GREECE UNCONQUERED: KATINA AMONG THE RUINS

 

Among the many narratives to emerge from the tumult of the Second World War, few possess the quiet intensity and symbolic magnitude of Roald Dahl’s Katina. First published in March 1944 in Ladies’ Home Journal, while the world still reeled from conflict, the story was inspired by Dahl’s experiences as a Royal Air Force pilot stationed in Greece during the spring of 1941. It was a moment of profound despair and dislocation. The German invasion had shattered Greek resistance, the government had fled into exile, and British and Commonwealth forces were in chaotic retreat. Out of this landscape of devastation Dahl forged a story that transcends military history. At its centre stands a child, a little orphaned girl named Katina, whose raised fist towards the heavens amidst the ruins encapsulates the unbroken soul of an entire people.

Dahl’s fiction is often celebrated for its mordant humour, its dark ironies and its playfulness, yet Katina belongs to another register entirely. It is a serious, elegiac work, suffused with an admiration that is both personal and profound. Its origins lie deep within Dahl’s wartime service. In the spring of 1941 he flew with No. 80 Squadron RAF in embattled Greece, taking part in air operations that culminated in the Battle of Athens on 20 April. He witnessed the catastrophic bombing of Piraeus, the swift collapse of Greek defences and the desperate withdrawal that followed. During this time he encountered the people of Greece less as remote and subordinate allies than as valiant comrades enduring a shared ordeal. It was this encounter that inspired Katina, a fictionalised narrative that seeks to capture the essence of a people who, though overrun and bereft, refused to incline their heads before their conquerors.

The plot appears deceptively simple. A squadron of RAF pilots stationed at a forward base in Greece encounters a very young girl, perhaps eight or nine years old, wandering alone near their encampment. She is barefoot, ragged and dazed. Her village has been bombed, her family annihilated, and she has no one left in the world. The men, stirred by compassion, take her in. They feed her, clothe her and offer her shelter. They attempt, in their halting and awkward way, to provide comfort and protection. Katina speaks only a few words, enough to communicate simple thoughts, but it is her presence rather than her speech that binds them to her. She follows them around the base, observes their labours and listens intently to their conversations. Gradually she becomes their constant companion and, more importantly, the moral centre of their world.

The pivotal moment of the story arrives during a German air raid. As bombs descend and the men rush to their stations, Katina steps out into the open air, diminutive and unarmed, and raises her fist skyward. She shouts, though the words themselves are unimportant. What matters is the raw, physical defiance of the gesture. It is the act of a child who has lost everything and yet refuses to surrender. It proclaims that the enemy may possess overwhelming might, yet the will of those they seek to subjugate remains forever beyond their reach.

At this instant Katina ceases to function merely as a character and assumes the dimensions of a symbol. Dahl’s prose makes this transformation luminous. The pilots, with all their training and technology, are powerless to halt the enemy’s advance. They cannot prevent the fall of Greece. They cannot even assure their own survival. Their gestures of protection, though sincere, are ultimately inconsequential. Here Dahl enacts a striking reversal of imperial narrative. These men are representatives of a global empire that governs vast territories and presumes to shape the destinies of other peoples. Yet on this desolate Greek airfield their power counts for nothing. They are stripped of agency, unable to defend the land they have come to aid or even to secure their own safety. The imperial mission collapses into impotence before the ferocity of fascist assault and, more significantly, before the unwavering resolve of those they believed themselves destined to save.

It is Katina, dispossessed and powerless in every material sense, who embodies the only form of power that endures: the power of refusal. Her raised fist reorders the entire moral landscape of the story. The imperial force that once claimed to protect becomes an impotent spectator, while the colonised subject rises from the rubble as the bearer of history. Through this inversion Dahl anticipates the death of imperial paternalism, revealing that the true agents of historical change are the so-called “little people” those who endure, resist and refuse annihilation even when abandoned by the machinery of empire.

Critics have long noted the recurrent use of the female child as a narrative device in literature that deals with war. She is frequently portrayed as the embodiment of innocence violated by conflict, a figure designed to evoke pity and serve as a mirror for masculine heroism. Katina overturns this tradition. Katina is neither a helpless victim nor a symbol of lost purity. She is a force of nature, the vessel of a collective will to endure. She does not require rescue because she represents a people who refuse annihilation. In her small frame and defiant gesture Dahl distils the essence of a civilisation that has survived invasion, enslavement and catastrophe over millennia.

This reading acquires deeper resonance when placed within the wider continuum of Greek history. Time and again Greece has stood against overwhelming odds: during the Persian invasions of antiquity, throughout the long centuries of Ottoman domination, in the ashes of the Asia Minor Catastrophe and in the midst of famine and terror during the Axis occupation. In each case the material power of the aggressor was beyond question. Yet the Hellenic response was consistently characterised by endurance, stubbornness and an unwavering refusal to submit. Katina’s clenched fist is the continuation of the same impulse that inspired the defenders of Missolonghi, the insurgents of Souli and the partisans of EAM ELAS. Dahl, perhaps unconsciously, captures this historical continuum in a single, unforgettable image.

What renders Katina so singular is its conscious avoidance of the orientalist tropes that disfigure much Western writing about Greece and the Balkans. There is no trace of patronising exoticism, no suggestion of a backward land requiring British guidance. Greece is not a backdrop for imperial heroism but the true protagonist of the narrative. The British pilots are secondary figures, witnesses to a drama whose depth they can only partially comprehend. They cannot save Greece, and they cannot save themselves. Their presence, once emblematic of imperial assurance, is rendered irrelevant by the magnitude of events and by the elemental resilience of the people they came to defend.

This inversion allows Dahl to enact a subtle but profound act of narrative justice. The child, and through her, Greece, is never infantilised. She is not depicted as a helpless object awaiting deliverance. Rather, she embodies agency and resistance, while imperial power is shown to be hollow, stripped of the illusions of control and destiny that once underpinned it. The image of Katina shaking her fist at the bombers is more potent than any weapon the RAF can deploy. It represents the one force the enemy cannot obliterate: the spirit of defiance.

The story’s conclusion is deliberately unresolved. As German forces close in, the RAF squadron is ordered to evacuate. They are unable to take Katina with them. She chooses to remain behind in her homeland, and the men, devastated and powerless, depart without her. Dahl offers no sentimental epilogue, no assurances of safety or contentment. Yet the absence of closure magnifies the story’s power. The point is not the fate of Katina but what she represents. Her raised fist lingers in the reader’s imagination long after the final page, a symbol of a spirit that cannot be extinguished by bombs or armies.

In the decades that followed, Katina slipped from public consciousness, overshadowed by Dahl’s later and more famous works for children. Yet it remains one of the most profound literary tributes to the Greek wartime experience ever penned in English. It is a testament to the enduring power of narrative to articulate truths that official histories often overlook. Further, it is also a reminder that the most potent symbols of defiance sometimes emerge not from generals or statesmen but from the smallest and most vulnerable among us.

Katina’s defiance is therefore more than a story from a vanished war. It is a summons. It calls us to vigilance, to endurance, to the defence of what is precious in ourselves and in the world. It insists that even amid ruin and despair, humanity can still rise and speak its own name. And it leaves us with the final, indelible truth: Greece, battered and bloodied, remains unconquered, and so too does the human will to be free.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

first published in NKEE on Saturday 11 October 2025