Evangelis Liolios

"I must also add that I was in orphanages. I was at a time when my parents had nowhere to live, they could not take full care of us, so I remember that I was in Hadinec u Klokočova, I know that for sure. I even know what I ate fifty, sixty years ago. I was there for two years before my father picked me up, then when they had a house and work. There were a hundred orphanages here. I still remember, I have visions that I ran through long corridors. Sometimes, in my dreams, I see the castles where I stayed and where I lived. I had no problem with my home at the time, except that we were planning to flee to Austria at the time. In winter, when there was snow up to my neck. We were running then, and I still don't know who set the direction and how it was there. We were four friends and we said, 'We have to go.' We fled and then they caught us up, of course. And so, the ladies who looked after us, the educators, because we ran away from them, slapped our butts so they were blue. Then I had to have compresses for a week. Then they watched us, of course, so we wouldn't do it a second time. Because it would be a big disgrace, a socialist country, and the children are running away from children's homes."

"What bothers me the most is that a person disappears, somewhere in a country, circumstances, of course - there is a war and so on. But there in Greece, his parents, maybe his wife, his children, are waiting for him. And they don´t know what happened to him. The point is, if it is possible, to correct these wrongs. There is no room for developing any counter-actions and so on. Because we know that time was like that, and we cannot do anything about it. But what we can do is find out the real situation, namely send a message to Greece that they are buried here and there. But we know how the State Security officers did it then, because they killed them namelessly in mass graves and likewise. I don't know until the information channels open in Slovakia, and we will find out more, because there must be a record of it. Even if I was put under some pressure of some kind, let me stop, I don't care. And so, of course, it was in the best interest of the Communists not to let these things go public. But this thing I'm talking about now still bothers me, because it's an unresolved issue."

"It is true that not everything in relation to us as Greeks was in any way fair, because when someone disagreed with politics as such, party, he was a revisionist for everyone, they looked at him strangely, and on the contrary he was bullied and so on. There were a number of people who wanted to go back after five years, and there were also trains full of Greeks returning. It was also the case that the Greeks got here by force. When someone arrested the opposing party, a soldier, they were mainly arresting officers, our comrades took care of that. And those officers were brought here as prisoners. Thirty percent of the Vír dam was built here by the Greeks. And there's still their blood in the concrete. In the next stage of the development of the Greek community in the Czech Republic, our effort will be to clarify factually what was actually happening. And there was no doubt that it happened. Some were convicted, some were killed. These are things that just happened. Those who disagreed with the regime, politics, caused so-called problems. The community noticed it, knew it, felt it. However, people did not really talk about much."

"My parents were prepared to come here, to be here for a while. And then the situation in Greece would change, so everyone could return. Because one of the basic attributes at Christmas, the sentence was 'Tětu Chronu!'. That means: 'At home in a year! Tětu chronu stepatrida! We're going home in a year!' Well, that was the idea. Even the people who came here, including my parents, were saying that. They believed that we would return because everyone is always trying to return to their country."