Nikolaos Tsametis

“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.”