Abstract
This article focusses on the narratives of collective victimhood and martyrdom in the memories of refugees from the Greek Civil War (GCW, 1946–1949) to post-1948 communist Czechoslovakia (later, the Czech Republic). It analyses literary production by refugees, that is, ego-documents, popular history books and fiction, assessing refugees’ motivations in writing their own histories. It investigates the role of collective victimhood and its effect on the diaspora's identity, its aims and its functions. It determines that the narratives of martyrdom were an early representation by GCW refugees to portray themselves as heroic partisans and anti-fascist fighters and gain the high ground on the moral side of the conflict. Such perceptions, however, have in some cases persisted among communist-oriented authors to this day. This article distinguishes them from more personal expressions of collective victimhood, allowing for a plurality of interpretations of their refugee experience as well as a greater variety of motivations for capturing it in written form for a broader audience. This study aims to show how fluid and permeable these narratives of collective victimhood have been and how fundamentally they have affected the constitution of the GCW diaspora's identity.
I am still agonised by the pain of my war-scarred soul, which even in the 50 years that have passed since then have not been able to heal. I am still tormented by the flames of my house and our village; I am torn by the pain of those killed and the humble and pitiful look of my severely wounded 18-year-old brother shortly before his death. 1
Artemi Vakopoulou-Orfanidou, a young teacher, who at the age of 15 in the late 1940s fled from the Greek Civil War (GCW, 1946–1949) to communist Czechoslovakia, continued to bear this traumatic experience her entire life. 2 Her suffering, unique within the confines of her personal life story, was symptomatic of the fate of the GCW political refugees, who fled Greece both during the civil war and, especially, after the defeat of the communist Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) in the late summer of 1949. The left-leaning GCW diaspora, dispersed across the Eastern bloc and numbering approximately 56,200 refugees 3 (of whom approximately 12,100 refugees settled in Czechoslovakia), 4 predominantly identified with the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). As KKE's supporters, many diaspora members experienced harsh political oppression, persecution and criminalisation in their homeland. 5 As a result of the civil conflict, they were exposed to a high level of violence, often losing their loved ones. Forced into decades-long exile, their identity was seriously compromised by the Greek monarchy that denationalised them and passed laws to expropriate their property. The retributive measures that Greece applied to all GCW emigrants to the ‘East’, in line with the principle of collective guilt for the civil war, affected all refugees, both children and adults alike, including the children born in exile. 6 The GCW refugees frequently experienced feelings of loss and uprootedness: they struggled to establish a sense of belonging and had difficulty defining their identity. Struggling to reconcile their Greek origins with the long-term experience of living in the People's Democracies, 7 the majority attempted, sometimes unsuccessfully, either to repatriate or find peace of mind by remigrating to a third country.
At its core, the diaspora was composed of former partisans, whose previous life experience was shaped by their active participation in the 1940–1941 Greco-Italian War, the anti-Axis resistance (1941–1944) and the subsequent Greek Civil War. With their partisan backgrounds, and as loyal party members, they embodied the ideal of anti-fascist freedom fighters fundamental to the post-war creation of the communist public image. Or, to quote Joanna Wawrzyniak, who investigated the memory of the World War in socialist Poland, they fuelled ‘the revolutionary rhetoric towards patriotic narratives of collective heroism and sacrifice’. 8 The newly established regimes in the CEE countries relied on the very idea of a continuous anti-fascist and anti-imperialist struggle as their foundational myth and as a legitimising tool. 9 Therefore, granting aid to ‘comrade refugees’ provided them with a coveted opportunity to manifest their proclaimed internationalism and ‘teach’ their respective populations the values of socialist brotherhood and solidarity. 10 Refugee children in particular naturally assumed the ‘innocent victims’ role in the propaganda, while at the same time, they were viewed by the communist regime as those who were predestined to transform Greece into a future communist state.
Besides the KKE-instigated narrative of martyrdom that was exploited for political legitimisation and advancement, GCW refugees (as individuals) and the diaspora (as a collective) developed a strong sense of victimhood that was free from a political agenda. 11 Their victimhood, perpetuated by the Cold War and the indefinite impossibility of returning to Greece, was transmitted from the first generation of refugees onto the next generation who were born in exile, thus, ultimately shaping the diaspora's identity. The diaspora, representing the defeated side of the GCW, preserved its distinct interpretation of the civil conflict as a ‘fight for freedom and democracy’, opposing the official narratives presented by the pre-1974 anti-communist Greek governments in which the GCW was a ‘rebellion’ initiated by the KKE as a fifth column of the USSR. 12 This article, however, neither deals with these conflicting interpretations of the GCW nor with the diaspora's understanding of its role in the ongoing rupture between the two conceptions of Greece: that it is either communist or anti-communist. Instead, it centres on the interrelated collective narrative of victimhood expressed by GCW refugees in Czechoslovakia through their literary production, and it investigates its functions and permeability in relation to official communist narratives of martyrdom.
The experience of GCW refugees during their flight from Greece, their residency in the communist ‘East’ and their partial repatriation to their homeland has been well documented in the academic literature, both internationally 13 and within the Czechoslovak (or Czech) context. 14 With the growing interest in oral history, several projects – both academic and in popular discourse – have given a voice to the GCW refugees and their descendants, and have further facilitated the transmission of their stories to a wider public. 15 Rather than referring to ‘collective victimhood’, scholars typically use the concept of collective trauma to theoretically frame their case, diagnosing the effects of the social rupture created by the civil war rather than looking into the self-identification and communication strategies of the diaspora as undisputed victims. 16 But it is precisely the victimhood of the diaspora that stands out as a repeated pattern in the writings of around two dozen authors with GCW refugee backgrounds living in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. Such a pattern can be identified in their memoirs and autobiographies, in the literary fiction (such as novels, short stories and poems) inspired by the diaspora's experience and in popular history books and articles written by ‘refugee historians’. 17 These authors published their works in either Czech or Greek, depending on whether they continued to reside in Czechoslovakia or chose to repatriate. 18 Their sense of victimhood can, however, also be traced in academic works by scholars who emerged from the GCW diaspora in Czechoslovakia and who – from historical, sociological, anthropological and linguistic viewpoints – focussed on reconstructing the diaspora's past, capturing the life of the refugee community and analysing the impact of ‘refugeedom’ on its collective identity. 19 In parallel with Greek-centred scholarly works, another branch of research developed that concentrates on Macedonian (Slavic-speaking) GCW refugees. The latter's voices further problematised the issue of the diaspora's shared memory by forming their own narratives of national identity that were in opposition to the Greek-speaking core's. 20
In this article, I first focus on the role of collective victimhood in the memory of GCW refugees by examining its effects on the group's identity, its aims and its functions. I approach the topic through the lens of ‘refugee’ literature, assessing the motivations with which refugees attempt to write their own history. The capacity of the GCW refugees to do so was historically limited by the illiberal political environment of post-1948 socialist Czechoslovakia. As a result, most of the literature emerged in the post-1989 era of democratisation. Furthermore, and in line with the worldwide trends of the time, 21 most of the literature by GCW refugees was produced by men, thus resulting in a gender-imbalance in the public's perception.
Second, I investigate the communist narrative of martyrdom as an early representation of GCW refugees for the Czechoslovak public, which has persisted in the ‘refugee’ literature practically to the present day. I argue that some GCW refugee authors employed the theme of heroic partisans and anti-fascist fighters to foster an idealised image of the diaspora. In this form, it suited the state-supported policies of internationalism and socialist brotherhood, bolstered the Eastern bloc in its ‘moral’ competition with the ‘West’ and helped provoke sympathies from the domestic population towards the refugees.
Third, I analyse the portion of the Czechoslovak and Czech GCW-refugee literature that has a primarily non-political character, and thus avoids the communist narratives of martyrdom altogether. Mostly in the form of memoirs, autobiographies, novels and poems, it presents the collective victimhood of the GCW diaspora in a more subtle and intimate way, allowing for a plurality of interpretations of their refugee experience as well as a greater variety of motivations to capture it in written form for a wider public readership. In the final section, I point out the various ways these authors challenge the official narratives previously promoted by the Czechoslovak communist regime and where they fall short of it. In this sense, I also attempt to show how fluid and permeable these narratives of collective victimhood have been and how fundamentally they have affected the GCW diaspora's identity.
Tracing victimhood in the ‘refugee’ literature
In recent years, research on collective victimhood has received significant attention from scholars, leading to the more elaborate theoretical framing of the concept by social psychologists 22 and its employment in countless case studies by scholars in the social sciences and humanities. 23 This article follows the definition of Daniel Bar-Tal, Lily Chernyak-Hai, Noa Schori and Ayelet Gundar, who understand collective victimhood as ‘a mindset shared by group members that results from a perceived intentional harm with severe and lasting consequences inflicted on a collective by another group or groups, a harm that is viewed as undeserved, unjust and immoral, and one that the group was not able to prevent’. The authors emphasise that such harm can have occurred in the distant past and, thus, it can appear as indirect harm and be transmitted through the collective memory of a past injustice to successive generations, having a ‘real or partly imagined’ character. 24 According to Johanna Ray Vollhardt and Rashmi Nair, ‘Collective victimhood, the subjective construal of the ingroup's experiences of victimization, affects individuals and shapes social and political attitudes, even once the violence has ended’. 25 The beliefs of collective victimhood manifested as ‘losses, destructions, suffering, oppressions, humiliations or atrocities’’ have a unifying and mobilising effect for the group itself. These beliefs form the basis for the construction and maintenance of the group's identity and the communication of the group's position as victims who are ‘morally superior, entitled to sympathy and consideration and protected from criticism’. 26
The GCW diaspora developed a strong sense of collective victimhood, having faced isolation in exile and the indefinite inability to repatriate due to the ongoing intractable domestic political and social conflict. While the victimhood of its members was grounded in the perceptions of their suffering, 27 it was also exacerbated by the black-and-white interpretation of the GCW by the KKE and, generally, the pro-Soviet camp. The official communist narratives on the one hand portrayed the GCW as a clash between ‘monarcho-fascist’ Greece (even likened to Nazi Germany) and the ‘imperialist’ United States both characterised as incontestable culprits, and on the other hand, the partisans were portrayed as the moral side of the conflict fighting for the values of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ in an extended struggle against fascist forces. The Greek communist leadership also idealised its role in the resistance during the war and the GCW, avoiding discussion of its engagement in launching terror against its political opponents in Greece. As a result, the party utilised the memory of the continuous Greek anti-fascist struggle as a tool to unite and mobilise the diaspora, which was searching for its identity and future mission in communist exile. This historical memory then played a crucial role in strengthening the diaspora's identity and its sense of belonging, providing it with meaning and self-esteem.
Similar mechanisms underscored the motivations of some of the GCW diaspora's members in reproducing their experience – and accentuating their personal or collective victimhood – in written form and for the wider public. Still, the fact that the GCW diaspora was relatively active in pursuing these publication activities is not something that can be taken for granted. According to Lauren Banko, Katarzyna Nowak and Peter Gatrell,
Refugees might write their history as a chronicle of personal suffering and loss, or as the expression of their capacity to overcome adversity and to ‘make a contribution’, for example, to the host society or to the diaspora. Equally, they might choose to keep quiet or to make a calculated decision to forget. 28
Many GCW refugees preferred to be vocal about their experiences. In this sense, the writing fulfilled their need for the acknowledgement and recognition of their refugee status 29 as well as their empowerment in a society that made an effort to include them exactly because they were ‘political’ refugees. The ‘memorial’ books, once again, contributed to the formation of the group's identity by sharing the memory of personal and collective suffering, revolving around the senses of loss, the self and the other, and establishing connections between those displaced and their homeland. 30 Finally, scholars emphasise the therapeutic effect of such writings that help refugees (but also the survivors of genocides, in particular) to process their experience, give it meaning and reach reconciliation. 31
Political censorship during the communist era (1948–1989) significantly delayed such attempts by GCW refugees to express themselves freely. According to Venetia Apostolidou, the communist leadership was concerned that the refugees might publish a negative or politically inappropriate assessment of their lives under socialism that the Western media could potentially exploit. 32 For this reason, the capacity of GCW refugees to share their experiences publicly was limited. Instead, the Czechoslovak state actively supported the creation of an officially acceptable image of GCW refugees that could be easily utilised for political purposes. Thus, state media occasionally offered a platform to refugees, quoting them in articles on the political situation in Greece and the GCW diaspora in Czechoslovakia. 33 These, however, were shaped by the communist narratives of martyrdom, and the refugees themselves could not influence how they were portrayed in the media. The bilingual Greek-Macedonian weekly Agonistis - Borec (Fighter), published by the KKE in Czechoslovakia from the 1950s to the 1970s, does not provide an exception to this trend. Moreover, the priority of its editorial staff was to deliver information about political and party-related news. 34
State organs strictly controlled all publication activities, which is why only state-sponsored publications, edited by people outside the community, emerged in the early stages. Furthermore, these publications often targeted school children. 35 Only during the 1970s and 1980s could greater openness toward literature written by GCW refugees and their next generations be observed. However, examples remained scarce and largely uncritical of the receiving country, following an artistic rather than factographic agenda. 36 One could argue that the political climate during Czechoslovakia's ‘Normalisation’ period (after the authorities suppressed public resistance to the 1968 Soviet invasion) favoured the resurrection of the GCW refugee topic as a positive example of socialist brotherhood and internationalism. Such an assumption could also partly explain the parallel growth of interest in ethnographic scholarly work centring on the GCW diaspora, which was inevitably state-sponsored and also involved researchers with a GCW refugee background. 37
In this respect, the post-1989 democratisation of Czechoslovakia, and the Czech Republic respectively, triggered independent academic research on this topic: this time mainly by scholars unrelated to the GCW diaspora. 38 In parallel, memory studies as a discipline witnessed an unprecedented upswing, leading to the opening of a public space of remembrance and the growing body of literature on collective memory. 39 Regime change in Czechoslovakia also improved conditions, thus allowing the former refugees to publish, both politically and practically. Greater accessibility in the free media market, the growing number of private publishers and the option for self-publishing made it easier for otherwise unknown personalities to release memoirs and niche literature with a minimal number of copies printed. Most importantly, however, the political change enabled a greater plurality of voices – communist, non-communist and apolitical – to make it to the public sphere and foster general knowledge on the topic. Those authors who were previously active in the DSE or the KKE in Czechoslovakia especially maintained the interrelated discourse of martyrdom that was supported by official party narratives. Characteristically, they were mainly the ones who felt responsible for capturing the origins and history of the GCW diaspora in the country as a whole and pursued the task with clear political aims, or rather, a vision. 40 In contrast, those testimonies that were more intimate and personal, such as memoirs, pointed more subtly to either collective or personal victimhood derived from the inherited experience. 41
Narratives of martyrdom and their function
In December 1949, a total of 91 delegates from the KKE's local organisations in Czechoslovakia convened in the town of Jeseník, the centre for GCW refugees, at the first conference for Greek and Macedonian communists in the country. The participants were predominantly men under the age of 35 with backgrounds as industrial or agricultural workers and with previous partisan experience from the left-wing war resistance or the civil war. About one-third of them had suffered an injury during their military deployment.
42
In his opening speech, a representative from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) greeted them ‘expressing [the] immense respect and love that the entire Czechoslovak people hold towards the heroic fighters for free and democratic Greece’.
43
In his politically uncompromising talk, where he predicted the imminent decline of the imperialist camp and the definitive expansion of the socialist one, the representative committed on behalf of the KSČ: I assure you that our party, loyal to the principles of proletarian internationalism and aware of the enormous sacrifice that you have made for the sake of our common mission, will do anything possible to keep you satisfied during your stay here [in Czechoslovakia]. We would be happy if our country becomes your second home until you can return to free Greece.
44
Such media representations of GCW refugees in Czechoslovakia were not unusual by any means. A reporter for the trade union newspaper Práce even travelled to the mountains of north-western Greece and, in August 1947, he published an emotional report about the local partisans giving his readers a sense of the everyday lives of the ‘heroes’ led by the ‘untameable desire to live freely [through their] bravery and perseverance’. 47 To give one more example, in April 1948, two months after the Czechoslovak communists took power, the daily Svobodné Slovo painted a grim picture of the political situation in Greece. According to the article, the Greek monarchy was leading ‘a war of extermination against partisans and democratic citizens’ and subjecting Greek workers to ‘slavery’. 48 Thus, the partisans as bearers of the highest moral values were portrayed as waging a war against the ultimate evil, facing unjust, undeserved and disproportionate terror.
Spreading the idea of Greek partisans as martyrs of the broader anti-fascist struggle had further political potency outside the diaspora, both in domestic and international contexts. The GCW refugees made a case for strengthening the post-war ideologically driven social cohesion of communist countries, building upon the values of internationalist brotherhood and practicing socialist solidarity with ‘comrade refugees’. As a result, they represented an asset in the information war between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’, fighting over who was more moral in the Cold War conflict. This corresponds with a broader trend. As Jessie Barton Hronešová has noted, ‘it is due to the symbolism inherent in victims’ suffering and the implied morality of their roles that they started to play an increasingly important role in national and international politics’.
49
In the case of GCW refugees, both sides politically exploited the case of refugee children, in particular, mutually accusing one another of kidnapping and indoctrination (in Greek, paidomazoma).
50
The Czechoslovak media criticised Greece for subjecting children to hardship and starvation, war atrocities, torture, imprisonment, deportation and execution,
51
and utilising the children in order to make political claims: [The children] look forward to the people in their country being freed from the shackles [of fascism], exploitation and terror […] From the blood shed by their fathers, brothers, and sisters who bravely fight in partisan units, a new force and happiness of the Greek nation will arise. With this belief, the Greek children go to sleep every night.
52
The early literary production of GCW refugees in Czechoslovakia fulfilled the same function. In 1952, a book composed of contributions by refugee children was published under the auspices of the Czechoslovak Red Cross, titled Greek Eaglets (Aetopoula): Memories of Home, Verses, Rhymes, and Drawings of Greek Children who live in Czechoslovakia. Calling the children ‘Eaglets’ refers to the United Panhellenic Organization of Youth (EPON), a World War II pro-communist resistance organisation that nicknamed its youngest members (aged 8–15) in this way. The Eaglets were, in fact, sort of child partisans who assisted the actual adult partisan fighters in their operations. The book mentioned is more or less composed of ideologically biased entries, representing a mixture of martyrdom, collective victimhood, communist indoctrination and Greek nationalism. Its introduction depicts the suffering and bravery of refugee children (‘Nearly every child's fate became a piece of national tragedy’)
54
while it contextualises the ongoing Greek anti-fascist struggle with the previous struggle for national liberation from the Ottoman Empire thus fostering anti-Turkish sentiment.
55
To illustrate the political dimensions of the book's contents, once again pointing out the partisans’ self-sacrifice, I include a poem allegedly written by 12-year-old Sterios T.: They slew you, proud eagles of our mountains, but we eaglets, hatched from your blood, we will fly home freely one day.
56
We were born with our eyes fixed on the revolution […] We matured by watching the catastrophe of our dream […] We didn’t know the place that we had reached […] We believe that one day our dream will come true
57
The communist representation of GCW refugees as martyrs persisted in post-1989 publications, especially those written by amateur refugee historians who aspired to present the entire history of the country's diaspora. Lysimachos Papadopulos (born in 1915 in Votani, Kastoria) was called ‘the teacher of emigration’ because of his life-long contributions to youth education in socialist Czechoslovakia. He arrived in 1949 as a partisan with previous experience in the resistance (1941–1944), political imprisonment in Greece (1945–1946) and the DSE's self-administration (1947–1948). In the post-1989 era, he authored two books, one reflecting on the historical experience of refugee children in Czechoslovakia (1998) and the other on the adult refugee experience (1999). 58 The latter publication especially appears as if its author was attempting to put the definition of collective victimhood into practice. Papadopulos advocated the DSE's mission as ‘a nationwide movement’ for a ‘free, independent, democratic and socially just Greece’ fighting against the monarchist army. He described the latter as ‘merciless pursuers’ and ‘the forces of violence and lawlessness’. Furthermore, he reaffirmed that ‘[t]he male and female DSE's fighters proved their undeniable heroism, self-denial, and belief in just struggle despite the harsh and uneven fight’. 59 Finally, he excused the DSE's defeat as unpreventable since the enemy was ‘perfidious’ and ‘unscrupulous’, while the communist leadership lacked the experience to overcome the ‘diplomatic dodges’. 60
On the one hand, Papadopulos depicted the GCW refugees as ‘common country people’ who were ‘defenceless’ and ‘suffering’ from separation from their homeland and their families;
61
on the other hand, he viewed them as a ‘chosen group of the Greek nation’ and a sort of mythical army for national liberation: They were the ‘Ohi’ fighters who fought against the Italian aggressors in the Albanian mountains. Their mothers and sisters knitted undershirts for them so that they would not freeze to death […]. They were the [female] fighters, the able-bodied women of Pindos [the mountain range], who carried burdens, loaves of bread and ammunition up the hills to their children in the frontline amidst the windstorms and fighting. They were the fighters in the rear against the Hitlerite armies, the national resistance fighters of the EAM/ELAS [a pro-communist WWII resistance organisation], [and] the DSE's fighters against fascism and terror.
62
In 2013, the Greek Community of Prague, which holds the status of a citizens’ association, published (with financial contribution from the city authorities) a book written by its head, Tassula Zissaki-Healey, a GCW refugee (born in 1949 in Romania) who was a linguist by training and later settled in Prague. Influenced by communist interpretations of GCW refugees, Zissaki-Healey once again portrayed the refugees as ‘common people who usually do not talk about themselves’ and who live in ‘modest silence’ but ‘in reality, are heroes on their journey towards better, more just, freer and more human Greece, a socialist Greece’.
67
Her book is composed of GCW refugees’ life stories and accentuates the sacrifices made by male and female partisans and their children: These highlanders — men and women — never bent their backs for any occupier, nor did they ever lend themselves to collaboration; they never reconciled with a compromise or an excuse that it is necessary to somehow survive. Joining the EAM/ELAS, [… and/or] the DSE, was for them a natural response to specific historical events. They became male and female partisans because their highland ethics wouldn’t allow them to falter and submit to evil. Their children, the Eaglets, were their conduits and helpers. Women—nurses and mothers.
68
The most striking finding about the communist narratives of martyrdom in the writings of GCW refugees is how little (if at all) they changed over time. They resisted the 1989 regime change in Czechoslovakia and persisted despite the strong anti-communist sentiment that has taken root in contemporary Czech society. 71 The reason for this is not only that a certain portion of the still-existent Greek community in the Czech Republic continues to support communism but also because the narratives of martyrdom became part of the diaspora's identity. They influenced the way the refugees formulated and narrated their stories within the community and to the outside world. In contrast, the less-politicised accounts, which I will analyse in the following section, suppressed the theme of heroic partisans and instead gave a platform to the intimate experiences of personal life stories without highlighting the universality of their suffering.
Personal narratives of collective victimhood and their function
Unlike the timeless communist narratives of martyrdom, both fiction and autobiographical narratives by GCW refugees in Czechoslovakia and their descendants are firmly set in the historical context in which they emerged and reflect on individual experiences at various stages of life. The 1986 novel by Praxitelis Makris, Děti vyděděnců [Children of Outcasts], focusses on the internal existential struggle of a young man, born stateless to a GCW refugee family in Czechoslovakia. His story takes place in the mid-1970s when the political change in Greece (the fall of the junta in 1974) opened the way for the settlement of the refugee issue and the repatriation of refugees. Feeling like a foreigner in the country where he was born and not belonging to Greece either,
72
he faces the dilemma of either repatriating to Greece with his family or staying with his Czech girlfriend in his Czech hometown. The novel exposes the victimhood of the second-generation GCW refugees who struggled to come to terms with their parents’ life choices, which had an irreversible impact on their own lives and identities. Makris does not diminish the first generation's contribution in the civil war, but he does not consider it either. Instead, he resents the situation of his peers who have spent their lives ‘with suitcases ready in their hands’ and will ‘remain foreigners forever’.
73
One of his characters accuses the older generation of failing to provide them with a real basis for common values to establish a sense of belonging: All that talk about country and patriotism is a lie. You [his parents’ generation] tricked us! We don’t have a homeland, and the worst part is that we’ll never have one again. It's too late for that now. We’re finished once and for all. Even if we got citizenship here or there [in Czechoslovakia or Greece], it still wouldn’t be our homeland. We don’t know what homeland is anymore, and we don’t believe in anything. You fought and died, but you knew where you stood. But what about us? What do we believe in? What do we fight for?
74
The fervent message of Makris’ young characters sharply contrasts with a series of memoirs and autobiographies that the members of the GCW diaspora in the Czech Republic have published in the past three decades. From the perspective of their old age, they no longer contest their identity. Rather, they evaluate their life-long experiences in search of reconciliation and closure. In his 2004 book, Stolen Sun, Georgios Karadzos comes to terms with the positive and negative sides of his life in a kind and heartfelt manner: from becoming a refugee as a child, to becoming a successful surgeon in socialist Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, who later becomes a contented retiree. Although he identified himself as a communist, Karadzos became more critical of the communist regime than his contemporaries, breaking some of the taboos of the GCW diaspora. He reflects on the painful memory of being a ‘taken child’, suggesting that becoming a refugee, especially as a child, is not by any means a voluntary decision. 77 Karadzos does not differentiate between the attempts of Greek communists and anti-communists to relocate and indoctrinate children during the civil war and in its aftermath and, thus, he does not conform to the persistent narratives in the GCW diaspora inherited from the Cold War era. 78 He is receptive to the politicisation of children by the communist regime as a means of ideological struggle and their occasional mistreatment and alienation under the influence of the highly institutionalised system of childcare. 79 In this way, he relativises the narratives of altruistic aid provided to GCW refugees by the Eastern bloc countries, which the diaspora has rarely disputed until today.
Further, Karadzos questions the Greek communist representation in Czechoslovakia and its genuine ardour to fight for its proclaimed ideals, and he does not hide his disappointment about the results of this political endeavour. In fact, he undermines the image of the GCW diaspora as a united, solid and homogeneous community of like-minded comrades and instead draws a picture of great disillusionment.
80
As the book's preface reveals, he decided to write his memoir because he felt that he owed it to all those who had suffered from poor decision-making and the greediness of the political elites on both sides: In the name of those who were killed and tortured by individuals who wielded the power of money and weapons. In the name of those who found themselves in foreign lands and were driven from their homeland without the slightest desire to leave. In the name of all the generations of unhappy children who are not to blame for anything that has happened on this planet after their birth. In the name of all the mothers who gave us life, but to whom life retaliated by taking the greatest gift of their existence away into the unknown. I accuse all the tyrants of all time, and I am ashamed of the majority who, for centuries, have not been able to stand up once and for all against a minority of unscrupulous fanatics!
81
During my years abroad, I have come to know the fateful bond of my countrymen to their roots. To the past, to their native soil, to their loved ones and friends, a metaphysical bond that they carry with them all their lives, regardless of their education. The Greeks find it hard to adapt to new living conditions. The Greeks are bad emigrants. They keep thinking of returning. They travel all their lives, like their great-grandfather Odysseus, but in the end, they want to be buried on [the island of] Ithaca. They are incredibly homesick.
82
Disregarding the nationalist undertones in this quote, the way Agathonikiadis treats the GCW diaspora as exclusive – underscoring the diaspora's victimhood as unique – is not only symptomatic of the GCW refugee authors but also of migrant or refugee literature as a genre. Except for Karadzos, who in his book is very sensitive to North Korean child refugees and compares their ordeal to that of refugee children from Greece, 83 the overall majority of GCW refugee authors focus on Greek suffering. In doing that, they do not reflect on the specific victimhood of the Macedonian (Slavic-speaking) GCW refugees, drawing a sharp ethnically defined line separating the two groups. Ivan Dorovský, a Czech Balkanologist of Macedonian origin, primarily wrote academic books and articles focussing on the Macedonian GCW refugee community in Czechoslovakia, but he also authored poems about their victimhood, identity crisis and longing for a return to their homeland – to what territorially remained Greek Macedonia – a desire that he considered stronger than his death as his poem Until one day… suggests:
When I die,
don’t be sad.
Think of it as me going to visit my Balkans,
to regain my strength there.
Believe that I will surely
return one day
to my other homeland,
which has become my love,
my home,
my bond,
my destiny,
my everything. 84
Although there had been underlying discord between the Greek and Macedonian GCW refugees abroad during the socialist era, it escalated exponentially with the emergence of the independent Macedonian state in 1991; this event immediately caused tensions between North Macedonia and its neighbouring states, first and foremost Greece, which saw the new state as a threat to its sovereignty. The inability of the GCW diaspora to overcome their cultural differences once again challenged the communist-promoted ideas of unity, internationalism and socialist brotherhood. It also exposed the principally nationalist determination of these groups, which is so strongly reflected in the refugee literature. Petros Cironis, a historian with a GCW refugee background, ironically summarises the self-centred attitude of the diaspora and his own contribution to it and still sees an urgent need to write its history: I am also aware that emigrant literature […] has never been worth much, even if the emigrants often think that they are unbeatable. Emigrant literature is not usually of benefit because it is based on delusions of [the diaspora's] grandeur, often cosmopolitanism, contempt for one's own nation, nostalgia, and false ideas. Despite this devastating realization, I sin and toil away at the emigrant issue […].
85
The literary excerpts quoted in this article constitute a small portion of a much larger volume of GCW refugee literature. The selection, designed to cover the periods of both the early- and late-socialist periods in Czechoslovakia and the post-1989 era, represents those refugees who arrived in Czechoslovakia as adults or as children or those who were born shortly after their arrival. Any attempt to analyse the writings of GCW refugees in Czechoslovakia unavoidably results in creating an inaccurate image of the community, skewed by the underrepresentation of female voices and by the prioritisation of ethnically Greek refugees. Still, the sample presented here offers various examples of collective victimhood narratives, ranging from those essentially personal to those purposefully political, including some that emphasise martyrdom and heroism in the communist sense. The use of collective victimhood in their writings points to the varied strategies employed by GCW refugees to help them deal with their difficult collective past, to overcome its traumatic memory and to negotiate their position in the receiving society, while at the same time, maintain a connection with their forcibly abandoned homeland.
Conclusions
Whether their aims were political or personal in nature, GCW refugee authors have contributed to the formation of the diaspora's identity, building upon a strong sense of collective victimhood. As Banko, Nowak and Gatrell have underlined, we need to consider ‘refugees’ capacity to write their own history, the conditions under which they do so, and the purpose that these writings serve’ as well as the ‘political component […] associated especially with diasporic initiatives’. 86 This is particularly true for the GCW diaspora in Czechoslovakia (as well as in the former Eastern bloc countries). The GCW refugees’ multi-faceted identity has consisted of a combination of contradictory influences at times, going deeper than what the civil conflict in Greece had created. Their sense of identity transcends the concept of a communist partisan who struggles against imperialist oppression and the anti-fascist fighter for freedom and democracy. It is connected to an essentially nationalist idea about the homeland, its character, meaning and importance. Therefore, GCW refugee literature is primarily a message for and about the homeland they were forced to involuntarily abandon.
Within the Cold War context, GCW refugees had varied and polarised audiences: Greece and the Greek ‘exile’, the ‘East’ as opposed to the ‘West’, the communist political elites as well as the domestic populations of the receiving states, and finally, the diaspora itself. The images of communist martyrdom manifested in the heroism of partisans, the self-sacrifice of their women and the suffering of their children were all designed to speak to these audiences. Such imagery aimed to justify the GCW refugees as the moral ones in the civil conflict, to gain recognition as indisputable heroes and victims and to evoke sympathy by portraying the refugees as defenceless. The idea was also meant to mobilise and unite them in their adverse situation and provide them with new meaning.
Post-1989 democratisation in Czechoslovakia allowed for a plurality of opinions that enabled a parallel coexistence of communist narratives of martyrdom and anti-communist or non-political interpretations of the GCW refugee experience. The multitude of refugee voices made it possible to challenge certain communist dogmas that portrayed the GCW diaspora as politically united, internationalist and well-integrated into Czechoslovak society. Despite this fresh view, the sense of collective victimhood long remained the most characteristic feature of GCW refugee literature, centring on the diaspora's uniqueness and, at the same time, deeming its suffering universal. Still, in this new era, GCW refugees, motivated by their own personal experiences and the therapeutic functions of ‘refugee’ literature, have been free to publicly express their victimhood in a pure and intimate form.
Footnotes
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article was written as a part of the ERC Consolidator project ‘Unlikely refuge? Refugees andcitizens in East-Central Europe in the 20th century’ under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 819461).
