Nikos Karagiorgis

[Q: “Did you always have the feeling you would be back in Greece in a few weeks, even when you were here?”] “Yes, always when there was some celebration, we would say: ‘And home next year.’ We believed there would soon be a time when we would return.” [Q: “And did you feel your parents longed for their return more than you, seeing as they had been born there and had lived a larger part of their life there?”] Yes, that was how it was. They often told us stories from their younger days.”

“It was a small town, it was called Buljkes then, Maglić today, and it was allocated to the Greek resistance. It was something of an asylum camp, I went to school there, the town was practically Greek. People there worked on fields mostly, because its plain lands there, good conditions for sweet corn. Simply, the town fed itself. I read on the internet that some twelve thousand people passed through the town. We had to leave it after a spat between Moscow and Belgrade. I don’t really know why exactly. I think the Greek Communist party sided with Moscow and that was that. Children went first - there were children here who didn’t have any parents, they had been killed maybe - so those went to Czechoslovakia first, in 1948. Well, and I was in the third group and I went to Poland in ’49. It was a spa town with villas, they placed us in a two-week quarantine, took our clothes and gave us different ones. We had all we needed, we didn’t miss anything, apart from our parents of course. Then they placed us in a children’s home in Zgorzelec - the town was divided by the River Neisse in two parts, German and Polish - I was in the Polish part. Then in 1951 they made us a new children’s home about twenty kilometres from Štětín. I stayed there until the holidays in 1954.” [Q: “Was your brother with you in these children’s homes?”] “No, he died in Buljkes. He was four years old.”

“As far as I know, it was only the women, children and old people who left. And we all believed we would be back in a few weeks, that the war would end and we would return to our homes. None of us who had left believed it would end the way it did. During the civil war, the democratic army was formed from partisan groups; I had the feeling they wanted to make it look like [the partisans] took the children by force and sent them abroad. That’s not true. I was in Poland - just a short digression - in a children’s home. There were more than two thousand of us there, and I don’t remember anyone saying that they had to go, that they’d been taken from their family. That was propaganda of the time, they wanted to scare people by claiming the democratic army dragged children from their families. We had left, I had a younger brother, my mum took me, because Dad was hiding in the mountains; us and other people from our village reached a place further north, close to the borders with Yugoslavia. We waited the night there, and early in the morning, with the sun coming up, we crossed the borders on to the other side.”

“We hardly knew any Polish. We only talked in Greek, both during the games in our living quarters, and at school. They even forbade - forbade in inverted commas of course - us to speak Greek in school. As I say, it was difficult for those who went to other school after finishing there, it was hard for them because they didn’t speak Polish. So everything was in Greek, in the Greek spirit. I stayed in Poland till I was fourteen years old. I completed the seven-year school there, and during the holidays, on the 6th of July I came to Czechoslovakia. Families were being reunited. Every country in Europe had its difficulties after the war, and they couldn’t start reuniting families straight away. It started later on, through the Red Cross, they found out where the children are, where the parents are. Mum and Dad were in Czechoslovakia, my sister was born here in Krnov in 1950, so I didn’t see her until four years later. I can’t describe it, words fail me. Of course, I kept thinking about how the reunion will happen, what it will be like. There were more of us who arrived, we had our guides. Then they passed us on to the local Red Cross, and we came by train to Krnov. I recognised Mum, but she didn’t recognise me. She didn’t recognise me, I came to her.”