Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece

Where are you from; This is the most common question that Greeks ask foreign visitors. The question talks about the need to understand where someone comes from, to understand how it is connected to a place and at the same time to place it in a temporal and social context. And yet, about 4,000 Greeks can not give a clear answer to this question. International adoptions from Greece to the United States (and later to the Netherlands) from the 1950s onwards disrupted that sense of belonging. These people and their families have spent seventy years wondering what exactly happened and whether there is still a chance for them to discover their roots in a Greek family and in the Greek tradition. I hope my research provides some answers through the difficult paths taken by the adoptees during their lifetime, paths that all together compose an unknown chapter in the history of Greece and the United States during the Cold War.