Aneta Stankovičová
* 1935
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“My dad was a partisan and one time they were looking for him, and they came and pulled me by the hair to make me tell them where Dad was. Those were Fascists. But I wouldn’t know where he was anyway, seeing as he was suddenly gone. But what should I say. Later on, as a partisan, Dad met this one woman who was also very nice, because my mum had died very early on. She had children in Poland, so they went there. All the partisans had to escape. And they were in Poland. When the organisations here found out who had which relatives or parents where, they reunited us. I had a sister here, she went to Poland. They wanted to send me too, but I said I would decide for myself after finishing school. Because I won’t quit school and I don’t speak Polish either.”
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“The teachers here were so good, both Czechs and Greeks, that they wrote us down according to how they saw us, what we looked like. Younger, even, so we could study. Because when had arrived, me from my village, I was illiterate. We didn’t have a school there back then. It was wartime, and a good thing we’d escaped, because Dad was a partisan and who knows what would’ve happened.”
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“Us from Greece were in Yugoslavia first, and then in Buljkes. And then Tito came up with the idea that we should either stay or that we should go back to Greece, I don’t know which it was. Well, and then the teachers took us to the train and we rode to Czechoslovakia. But we were robbed in the train. That was in Czechoslovakia. We stopped somewhere, and someone stole as much as they could. That’s why some of us didn’t have any papers for instance. There wasn’t much to steal anyway, but something like that happened. We arrived in Sobotín. Some of us carried on to Slovakia. But I was content in Sobotín.”
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“When I was young I didn’t count on returning to Greece, I didn’t know. Also I didn’t have my parents there... I don’t know if it was in 1985 or 1986 that they offered that who wants to can go back. But by then I already had a husband and children. So I said to myself, what would I do there, seeing as my husband didn’t speak Greek and the children also went to school here. I was there two or three times. But I must say that the Greeks gave pensioners the possibility to go to Greece for three weeks for free. Not only those from Czechoslovakia, but from the whole world. So I went too. It was perfect. We got to know more people. Greece is a wonderful country, the people there are good and they take good care of those who come to Greece on vacation.”
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Full recordings
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Praha, 23.06.2010
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If we hadn’t run, they’d have killed us.
Aneta Stankovičová is not sure of the date of her birth, but she was probably born in 1935. Her mother died when she was a small child, and because her father was a partisan, she and her younger sister were taken care of by their grandmother. She arrived in Czechoslovakia together with other children from Buljkes, Yugoslavia, and was placed in a children’s home in Sobotín. She was later transferred to the children’s home in Chrastava, from whence she moved to Prague to study the secondary business school in Resslova Street. When the time came for families to be reunited, she found out her father was in Poland, but as she did not want to leave Czechoslovakia, she only went to visit him. She met her future husband in Prague - he was from Serbia. They settled down in a flat in Prague and raised two daughters together. She worked at a savings bank. She has never considered repatriating to Greece.