Haritini Ikizidou passed away at the age of 96 on 3 May.
Her grandson Gregory Sembelides shares her stories of how she fought Hitler’s regime and until recently received greeting cards from Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as medals for her contribution to the war that shook the world:
Pontian Haritini Ikizidou was only 16 years old when Hitler began conquering Europe.
She was born in 1924 in the Caucasus to refugee parents from Samsun, Pontus. Like everyone else at the time, she had many siblings, half of whom did not succeed in childhood, years of famine, exile and misery. With the persecution of the Greeks in 1942, she lost her first husband and became a young single mother with a sick mother.
Her two older brothers enlisted in the Red Army to fight the Germans in World War II and after the capture of Berlin they were immediately transferred to the other side of the Soviet Union, the Japanese Front, leaving them fighting in the war for eight consecutive years.
She, along with the other women, worked selflessly in the fortifications, a few kilometres from the front of the war (until she uncovered and once betrayed a Russian spy for the Germans) and is still as proud today as anything else of her contribution in the war and her motherland.
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After the war in 1949 my grandmother with her small child and old mother, along with other fellow Greeks were loaded onto trains without water, food and medicine. They disembarked them into Kazakhstan, in the middle of nowhere, leaving them in God’s hands.
There she remarried to a Russian policeman, my grandfather, and gave birth to my mother and another daughter. Years later when it was allowed, retirees returned to the Caucasus, to their homeland where everything started again from scratch.
They worked hard for a lifetime and were rewarded with praise, medals and awards from the State, but also from life itself. Of all her medals, my grandmother was most proud of the “Veteran of Labour” medal, which was an honorary distinction for Soviet workers for their many years of hard work and contribution to the national economy, the sciences, culture, education, health care, government services and public organisations.
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At every celebration, anniversary or birthday, my grandmother received greeting cards from the Russian authorities and was moved. She felt that someone was thinking about her and remembering her sacrifice. It was the only joy she had left, except for her children.
My grandmother’s stories were full of paradoxes which she herself could not explain. One example was that while the generation of our grandparents always dreamed of one day leaving for Greece, and for this purpose they kept the Greek citizenship for decades, which they paid for so dearly (they had no political rights and could not settle in the cities) and when they arrived in Greece, now old, they always asked to go “to die at home” that is, in Russia.
In recent years, since we lost our grandfather, my grandmother could no longer live alone in Russia and we had brought her to Greece, where she lived with my mother in Thrylorio, Komotini, a village built by ANZAC hero George Devine Treloar, 100 years ago for the reception of refugees from Pontus.
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And now saying goodbye to her from distant Melbourne. That’s the circle of life. Circles that are sometimes inexplicable and paradoxical, as life itself.
Thank you for everything Grandma, rest in peace.