Page 32 - Studia Universitatis Hereditati, vol 11(2) (2023)

64) suggests, the photographs also allow us both, tlement of the refugees, although intended to be
interlocutors and researchers, to escape from our temporary for them, quickly became necessary
own representations of the period in question for the host countries. So, as soon as 1950, a sec-
but also to understand, through the narratives ond redistribution of refugees, ordered accord-
of the refugees in their photographs, the social- ing to labour needs, was put in place, this time
ist period in which these images were taken. For within the country, sending them to different
the people involved, they are also a way of pre- towns and villages with, in parallel, the process
serving their memory before they disappear. of reuniting families, whose members had been
The narrative(s) on the reception of Greek scattered across different countries. This process
refugees in Eastern Europe is, therefore, on the lasted almost 10 years, and it also led to a further
verge of writing another narrative that becomes displacement of refugees within the bloc.
a multiple heritage issue, because it contains the In the Czech Republic, healthy and
32 memory of the foreigners and defeated of the able-bodied refugees were scattered throughout
Greek civil war during the socialist period in the the Moravia region; in Krnov and Jesenik (Sa-
countries of Eastern Europe. In these two pasts, rikoudi 2014, 100). Some of them also found ti
studia universitatis hereditati, letnik 11 (2023), številka 2 / volume 11 (2023), number 2
the narratives that form a link between Eastern themselves in the Silesia region, where the village
and Western Europe, passing through the local of Těchonín was also located, living in forcibly
to the national, encourage us to revisit the social- emptied houses belonging to Czechs of German
ist past (and its ‘vestiges’) from the point of view origin who had been expelled from Czechoslo- ta
of refugees. vak territory following the end of the Second
World War.
The Arrival of Refugees in Eastern Europe: However, as Sarikoudi (2014, 100–101)
a Three-stage Installation notes,
After the defeat of the DSE in 1949, a forced ex- it soon became clear [to the authorities] that di
odus of refugees from Greece took place. The these regions were unable to offer work to all
agreements concluded earlier between KKE the refugees who were sent there. Many in-
and East European Communist Parties resulted dustries had closed before the war, and even
in the dispersal of refugees throughout the so- those that were open were remote, which,
called Eastern bloc: from Bulgaria to the distant combined with the poor transport network,
city of Tashkent in Uzbekistan. meant that Greeks could not be employed
The adult refugee population, composed of there. The Czechoslovak CP, (Komunistická here
men and women (partisans and civilians) and el- strana Československa, KSČ), therefore de-
derly people, were initially provided with tempo- cided to promote these new workers in the
rary accommodation in places such as camps: in industrial sector, particularly in the textile
Berkovitsa in Bulgaria (Kokkinou 2019, 37), in industry. From the spring of 1950, the refu-
Mikulov, Lešany and Svatobořice in the Czech gees began to leave their original homes and
Republic (Sarikoudi 2014, 99), or at factories were sent to villages such as Zláte Hory, Re-
such as Dohánygyár in Budapest, (Fokasz 2013), jviz, Jindřichov, Janornik, Žulová and Buk-
while children who arrived at the host countries ová, in the Jesenik prefecture. Heavy indus-
before the end of the war, particularly in 1948, try workers also travelled to neighboring
were accommodated in places specifically pre- regions such as Šumperk and Dvůr Králové.
pared for them, a kind of boarding school, or
in Greek, pedikos stathmos (Danforth and Van The Case of the reception Centre studiauniversitatis
Boeschoten 2012). in Těchonín
The return of the refugees to Greece was not The military barracks in Těchonín were
as immediate as had been estimated, and the set- used by the Czechoslovak Red Cross and re-