Love and Silence-Giorgos Tsarouhas

Giorgos Tsarouhas was born in 1912. He studied Law at the Athens Law School. After the end of the Civil War, he was sentenced to imprisonment for 12 years and exiled to Yaros island. He was temporarily released in 1951, re-arrested in 1953 and sent to Ai-Stratis island. He was finally released in 1961 and elected as an EDA MP (KKE was banned) in the same year. On the night of the 27th of May 1963, when Gregoris Lamprakis was assassinated, Tsarouhas was also violently attacked and had to be hospitalized for 29 days (photo above). He was one of the main witnesses in the Lambrakis assassination trial. In 1968, in the second year of the military dictatorship, he was kidnapped by Police and tortured. He died from the beatings he received in the Police station. Before dying, Giorgos Tsarouhas managed to swallow a note he was carrying from the illegal KKE Party Organization of Salonica, as it contained the names of his comrades. The note was found when they cut his body open during autopsy, and it was included in the evidence when the case against his Police assassins was finally prosecuted, in 1979. My mother was friends with his daughter and this note is in his memory.