Vasiliki Niku

* 1934

  • "My sister moved from Javorník to Greece, then she was sick, so I had to take care of her. I was there for three months. And I was in that village too, with the older sister. I remember a little, the school is good, it was still standing. But the church and everything else had already been burnt down. They burned our whole village." - "Still during the war?" - "Even during the war." - "What was it like for you to go back to your home village after forty years?" - "Well, it was... I was crying and everything."

  • "They took it between them, yeah, yeah. The older people wanted to come back, but I didn't, I was like, they brought me here, so I'll be here. We had a good time in the children´s home, I was happy and I will remember till the day I die how they took us... In Náchod there were eighty girls, the educators took us and drove us to shops, they bought us everything... They bought us everything - shoes, clothes, whatever we wanted. We had no money at all, the boarding school paid for everything."

  • "They came on the night of 1948, picked us up and took us away. The whole village. Like Krnov, Jindřichov, Osoblaha or Úvalno, they came, took us all and that was it. They took us, brought us to Albania, from Albania to Yugoslavia. I don't know how many days we were there, but a lot. My brother and my husband were there. His sister and his brothers. But we didn't know them. We were in Yugoslavia and we were separated there. My sister-in-law was in Poland, her brother was in Poland. My husband went with us to the Czech Republic. Everyone else was sent to Russia or Hungary, the socialist countries. We were brought to Mikulov, but first we were alone in Yugoslavia. There were a lot of us there, about a thousand people."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Krnov, 19.09.2025

    (audio)
    duration: 01:21:53
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

In 1948, they came for us. They took the whole village away at night

Historical photo of Vasiliki Niku
Historical photo of Vasiliki Niku
photo: Witness´s archive

Vasiliki Niku was born on 5 May 1934 in the Greek village of Glikoneri as Vasiliki Dzima. Part of her family was involved in the Greek Civil War between 1946 and 1949, and she and her brother were taken abroad from Greece in 1948. They first went to Yugoslavia and later to Czechoslovakia, where the witness has lived ever since. She passed through several children´s homes and eventually ended up in Náchod, where she attended a textile apprenticeship. In 1949, the rest of her immediate family came to Czechoslovakia and settled in Javorník. In 1953, she moved to Krnov and started working for the S. K. Neumann Textile Plants as a labourer. She participated in the first Czechoslovak Spartakiad. In 1960 she married a Greek, who was also brought to Czechoslovakia as a child. They had two children together, a daughter Despina and a son Tomas. Vasiliki Niku worked as a textile worker all her life, and only looked back to her homeland in 1988. Since then she has been visiting Greece regularly. In 2025 she lived in Krnov.