Loring M. Danforth and Riki Van Boeschoten
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226135984
- eISBN:
- 9780226136004
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226136004.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, European Cultural Anthropology
At the height of the Greek Civil War in 1948, thirty-eight thousand children were evacuated from their homes in the mountains of northern Greece. The Greek Communist Party relocated half of them to ...
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At the height of the Greek Civil War in 1948, thirty-eight thousand children were evacuated from their homes in the mountains of northern Greece. The Greek Communist Party relocated half of them to orphanages in Eastern Europe, while their adversaries in the national government 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. The authors present here a comprehensive study of the two evacuation programs and the lives of the children they forever transformed. Marshalling archival records, oral histories, and ethnographic fieldwork, they 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. The authors 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. A corrective to previous historical accounts, the book is also a searching examination of the enduring effects of displacement on the lives of refugee children.Less
At the height of the Greek Civil War in 1948, thirty-eight thousand children were evacuated from their homes in the mountains of northern Greece. The Greek Communist Party relocated half of them to orphanages in Eastern Europe, while their adversaries in the national government 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. The authors present here a comprehensive study of the two evacuation programs and the lives of the children they forever transformed. Marshalling archival records, oral histories, and ethnographic fieldwork, they 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. The authors 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. A corrective to previous historical accounts, the book is also a searching examination of the enduring effects of displacement on the lives of refugee children.
Yoosun Park
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- November 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780199765058
- eISBN:
- 9780190081348
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199765058.003.0002
- Subject:
- Social Work, Social Policy
Prior to the War, few social workers in the coastal states, including state and county welfare workers soon to be confronted with the massive task of facilitating the forced removal of an entire ...
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Prior to the War, few social workers in the coastal states, including state and county welfare workers soon to be confronted with the massive task of facilitating the forced removal of an entire population, had any significant contact with the Nikkei. As West Coast social work began preparing for the fallout from Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of War on Japan, therefore, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and its offshoot organization, the International Institutes, were the only social work organizations with both knowledge of the community and contacts within it. This chapter, focused on the so-called voluntary period between mid-February 1942 and March 29, 1943, outlines the beginnings of social work’s equivocal role as both the protector of the Nikkei and the instrument of their delivery into incarceration.Less
Prior to the War, few social workers in the coastal states, including state and county welfare workers soon to be confronted with the massive task of facilitating the forced removal of an entire population, had any significant contact with the Nikkei. As West Coast social work began preparing for the fallout from Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of War on Japan, therefore, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and its offshoot organization, the International Institutes, were the only social work organizations with both knowledge of the community and contacts within it. This chapter, focused on the so-called voluntary period between mid-February 1942 and March 29, 1943, outlines the beginnings of social work’s equivocal role as both the protector of the Nikkei and the instrument of their delivery into incarceration.
