Voices of the Lost Children of Greece: Oral Histories of Cold War International Adoption ed. by Mary Cardaras (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Voices of the Lost Children of Greece: Oral Histories of Cold War International Adoption ed. by Mary Cardaras Alexander Kitroeff (bio) Mary Cardaras, editor, Voices of the Lost Children of Greece: Oral Histories of Cold War International Adoption. London and New York: Anthem Press, 2023. Pp. xvi + 192. Hardback $110.00, Paper $35.00, and E-book $35.00. Now that the overall facts of their experience have been established, writes Gonda Van Steen in the introduction to this volume of fourteen short essays, it is time for the voices of the adoptees themselves to be heard. It is Van Steen herself who, in her meticulously researched book-length study Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? (2019), uncovered how 3,200 young Greek children were adopted by families in the United States between 1950 and 1962. The story Van Steen tells is one of well-meaning humanitarian motives which were overtaken by practices ranging from mere irregularities to brazenly illegal acts that profited unscrupulous middlemen. When those practices began to be uncovered, several hundred Greek children were already in the process of being adopted. Abetting those underhand practices in the 1950s were Greek government authorities, Greek orphanage officials, and unprepared childless couples in the United States. In several cases, some or all of these participants in the adoption process enabled the middlemen to cut corners. And while it is important to note that many of these adoptions had happy outcomes, others were harmful for the children involved because they were denied knowledge of who their biological parents were and the circumstances of their adoption, making for traumatic discoveries when they tried to retrieve the truth. It is these children who tell their personal stories in this volume. Naturally, the publication of Van Steen’s study sent shock waves among the many adoptees, some of whom were already searching for their biological parents and the truth about their backgrounds. One of these, who decided to take up the cause of her fellow adoptees, was Mary Cardaras, a communications professor at California State University, East Bay. Cardaras proved to be the ideal person to fulfill Van Steen’s wish that the adoptees would follow up her book by telling their own stories. Cardaras and Van Steen appeared together at several book presentations, including those for the Greek translation of Van Steen’s book that was published by the Athens-based Potamos Publishers in 2021. In that same year, Cardaras herself published Ripped at the Root: An Adoption Story, an account of how Dena Poulias was taken as a child from her Greek biological parents in 1958 and found her way back to their village after many years. The book traces how Poulias’s discovery of her origins affected everyone involved—the two families on either side of the Atlantic, the Greek village community, and of course Poulias herself and her loved ones. This new book is [End Page 308] both an outgrowth of Poulias’s story, which, as Cardaras notes, inspired her to present this collection of the stories of adoptees (including her own), and, in a sense, a companion to Van Steen’s academic study of the adoptions in the 1950s. There is no way to summarize here all the moving accounts that reveal the full range of experiences each of the adoptees went through. The essence of these accounts is, however, nicely summarized in a foreword written by Andrew Mossin, a writer who teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia and who is himself also a Greek adoptee. (His original name, Antonios Sakkas, is also used in the book.) Mossin has already told his own story in a book titled A Son from the Mountains, where he details his Cold War–era adoption from Greece and subsequent childhood. In his foreword to this new collection, Mossin offers vignettes from the experiences that the volume’s contributors describe, many of them emotionally wrenching and hard to read. Mossin writes that each of those stories is a form of haunting post-memory, constructed through the documents and other data that the adoptees have located and have used in an effort to reconstruct their lives from the moments of...