Publikation "Our Tears dried up"

Im Rahmen des Geschichtswerkstatt Europa Programms wurde 2010 das Projekt "60 Jahre danach. Die Erinnerung griechischer Bürgerkriegsflüchtlinge in der Tschechoslowakei 1949-2009" gefördert. Nun ist auch eine tschechische Publikation veröffentlicht worden. 

In einem deutschsprachigen Interview auf radio.cz geht die Herausgeberin Katerina Kralova auf die Publikation ein. Hier kann das Interview angehört werden. 

Englische Zusammenfassung:

"Our Tears Dried Up..." Greek Refugees in Czechoslovakia

The 60th anniversary of the end of the Greek Civil War (1946 – 1949) was a great opportunity to summarize and to put into a broader socio-political context the causes that led to the ensuing exodus of nearly hundred thousand Greek citizens to the Eastern bloc countries. By the use of oral history methods, this book written by researches and students of the Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague examines the private strategies of about twelve thousand Greek Civil War refugees who arrived to Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s and stayed until these days, which is a part of Modern Greek diaspora that has been thus far largely overseen. Recent debates about population movements across Europe, and in Greece in particular, have focused almost exclusively on former East European migrants moving into Greece or economic emigration. This book fills in the forgotten history of Greek refugees by engaging with contemporary Diaspora studies in showing different aspects of Greek refugee migration and gives a general picture of their life and living conditions in communist Czechoslovakia since 1949, during the Cold War, and afterwards.

Based on qualitative approach, this study identifies dominant oral narratives of such individuals focusing not only on historical aspects and personal experiences in the hosting country, but also on the shaping and changing of identity of the refugees and their descendents revealed in the eyewitness accounts. A team of Czech, Polish, and Greek (post) graduate students assisted by leading experts on oral history and Greek Civil War from Czech Republic as well as from Greece collected and analyzed more than fifty testimonies of three generations of Greek and Slavo-Macedonian origin still living in the Czech Republic. The first generation is represented by civil war political refugees who arrived to Czechoslovakia in the age of 14 and older, the second generation is formed by underage immigrants and children born shortly after their parents arrived to their new homeland, and the third generation by those who were born later in communist Czechoslovakia, yet still identifying themselves with Greece. It is argued that the Greek community before and even after the fall of Iron Curtain in 1989 when many of its members already left for Greece or other countries still retained a specific culture and habits, thus escaping a complete assimilation within the Czechoslovak societies.

The historical introduction based for the most part on archival sources is written by two distinguished Czech researchers in the field of contemporary Greek history, Kateřina Královaand Kostas Tsivos, and illuminates the reader about the origins and political background of the emigration. In following twelve thematic studies written mainly by the students the authors assess, which memories the Greek refugees kept about the war and their homeland, how much their attitudes differ within the generations, how their mentalities changed, to what extent they integrated themselves into the majority society or kept their ethnic identity, their traditions, and their language and last but not least why they decided to stay in Czechoslovakia. Especially emotional are those narratives of adventurous journey from Greece to Central Europe and the memories form children's homes where most of the second generation Greeks had to spend their childhood collectively, separated from their families, and controlled by the party. The local, bilateral, and international political issues such as the fall of Stalinism, the split of the Greek communist party, the Prague Spring of 1968, the repatriation of some of the Greek refugees, alongside with regime changes at the end of the Cold War have transformed their memory into an arena of conflicting loyalties to opposing fractions and shaped among others their new identity. The documented testimonies are accompanied by rich photographic material coming mostly from private archives of the narrators.

The book was "Our Tears dried up..." Greek Refugees in Czechoslovakia was published thanks to a considerable financial support from the German foundation "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future" (EVZ) within the program Geschichtswerkstatt Europa – Paths of Rememberance and the Specific Scientific Research Program of the Charles University in Prague, for which we are particularly grateful.