Fotis Bulguris

“My wife had been in Albania and then in a children’s home in Hungary. I had been in a children’s home in Skopje in Macedonia. I remember that it was called Kuzman Josifovski Pitu. Then they took us to Crikvenice in Croatia. For a long time we were together - my sister and brother and myself. Mum was in Bulkes in Serbia, and she took my brother with her from Croatia, and then they moved from Bulkes to Czechoslovakia, where Christos and Irina were born. They took me from Croatia back to a children’s home in Skopje, where they wanted me to train as a radio technician, but only if I accepted their citizenship. But I wanted to escape and return to my parents. As a boy in Greece, I had liked Czechoslovakia when the teacher showed it on the map. But it wasn’t easy to just leave Macedonia when Tito and Stalin were at odds at the time. And our mum didn’t know where we were for ten years. You can imagine how hard it was. When my boys set off somewhere, three hours is enough and then they have to report where they are. In the children’s home we were forty boys and forty-two girls at one point.”

“They often beat my mum black and blue, because they were looking for my father. The royalists caught Mum and demanded she told them where Dad was. She didn’t know or didn’t want to say, so they beat her until she was black all over. My mother’s sister killed a sheep and wrapped her into its skin. They told Mum that if they caught her again, they’d kill her. So she was forced to leave, and we then left for Yugoslavia with another family in the forty-eighth.”