Pharmacist Muzaffer Akpınar describes the "health care"
and "bathroom facilities" at the Liosia Prison Camp.
Grim indeed.//
At the garrison there was no proper place for a sick person
to lay down,
nor was there any medicine.
Those who were ill were sent from Liosia
to a hospital in Piraeus, 30
kilometers away. Three days later they
would come back to the garrison dead.
There was no ill person who
went to that hospital and returned alive but
one escaped from the
hospital building and came back to our garrison. He was surrounded
by us all, who wanted to
know what it was like there, as if he had
returned from the dead.
He said that prisoners who went to the
hospital were put in the bottom
floor’s marble corridors and left there for a
couple of days. If in that
time he died, or somehow didn’t die, he would be brought to a room
on a stretcher and left
there, where the hapless prisoner would be left
to starve to death if he was
still clinging to life. Three days
later they
returned the body to the garrison in a “crucifix cart”. Money was
collected from among the prisoners
to buy wood . A fire was lit,
water
heated and the body cleansed. In lieu of a burial shroud, the
body was
wrapped in whatever kind of cloth available.
Transport to the cemetery posed another problem since it was located
1.5
hours away, outside of town. If we made
a thousand gestures of
gratitude, a permit might be given and the body taken
there for burial.
Without permission the
body remained at the garrison and, of course,
would begin to rot. We witnessed this many times. One of the 30 or
so women prisoners in Averof
Prison died and they refused permission
to remove her body for 3 days. On the fourth day the problem was left
to our
garrison. Finally, after appeals to the
commander and others, 4
prisoners went and brought the woman’s body to our
garrison, where
we buried her.
Those Who Leave Don’t Return:
The daily deaths and murders went unaccounted for. 40 people would
be taken to forced labor but
only 32 of them would return. 35 people
would be taken to move provisions but only 19 returned. We were told
that those who didn’t come back
went to another camp or were kept as
forced laborers at the ammunition
depot. No one had the courage to
question this.
The ditchs that they made into toilets were located 500
meters behind
the tents and between two rail lines. The ditches were a meter wide and
a bit more
than a meter deep and 10-meters long.
There was no lack of
incidents involving these latrine ditches. In rainy weather, to get from
the tents to
the latrine was even more difficult with the increased risk
of falling in. We saw this happen a number of times and it
was quite
nasty. In fact, an elderly
retired soldier from Adapazarı fell in
and
suffocated. At night, a number of
people had to go at the same time for
safety’s sake. If fellows went one by one they would be
stopped by the
guards, robbed and, according to what we were told by prisoners
who
came before us, many were killed and thrown into the ditches.
In our time there, thanks to our heroic
army’s effort in Anatolia to
cleanse the land, the Greeks were more careful
about their treatment of
us, so as not to bring down the Turkish Army’s wrath
on their soldiers
and populace in Anatolia.
Consequently, they were more reluctant to
kill in public. Nevertheless, we witnessed a prisoner being killed by
a
Greek guard over a line-cutting argument in the chow line and another
prisoner
being dragged to the garrison’s jail on the pretext that he had
relieved
himself close to the tents at night.
This prisoner was beaten
until morning and died two days later.
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