Angelos Jordanidis

"We were in farming. Dad had a lot of fields, he was a farmer. Us children, there were seven of us, we had to work dawn till dusk. As you know, there weren't any machines in those days, we had to do everything by hand. Then again, we were doing well. But then they somehow managed to persuade Dad to go into politics, said his life would be easier, he wouldn't have to sweat his back off on the fields. And at the time he believed the functionaries that propagated this, and he went into politics. He left us, Mum, the children, and joined the partisans in the resistance."

"There was an old monastery in the middle of the forest. There were about a hunderd and fifty of us there. There was a balcony circling the monastery, the corridors were built with stone. That's where they put us to sleep. We slept one next to the other in a circle. I remember we couldn't fall asleep. We were hungry, they gave us just hot soup every day. That was hot water and a few grains of rice with a bit of bread to go with it. But what was worse,and I remember that a lot, those were the lice. They marched about like ants and bit us all over. We couldn't do anything to get rid of them."

"I remember how as a twelve-year-old boy I was coming back home. We had a cow, so I'd been to set her to graze. Suddenly I see soldiers in black uniforms around our house. Those were the death soldiers, that's what they were called. They surrounded the house and all the other buildings we had, too. They started breaking windows, then they set it all on fire. I just saw the flames and the smoke. I didn't know what was going on. Then my relatives told me those were the evil soldiers. We were the only ones of the whole village who had their house and everything razed by them. We didn't have anywhere to live, the soldiers were looking for Mum. We had to hide. Then I started crying a lot, and I went on foot to the Yugoslavian border. Our field was only about a kilometre away from the border. We saw the border guard patrol back and forth. The Yugoslavians stopped me and asked why I was crying, so I told them there were evil soldiers at our home, that they burnt everything and nothing remained. They left me there and we watched the smoke. We even had a new barn, because it was a custom of ours, animals first, then us. The soldiers even gave the order that whoever should take a bucket and try to help extinguish the flames, they'd be shot on the spot."

"After 1953, Red Cross began reuniting families. So then we knew our parents were alive. Dad came back in 1953, he was wearing a uniform, I didn't even know it was my dad. They called me into one house, out of the blue. There were several of them sitting there, it was in Jeseníky, and I didn't know which one was my dad. It was terrible. It all got explained afterwards."