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