Lakis Jordanidis

Tazatel: “Your grandmother and grandfather spoke Czech?” L. J.: “Grandpa spoke very poorly. Since we couldn’t speak Greek and they spoke Greek to us when we were there on vacation, my brother and I often had to think hard what they were telling us, and often it was funny. Grandma learned it later. But originally they were almost illiterate. Grandma couldn’t even write. They arrived dirty, with lice, not knowing the language at all. Grandma, for example, was doing gardening work for two sixty per hour. She was planting flowers there. On the one hand, I admire them for having accomplished all this in a foreign country. And their children studied in schools in that foreign country. Whether we like it or not, the regime has provided this opportunity for them. They eventually rose from these terrible conditions and learned to speak Czech. Today nearly all of them speak very well. On top of that, they graduated from schools here, which is admirable.”

“I remember that my cousins, Míťa and Eliška, had to move to Greece with their parents. It was very difficult for them to cope with it, because they didn’t know a single word of Greek and they were being uprooted from their environment. We had been growing up here, although we had Greek names and are influenced by Greek traditions. When I spoke to them, they admitted that the Greek society has never accepted them. Here, we were not Czechs, we are something in between, and the Greeks in Greece didn’t accept us either.”

“It’s true that when we arrived in Jeseník we still adhered to the family hierarchy. It was a trifle, but for instance, when meals were served, the first to be served was the husband, my father, followed by us children, then all the others, and our mother only last. This rule was really observed. Or, when we would say that we would go for a swim and Mom said something, they would look at her as if, how dare she say something. This was strictly observed. I don’t want to make them look like usurpers, but that’s the way it was there and still is, I think.”

“You will notice that Greeks here are very proud, in spite of their suffering and the hard time they’ve had. They had to walk from Greece, they were begging, they had no money. The Red Cross allowed the children to stay in asylum homes for children. They were actually separated from their mothers for two or three years. They suffered like hell, but I don’t know a single Greek who has passed through this and who would regret it. They will justify it, they will defend the communist regime. Some more so, some less, but very few people from that generation will say: ´Yes, it was wrong.´ I can say that now, as my father’s son. They would be mad at me, but that’s the way it is.”