Introduction

Recently, in Poland, a number of anthropological and historical works have been written based on ‘oral histories’ or biographical narratives induced through an interview (cf. inter alia Włodarek & Ziółkowski, 1990; Engelking, 1994; Czyżewski, Piotrowski & Rokuszewska-Pawełek, 1996; Kurkowska-Budzan, 2009; Filipkowski, 2010). However, less interest is taken in written autobiographies issued in print, often in very limited editions, to satisfy the needs of family, friends, organizations and associations. During the research for my doctoral dissertation, dedicated to Macedonian refugees, 1 I encountered people who published their autobiographies as books and I would like to take a closer look at such texts in this paper.

Autobiographies of Macedonian refugees are unknown to a wider audience, just like the whole issue of Macedonian emigration from the time of the Greek Civil War. Aegean Macedonia, one of the parts of Macedonia, is the region of the Balkans that was the last to be liberated from the Turkish occupation. As a result of the Balkan wars it was incorporated by Greece, forming its northern province. Then, the autochthonous Slavic population living in this area—the Macedonians—became the largest ethnic minority in northern Greece, occupying mainly the Kosturski and Lerinski regions. During the Greek Civil War, which lasted from 1946 to 1949, partly voluntarily, partly under duress, the Macedonians joined the communist Greek guerrilla militias stationed in the mountain areas of the Aegean Macedonia.

The first wave of emigration from Greece took place in 1948 and embraced only children younger than sixteen years of age. The official reason for the expulsion was shielding the children from the turmoil of the war and, in particular, intensifying bombing. Children under the care of young women, the so-called majki (‘mothers’) and guerrillas, crossed on foot the mountain border between Greece and Yugoslavia, and then were sent by train from Yugoslavia, following the earlier agreement concluded with the communist parties of different countries, to the then Eastern bloc countries—Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.