Nikolaos Tsametis

* 1942

  • “After the war those who had collaborated most with the Germans – we called them burandades – went to the villages chasing the communist who had carried out resistance against the Germans. We, the children, were watching, and when we saw some of them approaching the village, we would inform our parents and all the others, and they would leave for the mountains, because otherwise they would get arrested and imprisoned.”

  • “One had no idea, we didn’t know what it would bring us. They did keep telling us about the unemployment in the West, but you don’t think about it unless it affects you. Eventually we discovered what the West was like. Unemployment came, beggars, but there are not so many beggars anymore, there were many of them at the beginning, and so many homeless people. Well, I liked the previous regime, it seemed more fair to me, there were not so many things, but we all had an equal share.”

  • “My Mom got to Czechoslovakia, and she had my little cousin with her. His mother had lost her leg due to an injury and she remained in Greece, his father managed to board another ship, and they passed through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles to the Back Sea and arrived to the Soviet Union to Tashkent. My other cousin – the sister of the cousin I mentioned, who was here with my Mom – was with me in Rumania. We were thus completely separated. In 1954 thanks to the Red Cross I went here to my Mom, the girl cousin went from Rumania to Tashkent, and this boy went from Czechoslovakia to Tashkent. The families got reunited. Their mother, who had the leg injury, then came to Tashkent a few years later.”

  • “Before we went to the children’s homes, I spent two weeks in the village of Hlinka. There was a school with four grades in one classroom. The teacher told me to sit in the first row, in the first grade, and he had me read a spelling-book. I read it; Rumanian used the same script. He thus immediately moved me to the second grade, where I spent one day, and then he transferred me to the fourth grade. We spent two weeks in the fourth grade and then we went to a children’s home, I was sent to Sobotín.”

  • “I began running in autumn, and the following spring a special race was held. It was called Laurel Horseshoe. The route followed the racecourse they use for the Great Pardubice Steeplechase, exactly the distance of 6,9 km. There were beams placed over the Taxis Ditch which we had to climb, and a plank was thrown over the water obstacles. This was the first year, in 1974 in spring, and I won this race. It was repeated the following year, but I didn’t participate, because I was already in Vítkovice and began running the league there. I have nice memories of that time. It takes twelve minutes for the horses to finish the race, and for us I took twenty-eight, twenty-nine minutes, quite a difference.”

  • “I did, but then I married a Czech citizen, we had kids. At that time when many began returning, one of our sons was studying grammar school, the other was about to graduate, and it was difficult to break it off here. We had these certainties here, and to start somewhere else from the very beginning - perhaps if it were just me, without the children, I would have certainly returned there.”

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    Ostrava - Poruba, 04.11.2010

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When the first opportunity arose, I ran a marathon in Greece, in 1982.

Photo from his graduation exam
Photo from his graduation exam
photo: Sbírka pana Tsametise

Ing. Nikolaos Tsametis was born on September 5, 1942 in the village of Trikono in northern Greece. At the time, his parents were earning their living through winegrowing. His father was a partisan who died during the civil war, while his mother was wounded during the war. In 1948 he left via Albania and Yugoslavia for Romania, where he would live in a children’s home in Oradea for six years. Later his mother managed to get to Czechoslovakia, and Mr. Tsametis made it there thanks to the Red Cross when he was twelve years old. He lived in several children’s homes and he studied in a grammar school in České Budějovice. He graduated from the Technical University in Brno, specializing in transport constructions. After completing his studies he found a job in Ostrava. After he was dismissed in 1990, he then worked as a translator for a Greek business man and then later in the Mining Construction Company. Mr. Tsametis is an active athlete, having practiced boxing when he was young, and later running, especially long-distance. He took part in many marathon runs in Europe and the USA and he is the holder of many veteran records.