On the Road of Time – Chapter 19 - Part 02

“Once we had transported all the wounded we were ordered to transport the entire refugee population to Durres,” resumed Stefo, but his story was then picked up by Stoina who said: “At night the road was lined with trucks. Everywhere there were bulletins and people calling out for us to collect our things and gather together near the trucks in groups by villages. So we did as we were asked and they told us that we were leaving Prenies. Naturally we all thought that we were going home. But the moment the trucks pulled away from Prenies along the flat road we knew that we were not going home. It seemed that we were on the road for a long time as the trucks drove very slowly, stopping often to pick up more people along the way. Some of these people, hiding in the forest, were there for days and even weeks under the naked sky sleeping on the bare ground. They were bitter, scared, dirty, thirsty and hungry but kept silent and to themselves. We were packed tight against one another in those trucks as they took us to a city called Durres. Finally they offloaded us on the sides of the road and told us to wait there until the rest of the refugees arrived. The trucks kept bringing more and more people all day long and the next day. They offloaded them all along the coast in and around the swamp. The place was a sea of people. The grounds all around us were a garbage dump and had an awful stench. This was where the coastal waves brought and dumped the garbage from the sea. There were thousands of people packed together standing person to person on the bare ground near the smelly swamp. And we constantly asked ourselves, ‘Where will they take us?’ More and more people continued to arrive some transported on trucks, some on foot. It seemed like the entire country was gathered here in this bare, swampy meadow by the sea, overgrown with thorns and with tall sharp barbs and smelling rotten. It seemed that there was no end to the day, to the night and to the cold winds that carried cold air and droplets of brine from the sea. The sea was active, thundering day and night with its high waves beating the shore. I don’t know which day it was when they arrived with their notepads, calling us each by name and placing us one behind another in a line. They asked us for our names and, along with our places of birth, registered us in their notebooks again. They asked us many times for our names and places of birth and many times they wrote them down in their notebooks and not just our names and places of birth but also how many sheep and goats, horses, calves, oxen, cows, chickens, blankets, woollen blankets, socks, sweaters, chairs, spoons, knives and forks we had given to the struggle. How many days we had spent digging trenches and building bunkers, carrying rocks and logs uphill, carrying wounded, how many of our children big and small they had taken, how many were killed and wounded and how many were crippled was also written down in their notebooks. They had all that information in their notebooks. Everything that we had given them they wrote in their notebooks. What they had not written in those notebooks was the amount of pain we had endured and the tears we had shed in our agony; nobody had written that down because nobody wanted to know about it. And so, lacking in those notebooks was our pain, our tears, our loneliness, our waiting for our children to come back ... and for us to go home again... After being registered we picked up our bags with our last meagre possessions and, bent over from the weight, we left on foot. We walked very slowly keeping pace with the old and sick people who could not walk fast. We did not have far to go. We soon passed through a large iron gate and entered a huge courtyard. We were astonished by the size of the vehicle we saw at the end of the courtyard. It was huge… Those who had been on such a vehicle before said it was a ship. It was huge and black and they told us to go towards it and climb up those narrow ladders hanging from it.

Those who could walk went up the narrow and unsteady ladders fearing they would fall and be consumed by the black water that boiled beneath them. Those who were sick and old and could not navigate the unsteady ladders were put inside big baskets and hoisted up by the chains and ropes that hung from them. People were crying and yelling, afraid of what was going to happen to them. Some whispered that they feared they would be thrown into the sea... Past the stairs at the top of the ship we were greeted by young women, dressed in white coats, who took us by the arm and escorted us down another set of stairs. Inside the ship they put us in large granaries, that we later came to call ‘barns’, with many rows of beds. The barns were warm and we were very tired and cold so we had no problem lying down and resting on the beds. All the doors or lids above the barns were closed but it was not dark, they turned lights on inside. We could feel the ship rock gently, that’s when some men who had been on ships before said that the ship was moving. After a while the women wearing white handed out plates and spoons and later brought baskets full of white bread and pots filled with sweet smelling stew. They filled our plates to the top and gave us plenty of bread and said we could have more if we wanted. Then came the doctors who examined us from head to toe. Patients were separated. They also separated the women with small babies and small children. Then the women in white began to spray us with a white powder. They said the dust would kill both the lice and their eggs. The women dressed in white were good to us during the trip. They fed us well and looked after us and when they spoke to us we could understand some of their words. We were so surprised that we figured they were ‘our’ (Macedonian) people pretending to be different people. So I asked one, ‘Dear girl, let me ask you something, are you one of ours?’ ‘Yes, I am one of yours,’ she replied. So then I thought to myself, look at her pretending and to check if she was pretending I pointed to the mouth with my finger and she said, ‘Mouth, nose, eye, head, teeth, leg, foot, knee… ‘She is pretending I am sure she is pretending,’ I said to the other women. Then I pointed at my tongue and she said, ‘Tongue.’ I again said to the women ‘I am pretty sure she is one of ours but she is pretending...’ The next morning they opened up the lids above and told us we could get out. We got out and being afraid of falling, we held each other by the hand, by the shabby dress, or by whatever else our hands could grab. And what was there to see? Water, more water and the sky above it… A few days later we all became seasick. Our heads were aching with pain. No bread and no water, we could not even look at food without violently vomiting and having bad diarrhea. It was like that… One day the sea all around us became covered with dense fog. It seemed like the water and the sky had all turned into milk. The fog was so dense that we couldn’t see one another. The ship roared and roared as we all sat huddled together crying and shaking with fear, thinking that our end was near and now that nothing was visible, they would toss us into the sea. Then a strong wind blew and disbursed the fog and some time later we heard the siren of another ship in the near vicinity. That’s when they told us to quickly go down into the barns and keep quiet because an English warship was approaching. They told us that if the English heard any noise they would open fire on us with their big guns. We covered our mouths and noses with our hands and kept quiet. We were afraid. We had this great fear that any second now they would fire on us. But they didn’t… Later we found out that our captain had told the English captain that he was carrying tourists… Were there any dead? Yes, many of the old people that could not endure the hardships of the trip died. Their bodies were wrapped in blankets and they were tossed in the sea. That was it, no ceremony, no prayer, no nothing.

All we heard was the splash. There was a person and then there was no person. I wondered what would happen to the souls of those people. Would they aimlessly whirl around the water? Most often they tossed the dead bodies overboard at night so that we didn’t see them... Were there many sick? Yes there were. The sick were looked after by the doctors and nurses. Did I leave anything in Prenies? A few days before they took us from Prenies, my husband died. He was burdened for months and unable to get up. His back was full of sores and he was rotting. The doctor saw him a couple of times and said that his liver was failing and there was nothing that he could do. He died during the night and was buried in the dark in a shallow grave in the cemetery on top of the hill. The ground was stony and it was difficult to dig a deep hole. There was no priest at the funeral. We had a priest but the Communists had shaven him. They were cruel and they did cruel things. I went to the cemetery and lit pine sticks for nine days in a row, to give him and the others some light. We had no candles. The pine sticks smouldered over my husband’s grave and over the other graves giving them some light until the sticks burned out. God bless his soul, I left him there under the hill and who knows whether there will ever be someone to light a candle for him... and will he and those beside him remain in darkness for centuries? Perhaps a traveller will someday find his or her way to the Prenies cemetery and will light a candle. My husband will lie there and, God willing, if I survive, I will go to visit him. I will light proper candles for him and for all of them... And who and where will they light candles for those who were tossed overboard, off the ship and into the sea? We spent twelve days and nights in the water traveling in the sea until we arrived in a big city with many ships and what seemed to us like very bright lights. Where was all this brightness coming from, we wondered? Then we overheard people saying that we had arrived in Poland, but where was Poland, was it near our homeland? We got off the ship down steep stairs one behind the other. The sick, the old and the women with babies were lowered to the ground in baskets. Then they told us to go to the other side and board a train waiting for us… When we walked inside the cars we found many people crying. A woman was running around like crazy from the train to the ship and back yelling at the top of her lungs crying, begging, looking for her baby that was missing. ‘Please people my little girl is missing, please help me find her, my child is missing, my little girl is missing…’ she kept yelling. Other women, mothers, also began to cry repeating that a child was missing and could not be found… (The child was later found. For those who are interested to learn more about this episode and about the fate of the girl as an adult please read the news article by Ivan Andonov printed in Nova Makedonija in 1973 and in Vecher.) Unfortunately for the poor mother and for all of us, the train left without the little girl. The little girl’s mother and father were crushed and broken hearted. The train left and travelled all day along a never ending long flat plain. There were no mountains, not even a hill, the land was flat like a pan everywhere with sown fields and forests to the left and to the right of the train tracks... The only rough terrain we saw was in the small town where the Poles moved us but there were no mountains, not even sizable hills. I do not know why, but I got a lump in my throat and my chest became tight. I became grief

stricken missing my village and those damn desolate and bloody mountains that I had left behind... After they cleaned us up with hot water and soap, boiled and washed our dirty clothes, dressed us in warm clothing, fed us well and housed us in warm and clean houses, we began to take inventory of ourselves and to ask about our living and about our dead. We began to take inventory of the maimed and crippled and of those lost. We gathered together and began to mourn and honour our departed. We began to come to the realization that we were exiled from our homes, villages and homeland and we were now living, as some would say, in the houses of the Germans who used to live here but were driven out. Even though a lot of time had passed, three years and forty-nine days, we continued to practice our own customs as we had practiced them at home. We quickly weaved baskets and placed boiled wheat, bread and a bit of fruit in them and went from house to house, from person to person to dispense some for the souls of those lost. Again and again we gathered in these strange and abandoned houses to mourn the dead and the living and our own fate. We had no priest to perform ceremonies and the churches and cemeteries around us were all Catholic...” concluded Stoina. Lena now took the opportunity to tell her story: “Our disarmed fighters were also taken to the Port of Durres where they waited for a Russian transport ship to take them. We were lined up in front of the unsteady narrow ladders military style, in one great big column organized in battalions, brigades and platoons and climbed on board the ship. We were then taken down into the ship’s bowels, packed together and told to keep silent. There were many levels. On top and below us were nailed boards creating several levels in a single holding tank. They kept loading us and packing us all night. We took our place inside the ship and kept silent, we did not even ask where they were taking us. We were soldiers, right? Soldiers are trained to keep quiet, obey orders and not ask questions. We thought that they would take us somewhere and then give us our weapons the same way they had given us our weapons at the approaches to Gramos after our withdrawal from Vicho. Our ship called ‘Michurin’, which had its name written in the Cyrillic alphabet, suddenly moved and began to leave the coast. In the distance we could see the road and the trucks that had brought us here and as we moved away into the distance we could hear the trucks blowing their horns. The sound of truck horns became one with the ship’s sirens... We later learned that the drivers had synchronized blowing their horns as the ship sailed out in order to say ‘goodbye’ to us. We were only allowed to come out of the ‘barns’ and go on deck at night. It was good to be out, to breathe clear air and watch the stars and the moon. The stars were not as large as we were used to them over our mountains. We were told that at the sound of the ship’s sirens blowing three times we were to quickly return to the barns and keep silent. On the left side of the ship we could see land with barely visible trembling lights in the distance. Someone said that the land beyond the coast was Greece so many of us thought that they were going to offload us somewhere, arm us and send us into battle to bring them new victories. But the ship kept going and never stopped and we continued to look for lights from both sides of the ship. We had a sailor among us who was able to tell the direction we were going by watching the stars. We were going north he used to say, after passing by several islands one after another as we approached Constantinople. At this point we were locked in the barns and forbidden from venturing out or talking because Turkish ships were sailing beside our ship. We were sailing but we had no idea where we were going. Others knew and assumed we knew. A seaman said we had entered the Marmara Sea but none of us knew what that was, never mind where it was.

All we knew were our mountains; that’s all we knew. Then the seaman said that we were entering the Black Sea. That’s when they allowed us to come out of the barns in the morning. From time to time our ship roared its siren greeting other ships passing by flying red flags with the star, hammer and sickle. We knew they were Soviet ships. Finally we arrived in Odessa where they offloaded us and loaded us onto train cars. By now we knew that we were far away from our homeland and when the train pulled out, we realized that we were going even further. The train ride was long, very long; we could not have imagined that there could be such a great wide desert with no end. But it had an end; everything has an end, but what kind of end? They offloaded us at the end of the station. The sign read ‘Tashkent’, it was written in Cyrillic letters. But where was Tashkent? Was it near to or far from our homeland? We were moved into barracks just outside of Tashkent. The higher-ups were given numbers and by those numbers the barracks became known as towns. There were the first, second, tenth, twelfth and so on town. They were called towns not because they were towns but because they were camps. Yes they were camps... This is where they had held the Japanese captives who they had released earlier in the year… or maybe earlier than that. Now they put us there in their place, the fighters who had fought against Anglo-American imperialism. The fighters who had fought for freedom and democracy were now housed in the barracks where they had held Japanese prisoners. Well, that was life. You never knew when you were up and when you were down. When we arrived they bathed us and gave us clean underwear on top of which we wore our old army clothes. Every day we were soldiers but we were clean and fed. We were present and accounted for every morning after which we did gymnastics and after that we were sent to the military mess hall, following the same schedule as we were used to before, along with the same commanders and political commissars. After some time they freed us from our military uniforms and allowed us to dress in civilian clothing. We felt uncomfortable and strange suddenly being dressed in civilian clothing without our military shoes, pants, shirts, hats and without orders and commanders. At the same time we were happy, very happy to be still alive... Yes... What about the lice? We left most of the lice in Albania. They kept cleaning us in Bureli for an entire month until we were almost free from lice. It was not easy to get rid of all the lice so we brought some here to Tashkent. Lice with two legs and with informing and denouncing voices. Did we work? Yes we did… We did all sorts of jobs that required a shovel or a pickaxe. Not that we were educated or anything, so that they could give us office work. We mostly worked in construction. We carried bricks, concrete, hardwood, iron bars, etc., all on our shoulders. From villagers to soldiers we now became a construction force. And here in Tashkent, our leaders, those from the political side, shed new slogans upon us: ‘We will defeat imperialism by building socialism!’... and that’s how they moulded our minds in the same manner as we kneaded dough... Do you know how dough is kneaded? In Tashkent we built our nests, created our families and kept our language, rituals, songs and dances alive. For many, Tashkent was part of our youth which we left in the factories of distant Uzbekistan, part of our freedom. For some Tashkent was the last station in life. Many waited for their wives and children to come from other countries. The ones that waited the most were the ones who had wives and children in Yugoslavia. These people were not even allowed to correspond with their families until later in the fifties after Stalin died. When Khrushchev came into power he declared war on Stalinism. In Poland the workers caused an insurrection and a revolution was started in Hungary. And we in Tashkent rebelled against one another.

Tito and Khrushchev made peace with each other and all sins were forgiven. Even after the great damage that was done to us! Those responsible for the damage were identified but the only punishment they received was their expulsion from the Party... Then, in those days, being removed from the Party was a serious punishment. It meant that you were locked out of everything, you were excluded from everything and you remained alone and nothing existed for you and all around you. The responsible were named by name at the plenums and congresses and that’s when we realized and understood that we were ruined, dispersed, let down. We were a people without a crumb of a chance of repatriation. We had become a people without roots and without veins, a homeless people. The thieves had robbed us and the liars had led us astray. We had become a displaced people... And to think that in the past these very same people had thought of themselves as the brightest heads, they held that the highest wisdom lay in the deepest kindness. Not only did they not have any wisdom but they also had no kindness whatsoever. They only sowed and planted evil... All those who had passed through the vice of time before and after the defeat, with my greatest desire I want to leave them with their thoughts, memories and pains that are not only part of them, but part of their life. But I just can’t free myself from the questions that constantly haunt me: ‘Who is to blame?’ For every crime there is always a perpetrator. Who is the perpetrator of this crime? Has this crime expired? Is there anyone who feels remorse? And until when will they lead our people astray, until when will they ill shape their fate and destiny? Until when will they make our people’s misfortune their fortune? And how long will they divide us?... You ask me about those in the NOF leadership? They were arrested and taken away from us. Like they say, they were ‘isolated’ from us. Moscow condemned them and jailed them in the camps in Siberia. Zahariadis had taken a hand against Macedonian organizations before but this time he used the opportunity to completely crush them along with the Macedonian alphabet and the Macedonian language. He alleged that they, our language and alphabet, were Tito’s creations. He found a semi-literate person, who I believe was from Bapchor, who attempted to create a new patchwork Macedonian language of largely Bulgarian and some Russian words. In the southeast of Poland, in a vacant Ukrainian village called Kroshchenko, they established a kolkhoz and called it ‘Nov Zhivot’ (New Life) and there they settled two or three thousand Macedonians and Greeks. They turned the Ukrainian Orthodox Church into a cinema and named it ‘Partizan’ which was famous not so much for showing Soviet war movies, but more for gathering all of Zahariadis’s Eastern European worshipers and forming the ‘People’s Liberation and Revolutionary Organization of the Slavo-Macedonians’ called ‘ILINDEN.’ One of the main goals of this Organization was to work against Tito and Kolishevski’s clique and against the Association of Aegean Macedonians in Skopje, which worked against Zahariadis’s clique. Now as I tell you about this, a bug buzzes near my ear: What was going on in the minds of those migrants and displaced people who obviously were the same people with the same roots? (Meaning what was going on between the Macedonians from Greece living inside Yugoslavia and those living in other communist countries?) On one side we had the Aegeans and on the other the Slavo-Macedonians. Were they called that because someone did not want them to be Macedonians? Then and now, after more than half a century had passed, there are still many unanswered questions. Why did the Macedonian fighters not come to the rescue of the twelve NOF and AFZH leaders? Why did they not speak in their defence? Surely there were many Macedonian fighters and, in terms of strength, they had the upper hand. Why did they not oppose the charges the Greeks levelled against them?

Why? Whom did they believe more, the Greeks or their own people? Why did no one stand in their defence in Bureli when Zahariadis and his cohorts pushed them onto the stage and one by one named them traitors and spies, each by name? Why not then and why not afterwards, while they were in the Siberian camps, did no one say a word in their defence and no one asked whether they were dead or alive? And why after they were released from the camps did no one ask where and how they had spent their lives? Now that they had been released from prison and rehabilitated as they say, why did none of the twelve go and speak with the former fighters and the people, whom they had gathered and sent into battle, telling them that not a single Macedonian man or woman should be left out from the battle lines? Why did neither side take the initiative to air out their differences and cleanse their souls and say whatever happened, happened; let us put the past behind us? Why did the battle continue in Tashkent, Macedonians fighting against Macedonians? Did no one in Tashkent ever stop for a moment and wonder why the twelve were discharged from the Siberian prisons? And on the other hand, did none of the so-called leaders find the courage to appear before the ex-fighters, now workers in the Soviet Union Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Poland and say something to console them? Why did they allow Zahariadis to manipulate them all? Why did the twelve return to Skopje before everyone else did? If they were good leaders they should have returned last! The twelve settled themselves in Alma Ata, capital of Kazakhstan and all the time they looked for opportunities to return to Skopje. They were the first to immigrate to Skopje where they were awarded high positions in the state. Lazo (Kolishevski) did not forget them and neither did Belgrade and they in turn did not forget Lazo or Belgrade. They were back with old friends who remembered and did not forget them. That’s exactly how it was. Here in Skopje the opponents clashed again one calling the other defector and the other calling the first traitor, thus invigorating their mutual hatred. They appointed themselves defenders of the Aegeans and began pointing fingers at each other without accepting any responsibility or feeling any remorse for their involvement in what had happened to our people. Lazo personally had to keep a careful balance between the two parties making sure that their mutual dislike did not turn into a nightmare. Who had created this strife and why? Both parties attracted supporters with promises of better jobs, finding an apartment faster, better choice of residence etc. Anyone refusing to join one party or the other found themselves alone on the sidelines... Neither side could find common ground to stand on at the national table until judgment day when their division became permanent. Instead of working for the good of the thousands of destitute people they both chose the path of destruction and continued to throw personal insults at each other. Each group believed that they were going ‘in the right direction’ and they constantly quarrelled without even the slightest gesture of reconciliation. Until judgment day they vilified and spat at each other from the distance and never reached out and extended a hand... Their loathing for each other was deep seated and festered in their thoughts and their behaviour boiled with strife, hatred, intolerance and disunity. Each in their own way shared some truth but no one wanted to openly share the ‘entire real truth’... And now that we are on the subject of ‘Aegeans’ I don’t want to forget this. This is what they called themselves at first when they were still soft. I am thinking of those who became Yugoslavs. So that they could be distinguished from the others they decided to call themselves ‘Aegeans’, not Macedonians from that part of Macedonia, but only ‘Aegeans.’ Was it by their own will and conviction, or by necessity that they requested from the central and local governments to register the ‘Association of Aegeans’ and to publish the newspaper ‘Glas na Egeitsite’ (Voice of the Aegeans)?

They gathered in the club for the ‘Aegeans’ and cared for the ‘Aegeans’ located in villages around Skopje, Bitola and Kumanovo, even for those located in Vojvodina. Then one day Paul, the Greek king, decided to take a train to Belgrade through Skopje. Since conditions were perfect, Paul decided to visit friendly Yugoslavia, the famous Marshal, his friend, but he wanted no part of the ‘Aegeans’, their newspaper, or their clubs and societies. He wanted them all gone. So while the train rumbled from Gevgelia to Belgrade and from Belgrade back to Gevgelia the ‘Aegeans’ were put in prison, some in Idrizovo, others in Matka and yet others in Solunska Glava further away from Skopje. Those who were not imprisoned and who remained in the villages around Skopje were ordered to stay home and sit still until the train with their precious guest and friend King Paul completed his tour. Was this done because this is what King Paul wanted or were the authorities fed up with the ‘Aegeans’ and wanted to teach them a lesson? Perhaps a bit of both? What do you think? And Lazo, a clever man, held the balance by flattering both sides. For him neither side was more important or less important. I believe the hardest thing for him was to watch the ‘Aegeans’ continue to divide themselves in spite of the damage they were doing to their Aegean brothers and sisters. That’s how it was. And look what happened next. Both sides quickly became ‘patrons’ to the ‘Aegeans’ who came from the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Hungary. The day they arrived and the next day they were put in prison. They spent their time in prison instead of relaxing from their long trip. They were put in prison so

that the authorities in Yugoslavia could question them and rout out the ‘spies’ and ‘agents’ among them. When we were in these countries they intimidated us looking for Yugoslav spies amongst us. There they wanted to rout out Tito’s spies. Then when we arrived in Yugoslavia they put us in prison looking to rout out the Soviet spies among us. Did they find any spies? No, but they certainly found informers, many informers; a proliferation of them. There were informers in the popular democratic countries and there were informers here in the prison. When I was questioned by the investigator, I said: ‘Well, comrade, the ones who criticized and badmouthed Tito and Kolishevski the most, you welcomed with open arms and you let them in first…’ And do you know what he said to me? He said: ‘It is true that they yelled against them there but they are yelling for them here. You, on the other hand, kept quiet there and you are going to keep quiet here…, but we are questioning you anyway to uncover the agents amongst you.’ Some of the higher-ups amongst us were employed by UDBA (State Security Bureau), perhaps because of their experience or because of their beliefs; they thought that everyone who came to Yugoslavia was an agent. Whether they themselves believed that or they were told to believe it, I don’t know. In the prison in Idrizovo more new arrivals were telling the investigator: ‘‘Well comrade, the ones who criticized Yugoslavia and swore at Tito the most, you welcomed with open arms first…’ And he said: ‘It is true that they swore and yelled against him there but they are yelling for him here. You kept your mouth shut there so you will keep you mouth shut here…’ After hearing that again, I became a permanent mute…! That’s what he said to me so I gathered that every government all the time and everywhere has its own reasons for doing what it is doing… That’s how it was… And we, crippled, some with one leg, some with one arm, many with two and three huge scars on our bodies from wounds received during the Greek Civil War, went with one side and with the other so that they would sign our statement proving that we were participants in the Second World War and in DAG and they with their signature would decide whether we got a veteran’s pension or not. That’s how it was... Am I lying? Let someone else prove that it was not like that...” concluded Lena.