I was three years old when they snatched us. We didn’t emigrate - emigrating is voluntary. We were snatched.
Melpomeni Filipová was born in 1945 in the village of Strkovo (Platy) in the district of Florina in Greece, close to the borders of Albania and what was then Yugoslavian Macedonia. The village was of mixed nationality, according to her mother’s recollections it was mostly Caucasian/Pontian Greeks. Her mother was the village healer, her first husband died during the war in 1940, and her second husband (the father of Melpomeni/Menka Miovská and her younger brothers) was a Slavo-Macedonian partisan. In 1948, she and her sister were “snatched” as she calls it, and taken through Yugoslavia to Czechoslovakia, where she stayed at a children’s home in Klokočov (a part of the village of Vítkov, Opava district). She spent 11 years there, completing primary school. When she was 14 years of age, her brother took her in with him to Brno, then to Kuřim. She worked in Tišnov first and went on to study at a non-graduate secondary technical night school. She was employed by TOS Kuřim for 30 years, living in the city with her Czech husband for many years. She is currently widowed and has one daughter and no grandchildren. She is integrated into Czech society, she only has Czech friends, she does not speak Macedonian very often, though she understands both Macedonian and Greek. She says she was given the name Melpomeni Petridou when she first went to Greece, because “the Greeks wanted to have things in order” and her father was recorded as Petridis in Greece. She was and is politically inactive, she feels disillusioned by politics post-1989. She feels herself to be “everything, I mean you don’t know who you came from”.
