Care, social rights, and labor integration of the war-disabled, chronically ill patients, and retirees among Greek Civil War refugees in socialist Czechoslovakia

The article discusses the role of labor integration in the social care for war-disabled, chronically ill and older refugees from the Greek Civil War in socialist Czechoslovakia. In state socialism, labor was an economic resource, a tool of political legitimization, and an instrument of social integration and cohesion. For those refugees in a care facility in the town of Těchonín who were unable to work either at all or part-time, labor integration was endorsed as a goal of their rehabilitation and as its means. The refugees’ labor symbolized their contribution to constructing socialism, an act of mutuality between comrades, thus bolstering the idea of transnational communist cooperation. This article draws on archival collections, memoirs, and oral history interviews to scrutinize the tensions between refugees, caregivers, and humanitarians over care, social rights, labor, and presumed socialist morals. The key argument is that neither the refugees’ informal status as heroes of the antifascist and anti-imperialist struggle, nor their reduced ability to work guaranteed their equal social rights. Their labor engagement, even if economically negligible, was equally integrative as it was coercive. It resembled the experience of foreign labor migrants and even Czechoslovak workers, thus surpassing the limits of the refugee category.