Chapter six - One of the sickest stories - Part 01

Chapter six - One of the sickest stories

For the sake of love, Queen Frederica separated the Macedonian children from their mothers and sent them to hell. For the mothers the separation was worse than death!

About this, Krsto Krapov said: “My memories will haunt me forever.”

I dedicate this chapter to all those who endured the sickest, most savage and inhuman conditions and genocidal acts during the child collection programs. To the mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers who lost their opportunity to see their children and grandchildren grow up, to the brothers and sisters who did not grow up together and especially those who could not return to their native place, not even to die there.

Krapov said: “...‘Nothing hurts more than the tears of a child... dear Krsto, there are no words to describe the pain a mother feels. When I heard him crying... my Doncho, I don’t think Queen Frederica, as a mother, understood how that felt...’ all broken up and in tears said Kiritsa, or Latsa as she was called at home in Kostur.”

Such were Krapov’s memories each time he visited the grave of his beloved. His memories of her weighed on his soul and he cried with each visit while holding a lit candle.

Krapov looked at me and said: “What will history say about this? What will history say about us Macedonians? Will history say anything at all? They did all this for another reason, even though they said it was done to save the children.

They will never mention anything! Half a century has passed and nothing has been said; not about the many thousands of victims whose bones were left on the battle fields. These people were fathers and brothers... yet nothing has been said about them... nothing has been recorded in our history...

My good friend, you don’t know what hope is until you have lost it. Now, years later, when I come to the grave of my Kiratsa (Latsa) I too am eager to leave this unfair world...”

I accompanied Krapov all through the cemetery. I was embarrassed because, of all those present, I was the only one who did not light a candle. I don’t know why I am like that. Perhaps I was brought up that way. I spent a long part of my life dealing with communist ideals. Perhaps I was an atheist after all. I would not cross myself, I would not light a candle but I do respect our traditions and love the ways of my ancestors. I remember when we were burying my grandmother in Tashkent we followed Communist Party protocol. It was also the same for all of our fighters; a short revolutionary speech.

Krapov kept looking at me. I figured he wanted to say something. Perhaps he wanted to tell me that I was “ignorant” and that I had been misled, even brainwashed, but instead he continued to stare at me… torturing me… finally he said: “Have you changed?”

Have I changed? How have I changed? I was left speechless… I did not understand the question and thus I did not know what to say. I did not answer him.

Krapov then said: “My day on Saturday begins unusually early. Just before seven o’clock in the morning I go and lay flowers on the graves of my closest. I have made it my habit to linger near the grave of my beloved late Kiratsa who died before her time. I get the feeling that there is an invisible force connecting me to her just like when we were young. She was one of the most beautiful, tender and sensitive young women in Kostur. We were faithful to each other and very happy, especially after our son Doncho was born. We named him after my father. Unfortunately, as his father, I never got the opportunity to see him grow up. I was sent to prison… to the dry Greek islands… that was my fate… The truth can be so cruel…”

After taking a moment to recompose himself, Krapov continued: “In prison I tried to convince myself that everything was going to be okay once I returned home. I told myself that I would turn a new

page and my family would come together again… but… I was lying to myself.

Then I left the island and returned to my home and to my people in Kostur… And since then all I have done is walk from my home to the cemetery and back. On the island I carried stones, here I carry roses and other flowers and light candles… winter and summer...

Roses were my beloved Kiratsa’s favourite flowers... It is painful to look at your own fate…” concluded Krapov.

Yes, I thought to myself. What cruel game fate can play. Poor Krapov, he is like a wounded animal with no purpose to live and living in constant pain. No one understands his pain. And based on the mocking of people who notice his physical disabilities, no one respects him. No one knows his mental anguish, let alone what he has done for his people. No one even cares what this gifted fighter had done for Macedonia and for Kostur during his days as a Macedonian freedom fighter and rebel.

“Life can become very difficult for a man who has been tainted by the Greek government!” he said. His entire life he had to endure listening to people mocking him… their quiet laughs… their whispers…

He loves to read. He reads all kinds of books, especially those on Macedonian history and about Kostur and Macedonia.

Sometimes he wonders how much of the memories of the Macedonian people’s sacrifices have already been lost over time? How much has been lost from Ilinden to this day? How long are we going to remember those things? Will they matter when we forget them or will they become the inalienable property of those who, unlike us, are still remembering and attaching their own undeserved importance to them.

“Our Greek occupiers, more recently, with total disregard for us have bulldozed our cemeteries, dug up the bones of our ancestors and discarded them into the wild. After this, do you think there is any sense of hope that there will be a future for us here? When these

things were happening do you think any of the internationalists, the likes of Markos and his DAG cohorts thought of us; to return those bones to us or to collect the bones of our people scattered throughout the whole of Europe, all the way to Tashkent?” asked Krapov.

Will there by anyone who will be willing to tell the truth about why we abandoned Macedonia, why Macedonia was stripped of its Macedonians and why we were evicted and sent away to scatter all over the world?!

Look at this poor man and you wonder why his eyes are filled with tears? The old people used to say: “We cry from our unpleasant bitterness!”

“I can no longer remain silent on this matter. I want everyone to know that I can no longer carry this secret with me for the rest of my life. I believe every human being wants his or her bones to rest in their homeland, beside those of their ancestors,” said Krapov.

* * *

It was April 8, 1988. Krapov remembered the date well. It was the day that he was released from the Island prison; after serving a 40 year sentence.

“I was on my way home,” he said. “It was a beautiful clear morning when I left and arrived in Kostur in time to witness the sunset. Unfortunately the sky was covered in dark clouds and the wind was carrying the smell of rain. The first thing I heard were the church bells calling for evening prayer. I was in an unusually good mood that day because it was my beloved Kiratsa’s birthday. She was sixty-two years old. She was a beautiful woman and I was blessed to have married her but cursed to not have enjoyed a life with her...

Then, suddenly I thought I heard Kiratsa whispering my name. I will never know for sure if I truly heard those two words or if I just wanted to hear them and my own mind fabricated them. All I remember was raising my head up and looking at Kiratsa’s lips as she was trying to open her eyes. Suddenly fear gripped my entire

body as I entered the yard and heard a sudden scream. It came from the ground floor of the house. It was a woman screaming. What could it be?

I felt cold all over. I was confused and worried as I ran toward the entrance of the house. My eyes were blinded with what seemed like whirlpools and I could not see where I was going. I had waited for this moment for years, counting the days before returning home and my aim was to arrive there exactly on the day of my wife’s sixty-second birthday.

It started to rain hard and dusk descended very fast. Suddenly it was night. It came as sudden as a blunt axe on the neck of a victim. Darkness soon became thick and opaque. A weak light filtered out from the window, emanating from some kind of petroleum fueled lantern.

My excitement was overpowering as I rushed madly to meet the woman who to me seemed like Kiratsa with her sweet and gentle smile, bursting with happiness, looking at me with her beautiful meek eyes, just like she had looked in her youthful days when we first met.

When I came closer I raised my eyes and I saw Kiratsa with her mild and restless eyes looking at me from the window on the lower floor. I don’t know if she recognized me. I smiled at her when I entered the room; apparently she was not aware of my return… and did not remember what we had discussed at our final meeting.

For a moment we stood aghast, looking at each other.

‘It was horrible! Like horror! I thought I would never see you again!’ Kiratsa said to me angrily. ‘I invested my entire life in you and you don’t seem to be grateful,’ she added.

I did not know what to say. Time was standing still as we looked at each other in silence with our eyes full of tears.

I hugged her and said: ‘May God be my witness that is not true. I always longed for you!’

Kiratsa was tired of talking about the injustices perpetrated by the powerful. They were what they were, period.

Time had slowly passed and eroded her beauty with its permanent traces.

She was wearing a green velvet dress and her smooth and plentiful hair was twisted into a bun. The best thing about her was her teary eyes when they were no longer tearing. When I looked at her face carefully I became anxious. It was full of wrinkles, looking like interlocking grooves. I looked at her again and thought: ‘These lines are the result of the secret pain in her life, a life spent waiting in sleeplessness, in fear…’ I wish I could take them and her pain away... All the ideals in the world were not worth the tears she shed for our child when he was taken away. They ruined all my hopes. I can no longer love anyone. I don’t want a life without my child. I don’t hate the people, I just feel better when they are not around me.

She stood beside the wooden chest in which she had carefully folded Doncho’s, my young son, clothes to safeguard them for his return. She kept all his stuff; shirts, shoes, sweaters, hats and socks. I noticed that she had also kept my hat from when I was a rebel. She loved all this stuff and was hoping that one day they would bring back our children who, by order of Queen Frederica, were sent to special camps here inside Greece...

I noticed that she had a couple of long wrinkles running down her cheeks. She watched me looking at her and said nothing. I noticed that there was an unspoken plea in her eyes, as if wanting to tell me something, perhaps something sad, but she said nothing. There was only silence. The pain she felt and the darkness that surrounded us had killed her desire to speak.

I remember our time well when we were young and in love, we were happy. Now Kiratsa looks sad and full of explosive feelings. I thought to myself: ‘Her soul has endured much torment and dark times!’

I hugged her again and said: ‘Kiratsa my love, I have returned to our nest!?’

She said nothing, but I still continued to hug and squeeze her while looking at the flowery dress that she was wearing.

I thought to myself: ‘She must have forgotten me? This is a disaster...’ I couldn’t help myself but think of the worst: ‘Surely Kiratsa must have lost her memory.’

She had no make up on her face but still she was beautiful. I hugged her again, this time harder, squeezing her in my arms, all the while thinking how can she have possibly lost her memory and how can there be a future with no past. Will I ever hear her beautiful voice sing again like she did in the old days when we were working in the fields? The thing that hurt me the most about this is, knowing that it is the woman that plans and makes the nest...

‘What is it?’ I whispered to her and, as she looked at me with a puzzled look on her face, I said: ‘I am Krsto. I am back. Why are you looking at me like that?’

She then blindly reached for my hand and I, excitedly, firmly grabbed hers. It felt like we were returning to the past.

Kiratsa sighed deeply and tried to smile. She lowered my hands into the trunk with Doncho’s folded clothing and nodded with her head trying to tell me something. I bowed down and touched the temple of her head. She shivered.

In the dark of night I asked her: “What is it? Don’t you remember me?’ Then I felt my own body shiver and my hands shake.

She slowly and gently shook her head. I then stroked her hair and said: ‘Kiratsa my love, what is it?’

I repeated the same question many times and after some time her eyes filled with tears and she said: ‘Come here sit down beside me.’

‘Are you crying?’ I asked her. ‘Yes I am!’ she replied and moved slightly over so that she could see me more clearly, then said: ‘The truth is I did not believe that one day I would see you…’

Now full of courage and confidence in herself she said: ‘I will tell you all about our only son… It is eating away at me to have given birth to a child and to then have that child taken away from me. This is the most terrible thing that could happen to a mother… her soul is all torn up inside…

For years after he was gone I waited for news from my little son Doncho, and nothing. Day by day ever since then my heart drips poison and I constantly curse those who took him, I curse the hidden hand of Queen Frederica for doing this to me and to all the mothers who lost their children in this way.

I don’t know if you know how far Queen Frederica’s boundaries of power can reach!?’

I could see the pain in her face and grief in her eyes as she recounted her story. Listening to her talk about our lost child and looking at her expressions made me very sad and sick to my stomach; it was killing me. There was no happiness in Kiratsa’s life and I felt responsible for that. I looked her straight in the eyes and noticed that she was crying again. She looked back at me and gave me a great big hug. I could see guilt in her face. She must have blamed herself for what happened. I hugged her right back and assured her that I loved her. I said to her: ‘I love you. I have always loved you. I am very happy to be here with you. Believe me, we will find our son!’

‘You are serious…?’ she replied and suddenly became a different person, a happy and cheerful person. Her eyes brightened up and she put on a great big smile. She was delighted at the prospect of finding our son.

‘I love you too!’ she whispered with eyes full of tears as she turned towards me. Now she felt confident and did not fear or want to escape the past or the burden of secrets concealed in her bosom.

Oh, what weight! What a great big weight, enough to crush a stone, had been lifted from her chest! Now she was ready to tell me everything from her life, a sad life that she lived alone here in our home.

‘For years,’ she said, ‘there has been no place of joy or of silence in our home. It was a place of sorrow, tears and loud crying. There were no children to run about, no children’s voices, no children’s laughter and no joy. They took our children and with them they took our happiness. They left all the mothers in pain and wounded with deep open wounds… wounds in our hearts and in our souls, wounds that don’t heal, wounds that constantly bleed and burn. There was nothing that could be done to ease our pain because the wounds were deep inside in our hearts and in our souls. We lived in fear and constant pain from the time we woke up. The fear and pain was there every day, waiting to greet us…’

Unfortunately her sudden joy was fleeting because now she felt sad, overwhelmed and choked up by the build up of sad feelings that she carried in her heart. I grabbed her hand and gently asked her to take her time and slowly tell me everything so that I could understand the feelings of inhumanity felt by these poor mothers who were deprived of their children. She agreed. Her voice was full of sympathy as she began to speak again, unfortunately with difficulty as her throat kept choking with each spoken word and her eyes filling with tears. It seemed like the floodgates were about to be opened and everything trapped in her heart and soul was about to come out. There had been a lot of suffering and it needed to come out.

Kiratsa remembered everything. She squeezed my hand and said: ‘Krsto, I wrote you about our son… they took him away from me by force. Not only our son, they took all the children from their mothers by order from Queen Frederica’.

She stopped talking and slowly walked over to the icon of the Virgin Mary. She stood up in front of it and began to curse: “Queen, as a mother may you burn in pain like I do so that you can understand what you have done to me! So that you may never feel joy for the hell you put us through! You took my child, may God strike you

dead! You took my beloved child and by doing so you ripped open my heart and soul! The souls of all the mothers! He was my only child… you took my only child and now, after so many years, I don’t know where he is?’

She then turned to me and said: ‘This is how I spent the last forty years of my life… moaning in pain…’

She continued with her cursing, hoping to get some relief. Some time later she stopped, turned to me and resumed her story.

‘Krsto,’ she said, ‘many trucks and guards came that January morning. There were two large dogs in front of each truck. Only the soldiers and police were allowed access. They grabbed my child and ordered me to stay back. I lacked the strength to do anything. He was our son, mine and yours… they took him from me by force… they tore him from my chest. He was the love and joy of my life.

He kept calling me: ‘Oh mother, dear mother, please don’t give me away!... I love you mother! I want to wait for father with you! Please don’t give me away…’ I love you a lot! Please write to father and the two of you come and get me! These are bad people and they will kill me… Please mother don’t let them take me…’

He continued to cry and yell: ‘Mother! Mother! Mother!...’ but what could I do? So I prayed and prayed and prayed for the safety of my only child. They would not tell us where they were taking the children and if they were going to keep them alive on not. It was a nightmare for all the mothers, we felt unbelievable pain… which would not subside… not even after all these years...

The roar of the truck engines and the barking of the dogs masked the cries of the mothers calling to their children while looking up, to a sky filled with smoke and dust, for relief.

With a step of uncertainty and with a distorted face, every mother pushed her way closer to the trucks to say just a few more words to their loved ones.’

At that point Kiratsa stopped talking and began to cry loudly. I thought to myself: ‘Nothing can comfort the pain of a mother. What kind of God, who listens to these cries and cursing of Queen Frederica every day, would allow this torment to go on and would do nothing to remedy the problem?’

Kiratsa regained her composure and resumed telling her story. She said: ‘Besides, no one could get near the trucks without being torn apart by those dogs. It was chaos. There was a line of heavily armed guards pushing the mothers back, every time one got near them.

Crying their eyes out, the mothers directed their curses at the individuals directly responsible and at the Queen Frederica, yelling: ‘Shame on you! Shame on the Queen! Shame on the state!...’

Kiratsa experienced her worst moment in that episode when the guards ordered her to stay back and the horrible dogs, trained to hate, lunged at her, pulling their leashes to the limit, trying to tear her apart. The sight of their vicious canine teeth, the eyes filled with hatred and fury and the loud barking made her skin crawl.

‘The soldiers,’ she said, ‘did not hesitate to use extreme force and beat us with everything they had. One commander waving his rifle hit me on the head with its butt. I was practically knocked unconscious. I was blinded by the blow and staggered around. I then saw a white-haired old man holding a stick and leaning on a wall some distance from the crowd. He too had been beaten and was weeping.’

Kiratsa wept as she told her story and every once in a while yelled out: ‘Please God! Please save our children...’

‘The military trucks, covered with a thick canvas,’ she said, ‘then began to roll on their way south following the road that led to the bare and dry Greek islands. This was terrible! I was struck with fear and horror and I could not help but think of the worst. It was a nightmare for all the mothers. We all ran after the trucks as fast as we could. It wasn’t too long after that we ran into a unit of gendarmes with dogs trained to kill. They stopped us from following

the trucks and beat us back with their rifle butts. All we could do was turn back and swear at them and curse them.’

Then, suddenly, Kiratsa’s eyes glistened strangely as she began to tell me that: ‘Everyone was crying; the old people, the women, the children… Everyone cried… All of Kostur was crying. It was terrible... The trucks left and the children could no longer see the lake... This was farewell for them from their beloved Kostur, their birthplace! The question in every child’s mind must have been: ‘Will I ever return to the place where I was born?’

Well, this is what the Queen Frederica did to us! A mother without feelings... This is how it was my dear Krsto… They treated us like dogs and then sent us home to our pain and loneliness…

‘They pulled him from my arms by force as we both kept crying,’ she said. ‘I can still remember the day vividly. The thought breaks me up, it torments me and blows my mind… I think of his childhood, of us being in love, of our hopes… but nothing helps. I am constantly alienated and feel like I am living in an unfair world… inside a storm… I want our son to return to us, to our home. Sometimes I want to go on living the life we lived before all this happened but I can’t.

What evil have these Greeks brought upon us? Every day they find ways to destroy the Macedonian family and the Macedonian home. Where did these Greeks come from? They must have come from a spiritually crippled civilization because everything they do to us natives, in their reality they perceive as something quite normal… But in our reality it is genocide… They want to get rid of us… force us out of our native homes and lands… force us out of our native Kostur.

There is an old saying: ‘When the Greeks came God left Macedonia…’

She then looked at me and said: ‘I have no more tears to shed. Sometimes I want to go on with life but, from where I stand and since they took my child, I no longer have the strength. They

grabbed him like he was a dog, but not just mine many of our children...’

* * *

When we were lying in bed I told her everything that they did to me on the island and that they ruined my ability to reproduce by destroying my manhood. I said to her: ‘I am very sorry. I don’t want to bring you more pain but I need you to know the truth… They destroyed my manhood. I also knew that you would wait for me.’

It was not something that she took lightly. My words weighed heavy in her heart. I could tell by the beads of sweat that formed on her forehead and by her tear filled eyes looking at me. She laid her head on my shoulder, closed her eyes, took a deep breath and said: ‘So, they destroyed our family line!’

Kiratsa got out of bed, walked around the room and then stood by the window staring into the dark. Our lives and the lives of many people from Kostur had been lost somewhere in that thick darkness. She crossed herself and said: ‘Dear Lord, give me strength to endure what I cannot change… How can I accept this? How can I accept these beastly acts purposely perpetrated by our occupiers to destroy us… God, only you know… And we, all we do is keep silent and flee! How can we not know that the foundations of Kostur were laid by our great ancestor King Samoil?

These people who grabbed my child and took him away from me were neither by appearance nor behaviour, ordinary people, they were blood thirsty monsters!

Yes! They are people from a spiritually crippled civilization. These people greedily killed our Ilinden predecessors and now our children... For years they have committed genocide against us.

They changed our names because our ancestors believed that a man’s name was essential to his identity, and his identity made the man who he is!

They changed our ethnic composition by bringing strangers to Macedonia, Turkish Christian colonists and settlers from Asia Minor.

They prohibited us from speaking our Macedonian language, the mother tongue of our people… which is a basic human right…

They erased our history which we carried with us from generation to generation passed on from our grandfathers, which has been part of our consciousness, our spiritual sustenance...

They took over our holy churches and persecuted our priests. Those who protested were slain… beheaded… and no one knows where they tossed their bodies.

They destroyed our monuments and cemeteries.

I am aware that we Macedonians don’t expect these invaders to love us but we do expect them to use a little common sense in the way they treat us, especially from their Queen. From the common man right up to the Queen, all these thirty or more years, no common sense was used. That is because their basic plan has always been to destroy us and to erase everything about us from history. Their main goal was to erase everything Macedonian including the Macedonian identity and in their books to call us the nameless dead.’

* * *

Kiratsa had survived a terrible ordeal. She experienced strong dark feelings, so strong that she believed they were going to kill her before she saw our son Doncho again.

Her years of separation from our little son, her longing for him, her sadness and dark thoughts, all piled up in her soul. She lived feeling guilty because she believed that she had given up our son easily and that thought upset her very much.

She felt useless. She did not have anything else left to do but pray for our son to be alive.

One day she knelt down and put her head on his little bed and remembered how she had held him in her arms. When he was about five years old he told his mother: ‘Mommy, I will be the man of the house until daddy comes back. I will protect you from the bad people… Don’t cry, don’t worry, one day daddy will come back.’ And as my grandmother used to say: ‘He is a brave little freedom fighter heroically defending Kostur…’

She looked disturbed, her lips were trembling. She turned away from me so that I would not look at her when she cried... Seeing her this way upset me very much...

She went back to the wooden chest and refolded Doncho’s tiny clothes. Who knows whether he is alive or not… we lived with the hope that he was and listened to the rumours of where they may have taken him. There was a circulating rumour that the children were taken to some island where they were being taught skills and that one day they would be returning.

Most of the time, day and night, Kiratsa spent her time in front of the icon cursing Queen Frederica. She begged God to punish her, as a mother, as a woman, and send her to hell. ‘How can she be a Queen,’ she used to yell out, ‘and do this to innocent children and to the mothers who bore them… to snatch them from their homes and ruin their family line? She does not resemble a queen! Oh God, destroy her family line like she has destroyed mine… let her feel how I feel...’

Every day it was the same thing… silence followed by a lot of lamenting. Sometimes our silence was our lamenting.

There was always the look of fear and concern on her face. One day she quickly sat, drooped on a chair. I looked at her. She looked as white as a ghost. She looked back at me but with a very strange look, like a person who had just survived a severe shock. She kept shaking her head while staring at me.

As time went on in our loneliness, she cried less and less and kept silent more and more. She had less and less of a desire to continue living.

I thought to myself: ‘Is this the end? Is the end near, knocking on the door, knocking on my head? In Kostur there are unfaithful but also faithful, there are suspicions and slaughter, there are murders and burnings and there is the collapse of the family. Our failures have divided us, our murders have disconcerted us. Is this the end? Is that it?’

I remembered Kostur differently. I remembered Kostur to be a place where the young pledged their love to each other… where people were happy to be together. And now?!

Sometimes life makes you want to forget who you are?

Kiratsa was not the only one living with such pain. Thousands of Macedonian mothers cried for their loved ones and cursed, swore, screamed and shouted, wondering how Queen Frederica, a trusted woman, who after World War II the people viewed like a second Virgin Mary, could reach so low as to kidnap innocent children, snatch them from the arms of their crying mothers, like some kind of she wolf? All the mothers lit candles and prayed to the Virgin Mary to punish the Queen and to do to her as she had done to them. The Mothers of the taken children even signed a petition and sent it to all the queens of the world to let them know the kind of evil that had been done to them. All Christian women also asked their churches to condemn this act.

* * *

Kiratsa used to write to me in prison and tell me many things about our son. Then one day she wrote and said that they had taken him. At this point I did not want to live and contemplated suicide. Then I found out that this whole hellish Greek strategy was invented by Queen Frederica. It was a planned genocide perpetrated against the Macedonian people to destroy the Macedonian home and the Macedonian family. This genocidal act was most probably designed to make life a living hell for the thousands of Macedonian mothers who lost their children. And in reality it didn’t take long for this plan to come to fruition. Mothers were indeed thrown into oblivion and their pain and suffering eventually tore up their families. The

mothers, for years, continued to live lives filled with anger and eternal longing for their children.

This kind of genocidal behaviour, having children taken away from their mothers, was uncommon in the history of mankind. But think about it. If you are to destroy the cubs of a wolf, a bear, a fox in the wild… then you destroy the line of that animal. Well, this is what Queen Frederica has done to us!

* * *

Look how many years have already passed and still both Kiratsa and I live miserable lives, waiting for our son to return and still there is no trace of him. Our souls are bleeding and have blackened with sorrow… and all we can do is pray...

After my return from the island in hell we were unable to have more children, not only because we were too old… but because it was my fault... I lost my manhood… It was my punishment from my tormentor… my executioner… he might as well have killed me then and there. He was a blood-thirsty monster for doing this inhuman thing to me… Also our time to reproduce had passed...

They say a man truly dies when the last memory of him dies. My memories of my Kiratsa will never fade.

Many years had passed since Kiratsa and I had seen each other. By the time I returned home she was not only an old woman but was unable to show any feelings or even talk to me. A lifetime of torment and pain made things difficult for her, especially talking about things that weighed heavily on her… and on me. She continuously used to say: ‘They grabbed my baby! I was alone and powerless! They took something very precious from me, the very thing that made me think of you… of our future… Nothing hurts more than the tears of a child… what else can I tell you dear Krsto? When I heard him crying… my Doncho… why can’t Queen Frederica, as a mother, understand that?’

Her eyes were always filled with tears. She would hug me and whisper: ‘I want my son back, my only son. God, please God, return him to me!’

Every day she repeated this. She would close her eyes, bow her head down and then open her arms and cry out: ‘How can we live without Doncho?’ After she hugged me she would pull away and shake her head. I felt sorry for her every time and would say to her: ‘I love you… I will always love you… For a fleeting moment there would be a look in her eyes, a familiar look I recognized from the past, but that look would quickly be replaced with a look filled with fear. She was always afraid that Doncho had been taken away to be killed…

One day, in the old house, she was quiet, too quiet. The silence was deafening. It was scary...” concluded Krapov, lowering his head and going deep into thought.

I could not help but feel sorry for him… and at the same time admire him… Krsto Krapov was like an old tree with deep roots in this country and in Kostur Region. He loved his country and the city Kostur immensely because it was the soil that sustained his family and people for many generations. Krsto did not care much for the invaders, past or present. It was sad to hear that he watched his wife Kiratsa suffer and wither away… It was heart-breaking. The poor woman cried herself unconscious every time she looked at a photograph of their son. Every moment of every day she spent thinking of him, imagining the worst and having fits of anger, pain and anguish… feeling bitter, helpless and unable to fulfill her only wish… his safe return home… She did not know where he was and how he was doing, so every thought of him, every memory of him brought tears to her eyes and pain and bitterness to her heart and soul...

Look at the poor man. He looks so sad it seems like he has forgotten what he wanted to tell me. As I watched him struggle with his demons, I could not help myself but think of my own fate. I noticed many stunning similarities in the way we both have suffered.

Krapov’s face had many more wrinkles than my own, his hair was completely white, his teeth were broken and cracked and his eyes

looked faded and very tired. But in spite of all these differences, our similarities in our mental anguish were nevertheless very similar. We both have experience enough torment and injustice to last us many lifetimes. Our pain is the same pain that our fathers and grandfathers have experienced; whose bones now lie in heaps in unmarked graves or are scattered all over the mountains being bleached by the sun. This is where our common pain lies…

* * *

After a short silence, Krapov recovered from his thoughts and, as if swallowing something, his voice broke up when he tried to speak.

He composed himself, looked at me and said: “Oh, my dear friend! I want to say a few things about our genocide… About all those Greeks, be they communists, fascists, democrats or whatever, who say we do not exist, about all those who let the war happen, be they the English, the Americans, the Yugoslavs or whoever. I want to talk about all those from our side who played the communist card and rode rabid horses to the end, thinking that they were solving the ‘Macedonian Question...’ I want to talk about those who forced our Macedonian people to fight in the war and as a result lost their lives and about those who survived and were exiled and lost their ancestral lands... That’s who I want to talk about…

History recognizes tragic events like the separation of children from their parents. Regardless of motive, the violent separation of my child Doncho from his mother and me will always bear the hallmark of tragedy. The violent separation of a child from its parents is an immeasurable tragedy for both the child and the parents. The violent separation of thousands of children from their parents is a catastrophe not only for the individuals involved but also for the entire nation. This has happened to us. This catastrophic genocide has been perpetrated against the Macedonian people! And what do we do about it? We keep silent! We keep silent about a perpetrated evil! About this intentional injustice! There are no words that you can say to me that will convince me to believe that this was not intentional! The displacement of the Macedonian children from Greek occupied Macedonia was part of a planned strategy of ethnically cleansing Macedonia.

In the old days they killed a man because he entered the Exarchate Church in Kostur or because he entered the new Patriarchate Church belonging to Bishop Karavangelis. A man entering a foreign church… They considered this a strange act.

This naturally had tragic and devastating consequences for the Macedonian nation. Macedonians were being killed for practically nothing. This genocidal project was started in the beginning of the 20th century. And what did we do then? We kept silent. Here is what an Andart wrote about this in his book: ‘While looking for living space for the Greek state, necessary for the economic and national survival of the Greeks, the first goal of the government in Athens was to acquire Macedonian lands but not with its population.’ Even a blind man can see what this looked like… Even then, Greece wanted Macedonia without the Macedonian people! How blind could we have been, not to see that?”

Krapov became visibly upset after he said that. His dry, wrinkled face turned pale. Finding out from Kiratsa that their child had been forcibly taken from them by Queen Frederica not only proved that the Greek plan to eradicate the Macedonians from Macedonia was being implemented but it was carried out in such an unheard of tragic, frightening manner. On top of that, the Greek plan to eradicate the Macedonians became a personal reality for Krsto Krapov…

After his return from the island and after seeing his wife Kiratsa, who every day had to live in agony until she sank completely into depression, he remained without words… speechless.

He looked at me with a sad look on his face and said: “Now in my old age, I have realized that the truth and the facts can not be denied, they are on our side. Listen to me! My sad fate is the same fate that thousands of Macedonians share!

Several years ago, I decided to research this evil; the forceful removal of our underage children from our homes and the persecution of our villagers. For years I have read and collected everything that has been written, everything has been said by those

who remained here and by those who wandered off and are now roaming the world. I have come to believe that this was done on purpose by all Greeks, communists and fascists alike. It was a genocidal act ruthlessly perpetrated by the Greeks, enemies of the Macedonian people, for the sole purpose of taking our homes and lands. They have been slowly and progressively destroying the Macedonian family and home, by any means possible, to achieve their goal: ‘a Macedonia without Macedonians’.

As difficult as it was to believe what was being done to us, it was even more difficult to imagine a situation were young mothers, grandparents, brothers and sisters looked on helplessly while they ripped our children away from us and tormented our most loved ones.

In other words, what the Germans did to the Jews was child’s play in comparison to what Queen Frederica did to us,” concluded Krapov.

Krsto Krapov, from a very young age, lived and grew up in a neighbourhood full of Jewish people. Many of his peers and friends were Jews. These friendships unfortunately were interrupted during World War II when the Germans, led by Hitler, occupied Greece. At that time almost all the Jews were deported to various concentration camps and never returned to their homes in Kostur. Since then Krapov was tormented by the question: ‘Why did Hitler persecute the Jews so much more than the others?’ And now, only a few years later, this very ghastly genocidal act was being perpetrated against the Macedonians by the Greeks, led by Queen Frederica. They violently snatched Macedonian children from their mothers and sent them to camps in the dry Greek islands!? Why?” concluded Krapov.

Well, let us now have a look at what the ‘chronicles of military strategy’ have to say about these violent genocidal abductions called ‘save the children’ programs perpetrated by: A / Queen and Frederica, and B / by the communists who had the same goals!

Regarding this terrible endeavour that caused a lot of suffering for both mothers and children, Krapov said: “The queen found herself a winner but her conduct cannot just be compared to that of Hitler

alone, or to Beria of the Soviet Union who resettled thousands of people in Siberia when he found himself to be a winner. The Queen, with her cleverness, according to her propaganda, did this to protect the children and population in general from the terrible partisans!”

Let us have a look at the clever games they played and how they informed the world. Let us have a look at the historical data kept in the secret archives: “The motives and measures put forth by the Athens government for initiating the Pedomazoma” i.e. the removal of Macedonian children from their families and homes (A Measure of Understanding).

According to Klars Barentzen, both sides in the Greek Civil War did exactly the same thing; they removed children from the population. One side did exactly the same thing as the other. The reason and necessity for this were basically the same; to save the children. And from investigations carried out it was difficult to disclose what the exact motives were and who started the program first. And then there were Queen Frederica’s pedopolis’s (cities of children).

Fifty-four pedopolis’s were established across Greece in the period between 1947 and 1950. Twenty-three were established in Athens alone, eleven in Solun and the rest in Lerin, Kavala, Yanina, Volos, Lamia, Agrinio, Patra, as well as on the islands Leros, Corfu, Syros, Rhodes, Tinoena and Mitilini. And what was to be the role of the Macedonian children in these Greek pedopolis’s?

The Macedonian children were taught to be loyal citizens of the Greek state and, without reserve, the strong Greek nation, which was in accordance with the basic principles of traditional Greek nationalism. Greece was a nation – state, a state whose citizens were all members of the same homogeneous Greek nation, community and culture.

As for the partisans, DAG fighters in the ranks of the Communists and fathers and mothers of most of the Macedonian children forcibly taken from them; they were referred to as bandits, criminals and traitors. Here is what the Greeks had to say about them: “The partisans burned villages, destroyed homes, exterminated whole families, killed innocent people and, worse than that, kidnapped