As my grandmother and the other members of her community were being marched through a Turkish village, they met a Turk on the road who pointed at my father, a small boy at the time, and said, 'Why are you bringing that child on the march with you? That child is going to die. Let me bring the child up and he will survive.' So my grandmother, very reluctantly, entrusted her child to a Turkish foster father. My father was immediately washed, fed, dressed and given a new Turkish name by his benefactor. Then the Turk sent my father into a fenced-off courtyard to play with some Turkish children of his own age. My father played for a while, but then he began thinking about his mother and the other members of his family who were on the march. He managed to escape through the fence, and by a lucky chance he ran into his older brother who was also on the march, with a different group. My father was reunited with his mother who, cried when she saw her child, saying: 'I won't leave you
again, either we will die together or we will live together.'
The following story was told in early 2005, by a middle-aged man in a northern Greek village where Turkish-speaking Christians from Havza, south of Samsun, settled in 1924. The speaker described the ordeal of his father, who was seven at the time of the mass deportations.
