Nikolaos Dumalas

"Our cousin used to visit us when we werein Těchonín in 1954 or '55. He was three years older and he was studying at the technical school in Česká Třebová. One time when he came to visit, he had these trousers, drainpipes they called them. It was all the rage at the time. Mother was angry at him for dancing the 'boogie-woogie'. She called it 'buti-buti' in Greek. She was mad at him for dancing an American dance like that. When we were living in Jeseník, later on, my brother came to visit us from Hranice, where he was studying, and he had jeans on. Father [presumably his step-father - transl.] was a Communist through and through, and so he took the trousers and an axe, and on a stump in the garden he hacked my brother's jeans to pieces. So we were brought up not to look Westward much. Russia was preferred."

"Every now and then on a Saturday we'd go to the cinema, and I remember how we really enjoyed Russian films. It was always - the Germans and our boys, the Russians. We took it really seriously in those days. A nice film was, for instance, 'She Fought for her Nation'. The story was that a German came into an occupied village and killed the woman's child. And in the end she returned in a tank with the Russian army and killed the German. I liked that a lot at the time. And I also liked 'The Fall of Berlin'. That was such a nice film, it was from the Russians' viewpoint. And various other films, war films mostly. That's what we lived for. At the time we [children] thought that when we grew up, we'd go back to Greece to fight for freedom. And that was how we learned how things were done."