“You’ll take even the bones of dead with you and leave!”
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Grigor Sukalovský was born in 1933 in the Macedonian village of Grache (renamed Ptelia in 1926 and Ptelea in 1949). He is the third of five children, he had two brothers (one died during the civil war, the other died recently in Skopje) and two sisters. Their village was attacked repeatedly, they did not receive any help from the British army, his father fled from repeated attacks into Albania, from thence to Bitola, Macedonia. In 1946 their village was occupied by the army, which split off those ihabitants who had relatives in the mountains or abroad, with the aim to drive them out, but in the end this did not happen, and Grigor Sukalovský did not leave until in 1948 to Albania. He was gradually transferred up through Korcë, Elbasan, Bitola and Skopje, which he left on the 17th of May 1948, arriving in Czechoslovakia. He was moved along through temporary lodgings in Maloměřice, Hlohovec, Slovenská Ľupča and Sobotín, he and the others were subsequently sent to Bratislava for military training, which they did not finish however, and were instead placed in schools. He received vocational schooling in Prague in the Praga factory, he worked for some time in Královopolská strojírna, in 1952 he entered a secondary technical school in Brno, he graduated in 1956, he then worked in Pilsen for two years. In 1958 he moved to Jeseník to his mother’s and found employment in the New Materials Pressing Shop in Adolfovice. In 1959 they were refused their request to relocate their father to Czechoslovakia, so his mother and younger siblings moved to his father in Skopje, Sukalovský stayed behind in Czechoslovakia alone. He lives in Kuřim since 1961, from the same year until 1992 he worked in TOS Kuřim. He has a son and daughter, he used to work part-time even during retirement, now he devotes his time to Macedonian societal life. He feels embittered for not being given back his Greek citizenship and for being forced to apply for Czech citizenship and wait 5 years as a common immigrant, while Greeks received theirs imediately.