Konstantinos Katsianikos

“I said to him: Look, my granddad was a pop, he moved to America with his whole family. In 1912, the Greek ship (with his family, he had six children, Mum was eleven) lay next to the Titanic. They left a bit sooner, warned the Titanic - icebergs, and later in New York they heard how it ended. He made himself a pile, because he was super educated. He was in Boston, and in Chicago and so on. And then in 1918 he was supposed to get American citizenship and to decide, whether yes or no, and the dumbo changed his mind and returned to Greece, he wanted to start a revolution. [...] And when he returned, he understood that it’s a couple of centuries elsewhere. So he went off to Holy Mountain, and meditated there about two months, and then he lived like Tolstoy. He built a school, he taught the locals to read and write - do the work first, and then come to church. He was such a good-natured man. And so my mum knew English, she was educated. And she was a midwife for our village, a nurse, doctor, scribe, everything, because everyone else was illiterate.”

“What Kundera wrote etcetera, that all happened very peacefully. Simply five classmates in a class formed a committee and wrote assessments of the others, whether they’ll be studying or not, what family they’re from. After that every granny, every cleaning lady, the school management, the Party all had their say. At that time, my classmates from grammar school received a paper - German father - banned from school, banned from university, banned from Prague. To my horror I received one as well, a week before my final exams. My class teacher called me in, he was crying, because he had been rooting for me, because he saw how I was improving, and the regime didn’t love too much either. I got a paper, that the Greek communist party, which was here at the time, bans me from third-level education, from university, for no reason. So I didn’t have any option but simply that instead of going to the graduation ball (the prom) that everyone at school was looking forward to, I went out into Krnov - there’s quite a lot of industry there, I’d say, there are several Strojosvits (a company name) there, they made machines for Gottwaldov, for Baťa, there were several cotton mills there - so I came to one headmaster, whether I might end up as a machinist, whether he’d take me on, with my graduation degree. So I told him my story, and he said: ‘I’ll take you on straight away. Straight into the second grade, then maybe in half a year into third grade, and you’ll only have the work practice.’ He understood, what was going on.”

“And in the meanwhile Dad was like: ‘Don’t put up with that, write to the president, write to the government!’ Just being political. He always freely listened to the BBC and rooted for Mao Tse Tung, because he didn’t like Russians. So at the age of 17, I started corresponding with the Ministry of Culture, Education. I wrote to the Red Cross, because I had their address, because we were looking for our lost brother. It’d be like this, some rotter would come along with a photo like this, and say: ‘I just escaped from Terst, there’s a prison camp there for Greek partisans, and your brother is there, his arm’s wounded and it’s this one here.’ Well, and Mum of course, tears and all, that the Italian embassy, that we should... 17 years old and I wrote such a letter, and the next day straight away interrogations, State Security, the police. And amongst all of that, Dad: ‘Don't give in, we didn’t either.’ ”

“My sister, the one who fought and survived, well she got to Tashkent with the partisans. And I’ll use her example to tell you she’s a victim of the civil war, and not some ideology or some such drivel. She met with and married an enemy. He was an ordinary, state soldier, who killed and hunted the partisans, and he was captured. They got there, got to know each other. They lost one child, they lost the second, the third - there was no medicine there, it was a prison camp like in Tashkent. But in that 53rd or 54th year, prisoners of war were exchanged, and some of them, if he was from the state army, not a Leftie, managed to get to Greece. We were never allowed to visit our sister, nor she us.”