Irini Bulgurisová

"When I finished the fifth grade, they took me and a few other children to a hospital in Budapest. We all had our eyes examined at the home, and the children who had some problems with their eyes were taken to the hospital in Budapest. We spent about 14 days there, during which our eyes were treated. When I came back from the hospital, the girls from my class, all my friends, were waiting for me at the train station to tell me the good news that I was going to visit my mother in Czechoslovakia. I said, 'But I don't want to go anywhere, I don't want to go to any mother, I want to be here with you.' Suddenly, I felt sorry that I was leaving my friends and going to live with my mother, whom I didn't really know. And this Czechoslovakia, where is it? It was all very strange and sad for me. I didn't want to. I cried the whole night, I didn't sleep at all, and the next morning they woke me up early. The girls who could have stayed sleeping walked me to the station."

"He was [my father's] youngest brother. They were actually three brothers and two sisters. He was a seventeen-year-old named Apostol who helped the partisans. He used to come down to the village for something, for information, for some things, and then he would go back to the mountains to the partisans. It always took place at night. One unfortunate day, my uncle was shot, and as he fell wounded, he only managed to crawl into a ditch and stay there. And those who shot him came up to him because he recognised them, and there was a risk that he would reveal them, and the partisans would then come after them, so they stoned him to death. They just killed him, with rocks, stoned him to death. It was sad. I only know this from stories, but my grandmother, who already suffered from having all her men in the mountains, came to collect the bones of my uncle, the youngest son, and his scattered brain; she came to collect everything and put it in a shawl so she could bury it. It was such a sad story, and my grandmother got ill from it all and didn't want to live anymore; she just gave up, and then she died."

“It was very cold. We walked along this kind of an animal trail. Steep slope below us, stone hills above us. I remember that we walked one behind the other. Our grandfather made us take turns on the donkey. My cousins were walking with us too. We still have a good relationship with one of them in Kopřivná. At one point the donkey misplaced his foot, slipped, and fell down the slope to his death. He fell down with all our clothing and we were left with nothing and we got to Albania only with the things we were wearing.”

“My mother ran home because my grandmother and I were inside the house. The field was definitely not far away because she would not leave us alone for too long. When she got home the burning house was surrounded by the monarchist fascists. My mother insisted on pulling us out of the house but they forbade it. They expected my father to be inside and to catch him as soon as he got out of the house. My mother told them that they can shoot her if they want but that she would go inside to get her child. Fortunately there was an Italian who told them to let my mum go. So my mother dragged me and my grandmother out and the house burnt down. And so we ended up without any shelter.”

“The pressure they put on our family in order to catch our father was growing more and more. They arrested my mother while she was still pregnant. They actually took all the people from the village, put them in chains, and took them to a prison in Kastoria. They took me at a very young age, my mother with her belly, and my grandfather because he was a sort of a main actor in the village. As the most successful farm owner, a well-read person who read a lot during his stay in America. He read Marx, Lenin, so he longed for freedom. And that’s why he’d been kind of putting the nation together in the village, which is why our village was burnt down house by house and the people murdered, locked up, and tortured.”