Adoption Agrafa, Parts “Unwritten” About Cold War Adoptions from Greece

Abstract

This preliminary empirical study delves into the “agrafa”, the “unwritten” or “uncharted” parts of a Greek adoption phenomenon and Greek–American relations that may, however, still be accessed via archival investigations, mixed research methods, and efforts to hone life writing skills. At stake is the case of the post-WWII adoptions of some 4000 Greek children who were sent to the United States between the years 1950 and 1975. This study asks how the related negotiations were transacted, especially in the early years of the intercountry adoption phenomenon. It challenges the researcher today to create a life writing narrative out of scant snippets and dense allusions and to disclose the dynamics of overlooked interactions, such as the consumerist and occasionally racist attitudes of some, though certainly not all, prospective adoptive parents. Thus, this article highlights formerly dismissed interactions, not necessarily numerically representative interactions, given that the window of opportunity has passed to interview adoptive parents of Greek children who pursued these foreign adoptions in the 1950s–1960s and to quantify their actions and reactions more systematically. Many of the adoptive parents of the 1950s–1960s, however, left their impressions, demands, and frustrations in writing. Those writings have yet to be studied, and their more deliberate, explicit language must be acknowledged, even amid generally more positive depictions of postwar intercountry adoption. I show that the victorious post-WWII era saw a sense of American entitlement emerge among the prospective adoptive parents that has since been whitewashed. Waiving the banner of altruism or humanitarianism (as a couple or as a superpower, respectively), some adoptive parents embarked on adoptions from Greece from a position of cultural as well as political and economic superiority. Their expectation was that the “destitute” partner should comply, that the Greeks themselves should not “talk back” when “poor orphans” were about to be “saved” from “illegitimacy” and lack of prospects.

1. Introduction

As a child, I was obsessed with finding written mention of Agrafa (an area in mountainous central Greece). How could there be such a place? Such an idea? To me, it was like a Shangri-La, Narnia, a fairy tale, a fabled other place that existed only in the stories I was told. Every book, every encyclopaedia I would search, made no mention of the unwritten. This place with deep history, with stories of love and hate, the learned and illiterate, mountains and sun, snow caps and river ravines did not exist in the books we had at home or in the library up the road.

—(Vassiliki Veros 2022).

A call for awareness permeates this article, which contributes to the search for the past of the post-WWII adoptions from Greece by conjuring up older legal and extra-legal frameworks and the modern burdens that they still place on the adoptees. It dwells on internal mechanisms and tell-tale motivations. It calls out the power of the master narrative behind intercountry adoption, driven by the adoptive parents and the mediators. This article then strikes home that the issues need to be reframed around adoptees, not adopters. Here, the extraordinary facts and archived exchanges of a few 1950s–1960s cases, which need to be quoted to be believed, raise awareness that change can and must still benefit the Greek adoptees today. Memories of the ambiguous losses and the mental scars of early childhood live on. Many “orphans” did not experience the “clean break” that supposedly put the process of Americanization on the fast track. Contributing to the aftershocks of loss and disruption has been the Greek adoptees’ realization that their history has not been properly documented and that many of their personal dossiers have become inaccessible or are long lost.

“Ordinary” American adoptive parents have carried a distinct burden of complicity in the rapidly developing consumer model of 1950s Greek adoptions, which went on to drive subsequent intercountry adoption models. Rachel R. Winslow places intercountry adoptions in the context of the rising postwar consumer culture of the West, complete with its high expectations and trappings (such as options to pay adoption fees in installments). Winslow also notes the semi-professionalization of adoption services, which presented adoption as a “service” to prospective adoptive parents as “consumers” (Winslow 2017, pp. 34–69). The common 1950s depiction of the adopted child as a “gift” to the new parents and of the adopted life as a “gift” to the “poor” child strengthened that perception.1 The first generations of intercountry adoption agents and social workers most certainly bought into the idea of providing adoption-related “service” to financially secure, white, Western couples. This weight of complicity adds nuance to the typical casting of Americans as well-meaning adopters eager to become parents. Reality and the future often played out in different ways.

The confounding of material and psychological needs as dominant motivators of postwar intercountry adoption and the pitfalls thereof merits further reflection. In her seminal book of 1985, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, Viviana Zelizer has shown up the shifting social identities—and economic values—associated with young children over recent centuries. Her chapter six, for instance, has contextualized the twentieth-century phenomena of baby farms and black-market babies. Zelizer has drawn crucial attention to the fact that children own a social or communal identity beyond political and legal identities, which shows signs of intensifying, not abating, during and after an intercountry adoption process. Significantly, Zelizer remarked on the long-standing efforts (by 1985) to define the exchange of money as a symbolic and elective “gift” rather than as a fee or price for obtaining a child; nonetheless, prospective parents, who are typically described as “desperate” to have a baby, pay such fees and offer donations (Zelizer 1985, pp. 204–5). Zelizer has spoken of the “sentimentalization of adoption”, which turned infant adoption into “the latest American fad” (Zelizer 1985, p. 192). The majority of American adoptive homes sought little girls for their “domestic sentimental value” (Zelizer 1985, p. 193). The (disguised) consumerist, money-driven focus bears on this article, in which I interrogate the sense of entitlement of some prospective adoptive parents and, more broadly, the commodifying dimensions of postwar intercountry adoption. Also, the field of critical adoption studies has more work to do on the socio-economic dynamics and the protectionist stance of sending countries, not just those of the consumerist receiving countries. This article contributes to a better understanding of conditions on the ground in 1950s Greece as well.

Usurped agency and entitlement frequently played a decisive role in the Cold War adoptions from Greece, with the primary destination being the United States. Between 1950 and 1975, Greece sent about 4000 children abroad for adoption, and various mediators were active in this field of “specialization” (Van Steen 2019). Beth Cohen established 1946 as the starting date of the legal adoption of Jewish children by American, mostly related, families (Cohen 2018, p. 8). The first Greek-to-American adoptions were being formally discussed from 1948 onward, along with other adoptions from war-stricken countries. Even though the Greek adoptions overseas did not stem from a catastrophe comparable to the Holocaust or to the fate of the “fatherless”, “mixed-race” children of Korea, the first petitions for sponsorships or adoptions from war-torn Greece again originated in kinship networks already established in the United States, to then expand to American couples who did not have any Greek ties. The war-infused ideology of saving “orphaned” and “abandoned” or “relinquished” children was thus re-applied and kept blurring otherwise important geographical, historical, and cultural distinctions (including diverging definitions of what overseas adoption legally entailed). This mission of rescuing Greek “war orphans” (whether or not the war had long ended) took hold with the best intentions but not necessarily with positive outcomes. International adoption of any country’s children can hardly be equated with a post-crisis return to normalcy. In the case of Greece, it attests to America’s undue influence in the process of postwar state-(re)building. For a Greece committed to postwar economic reconstruction and balancing transatlantic relations, the U.S.-bound adoption traffic became one of the ideological but all-too-real battlefields of the emerging Cold War. The same can be said, mutatis mutandis, of post-WWII Korea and American anticommunist intervention in South East Asia. The adoption movement from Korea to the United States benefits, however, from being far better documented and generally more recent than that from Greece.2

This article pursues related pre-adoption and postadoption narrative threads via specific cases presented in the sections below, which blend critical analysis of rare archival material with verbatim testimony from the late 1950s through the early 1960s (and from 1959–1960, in particular). The first case study also offers a unique example of Greeks “talking back” to the hard-to-satisfy American parents, who chased after quick and easy adoptions from abroad. By 1960, Greek professionals, backed by welfare institutions, had started to fight back against unreasonable expectations and against the commercialized adoption outfits that had been fanning such expectations in the first place. Admittedly, the first case cannot have been “typical”, but placed against the backdrop of similar pronouncements, it was not rare, either. Personal data protection rules, however, allow only for empirical, not for systematic approaches and, thus, impose the use of mixed methods (archival work enriched by semi-structured interviews). Nonetheless, this article seeks truth and authenticity by incorporating original quotations, which also help the reader comprehend the historical context in the first unusual case of close and repeated exchanges. This structure offers the advantage of taking the reader step by step through the communications of a prospective adoptive mother and the Greek director of a babies’ center whom she saw as an unyielding gatekeeper. It also takes the reader through a sample of the pre-adoption mindset and postadoption minefield.

2. Results

2.1. America Demands but Greece “Talks Back”

As a tireless reader of adoption-related archival sources accessible to me, I am left astonished by the demands made on adoptees’ young lives and non-agent status. Startling, too, are some of the claims that steered first the inquiries about adoptions from Greece and then the actual procedures to make these adoptions happen as quickly as possible. Moreover, infantilizing perceptions uttered by relatives and acquaintances keep recurring through the postadoption years. The case below details the vociferous demands put in writing by an American couple waiting to receive their baby girl from the Babies’ Center Mitera (Κέντρο Βρεφών “H Μητέρα”), after their dealings with a Greek–American adoption broker and a Greek lawyer had gone awry.3

Mr. and Mrs. X had clearly been shopping around for a Greek baby: They had been able to adopt a baby girl privately and by proxy, and they had been sending money for her supposedly private care. But the Greek lawyer must have misrepresented the status and the whereabouts of the girl because, through the run-up to the formal adoption, she had been cared for at the Babies’ Center Mitera. Therefore, the girl’s case resorted under the institution’s custody and requirements for international adoption. While residing at the institution, the girl should not have been adopted out by way of a separate and private arrangement, with bills for her accommodation and care being sent to the American parents. Rather, being one of Mitera’s wards, the child’s release for an intercountry adoption had to comply with higher standards, regardless of the prior arrangements. By 1960, these standards were modeled on practices instituted by the International Social Service (hereafter ISS), whose Hellenic Branch was the first agency to champion the need for proper adoption casework in Greece. The applicant parents’ submission of a home study, for one, had become a nonnegotiable prerequisite for the administration and social workers at Mitera. But these best or, rather, “better” practices and mechanisms of self-regulation were hardly a couple of years old. Mitera had tightened up its protocols after the Scopas scandal erupted in May 1959 and U.S.-bound adoptions of Greek children had been confronted with legal scrutiny and media hype (Van Steen 2021).

Mitera was founded by the Greek Queen Frederica in 1953, and it opened just two years later (Van Steen 2019, pp. 57–59). The institution cared for the newborns of unmarried mothers whose families did not know of or did not support their single motherhood. Most mothers who were sheltered at Mitera in Athens delivered their babies at the Alexandra maternity clinic, or else babies delivered and relinquished at the clinic were transferred to Mitera without their mothers ever staying in the Mothers’ Home there. These practices entailed that the names of the mothers were known, and their consent to their child’s adoption was a prerequisite for the Greek court to place the child, whether in Greece or abroad. But that is not how the impatient American couple saw the situation. Before I delve into the details of the case, however, let me introduce the reader to a key figure in the world of Greek adoptions: Spyros Doxiadis, a specialist in pediatrics and director of Mitera.

Alexandra Barmpouti devotes ample attention to Doxiadis, who had practiced medicine in Britain and figured prominently in the postwar Hellenic Eugenics Society (HES, founded in 1953), with its emphasis on hygiene, public health, population management, and social progress and prosperity (Barmpouti 2019, 2020; Turda 2010). Part of a transnational movement with British and American connections, the HES pursued its goals by reconceptualizing reproductive choices and by fostering new thinking about local and global biopolitics, or the structural control of human reproduction. Barmpouti does not dwell on the Greek policies of adopting out to the United States. However, the 1950s Greek demographic concerns that she has meticulously documented suggest that overseas adoption, too, functioned as a population management strategy. Dare I say, as a form of belated or retroactive family planning? Also, sending away “illegitimate” Greek children “assisted” in rebuilding a homogeneous state based on “pure” and conventional motherhood. It also lifted the burdens impeding a regime’s plans for economic progress. It further inflated a government’s aspirations for economic development or for strengthening diplomatic relations with the U.S.A. In that light, intellectuals with political ambitions such as Doxiadis and also Lina Tsaldari, regarded the practice of adopting out children from low-income families or single mothers as an effective tactic to manage the quality as well as the quantity of the Greek population—and the state’s resources. U.S.-bound adoption was thought to mitigate poverty (feared in postwar Greece as a breeding ground for communism) and to rectify the problem of “irresponsible childbearing”, which was a problem attributed to the poorer classes only. This thinking essentially “disqualified” impoverished unwed mothers, and it did so for many decades. Doxiadis and leading Greek intellectual circles encouraged “conscious reproduction” and the policy of protecting more highly valued, conventionally married, middle-class pregnant women and their newborn children (Barmpouti 2019, pp. 5, 6; Trubeta 2013, pp. 220–22; Van Steen 2022). All of the above goes to say that Doxiadis was, under normal circumstances, quite willing to collaborate on adoptions from Greece to the United States.

The first Greek social workers took their leads from influential figures such as Doxiadis, given his close ties with the very institutions that trained them and subsequently employed them (Mitera, PIKPA, or the Patriotic Institution for Social Welfare and Awareness, Πατριωτικό Ίδρυμα Κοινωνικής Πρoνοίας και Aντιλήψεως). Private as well as public actors working in the mixed Greek economy of postwar social welfare provision prolonged the conservative—and deeply classist—attitudes that essentially erased poor, unwed mothers and their “illegitimate” children. The mixed and complex social welfare sector of postwar Greece merits further study, as does the history of social work in Greece. Sevasti Trubeta posits that the widespread poverty of the Greek lower classes, which were also very prolific, was assessed as a “social pathology” rather than as a challenge to the social care system or as a form of social injustice (Trubeta 2013, pp. 207, 223–32). Barmpouti reminds the reader that, in 1950s and 1960s Greece, the use of female contraceptives was still forbidden, as was the practice of inducing abortion, but violators of the prohibition against abortion were not systematically prosecuted (Barmpouti 2019, pp. 9, 198–99; Avdela et al. 2020, pp. 3, 9–11).4 The adoption legal scholar David Smolin aptly remarks, in terms that reach well beyond postwar Greece: “Negative viewpoints of unwed mothers, influenced by eugenics, psychiatry and social work, stereotyped unwed mothers as unfit parents and their children as suffering from the social stigma of ‘illegitimacy’ and from inherited negative moral characteristics” (Smolin 2016, p. 187).

This type of Western stereotype was widespread, even though it is most often associated with traditionally Catholic countries (such as Ireland, Belgium, and Italy). Moreover, this stereotype seems to have inspired “properly married” Mrs. X, the American prospective mother, with a sense of superiority, which, ironically, boomerangs back to Spyros Doxiadis. Unaware of Greece’s demographic, psychological, and eugenic fears, Mrs. X expresses deep dismay in a four-page letter of 22 July 1960 addressed to Doxiadis. She is upset about the delays that have halted the release and the final transfer of their baby girl, for whom the new parents have obtained the act of adoption from the Athens Court of First Instance and also the travel visa. The perturbed American mother claims that she and her husband now have “all legal rights” to the child. She feels strongly that she should not have to submit to a new home study to be carried out by the state of Utah, where the couple has recently moved. Doxiadis, on the other hand, along with Mitera and the ISS, which took over the bungled adoption case, insist that Utah’s child protective services conduct a new home study, given that the previous study, from a different U.S. state, is no longer valid. “The entire matter is becoming somewhat ridiculous”, the American mother complains, “for we have long ago proved ourselves as worthy parents and I now contend that you should no further question this fact!” Then she drops the L word and even the Q word:

I have been strongly against a lawsuit over her [the adopted daughter’s] release, but it now appears that a lawsuit will bring quicker results than this extra protocol and paperwork of a second home study. I am writing today to our attorney to discuss the matter…

We are informed by our lawyer that your Institute is holding this child illegally and that this adoption is valid according to Greek law…

I have written in my letter to H.M. the Queen of these things, and it is our great hope that if you still do not listen to our plea, that she, herself, may understand.

In her letter to the Greek Queen Frederica, Mrs. X repeats her threat of initiating a lawsuit. She calls it “ridiculous” once more that her child should be “detained” at Mitera, “as she is legally our charge”. The queen’s Chief Court Mistress tries to set the matter straight: Yes, the queen had instructed Mitera’s director and lead social worker to look into the stalled adoption and to help facilitate the issuance of the child’s visa. It was the Hellenic Branch of the ISS, however, that requested the second home study, as per its regulations. This basic, external requirement absolves Doxiadis from the responsibility that Mrs. X, in her indignation, has placed upon him. The Chief Court Mistress warns: “You have misunderstood this keen desire of Her Majesty [‘to help as many babies as possible to be safely and happily adopted’]” in assuming that the queen would ask Mitera to “by-pass the rules and regulations by which [its] adoptions are made”. The Chief Court Mistress further explains that because of the “black-marketing of Greek babies for which irresponsible lawyers here and in New York are to blame”, the queen is committed to upholding the ISS’s requirements to ensure that babies are adopted and not “bought”. The queen does not want to create a precedent of circumventing the adoption rules set by legitimate agencies. The letter of the Chief Court Mistress ends with a little sting of “we could have told you so”, which is not lost in translation:

It is unfortunate that although you had read about … “Mitera” you did not apply directly to them … and you would have had your baby long ago. You are fortunate … that your baby just by chance happened to be a “Mitera” baby, healthy and happy, and that you have not had the misfortune of other parents who unknowingly adopted … unhealthy babies which they clandestinely “bought” rather than adopted. Her Majesty has received several heart-breaking letters of such cases…

The certainty with which the Greek Palace proclaims its superiority in childcare and international adoption is unsettling, too, given that its institutional expertise is barely five years old and comprises the insensitive labeling of “unhealthy babies” versus “healthy and happy” Mitera babies. The “Mitera baby” has become its own heavily advertised brand (Stathopoulou 2024). Applicant parents settle for “off-brand babies” at their own peril. Now forced into the role of the “contentious” intermediary, Doxiadis in turn, replies to the angry prospective mother. He confirms the distressing truth of the many recent Greek adoptions that have been handled defectively “through unofficial channels without all the necessary investigation”. He, too, places the responsibility of educating oneself on the proper ways to adopt from Greece squarely with the petitioning parents, who have every opportunity to read news reports and to write letters asking for information. “How is it possible,” Doxiadis pointedly adds, “that mature and highly educated people as you are and who should know the enormous risks inherent in any adoption, could possibly make use of unofficial channels?” Doxiadis also responds to Mrs. X’s mention of a possible lawsuit, and he closes with a dark warning in kind: “I shall be sorry if you decide to engage in [a] law-suit, the outcome of which can’t be predicted. Public opinion in Greece is very sensitive on the subject of adoptions, especially when these have been done through such unofficial channels as yours”.

Doxiadis’s closing statement may have done more than the queen’s message to make Mrs. X relent and strike a different, more conciliatory tone. In her letter of 10 August 1960, Mrs. X finally shows a better understanding of the procedures required by Mitera and the ISS, and she expresses her willingness to go along with them. But she cannot resist a final dig at the director: “We thank you for the intended compliment, but I am sorry you feel it necessary to chastise us at the same time”.

The demand for speed and confidentiality, which accelerated the process for the waiting new parents, was rebranded as most beneficial for the minors themselves, who would not linger in their respective institutions or inadequate homes or foster placements any longer than necessary. Entitled adults acted on behalf of unknowing children, and these dynamics conditioned even the very first steps of the overseas adoptions, which were final and left the records sealed (see Figure 1). Subverting this confidentiality, which was much tighter on the Greek side, the first samples of American publicity featuring Mitera and ISS adoptions did much to promote the mid-1950s wave of the Greek adoption movement. Moreover, word-of-mouth in local American communities also created a sense of urgency around a “supply” that might well dry up soon. In a letter from the spring of 1956, a happy new American adoptive mother, who had just welcomed a Greek girl into her family of four, wrote:

Now everyone in town wants to try and get a “Greek” baby … We refer them all to the Welfare [Service], but the Welfare does discourage a lot of them—they have so many applicants, already.

Speaking of wanting Greek babies, just what would it take for us to get a tiny one in about six months—to finish up our family… we want to get another one before they’re all gone. What with all these people wanting one. (personal archive of D.M.)

2.2. Consumerist Entitlement and Disappointment

No matter how personal the above, drawn-out case may have been, it was not the exception, even if the impatient voices droned out the many hopeful adoptive parents who did not complain. A representative of a religious charity that was also negotiating Greek-to-American adoptions commiserated in the related internal correspondence of 16 September 1958: “The adoptive parents send us letters of the sort that turn me into a wild animal (θηρίο) … If it wasn’t that I am representing a Christian organization, I would write them back in the same spirit”. (source kept confidential at the request of the archive holders)

The same adoption intermediary, an older man located in the United States, conveyed to his counterpart in Greece every couple’s preference of the age and sex of the child sought for adoption, every change in such preferences, the parents’ insistence on receiving photographs, their insistence on obtaining newer and better photographs, their lack of understanding of the delays, their claims that other organizations and lawyers could get results faster, and so on. In a letter dated 28 August 1958, the mediator attested to the pressures that the parents-to-be were placing on him and his own family:

You cannot imagine what a headache we suffer night and day. All [the waiting parents] are in a state of hyper-nervosity (ὑπερέντασι νεύρων), and they do not have the patience to wait until we call them to tell them the good news. They call us during the day at the office and again at night at home.

The mediator ended his handwritten letter of 19 January 1959 with the words: “They [the hopeful adopters] have set our head spinning (Μᾶς ἔχουν ζαλίσει) …” (source kept confidential at the request of the archive holders).

In the late summer of 1957, the director of the Hellenic Branch of the ISS was confronted by an American journalist and prospective father who was on a professional visit to Greece, where he also hoped to swiftly adopt a Greek baby boy. He expected to whisk away the child to the land of prosperity by the end of his two-week trip. When the ISS director insisted that a proper home study had to be carried out first and in the United States, the impatient father became “very rude and thought that I should not make difficulties when the Queen of Greece Herself, Mrs. [Lina] Tsaldaris, Minister of Welfare [,] and all the other high officials concerned have promised him to give him a child…. [H]e himself threatened that he will report me to [the ISS] Headquarters” (personal archive of N.C.).

Approximately a year later, another American adoptive father reacted with anger and threats as well. The caseworker reported on what was, admittedly, one of the loudest voices:

[H]e emphasized that they do not want this child [a Greek girl with health problems matched to these prospective parents] and are demanding that [the] International Social Service get them another one immediately. Mr. [name] further said that unless he gets another child right away, he will tell the Governor and every Senator in the United States about this program, and will break the International Social Service and will see to it that there is not another foreign child adopted in this country.

(personal archive of O.G.)

Such private signs of possessive (and premature) ownership mirrored that of capitalist America demanding Greece’s collaboration on matters of the transfer of children from the poorer partner to the richer receiving country. The exchange on the micro-level of individuals inflected 1950s American–Greek relations of hegemony, even aggression, versus dependency. By 1960, that Cold War model had not changed but had, rather, intensified and had now subsumed the language of bitter disappointment if American wishes were not fulfilled. The appropriation of the adoptee’s life and status, however, took on other forms as well, often in no less insidious terms, which again robbed the adoptee of autonomy and agency. One resentful adoptive father testified in court:

A[nswer]. Oh, yes, we told him [the middleman] we wanted to adopt the [Greek] children as fast as possible, and he said he would do that for us. He said he would help us to get them here as fast as possible.

Q[uestion]. Did you tell him what kind of children you wanted?

A. We told him … about eighteen months up to two—up to three years, … and the only stipulations we said were that we wanted normal healthy children with coloring that would fit into our family, light complected and children that would just fit in with the family group.

…

A. [A]nother thing … against the [Greek] boy was that he was very dark-complected and it made him hard to fit with the family group.

When I spoke about it to [middleman’s name], he said he was sorry, they are our children now, and there is nothing he can do about it.

(court proceedings kept confidential)

The above case represents a particularly grievous set of circumstances: The adoptive parents were attempting to return and even to replace the Greek boy whom they had recently adopted. The new parents even expressed public resentment against the person who had handled the adoptions—of two children, one of which they wanted to keep. They felt that the intermediary had not delivered the “product” that they had explicitly asked for—and paid fees for. Underneath the parents’ frustration, however, lay a deep disappointment in the adopted child, for apparently no other reason than the boy’s skin tone. They did not mention any other reasons while delivering their testimony in court, where they appeared as complainants bringing charges against the mediator. Notably, the American parents were convinced that their charges were justified, and they did not feel any inhibitions about voicing racial prejudice in a formal court hearing in the late 1950s.

Joanna Michlic has studied how disappointment loomed large in the placements of children who survived the Holocaust with their Jewish relatives in the United States or closer to home in Poland (Michlic 2011). The new American parents were left with a sense of not having any options, only family obligations. Vulnerable children were left to feel unwanted all over again. Michlic’s study (and Michlic 2017 edited volume) helps the reader grasp the personal tragedies behind the all-too-common mismatch of expectations. The disconnect between the high expectations that Jewish adoptive relatives placed on traumatized children resulted in a deep disenchantment that overshadowed many placements that were driven more by necessity than by choice and, therefore, subject to more lenient screenings, if any. The reasons for the disappointment of the unprepared host parents often had to do with the children’s physical features as well as with their emotional state. The child survivors did not look nor act like the rest of the new family. Therefore, the reasons were not specifically tied to the Jewish, Greek, or Korean sets of circumstances. They had to do, rather, with the recent histories of communities that remembered wartime hardships all too vividly and yet entered the 1950s with high hopes that life would be better, easier, and more affluent.

Greek-born adoptee Mary Cardaras, today an adoptee activist, speaks to the sense of disenchantment herself. It is important to listen to the adoptees expressing themselves. With Cardaras’s permission, I quote at length from her own contribution to the collective volume titled Voices of the Lost Children of Greece (Cardaras 2023b), which she has edited (see below, p. 13):

Adoptees are pleasers. I have accepted that in myself now. There is a drive to be perfect, not to hurt anyone, to do for, to live up to expectations. Would they [the adoptive parents] leave us if we were, well, human? Flawed? …

There are things that happen which characterize your life. For me it is my adoption and my fear of abandonment, my perceived and prescribed role to make sure I do not disappoint, and my feelings of not being good enough. Feeling less than. Those feelings were responsible for some of my behavior over the course of my life. It has played over and over again, that tired record, which I actively work at shutting down…

And my mother, especially, was displeased with me, how I acted, how I dressed, how I wasn’t interested in the things most girls my age were interested in. She let me know that I wasn’t what she wanted, wasn’t what she expected me to be. She wanted me to be someone different, like the other girls she knew and admired. It was not deliberately cruel what she did, how she thought, what she may have said, but it was insensitive and soul-crushing. Never to be good enough. Never to measure up. It took its toll and fed into the narrative of my adopted self. If I revealed my true self, would I be left again? …

I tried. I really did. But I was a disappointment. And I didn’t want them to think they did anything wrong, that they had damaged me in any way.

(Cardaras 2023a, pp. 167–68)

In the eyes of hard-to-please American adopters, the state of the pliable “adopted child” might well be a perpetual state, in the same way that “orphanhood” or “race” was still a constructed perpetual state. Some hopeful parents were more subtle but no less persistent: “[Both couples] expressed a very marked preference for the baby with the blue eyes” (personal archive of G.R.). Until the 1940s, the dominant white population in America had been racializing the Greeks as an ethnic minority, swarthy in skin color. These charged statements are best explained in the context of U.S. racial history and immigration politics and hierarchies (as, for instance, in the insightful 2009 study by Yiorgos Anagnostou 2009).5 Greek-to-white-American placements did not cross any stubborn racial lines—until, in the eyes of some adopters, they became reason enough to try to recall choices made (in the above case to try to return or even “replace” the darker-skinned child). The adoptee was orphaned of individuality and of a protective family on more than just one occasion. Thus, the early postwar Greek adoption history raises unsettling questions about how the adoptees’ families have influenced their lives, opening a window to different dimensions of the adoptee world. Some adoptive relatives upturned the expected sequence of relinquishment, adoption process, and postadoption experience. An otherwise linear sequence might become a circular one, and new relinquishment or rejection on the new family’s side could become part of the adoption journey. Such occurrences remind the reader, time and again, to move beyond the focus on childhood and the adjustment period since the adoption experience may never have reached closure or can be reopened at will.

2.3. The American Client Is King

Walks pretty good

laughed

held my hand

[I] like the best

mother removable

—American adoptive mother of K.K., from her confidential notebook (summer 1964)

In their search for the perfect children, American adopters expected the Greeks to be collaborative locals—and the Greek “orphan” to be a grateful adoptee. Kimberly McKee discusses the “demand for gratitude” that pervades the mainstream adoption discourse (McKee 2019, pp. 8–13). The demand for gratitude, however, poorly conceals the demand for children. Mike Milotte denounces, in the context of Irish-to-American adoptions, “the world of wealthy, powerful, self-assured, middle class, white America”. “They were the victors of the Second World War. Whatever they wanted seemed to be theirs for the asking, Irish babies included” (Milotte [1997] 2012, p. 14).

American adoptive mother Naomi Moessinger (2003) describes a sequence of procedural steps that took place in Greece in the spring of 1962 and that amount to a baby-trade transaction. This process was entirely driven by one lawyer’s willingness to lie to and bribe Greek officials while charging a handsome sum of hard currency for his services. The story of the Greek-born Deborah Johnson’s adoption by the Moessingers reveals that the couple was prepped to lie (even under oath) before the Greek authorities if necessary and that lawyer Maurice Issachar repeatedly referred to monetary “gifts” as tools to grease the system. Naomi declared herself ready to deny her Jewish faith “as no court in Greece would allow a Greek child to be adopted by a Jewish parent”. In a hearing before the newly appointed head of the Greek Passport Division, Naomi falsely promised to have her new baby baptized in the United States. Afterward, when Maurice realized that the new appointee might continue to stand in the way of his transactions, he shrugged that “it was going to be difficult to deal with him on matters of religion until some money changed hands”. As an adult, Deborah Johnson (2003) expressed her growing awareness of the shadowy route leading to her 1962 adoption, which, more than half a century later, may be summed up as a race to rubber-stamp Greek documents and to skirt intimidating but otherwise innocuous bureaucratic hurdles. By spring 1962, the Issachars’ case (involving Maurice and his New York-based sister Rebecca) had already been brought before and dismissed by a New York court. Maurice continued to operate from his Greek home base and handled Johnson’s adoption with the confidence of a seasoned pro.

Ironically, in 1959, Naomi had set out in pursuit of a Greek baby with solid conviction: “[T]he only possible way I could be comfortable would be if the adoption … was totally fixed in stone legally”. She and her husband Fred were not alarmed, however, when, on the way from the Athens airport driving into the city center, Maurice steered the couple straight to his private apartment, where he had ten baby girls waiting for them to choose from.6 Naomi and Fred had specified that they wanted an infant daughter, but they did not expect a lawyer’s apartment to be turned into a baby showroom. They did not question the how and why, and their strong convictions promptly fell by the wayside. Maurice must have had ample local help (including at least a few nannies) to welcome his foreign clientele to such displays of the “goods”. Social workers were not part of his team or otherwise involved, but at least one female “legal assistant” was.7 Maurice later commended the Moessingers for not checking out all of the babies because most visiting couples actually did—implying that this gesture of accommodating the American clients was nothing out of the ordinary. “Most of the adoptive parents looked over every baby that Maurice was able to show them,” Naomi repeated, tapping herself on the back. Her statement, too, had to “normalize” the Greek lawyer’s offer of a display of babies to shop from. And notably, “we knew not only that we were fit parents but also that we would be excellent parents”.

The reader of Naomi’s full chapter of 2003 (pp. 35–50, for the above quotations), titled “From Couple to Family” and included in Welcome Home! An International and Nontraditional Adoption Reader, is left with many questions: Who are these little girls? Where do they come from? Where are their mothers or families? Have all of them already been left with nannies or foster families? How come they are available for showcasing at short notice? And are the gawking Americans just credulous or willfully ignorant? How come they accept being treated to a “shopping experience”? Also, if the Moessingers had wanted an infant son, would Maurice’s apartment showroom have been filled with little boys waiting for them on arrival? Deborah’s birth mother still had to consent to the adoption in court, so the girl was technically not even free for adoption when Naomi decided that she was the must-have baby. This sequence of events violated ethical adoption standards and only exerted more pressure on the biological mother. Regrettably, “unethical” did not mean “illegal” back then. How could Maurice or the Moessingers be so sure that the mother would not recant? How many nannies and birth mothers did Maurice keep on call (or on “payroll”) at any given time?

Perhaps the most upsetting part of Naomi’s account is her constant monopolizing of the narrative of the adoption, which is about fifteen pages long. Her adoptive daughter Deborah’s account is an “addendum by …”, less than four pages long, in a volume that, in 2003, was designed to let adoptive parents share experiences. Now, more than twenty years later, such a volume strikes us as univocal, for effectively silencing the adult adoptee, and outdated, even as it calls itself a “nontraditional adoption reader”. Deborah’s few pages, moreover, repeat much of what Naomi states, sometimes even in the same choices of words. Her words read like those of a well-rehearsed speech. Who is permitted to tell the story? Whose story is being told? As in the case of the adoptive families with which this study opened, the adoptee’s identity is being denied. The story of the adoptee is hers, and yet not hers at all.

Greek bureaucracy was perceived to be an obstructive roadblock but not the kind of serious impediment that either the help or the threat of a lawyer could not eliminate. Even before laying eyes on their Greek child, the U.S.-based adopters started employing the language of ownership. They felt entitled to take ownership of the child as if it were a piece of property. Every time these adopter “protagonists” looked past the children’s loss to place themselves at the center of the story, they disclosed their possessive approach to adoption. Some also felt entitled to the territoriality of their opinions. Greece had to be a consumer-friendly adoption site and an inexpensive tourist destination to boot. Adoption tourism was showing its consumerist side—the type of tourist consumerism that moves from country to country depending on where its demands can most easily be fulfilled. Also, prospective parents showed deep frustration with Greeks “talking back”. The fact that Naomi even published her scathing assessment is a mark of her not expecting Greece or the child to ever talk back.

Many Greek adoptees have yet to talk back, but fourteen of them have done so by publishing a collective volume titled Voices of the Lost Children of Greece (2023). Others have contributed to a documentary film project called The Greek Connection and to a play production titled For Three Refrigerators and a Washing Machine. Greek-born adoptee Mary Cardaras edited the 2023 volume, which includes her own life writing contribution (see above, p. 10). The documentary by the late (Ronit Kertsner, forthcoming) remains, unfortunately, unfinished, but that does not take away from the efforts, interviews, and reflections that Greek-born adoptees have poured into it. The testimony theater production, called For Three Refrigerators and a Washing Machine, opened in London on 24 October 2024 under the direction of Kyriaki Mitsou.8

Greek adoptees have started to “talk back”, but they have yet to “research back”, which will happen when the first Greek adoptee scholar publishes on their own and others’ behalf. The situation is different in the subfield of critical adoption studies that focus on intercountry adoptions from South Korea: Here, many of the scholars are Korean adoptees themselves.9 But, the Greek-born adoptees tend to be at least a decade older than their counterparts from Korea, and they were not kept abreast of Greece’s evolving adoption history. For many Americans, a Greek adoption was a rare historical occurrence, a one-time-only transaction, and it did not matter if it left other parties unsatisfied. Entrepreneurial intermediaries, such as the very forthcoming Greek lawyers who, by the mid-1950s, were competing for adoption business, confirmed the adopters’ impressions that a Greek adoption was also a rote process. By 1960, however, Doxiadis could warn that Greek public opinion, being “very sensitive on the subject of adoptions”, might no longer succumb to American capitalist pressures. By then, the Scopas scandal had cast long shadows of suspicion on U.S.-bound adoptions that had passed through nonprofessional channels (Van Steen 2021). Capitalist interests, which had already been muted by the loud rhetoric of altruism, became less pronounced, but mainly for fear of public outcry.

3. Discussion

The above-described situations and incidents do not represent the majority of the adoption cases from Greece in the 1950s through the early 1960s. Numerous American adoptive couples approached the adoption process with love and understanding. I hasten to concur with that more positive image, and I realize that parts of this article may be triggered for adoptive parents who have given their all. I respect them and value their lifelong commitment. But those are the constructive attitudes that have colored the popular narrative surrounding intercountry adoptions, especially the “historic” adoptions of the first waves. Significantly, the “master” narrative has drowned out other experiences of the type presented in this article, which are no less real. Even if those alternative realities are not numerically the most frequent ones (a fact I can no longer verify), their qualitative value as a corrective can no longer be ignored. Therefore, my aim has been to present a more fine-grained picture in which far-from-flattering attitudes may be discussed as well—and these are open to further debate. Again, the numerical proportions of either set of behaviors, if they can even be quantified or separated out, are hard to establish. But the texture of postwar adoptions from Greece, as from other sending countries, would be incomplete without them.

Today’s researchers come too late to interview a representative sample of prospective adoptive parents of the postwar era: If these parents pursued foreign adoptions in the 1950s, that timing implies that they were already in their thirties, if not forties when petitioning for a child and that they have by now passed away. More important, however, is the question of whether the initial attitudes of entitlement and occasional anger and resentment should have been read more carefully as red flags in the cases of the adoptions of children who came from a precarious past and whose future was about to be compromised. In each of the cases analyzed above, the planned adoption went through. Important, too, is the question of whether such 1950s attitudes among prospective adoptive parents persisted in later decades. But that question falls outside of the scope of the current article, which is only a pointer to the additional research required. A comprehensive article studying attitudes in later decades, or the very evolution of attitudes on the individual and/or the communal level, will have the advantage of being able to interview a substantial group of adoptive parents and come to more holistic conclusions. But, again, for the intercountry adoptions of the 1950s, steeped in postwar humanitarian theory and praxis, that window of opportunity has closed.

4. Materials and Methods

Archival research, confidential correspondence, and semi-structured interviews seeking contextualization may bring a historic adoption movement to life, as in the case of the post-WWII adoptions of some 4000 Greek children who were sent to the United States. This empirical study is based on twelve years of related historical research, mixed-methods interviews, numerous meetings and email exchanges with Greek-born adoptees aimed at better understanding the results and a close reading of their written as well as spoken contributions. Also, this study links to other creative efforts and committed projects, such as an adoptee-initiated volume, Voices of the Lost Children of Greece (2023), and to the adoption-related playscript and stage production based on collective life writing techniques (Mitsou 2024; Van Steen 2025). I have kept confidential what the adoptees themselves have indicated is not (yet) for publication. I have also consulted historical newspaper archives through the search tools of newspapers.com.

This approach cannot promise to be exhaustive, and the results are, therefore, qualitative rather than quantitative. Also, my very general observations about Greek-born adoptees and racial perceptions (above, Section 2.2) are not based on scientific studies of my own or any other measures of racial or broadly cultural assimilation. My observations are, rather, empirically informed by archival and oral testimonies.

My overall aim has been to add an important corrective to the portrayal and self-portrayal of American adoptive parents, whose wish to adopt a foreign child has typically been depicted as driven by philanthropic motivations only. Also, most adopted children who were the victims of such detrimental situations have been silenced in this master discourse, which has been conducted by the adoptive parents and the intermediaries or agencies involved in the adoptions. Hence, my choice of the title of this study: a contribution to the agrafa, to the “unwritten” parts of adoption, in the hope that they can be spoken and written about in the future.

5. Conclusions

I am always afraid of disappointing everyone. It is the “fear of disappointing” that my Mother left me with, even after all these years!

—67-year-old Greek-born adoptee O.G., testimony of 18 December 2024

Adoption is profoundly polysemic, so full of meanings and signs, to which I have long urged the adoptees to speak. In the archival discoveries and exchanges presented above, however, the missing parts or missing characters of the stories have been the Greek adoptees themselves. With some of my other studies, too, I aim to invert this balance by letting the adoptees speak and speak in many voices or, at the very least, by analyzing occurrences from an adoptee-sensitive perspective. I view the adoptees’ early experiences not merely as structures or end results but, rather, as tools and symbols in the hands of agents who historically had the power to affect processes of defining adoption, migration, legacy, legality, and ultimately, personhood. Like any other adoptions, the Greek adoptions were not short-time decisions but came with the everlasting effects of individual stories that have refused to fold into the remote past—a past that, for the oldest of the Greek adoptees, is now surpassing seven decades. The lack of proper records has only deepened this historical past and has threatened to turn it into an epistemic abyss.

Multiple times and tenses coexist in an adoption: the immediate past, the perfect tense, the pluperfect, along with the tenses that mark the unfulfilled wishes, the contrary-to-fact in the present as well as in the past. The simple past refers to the moment when, most often in Greece, the adoption was finalized or when the child first set foot in the United States. The pictures subsequently fix the past onto the continuum of the life of the adopted child—always as an adopted child, not as an adopted adult. The adopted person is never an ex-adoptee and is perennially viewed as the child that has been adopted—perfect tense for a far-from-perfect existence. Moreover, some adoptees’ status is still impermanent or conditional, depending on whether they show enough of a “collaborative” spirit or enough gratitude for “being allowed” to be among “us”. Through writing lives, we, the adoptees and those scholars adopted by them, have tried to reassemble the dispersed narrative details, the fragments of a cross-temporal and hybrid identity, to create stories open to recomposition, to make files and perhaps lives whole again, without riling more emotions. That is a different kind of (provisional) closure.