But, as you can see from this article, there are those who think that de 
Bernieres  was somewhat loose with the data.

But, best of all, the Hollywood people can divert everyone from the tragedy 
by portraying the Italians as a bunch of opera singing, mandolin playing, 
romantics.  No wonder the Germans could do them in so easily!!! 

[RAA NOTE: It appears from various reports and reviews emphasize the fact that 
the author, Louis de Bernieres relies almost exclusively on British sources, and 
panders to British concerns and sensitivities, to the detriment of  Italian and 
Greek Truths.]
=======================================================
CAPTAIN CORELLI'S CRISIS 

The Age
By Seumas Milne
Sunday, 6 August 2000

For countless enthusiasts, Captain Corelli's Mandolin is an enchanting 
literary tour de force, an epic wartime love story with the authentic flavor 
of Greek island life, still the ideal beach accessory for the discerning 
holidaymaker. Compared to the work of Charles Dickens and hailed as 
"absolutely brilliant", the book became a publishing phenomenon of the late 
'90s.

It has sold 1.5 million copies, making its author, Louis de Bernieres, a rich 
man and sending an electric current through the tourist industry on the 
island of Cephalonia, where it is set.

Now Captain Corelli is about to become a $US70 million ($A115 million) 
Hollywood-backed movie in its own right, starring Nicolas Cage, Penelope Cruz 
and John Hurt. When the film is released next year, the de Bernieres tourist 
boom on the island seems likely to turn into full-scale Corellimania.

But for all the extra income, large numbers of Cephalonians are deeply 
ambivalent about the Corelli phenomenon, and far from being as grateful for 
their new-found celebrity.

The problem is not so much the downside of the expected tourist invasion, or 
the occasional traumatic flashback triggered by the sound of gunfire from the 
film set. For many of the older generation, who lived through the events 
described in de Bernieres' book, his story is a slur on the record of the 
Greek resistance to the Nazis and a mish-mash of distortions and untruths 
about their island's wartime history. For the Cephalonian resistance veterans 
themselves, and for one uniquely placed Italian officer and survivor of the 
Nazi terror on the island, Captain Corelli's Mandolin is a travesty - an 
inexcusable attempt to rewrite the story of their lives.

Dionisis Georgatos - the elected governor of Cephalonia, who negotiated 
carefully framed terms for the Corelli film to be made on the island - 
dismisses de Bernieres' book as "reactionary and wrong". Nobody, he says, 
wants to benefit from the film "if it distorts our history - we had many 
deaths, houses were burned, people hanged in the streets. It is very 
sensitive. De Bernieres clearly used British sources from that time and, of 
course, they had the role of invaders".

Gerasimos Artelanis, mayor of Sami and, like Georgatos, a member of Greece's 
ruling socialist party, Pasok, has threatened to take the film-makers to the 
International Court of Justice if they include de Bernieres' most 
controversial claims, thus breaking an undertaking not to inflame political 
and national sensitivities.

"We are at war with Louis de Bernieres," explains Lefteris Eleftheratos, a 
72-year-old former Cephalonian journalist and unofficial leader of the Greek 
campaign against the novel. "It is a defensive war because it is a war he 
declared on us."

Such reactions can come as something of a surprise to foreign readers for 
whom the novel's historical backdrop has little of the neuralgic resonance it 
has for Greeks. Set against the background of an Ionian Arcadia, Captain 
Corelli's Mandolin is the story of an unconsummated love affair between 
Pelagia, the daughter of a patriotic Cephalonian doctor, and Antonio Corelli, 
an amiable, mandolin-playing artillery captain in the Italian army of 
occupation.

The relationship flourishes when Pelagia's fiance, Mandras, traumatised by 
the Greek-Italian war of 1940-41, goes off to fight with the partisans on the 
mainland. The opera-loving Corelli befriends a "good Nazi" from the German 
garrison, but is then engulfed in the conflagrationary events of September 
1943, when - after Italy declared an armistice with the Allies - Italian 
troops on the island refused to surrender to the Germans and fought 
desperately for 10 days. Overwhelmed, more than 9000 Italian soldiers on 
Cephalonia were either massacred on Hitler's orders or drowned as they were 
deported by ship.

In de Bernieres' novel, Captain Corelli, of the 33rd artillery regiment, 
Acqui division, is one of those who first open fire on the Germans and later 
miraculously survives the mass executions, his wounds successfully treated by 
Pelagia's father...The lovers are not reunited until their old age, in 
modern-day Cephalonia.

But woven into this human drama is a one-sided account of the history of the 
period, and a crude and unremittingly hostile portrayal of the Greek 
communists in particular, who led the resistance against the Italian and 
German occupations and later fought British and American-backed forces in the 
civil war of the late '40s. In a series of jarring interludes, de Bernieres 
offers a notably sympathetic portrait of the pre-war Greek dictator Metaxas - 
a man responsible for the torture, imprisonment and murder of thousands of 
left-wing political opponents - while Mussolini's occupation army,... is 
presented as a collection of harmless, fun-loving rogues.

By contrast, the main Greek resistance organisation, ELAS - which, according 
to the German Army's own records, killed more than 8000 German soldiers in 
little over a year, tied down tens of thousands more and controlled 
four-fifths of the country when Hitler withdrew - is depicted as a gang of 
torturers, ignorant demagogues and cowards, who spent the war "doing 
absolutely nothing" except stealing food from peasants and murdering 
guerillas from smaller rival, British-backed resistance groups. Of the three 
communist characters in the novel, Hector is a sadistic monster, Mandras a 
rapist and Kokolios a penitent who swiftly abandons his political foolishness 
before being shot by his former comrades.

Until the '70s, it was still a crime in Greece to have fought against the 
Nazis in the main wartime resistance movement, while Nazi collaborators 
received pensions. The role of the ELAS andartes, or guerrillas, in the 
liberation was formally recognised by the state only under Andreas Papandreou 
in the "80s. But, in case any reader might have mistaken his own view, de 
Bernieres included an author's note in earlier editions of Captain Corelli's 
Mandolin to berate "disconnected intellectuals" for regarding the Greek 
communists as "romantic heroes", adding, "when they were not totally useless, 
perfidious and parasitic, they were unspeakably barbaric".

Makis Faraklos, now the 76-year-old president of the resistance veterans' 
association in the Cephalonian town of Lixouri, remembers witnessing the fate 
of some of those whom de Bernieres insists spent the German occupation doing 
nothing.

"On June 5, 1944, the Germans hanged five resistance members in the main 
square because the andartes had killed a collaborator. They forced everyone 
they found on the streets to go there and set up four machine guns around us. 
One of the five, Dionisis Ratsiatos, was my teacher - I loved that man. There 
was a father and son, Gavrilis and Vasilis Rallatos, and the father was 
forced to watch his son hanged twice, because the rope broke the first time 
they strung him up. They hanged them from two trees. The youngest to die that 
day was Spiros Analitis, in his early 20s. The German commander announced 
through an interpreter that he would be freed if he gave information about 
the resistance. Analitis didn't reply, but called to the crowd, `You, 
tyranny-fighting youth, will avenge our deaths'."

Another of de Bernieres' "barbarians" - a retired theatre director, the 
83-year-old opera-singing Spiros Fokas - keeps a pair of Wehrmacht jackboots 
by the bar in his hotel. They belonged, he explains, to a German soldier he 
shot in an ambush of two troop carriers.Fokas, who spent almost a year 
fighting with ELAS on the mainland during the war, had been sent back to 
Cephalonia with three other andartes as a scouting group in the last phase of 
the German occupation. He went on to take part in other attacks on German 
forces as they retreated from the island. For his pains, he was persecuted 
and imprisoned in the "50s and "60s, and his son, now a professor at Imperial 
College in London, was forced to study abroad.

But of all de Bernieres' disparaging claims about the Cephalonian resistance, 
perhaps the most deeply resented by the island's veterans is his insistence 
that the movement refused to come to the aid of the Italians when they turned 
on their former German allies at such terrible cost in the autumn of 1943. It 
is "certain", the British soldier-turned-author declares in the novel, that 
the "communist andartes of ELAS took no part, seeing no reason to shake 
themselves out of their parasitic lethargy". Later, he even has the heroine, 
Pelagia, hearing that the partisans have been "killing off" Italians who came 
to fight alongside them against the Germans.

>From the islanders' point of view, no charge could be more wounding. The 
Italian-German confrontation and subsequent massacres were a defining moment 
of modern Cephalonian history. The only resistance force on the island was 
ELAS and its political wing, EAM, though neither organisation was 
exclusively, or even predominantly, communist. Both Greeks and Italian 
survivors testify that not only did the resistance give practical and armed 
support to the Italian troops, but also 15 andartes lost their lives in the 
fighting. Far from killing Italians who escaped the German slaughter, the 
resistance - including the parents of Dionisis Georgatos, Cephalonia's 
present-day governor - hid them and helped spirit them off the island.

The backlash against Captain Corelli's Mandolin was a slow-burn affair. When 
the novel was first translated into Greek, the communist paper, Rizospastis, 
accidentally gave it a glowing review, lifted in haste from a news agency. 
But by the time the film-makers came to recce the island two years ago, the 
campaign was already up and running. By the time the shooting of the Corelli 
movie began in earnest in Cephalonia this year, the film-makers were having 
to issue public assurances that they would not be re-opening the wounds of 
the civil war or repeating what the island's resistance veterans regard as de 
Bernieres' defamation of their movement.

Most critics on the island have accepted the undertakings that the film will 
be a straightforward love story and avoid the controversy surrounding the 
book. They have also been mollified by the fact that the scriptwriter is 
Shawn Slovo, daughter of Ruth First, the murdered anti-apartheid heroine, and 
Joe Slovo, former communist and African National Congress leader in South 
Africa.
-Guardian

 <A 
HREF="http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/20000806/A50714-2000Aug4.html">
The Age: Captain Corelli's crisis</A>
http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/20000806/A50714-2000Aug4.html