Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory

At the height of the Greek Civil War (1946-1949) in 1948, thirty-eight thousand children were evacuated from their homes. The Greek Communist Party relocated half of them to orphanages in Eastern Europe, while their adversaries placed the rest in children's homes elsewhere in Greece. A point of contention during the Cold War, this controversial episode continues to fuel tensions between Greeks and Macedonians and within Greek society itself. In this volume, the authors present a study of the two evacuation programs and the lives of the children they forever transformed. Marshalling archival records, oral histories, and ethnographic fieldwork, the authors analyze the evacuation process, the political conflict surrounding it, the children's upbringing, and their fates as adults cut off from their parents and their homeland. They also give voice to seven refugee children who poignantly recount their childhood experiences and heroic efforts to construct new lives in diaspora communities throughout the world.