They tried to kill us all [English voice over]

In January of 1946, four-year-old Dimitra Petroula is playing in the yard of her home in Mani when suddenly armed men appear, asking where her mother is. They are right wing paramilitary troops, seeking revenge for her father’s alliance with the Greek Left. Young Dimitra survives the extreme violence of the Civil War era, but most of her family does not.

Interviewee: Dimitra Petroula
Field Reporter: Antonia Michalakakou
Producer: Maya Filippopoulou
Sound Designer: Iasonas Theofanou
Sound Editor: Dimitris Papadakis
Video Director: Stefanos Bertakis
Voiceover: Melissanthi Mahut

Istorima is the bigest project of recording and preserving oral histories of Greece. Over 1,000 young researchers find narrators, listen, collect and save stories of people from all over Greece : Stories of their place, stories of love, stories that changed us or defined us, stories modern or old. Stories that are not recorded in the history books and that could be lost in time. Istorima is the co-creation of the journalist Sofia Papaioannou and the historian Katherine Fleming and is implemented with a founding donation from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) as part of his Youth Reboot and Empowerment initiative (learn more at  www.snf.org). The more than 20,000 stories are being published in their entirety in stages at www.archive.istorima.org. Excerpts of the stories are published in the form of podcasts, videos or written stories at www.istorima.org