by REBECCA LIPCHITZ, Sun Staff [with minor corrections by Jesse Heines in square brackets]
Tuesday, December 2, 2003 - CHELMSFORD - At the age of 26, a young Greek banker named Rigas Rigopoulos became the unwitting leader of a small group of men who resisted the Nazi occupation of their country by spying on the Axis powers and secretly giving information to the Allies.
The group was responsible for the destruction of 55 ships in the port of Piraeus, but many of the men were captured, tortured and shot by the Germans.
UMass Lowell Computer Science professor Jesse Heines, of Chelmsford, met Rigopoulos’s son, Dionysis, at a computer-related conference in Greece. Sharing a [bus] ride, they passed a monument, which Dionysis noted was in honor of his [grand]father, [Christos Carvounis].
Upon hearing [this] story, Heines was so intrigued that he jumped at the chance to meet [Dionysis’s father, Rigas Rigopoulos, who had lived through those terrible times]. Rigopoulos, 89, has authored three books of his own.
Meeting Rigopoulos led Heines to invest three years and thousands of dollars into translating Rigopoulos’s memoirs into English and having the work published.
“It’s for the love of the story, but really for love of the man,” Heines says.
With the help of Greek translator Eleni Dedoglou of Andover, the book was published in English by Turner Publishing in July.
“It’s easy to understand why people would follow him,” Heines says of Rigopoulos’s charm and intelligence. “People assumed that he would know how to contact the Allies.”
But Rigopoulos doesn’t think of himself as a hero.
“‘We were ordinary men,’” Rigopoulos said, according to Heines.
“He didn’t set out to be an organizer. He sat around with his friends asking ‘What can we do with no resources and no weapons?’ An ordinary man in extraordinary times,” Heines says.
The losses in Greece were tremendous. More than 620,000 military and civilian Greeks died in World War II. It was news to Heines when he started his project. He says he knew little of the Greek resistance to Nazi occupation, and even less of the language.
“I don’t speak a word of Greek,” he says.
But while he found little in shared experience meeting Rigopoulos, he did find shared emotion.
“There are a lot of stories out there like this,” he concedes, but considers Rigopoulos’s story unique partly because of his political situation during the war he was neither loyalist nor Communist. Rigopoulos’s desire to fight the Nazis was driven by the desire to end occupation and reclaim his country.
The name of the resistance effort was 5-16-5, the numbers that correspond to letters of the Greek alphabet that stand for the “Hellenic Patriotic Society.”
The resistance was less about adopting a political ideology than it was about preserving a homeland.
Heines asked Rigopoulos once how he could go on with life after witnessing the horrors of World War II, which included watching his mother starve to death.
“And he answered,” Heines says, pausing to fight tears, “that you have to believe in the basic good of humanity.
“Books like this hopefully educate us about how we are all connected, that our differences are very small.”
For information about the book, visit www.cs.uml.edu/secretwar/.
Rebecca Lipchitz’s e-mail address is rlipchitz@lowellsun.com.