unable to tame the Richters that vibrated my inner world, I burst into sobs, almost collapsing. The ghosts of the past had come to life in front of me"...
A punch-in-the-stomach book
Journalist Stavros Tzimas described Giorgos Bakaliou's book as "a punch in the stomach", pointing out that it vividly describes what we used to hear or read about the psychological torture to which the Stazi subjected its victims. "Few endured and did not come out of her prisons with broken logic. One of them was Giorgos Bakalios," he said, characterizing the book as "the most powerful" he has read about the Stasi, but also the third "child" of Bakalios.
"Yorgos Bakalios has two children with his wife Angela and a third with Stasi, which is what this book is about," he said, wanting to demonstrate the depth of the author's dedication to the 275 pages of the book, which describes the rich scientific arsenal used by the Stasi to crush the human psyche. "In order to get what it wanted from its victims, the Stasi did not mutilate their bodies but primarily their souls," he emphasized.
Theologian, philologist and writer Dimitris Demirtzis, who signs the foreword of the book and also spoke at last night's event, with warm words about the author and the work, characterizes "Six years in the Stasi prisons" as a book written with tears and blood. of. The publisher Petros Papasarandopoulos spoke of a "shocking book", pointing out that "it was a comic-tragic attempt by the East German regime to manufacture an enemy, at all costs despite the fact that there was no evidence against him". Bakalios experienced a nightmarish reality that should never be repeated again, he stressed.
From Soho to West Germany
Giorgos Bakalios was born in Soho, Thessaloniki and in 1964 he immigrated to West Germany. In 1966, after training at the School of Social Workers in Cologne, he was hired in the Evangelical Church's Ministry Project in West Berlin, charged with helping the Greek immigrants there. After his release he returned to his service, from where he retired. He is a graduate of the Free University of Berlin. For his contribution to the social development of Berlin, he and his wife Angela were awarded the Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany by President Richard von Weissecker. Since then he lives in Berlin with his wife, their two children, daughters-in-law and grandchildren.
SOURCE:APE-ME