Nikolaos Dumalas

"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."

"Father had joined the partisans, and this one time he came to tell Mother that our enemies, Fascists he called them, were coming for us. That it would be good if she hid somewhere. So Mother decided she'd join the partisans as well. She told me later how we had gone with a whole group of people. She was leading me on a donkey with straps. I was hanging from the one side, and a basket from the other, as a counter-weight to stop me falling. We stayed with the partisans for about a month or two, then we crossed the borders. The last thing I remember from Greece is from when we were in a village somewhere near the borders. The only thing I remember is hiding in the trenches with planes bombing us."