Kostas Pandularis

* 1935

  • "When we arrived, they asked us what our names were, when we were born. We went in line to a room. There, at the table, they asked us questions. Most of us didn't know our date of birth at all. They were guessing. They first wrote down the year 1939. I was thin and shorter. And I lived with that. Only later, when my brother got married and went to Greece again, did he go to our Orthodox church. Pop had a notebook where he wrote the names and the year of birth of the boys. It was for the army, so they would know when to enlist us. There, he found out that I was born in 1935, and he sent me the papers from Greece. So, I changed my ID and all my documents. The month and day of birth stayed made up."

  • "When one raked his hand through his hair, lice fell from his head. I don't know how long we didn't bathe at all, didn't change our clothes. We wore the same clothes all the time. It was disastrous. We had nothing to change into. We didn't have anything with us, suitcases, bags, nothing like that. Only what we were wearing."

  • "The army, which fought against the guerrillas, sometimes occupied villages. We ran away to hide. Once, what happened was that they made a huge attack and drove us to the Albanian border. We, the civilians who were running together with the partisans, entered Albania. We were there for several months. Me, two sisters. The fourth, the little brother, stayed with neighbours who didn't get involved in anything. We thought we'd be back soon, but we never came back. We ended up in Albania. It was a place of great misery. We got a piece of bread once a day, that was all. We were put up in barracks left over from the Italian army, which had no roof. There was only concrete, we had one blanket each. When it rained, wrapped in a blanket, we would lie on that cement."

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    Ostrava, 01.09.2020

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We came from Greece illiterate. I am grateful to communist Czechoslovakia for taking care of us, letting us study and live a beautiful life

Kostas Pandularis / 1955
Kostas Pandularis / 1955
photo: Kostas Pandularis archive

Kostas Pandularis was born in 1935 in the mountain village of Ano Perivoli in northern Greece, in the former Macedonia. The family lived on a sheep farm. During the Second World War, he experienced the Italian and German occupation. His father, Pavlos Pandularis, joined the partisan movement. Around 1947, during the Greek Civil War, he escaped with part of his family from the battles to Albania, where they were starving. After returning to warring Greece, he and his sisters were evacuated to Yugoslavia and then Czechoslovakia. He grew up in an orphanage in the Vítkov part of Klokočov in northern Moravia. He graduated from the secondary pedagogical school in Prague. He worked as an educator and Macedonian language teacher in Greek orphanages. After their dissolution, he taught in Hať and Hlučín. In the seventies, he moved to the Krásné Pole part of Ostrava.