At primary school, I was always trying to fit in, but I stood out for a number of reasons, and was often teased. First, I was the only Greek kid in my mostly Anglo Australian class. Whenever my parents came to school, I was very embarrassed because they spoke Greek....
When I was 7, my family left Czechoslovakia because things had became progressively worse in the 20 years since it was occupied by the Russians – there was no freedom of speech, and they had slowly obliterated the Czech way of life. Fleeing was very risky at that time...
One day the secret police came to our apartment, ransacked our house and turned everything upside down. They said, ‘We’ve been following your wife and we know she’s been attending an underground church. If we ever see her attending again, your daughter will...
When I was only six months old, we fled Burma to Bangladesh because of the violence towards the Rohingyans, crossing the border through the jungles along with 280 000 other people. At first, we had to take shelter under a tree in the open sky. There were thousands and...
(3/3) When my dad was released from the detention centre to mainland Australia, he sent us this photo of himself in JB HiFi. He was always trying to keep us connected to his life, so he used to send us photos of really simple things. It has a message scrawled on the...
