Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid Pro Quo? by Gonda Van Steen (review)

Gonda Van Steen’s Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid Pro Quo? tells the story of the Greek adoption movement which emerged in the aftermath of World War II and the Greek Civil War (1947–1949). During the period 1950–1963, according to official records, 3,200 Greek-born children were adopted out to the United States. Drawing on a variety of sources that include archival records, personal records, interviews and testimonies, Van Steen reveals the legal and bureaucratic means by which those adoptions were facilitated, allows the adoptees and their families to tell their stories, and traces the politics and social history of Greece during the Cold War. Her sensitive account explores the impact of politics in people’s intimate lives and personal biographies, and the ways in which those intimacies and biographies shape politics in return. Her book, which relies on archival research and the testimonies of Greek-born adoptees, is the first study concerning the movement of children to the United States and will serve as a starting point for future research. Van Steen has also provided a welcome contribution to the growing number of studies focusing on the politics of international adoptions. On a global level, Greece had the most international adoptions per capita during the period in question and was second only to Korea in the overall number of adopted children. Van Steen explains that the lack of existing studies on this subject stems from the fact that Greek international adoptions occurred in an “invisible” manner (79) and did not raise issues of race, as Korean adoptions did.

The 1950s found the people of Greece ideologically polarized after the end of the Civil War. The defeated Greek communists and their families were seen as having betrayed their country. The repressive anticommunist policies that characterized the decade under Greece’s right-wing governments—including exiles, executions, and the intimidation of communists (or suspected communists)—had a tremendous impact on leftist families, who found themselves displaced, dissolved, separated, or dealing with severe economic conditions and problems with basic survival. At the same time, the Americans had undertaken a major political and economic intervention, supported by the royal family of Greece. A variety of local and international services, associations, and organizations undertook the international relocation of children. These included the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA), the International Social Service (ISS), the Patriotic Institution for Social Welfare and Awareness (PIKPA), and the Royal Welfare Fund or the Queen’s Fund. Local authorities, churches, and independent US agents also played a role. These actors focused especially on children from leftist families because they considered them a potential threat to law and order.

Van Steen builds her book around the “peripherals” (245) of the adoption of Elias Argyriadis’ daughters, situating their story in the social and political terrain of Greece during the Cold War. In November 1951, Greek authorities discovered a wireless station in the house of Elias Argyriadis in Glyfada, and arrested him on suspicion of being a member of the outlawed Communist Party of Greece (KKE). Soon after, he was found guilty of espionage by the military tribunal and sentenced to death. Ten days after his arrest, his wife Katerina Dalla committed suicide at home, having spent the interim in police headquarters under investigation. She left behind two small daughters—Olympia, aged three, and Ioanna, aged six—as well as their half-sister, Efterpi, aged 12, from Elias’ previous marriage. On 30 March 1952, Elias Argyriadis was executed, alongside Nikos Beloyannis, Nikos Kaloumenos, and Dimitris Batsis. Efterpi took care of her younger sisters at their home in Glyfada, but after a short time Olympia and Ioanna were removed from their sister’s care, and PIKPA took over their custody. Although Efterpi regularly visited her sisters in their foster home until 1953, she lost track of them, and her efforts to find them were forcibly repulsed. In 1955, the sisters’ overseas adoption was...