Ioannis Nitsios

"We bathed there. Cleaned everything. We were still lice-ridden from the war. They gave us food. The soldiers waited on us. Greeks. They spoke normal Greek. And we watched also, some three hundred of us, we watched a film. They showed the civil war, the one that was in Russia, with Chapayev [a legendary Red Army commander during the Russian Civil War - ed.], that one. And in the afternoon we boarded a freight train."

(Q: "The main fighting was up north?") "It was all over Greece. But the main thing was for us to have open borders, so we could take the wounded to Albania or Bulgaria. To have those borders open. Some said: 'We shouldn't have opened the borders.' But where would the wounded go? Or the children, the old people? Because we were fighting to keep the borders open. And people were fighting down below as well. Close to Athens. There was an army. In the whole of Greece, on the Peloponnese, on Crete, on the islands - fighting everywhere."

(Q: "How was it actually, living in Uzbekistan those eight years?") "Good, good. We worked in a factory, and always in autumn, Uzbekistan mostly grew melons, kind of bigger ones, vegetables and cotton. So they sent us out on to the fields for a month to gather cotton. What we earned there, we got paid for the work, and the factory paid the month as well, so we got double wages."

"Seventy kilometres it was, for the soldiers to reach the borders. Nearly three months. We had bunkers. Twenty thousand soldiers died there. Our men died mostly from artillery fire and air strikes."