Books: Mother's Love, Son's Revenge

ELENI by Nicholas Gage; Random House; 470 pages; $15.95

As the Communist attempt to take over Greece became an increasingly bloody failure in 1948, the desperate leftist guerrillas, driven back to a few mountain coverts, adopted a cruel strategy: a pedomasoma, a "gathering up of children." The young were taken from occupied villages and sent as hostages to Albania and other nearby Iron Curtain countries. Publicly the guerrillas said the children were being protected from the hazards of war. In fact, the plan was meant to terrorize their parents into subservience to the guerrillas and to indoctrinate the children as a new...

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