Di-versions of Childhood during the Greek Civil War (1946-1949):
A Research Project

Vassiliki Vassiloudi & Vassiliki Theodorou
Democritus University of Thrace, Greece

The Greek Civil War (1946-1949) and its various aspects have been up until the early 1980’s a taboo issue not only for civilians and politicians but for historians as well.[1] However, since then, we have witnessed the publication of the memoirs of some of the protagonists of the Greek Civil War as well as of relevant archival records which shed light to some controversial aspects of this historical period. Following suit, an ever growing number of academic studies addressing various issues in regard to the Greek Civil War came to light. Questions such as the political situation, the warfare between the Greek Communists and the Greek Army, the role Britain, the Soviet Union and the U.S.A. played in the Greek Civil War, the internal conflicts of the Greek Communist Party, and the role of women during these upheaval times have been thoroughly addressed in a number of studies.[2]

One issue that is pertinent to many of these inquiries is the issue of children.[3] Studies taking children as their main subject during this period investigate the circumstances under which post World War II Greek society became deeply divided into two opposing camps. So deep was the division that children, perceived as the pillars of the nation’s future, became the object of a harsh ideological battle fought between the Greek Communists and the Right Wing Party. Children were perceived as an ideological asset which being invested on the nation’s future properly would lead to a glorious re-construction of the sorely tried Greek society.

Having reviewed the existent literature, we realised that the voices of the protagonists of this national drama were absent in the sense that so far there has not been any study dealing with the children’s experience itself or granting today’s adults a forum so as to present their experience. As such, our project falls into investigations of regional history and attempts to re-construct the experience of being a child during the Greek Civil War. Our project focuses on a particular area, that of Thrace, a region up in the north of Greece which was deeply affected by the warfare between the Greek Communists and the Right-Wing Party. During the Greek Civil War many children originating from Thrace were either transported to the Iron Curtain countries, well disposed towards the Greek Communists, or to paidopoleis (Childtowns), specially designated camps by the Queen of Greece, Queen Frederique, for those children allegedly under the threat of communism. However, a third category of children should not elude us: that of the children who stayed behind within their families whether united or divided and they had a different experience altogether.[4] Our attention is drawn to these three categories of children and the way they lived through such a traumatic experience as a Civil War.

For the purposes of this project we started conducting interviews in order to form a corpus of oral testimonies which our narrative will be based on. On the one hand, a questionnaire has been designed for each of these three categories addressing questions such as their family background-material conditions of life, political ideology and educational level-the circumstances under which their transportation took place, everyday life in the institutions or in the homeland, school routines, communication with the family and so forth. On the other hand, our project aims at examining the various loci in which this ideological battle was fiercely fought. For this reason, resorting to archival and library catalogues, we traced some of the written material produced at the time of the Civil War, material that allows as to analyse the discourse with regard, to the children.  Sources such as children’s periodicals, school textbooks, children’s literature, and newspapers fall within our investigation in order to grasp the extent of the attempted ideological indoctrination.

All the same, our project is not confined only to the use of written sources. Having conducted some preliminary field research, we came to conclude that the history of Greek childhood during this period can be reconstructed through other means as well such as photographical material portraying children at that time. Moreover, films,[5] posters and even stamps will be used in order to capture the spirit of the times.

It becomes evident that both opponents used a variety of means to justify their “rightness” as far as the children’s displacement was concerned. So, using primary sources, we shed light to what outcome was expected of this indoctrination, namely what the ideal child should have become either in a communist establishment or in a paidopolis. Unlike the written sources, interviewing the persons directly involved in this situation reveals what impact all this ideological campaign had on their lives. We interview these adults today in order to see the way they came to grips with their displacement and what were the limits of their agency. By agency, here we mean whether they left the homeland on their own accord or they were forced to do so, and how they used this experience of separation in later life. Perceiving these children as agents and not as passive subjects manipulated by adults is what differentiates our project from similar historical endeavours.

Analysing the statements of the interviewees, one can tentatively conclude that childhood was experienced quite differently, even in the group of children whose fortunes followed similar patterns. We intend to employ a thematic presentation of the interviews, focusing on such issues as the experience of separation; the relationship children had, if they did at all, with their absent parents; the experience of being an inmate in either a communist establishment abroad or in a children’s camp in Greece; the “interpretation” of the separation through the memory lens; the role gender played in formulating boys’ or girls’ experience; the kind of manhood or womanhood expected from boys and girls respectively once they reached maturity; the factors which were at play defining the proper boyhood or girlhood; whether the model of the proper manhood or womanhood according to which the children both in the Communist establishments and the Childtowns were nurtured was opposed to the values of the society they came from is an issue which needs further investigation; the introduction of technical and vocational education both in the Communist institutions and in the Childtowns; the age limits of childhood during the period of the Civil War since the term “children” is broadly used in the discourse to indicate persons as young as four years old and persons who were growing out of childhood, being in the transitory stage of adolescence.

Yet, all of these persons are homogeneously addressed as children. The reasons behind such a use needs exploration.  Another issue which we intend to address through this project is the role the State played in the displacement of children, since it is evident that in the case of the Greek Civil War children came to belong first and foremost to the State, the broad national family, rather than to their parents. 

We are well aware of the fact that while using interviews as a tool of historical investigation, we deal with issues of elaborate memory which to a lesser or greater extent modifies the initial experience.  The initial separation, whether voluntary or not, is being constantly processed in order to weave a coherent narrative for today’s adult.  Another interesting finding coming out of the first interviews is that a different conjunction of circumstances either forced or urged these children to separation: some of them saw this separation as an adventure, others as an opportunity for social evolution, while others experienced it as an imposed necessity. 

With all these aspects taken into consideration, this project will examine childhood and children at a micro-level trying to determine what were the repercussions of the Greek Civil War for the individual child. From this vantage point, we might be able to go even further and reconstruct some different versions of childhood at a macro-level as well.  We hope that by the end of this project it will become evident that in many cases, children during the Greek Civil War neither lacked agency nor did they have a unified experience. Fragmentation and heterogeneity will be our key ideas as the tentative results of our project already point out.

Notes
1.  The reasons behind this attitude can be attributed to the prolonged Cold War Era and to political confrontations in Greece.  The repatriation of the Greek Communists remained a hot debated issue until 1982 when it was finally resolved at least in the political arena. Another factor which contributed to this deliberate “neglect” was the fact that the archives of the Greek Communist Party remained closed up until the early 1990’s. It was then that the Archives of Contemporary Social history were established and a part of the Communist Party records devolved to them after a lot of adventures.
2.  Vervenioti, T. (2002), “Charity and Nationalism. The Greek Civil War and the Entrance of Right-Wing Women into Politics” in Bacchetta P. & Power M. (eds) Right-Wing Women from Conservatives to Extremists Around the World. New York and London, Routledge.
3.  See for example, Vervenioti, T. (2003), “The Civil War Children: Children’s Abduction or/and Children’s Salvation” in History of the New Hellenism 1770-2000. Greece at war. Athens: Ellinika Grammata, 271-280. Bærentzen L. (1992), “The Paidomazoma and the Queen’s Paidopoleis” in Bærentzen L., Iatrides G. & Smith Ol. (eds) Studies for the Civil War 1945-1949. Athens, Olkos, 137-164. Ristović M.(1998) “Children as Refugees: Greek Children in Yugoslavia 1948-1960” in Naumović S. & Jovanović M. (eds), Childhood in South East Europe. Historical Perspectives on Growing up in the 19th and 20th Century. Belgrade-Graz, 215-234. Voutira E., Dalkavoukis V., Marantzidis N. & Bodila M. (eds), The Political Refugees of the Greek Civil War in Eastern Europe. Thessaloniki, University of Macedonia Press. Let us also add here that apart from academics dealing with the displacement of children during the Civil War, nowadays there is a growing number of documentaries broadcast nationwide which take a particular interest in children who spent part of their childhood in the Childtowns (paidopoleis).  They are certainly inscribed in a revisionist trend which moves the interpretation of the Greek Civil War away from polarisation.
4.  In this third category fall children whose parents were communists (in most cases the father had fled to a Soviet Bloc country) or children whose parents, for whatever reason, kept them within the family.
5.  The Marshall project for example subsidised the shooting of some films with regard to children, films that were in favour of the Right-Wing Party. However, films were shot from the Communists as well in order to provide their own version of truth on the subject of the children.