Testimony: Vasileios Anastasiades (1912-1994)

I was born in Kaesareia/Kayseri district, Kappadokia, in 1912, but grew up in Ak Dagh Maden, Pontus. I remember Aristotle Onassis' father, a friend of my father's, warning him to leave Asia Minor before war broke out. My father, however, could not leave as he had a family to look after. In 1916, when I was three or four years old, they took my parents into exile. My elder brother took me by the hand to a field where hay was grown. We cut some and ate it to satisfy our hunger. We collected wild grasses, ground them into flour, baked them like flat bread and ate. I remember searching ant nests for kernels of wheat, which we would eat.

When the Turks hit Pelemet, attacking the French, the Greeks and especially those who worked on the railways, that is when they took us into exile, the men separate from the women, separate from the children. The children were taken to Zougoultah. Next to us was a camp for Greek POWs, all but one of whom died as slave labourers. The sole survivor was Dimitrios Pairahtaroglou. The soldiers gave us some of their meager food rations, so that we would not starve to death.

When the Red Cross was notified about us [our captivity] and came looking for us, the Turks would move us around by night. One Christian prisoner, serving as a guard, told the Red Cross where we were hidden, on condition that they free him also. That is how one hundred and fifty children were saved.

I came to Greece in 1924, with the Exchange of Populations. We went firstly to Kythera, where we stayed for about two months, and then to Larissa. There they offered my grandfather the local disused Turkish mosque as a home, since he was a craftsman (and craftsmen were highly valued), but he refused to live there because he did not want the building to remind him of the Turks, from whom he had suffered so much.

Source: Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies