“My mum was in all the communist parties - the Czech one, the Women’s Union, the Greek one. Dad wasn’t so much, but he was in the Greek communist party. But Mum - she was in everything. They tried to get me involved, but that didn’t happen. Well, Dad wasn’t into it so much; Mum was something of a general, very passionate. But she realised in time that she wouldn’t have much success with me. And it’s true that I made my own opinion, my own understanding of things, and I didn’t agree with (my parents) much, so I guess that’s why I didn’t want to be part of it.”
“You asked about the twin citizenship, well I’m one of the few who only has Greek citizenship. Other people maybe registered for the Czech one as well, it had some advantages etc. Right from the start we were, actually I’m not sure; our parents had citizenship, then they took it from them, so they were without citizenship. So then I found out that I had ‘without citizenship’ written on one of my school reports, and I was completely astounded. We would be abroad on a tourney with the theatre, because we did that a lot, and I didn’t have a passport.”
“1989 - I remember that year quite clearly, because it all began with us in the National Theatre, so we all took part, all sections. It started with drama, then opera, ballet. The demonstrations. The performances - we always agreed that we wouldn’t play and that we’d come and support it all. I see it positively. In 1968, I was small then, I was ten years old. I remember exactly how we were in Dresden at the time, visiting some German friends. Because Mum had a lot of friends there from when she had been in Leipzig. She had studied there, I have some photos at home of a black girl and even one of her on skis. I hadn’t thought that Mum had ever been on skis. Maybe they had just stood her there, I don’t know. Then one next to a motorbike, that was a great one. So we were there, I remember, and they rushed up and started going on about something that was happening in Prague. We didn’t know what they were talking about; and they kept playing the radio. I can see the big bed and us all there, Dad, Mum and my brother. We listened to what went on, Mum translated it, and we couldn’t go back to Prague because they’d closed the borders or something. I know that I was late to school, that I wasn’t there on the 1st of September [the first day of the school year - transl.], I didn’t come until a week later or so. So that’s how I saw it then. When we did return home - we lived in Hadovka, no actually in Dejvice [a district of Prague - transl.], near the airport - there were tanks passing by. I was frightened, that I was. I was frightened because I had it a long way to school. And the tanks were all over the place.”
Maria Müllerová Karastathi was born in Czechoslovakia in 1958. Her mother and father were both partisans who had fought in the Greek civil war and had been forced to flee their homeland. However, it was in Prague that they first met, and it was there that they settled and started a family. Her father wanted Maria to become a doctor, but she herself longed for the life of a ballet dancer. She went to Greece for the first time in 1975. Since then she has been visitingthere regularly. Her parents were very politically active and were respected throughout the Greek community in Czechoslovakia. Maria and her brother were not interested in politics, however. Her parents brought her up with the conviction that she would one day return to Greece and that she must marry a Greek. She had a very heavy workload - dancing in the theatre, filming television fairy tales and concert programmes. She did consider moving to Greece, but finally decided against it because of the limited possibilities for employment in her profession.
