"Well, like when I came to Greece...so I, we were...when I crossed the border. So it was such an experience, you can't say it, only those who experience it will understand. Because we were actually living with the idea that one day we would return to Greece, so we were living in Czechoslovakia, but we were kind of homeless because we were living here on a residence permit, we didn't have citizenship. So we were living in that, that one day, to that homeland of our parents - so we took it as that was our homeland as well, so we took it as that we would just go back there. And the moment we crossed the border, the Yugoslavian border - Yugoslavia it was then - and we were coming to Greece, we had this strange feeling, and not just me, more people will tell you, that we had actually stepped on that native soil."
"My mother didn't talk about it at all, she didn't even want to hear about it, she just told me a story about when they were actually on a boat and they were in the hold, the mothers with the children. And unfortunately, there were such disasters, like one mother wanted to soothe her baby who was crying, and she actually suffocated him in the process. So... because if the children were crying, the fascists would just come at them. So they just had to calm the kids down so they wouldn't give themselves away. And she didn't want to talk about it at all. She had such bad experiences, so she didn't want to talk about it at all."
"They just had to run away from there and there was no time to pick up anything. They ran so that they only took a blanket, maybe some sugar, some bread in a bundle. That was all they had. They just ran so they wouldn't get killed. And my parents... some of them ran through Albania and my parents ran through Yugoslavia. Well, they were actually, they were like convoys back then, where they took the kids on a different path and the adults took different paths. And the children who were older could go with their parents. And the younger ones they took the safer way. So what used to happen was that the children would have a different date of birth written on them. My sister, she was born in 1947, but in order not to be taken away from her mother, she wrote at that time that she was born in 1946, so that she could go in the same transport that she went in."
Eleni Chadzielefteriadu was born on 14 January 1957 in Šumperk. Both her parents came from Greece. They came to Czechoslovak asylum in 1950, fleeing the civil war that took place in Greece between 1946 and 1949, in which her father was seriously injured. Although the family was of Greek origin, Eleni integrated into the local society, learned fluent Czech and graduated from school, was brought up bilingual at home and grew up in the Greek community. Its members lived here thanks to the residence permit they had obtained and hoped to one day return to their native country. However, due to family circumstances, Eleni Chadzielefteriadu remained living in the Czech Republic. She considers Greece her distant home.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
