A female informant describes the despair she felt, reaching the port of
Halifax, being unable to communicate with her husband who was in Montreal.
ΑΝ.: And then we arrived in… in Halifax. And my first
thought what was it? To call and tell him that we arrived. I hadn’t even asked
ever… Alright, I knew because I’m not… I had… I had gone to school and I knew
where Halifax is and where Montreal is, but I was never aware that there
exists… a telephone code, because I had never gone away from Athens.
Therefore, how was I supposed to know there is a telephone code. So, I call on
the phone and on comes… the operator and turns and says “The number you’re
calling is wrong!” and I tell her “But my husband is in Montreal!” and she
says “Then you have to change the code and call another code”. She gave me
that code, I tried to call him, he wasn’t, he didn’t respond. There didn’t
exist mobile phones at the time. It’s possible it might have been the time
that… he wasn’t working. Because he had given me his workplace’s number. And…
I remember that I took my Savvina and I sat at… there I asked where our things
are, everything, and they showed me where they are and I went… because they
told me that they are in the name […], because this was my husband’s name
which I kept then. And I went and saw them and I say “How am I supposed to get
these down from up there?”. I thought that each one of us must go take his
things. I didn’t know where they would be placed, how we would put them, I had
no idea. And this time I felt such a… frustration inside me and I said “What
am I doing here?” and I sat down on the floor. It was (Laughs) a grey floor
inside there, which was the whole of the… the customs, I guess. And the people
were coming and going, this and that. I hugged my Savvina and I started
crying. Because I didn’t know… where I am and what I’m going to do and where
I’m going to go. Finally, they said… a lady saw me, who was… she must have
been… who helped and… she came and… and she told me “Come inside!”. Meanwhile,
Savvina was dead tired, the poor thing, who also had a whooping cough. She was
sick and she had a whooping cough as well. And we went, they put me… they gave
her biscuits and milk to drink the… and they had some small beds, they put her
to sleep. And I was sitting there and she was talking to me to pass a bit
this… this overwhelm, this thing I felt that I didn’t know what was going on.
