Janis Pataridis

“We were little children. There was a director of the children’s home while we were in Unčín, even before the others came there. He really was a wonderful person. He had this relationship with the children. Since we could not speak Czech, we gathered in a room and he would point to us in Czech: ‘This is a chair,’ and he wrote ‘chair,’ but we could not write. ‘And this is a table, this is a glass.’ Simple words like this so that we would learn them. And he repeated them over an over, until we learnt them. At that time, my hand-written ‘a’ was not like this, but it looked like that. I signed my name Pataridis, with ‘a’ like this, and ‘t’ and ‘a.’ He was such a good and patient man. I have such fond memories of the people who worked for the Red Cross. They were mostly Red Cross workers assigned to work with Greek children and teach them Czech. And to teach them pronunciation like this: for example, the letter ‘ř,’ which for us was like: ‘rzzzzzz,’ ‘lzzzzzz.’ Or ‘ž,’ or ‘š.’ We could not pronounce them. Greek language does not have anything like this, the diacritics, and so on. So we were gradually learning something. But we did not learn much. The children were sometimes making fun of it.”

“They placed us in these children’s homes and we lived there. The nurses there were from the Red Cross and they always took care of us. We were all in one room, but there were several rooms in the house. The nurse Květa… we were afraid of her. You know, we were curious. We were going out from the building, although we were suppose to sleep – because many children from Greece were sick, there was an epidemic of tuberculosis. But we were curious. And she yelled at us: ‘Damned boys!’”