Adoption Agrafa, Parts ‘Unwritten’ About Cold War Adoptions from Greece: Adoption Is a Life in a Sentence, Adoption Is a Life Sentence

Abstract

This essay focuses on the Greek adoptees’ search for identity and on the agrafa, or the “unwritten” territories, into which this search penetrates. The Greek adoptees represent an underresearched case study of the postwar intercountry adoption movement (1950–1975). Creating a narrative of the self is key to the adoptees’ identity formation, but their personal narrative is often undermined by stereotypes and denunciations that stunt its development. The research presented here has been guided by questions that interrogate the verdict-making or “sentencing” associated with the adoptees’ identity-shaping process: their sentencing to subjugation by stock opinions, the denouncing of their alternative viewpoints about “rescue” adoptions, and the verdict of their entrapment in feel-good master narratives. This essay also explores broader research questions pertaining to modes of interrogating “historic” adoptions from Greece. It is concerned with the why rather than with the how or the who of the oldest, post-WWII intercountry adoption flows. In what forums and genres (narrative, visual, journalistic, scholarly) are Greek adoption facts and legacies articulated, mediated, and/or materialized? How do memories, both positive and negative, underpin current projects of self-identification and transformation? What are the adoptees’ preferred outlets to speak about embodied experiences, and are those satisfactory? Based on a mixed methods approach, the essay ties these steps in identity growth to the Adoptee Consciousness Model, illustrating the five phases of consciousness that the adoptees may experience throughout their lives.

1. Introduction: Adoption Is a Life in a Sentence

When all else fails, we might remake the story itself. Because most of us can’t do much about the conditions in which we find ourselves, we can begin by repairing the stories about who we are … [T]hese stories are not happiness-seeking—they are meaning-making, meaning-remaking.

(Gotlib 2020)

This essay seizes upon the incommensurability of uprootedness through adoption, focusing on the Greek-born adoptees who, as a coherent but lesser-known group, were sent to the United States and to the Netherlands in the 1950s and 1960s. Greek adoptees are among the oldest of the postwar intercountry adoption flows, which, in their first incarnations, were humanitarian responses to crisis situations, before increasing demand from white and well-to-do American couples for white babies changed the dynamics. Few of these waves of foreign-born adoptees have members born in the 1940s, but the Greek wave does. Notably, Greece of the 1940s was devastated by not one but two wars, with a civil war following in the wake of the destructive Axis (Nazi German, Italian, and Bulgarian) Occupation. The adoption flow from Greece to the United States preceded that from Korea by at least three years. The Greek-born adoptees, however, were not in the same way racially visible and their total numbers remained much smaller than those of the—typically very young—Korean adoptees. Therefore, their history has commonly been overlooked. Their history has only been “rediscovered” in the past thirty, perhaps even fifteen years.

Given the differences in circumstances, numbers, and age, the Greek-born adoptees are running out of time if they want their stories to be told and their concerns addressed. Therefore, the need for awareness and action permeates this essay as well, which speaks with—or in unison with—the voices of the now ageing adoptees. This essay must, however, be more than a collection of short, memoir-like stories and reflections. It delves into the writing choices and struggles that these adoptee storytellers of recent years have experienced and have independently shared with me (along with their permission to use excerpts from their work). This essay incorporates the harsh language spoken and written by Greek-born adoptees. All too often, the adoptee has been reduced to the passive role of a listener who is not allowed to pose critical questions. Other adoptees are reduced to “stolen” babies. Often, too, the adoptees’ reminiscences convey the sense of living a false existence, a deceived life, even a staged life, in which the performance of the happy and thankful, docile and pleasing adoptee has been mandatory. These are, if not majority views, at least views worthy of acknowledgment.

The essay further mines the virtual but far from immaterial networks of adoptees who have regrouped and find strength in the collective search for knowledge and in sharing with the online adoptee communities. It underscores the power that “gatekeepers” (such as TV search programs) wield over intangible histories and files. It also voices a call to action, for the non-adoptee world to think and act more openly toward adoptee citizenship campaigns, reunion activities, media exposure, and so on. The examples presented in this essay are substantially different from one another, but they all inflect, in varying degrees, the motivations that adoptees invoke for searching for their roots and for writing and “coming out” by way of retrospective storytelling, which are prevailing tendencies among the older Greek-born adoptees: Adoptee detective work and writing are ongoing, to grasp and grapple with that elusive connection to truth and documentation, to the history of the country and of the birth family. For all these reasons, I do not take the route of a conventional article but maintain the flexibility and multivocality of an empirically grounded essay that adds qualitative nuance rather than numerical proof—that functions as a corrective to what we thought we knew.

For a theoretical framing, I resort to the five touchstones or turning points of adoptee consciousness, as they have been defined by Susan Branco et al. (2023) in their Adoptee Consciousness Model. The authors call the model “templated from [Gloria E.] Anzaldúa’s conocimiento [‘knowledge’] process” (Branco et al. 2023, p. 53) and see it as steps on the path, or “spiral,” towards collective adoptee activism that also acknowledges individuals’ somatic needs. Thus, this model covers the five phases through which adoptees tend to journey as they come “out of the fog” (Branco et al. 2023, pp. 55–56), that is, as they become aware that their adoption, too, whether “successful” or not, was part of oppressive structures of inequity and possibly violence against women and families. Those five steps, which others, too, have identified as particularly helpful in the process of meaning-making, are: (a) status quo, (b) rupture, (c) dissonance, (d) expansiveness, and (e) forgiveness and activism. The painful scriptions and ascriptions presented in the sections below illustrate the phases of the Adoptee Consciousness Model, and they are themselves illuminated by the broader paradigm. Not all the Greek-born adoptees whom I interviewed or otherwise met have gone through all the stages. Not all of them have committed to forgiveness and activism (although I revisit the latter topic, especially, in Section 4 of this essay). Not all stories are full versions; rather, they express writing and reflection in progress. Not all stories speak to false narratives or abusive processes, either, but those extremes are not necessary for the adoptee to feel affected by deception or constraint.1 However, by organizing the Greek-born adoptees’ lived experiences through the Adoptee Consciousness Model, this essay may provide an analytical framework for understanding adoptees’ lifelong journeys, beyond the Greek and the individual sets of circumstances. Conversely, the predicament of the Greek-born adoptees may add a corrective to the otherwise robust Adoptee Consciousness Model, for reminding the reader that not all adoptee groups have the benefit of coming full circle on their lived experiences. Age, illness, and death intervene and may color the stages of engaging-while-ageing differently.

“Adoption is a whole life in just a sentence,” I told my adoptee friend S.P. “No,” she answered pointedly, “Adoption is a life sentence, without any right to appeal.” This essay digs deeper into postadoption adjustments and challenges and thus into the “unwritten” truths about adoption, the adoption agrafa. It is the last of a cycle of three Agrafa papers. The main themes of Agrafa part 1 were consumerist entitlement and disappointment (Van Steen 2025a). The article also struck home how likely postwar adoptive parents were to focus on their own “obstacle course” that made the adoption from Greece happen, and how quickly they resorted to self-victimization if illicit actions were found to be associated with their adoption efforts. Agrafa part 2 called in inheritance-related testimonies and real-life contestations of the status of Greek-born adoptees as current heirs to the estates of their adoptive parents and/or relatives (Van Steen 2025b). It dwelled on membership of the family that is being presented as conditional, even after decades of being adopted have passed. It foregrounded adoption frustration, or the signs of the long-lasting non-acceptance of an adoption within a family. Thus, Agrafa parts 1 and 2 showed that postwar intercountry adoption was about multi-layered adoption-and-appropriation and disappropriation experiences, once the “rescue” construct had started to unravel. Some children—far from all—became accessories to strangers’ lives, one-dimensional objects or props that had to shore up the adopters’ rhetoric. Agrafa part 3 continues in this vein and adds further critical thoughts on the lasting trend to infantilize the adopted child, to push its origins and links back into the past, to untie the family connections forged for more than half a century. Like the two previous parts, this part, too, blends quantitative and qualitative methods from social sciences and arts to enable life experiences to be told, valued, and interpreted, in order to provide appropriate support and to formulate policy for social justice.2

2. Research Methods

No systematic methodological framework has ever been set up to measure the outcomes of the processes of adoptee identity formation and adjustment over a life span among the adopted persons of the immediate postwar era (mainly the 1950s). Many of these adoptees born in the late 1940s and 1950s are no longer alive, which prevents the researcher from establishing a representative sample and creating robust tools for data collection in what remains a sensitive area. Therefore, the methodological approach to “measuring” among the immediate postwar adoptees is better served by an empirical study that draws on archival and oral evidence. This study must necessarily acknowledge that the first decade of postwar intercountry adoption was probably the least well-documented and yet the hardest on the birth families, the adoptees, and the adoptive families. Both archival sources and oral testimonies need to be obtained under the terms of proper ethical clearance and appropriate permission-seeking to be valid, as they have been in this study of the Greek-born adoptees who were sent to the United States in the 1950s and early 1960s. The author has received ethical clearance from her home university to meticulously use archival research and oral and written testimonies or narratives.

This essay can reach preliminary quantitative as well as qualitative conclusions by taking an empirical approach based on mixed methods, combining the results of thirteen years of archival research and of lessons learned from semi-guided interviews. I have conducted approximately 200 semi-structured interviews as well as about 100 more formal interviews, in which the themes of identity and adjustment have come up time and again, often in a tangential manner. The protocols on which this narrative research is based include an approved model of semi-structured interviews with participants whose personal data remain carefully protected, unless they insist on making themselves known, as is frequently the case.3 In addition to conducting the interviews, I have benefited also as the recipient of numerous unsolicited emails from Greek-born adoptees, who have shared thoughts, documents, historical photographs, snapshots of return trips to Greece, and so on. I have learned much from these materials as well, and I have protected them with the same care and professionalism as the data gathered from the interviews.

The Greek-born adopted persons are very active on social media, and their public posts have provided another rich source of materials related to identity formation over the span of a lifetime. Additionally, online historical newspaper archives such as newspapers.com have provided the search tools that led me to many news stories in the American press of the 1950s and 1960s. I am fully aware that the printed press does not tell the whole story, and I go on to qualify newspaper articles as such, for the feel-good narrative that they wished to impart and their reluctance to drill below the surface.

I am fully aware that all the above sources and methods require careful assessment and repeated cross-checking, in close collaboration with the Greek-born adoptees, who are keen to have their voices be heard. This essay aims to increase awareness of issues related to the historic Greek adoptions, among readers who are not yet adoption-informed as well as among those who are. Notably, the stories shared here are not meant to comfort or please the reader, and they may even be triggering. The author is aware of many alternative views, perhaps even majority views, but that does not take away from the need to express and organize the “agrafa” that could not be written for the past 75 years now (since the start of mass intercountry adoption from Greece to the United States in 1950).

3. Adoptee Experiences and Testimonies

3.1. Status Quo: Chrisoula (Chrisy) Moutsatsos: “As if I Am a Spectacle”

Some Greek-born adoptees have in the past used a reality TV show called Pame Paketo (The Whole Package) to find their biological relatives. Over the course of many years, the popular show attracted numerous people pursuing reunification with missing loved ones. It is no longer active,4 but it is still remembered for blasting reunions into every Greek living room where the TV set was on. Personal data protection laws and ethics became real concerns, as did the depiction of the birth family as the only “real” family. Adoption, which had always been clouded in secrecy and privacy, was now thrown out in the open for everyone to see and comment on. Like similar search programs, the Greek show was able to appropriate and commercialize the domain of adoptee roots searches, complete with the intrusiveness of reality-TV-style questions and exhibitions. It renewed a biogenetic essentialism without dwelling on what that entails. It added layers of popular voyeurism to a phenomenon that still benefits most from discretion. It promoted the idea that searches are an inevitable part of the adoptee’s journey, even when subject to the scheduling and/or programming of outsiders.

Greek-to-American adoptee Chrisy broke away from the passive adoptee role. She feels strongly that one should not necessarily consider it normal to go looking for one’s birth family, let alone to do so publicly. Adoptees have the right to decide whether they commit to such quests or not, and when, and under which conditions. They are not sentenced to searching. In Chrisy’s view, the position of passive listener to search intrigues unfolding is a far from attractive position to be in, which is only marginally productive. “Search has become expected on an invisible checklist for those actively engaged in the adoptee community,” maintains McKee, referring to the Korean adoptees, but it should not at all be taken for granted (McKee 2019, p. 91). Several years ago, Chrisy was presented with a search-and-find opportunity, as she describes below:

“The Total Package” (20 October 2017)

Fear has kept me from bungee jumping, skydiving, vacationing in the jungle, and keeping a pet snake. Not engaging in these activities does not really matter to me as they would not in any way change my life for better or worse. But there is one instance when fear stopped me from making a decision that could have changed one aspect of my life: that is to go on a Greek television show and possibly meet some of my biological relatives. Let me explain.

By the time I was 52, I had only in passing considered finding out more about my biological mother. This would be more because of curiosity than to find out who I am, etc. My reluctance to go down this path stems primarily from my belief that biological relations are not definitive of anything.

Since the age of three, the only parents I came to love, and occasionally hate, were Matina and John Moutsatsos. This mismatched couple adopted me from an orphanage in Greece and brought me to the States. This was like winning the lotto for me. I went from being an unwanted, malnourished child to a wanted, well-cared-for child with many many opportunities. I can feel to this day the deep affection and love I felt from my mother and father when I was really young. My feelings towards them became much more complex later, but that is another story. These people loved me, clothed me, fed me, on occasion encouraged me, and, for better or worse, passed on to me their world views.

But more honestly, the reason why I have not wanted to find out about my biological mother, is mostly fear of what I would find out about her. Women do not usually abandon their children on a whim. There are usually serious, tragic, and sad reasons that lead to that. Knowing the history and socioeconomic conditions of the era I was born, my biological mother could have been a very young girl working as a maid in someone’s home, where she was raped by someone in the family. Or she had an out of wedlock relationship with someone who left her when pregnant. Or she may have been a prostitute. Or maybe she was just a mean woman who did not want her child. Or she was a very poor woman with too many children already who could not support them all and had to give some away. At that time being born out of wedlock made you a bastard and stigmatized you and your mother for life.

Why on earth would I want to know about these or any other tragedies? Don’t I have to negotiate enough trauma as it is? Why would I want to add more traumatic narratives in my life? I always joked with friends that I would look for my biological parents if I knew they were rich shipowners.

Nevertheless, at the age of 52 by way of the internet, I decided to make an inquiry when I found a nonprofit in Greece working to reunite adopted children with their biological kin. It so happens that many adoptions that took place in Greece in the 60s and 70s were illegal. There are documented cases where children were adopted out illegally, by people working in hospitals … This nonprofit formed to help out people involved in such cases. My inquiry did not go far, as they advised me to pursue this when in Greece. So, I put the matter at rest, or so I thought.

Not long after my email correspondence with this agency, I got an unsolicited email from a person in Greece inviting me to share my birth/adoption story with the Greek public on a TV show called “The Whole Package” [Pame Paketo]. The show would do all the investigating about my biological relatives and pay for me to go to Greece and reunite on camera with them. Not having lived in Greece for so long, I had no idea what she was talking about. But thanks to the magic of YouTube I was quickly up to speed. Yes, this was the tear-jerking, oversentimentalized, and sensationalizing show I was afraid it would be. The formula was simple but effective in pulling on the audience’s heartstrings. And in my humble opinion, making a mess of people’s lives.

In the one episode I watched, a young man living in Greece was looking for his father, an American rancher from Texas. His mother had lived there for a while and after marrying the man she had one child. When the marriage failed, she took the young boy to Greece and cut off all connections with the Texan. Now the young man and the father wanted to reunite. So, after the show built up the longing and the anticipation of the reunification in the audience, there was a dreadful climax. The young man sitting on one side of a partition is waiting with agony for the moment when he will meet his father sitting on the other side. The father on the other side, in full rancher regalia, i.e., cowboy boots, buckle belt, cowboy hat, is anxiously waiting to see his son for the first time in 25 years. The partition moves out of the way and tears begin to fall. And then what? They all live happily ever after? Maybe I am too cynical, but I don’t think so. Just because you are biologically related to someone, it does not mean that you will automatically be able to have a relationship with him/her or like them.

As I watched the show in horror, I could only imagine myself up on that stage. Sitting there waiting for the reveal and anticipating being hit by a tsunami wave of emotions that would swallow me whole. Who would be behind that partition? A very old decrepit woman? Half-brothers and half-sisters who are fat like me? No one? My response to this invite was quick and clear: “No thank you. This is not for me.”

After a rather unsatisfactory search experience in the spring of 2019, Chrisy dropped her involvement with “detectives” and decided not to engage any further. She remains content with the status quo. Searching means sharing unsafe borders with other lives. There is a time to explore those borders but also a time to let them be, she feels. Realizing that preparing for a reunion would inevitably trigger strong feelings, Chrisy reaffirms her desire to exercise control over her own destiny going forward. This stance also includes an unpreparedness or unwillingness to “question individual or structural factors leading to adoption,” as per the Adoptee Consciousness Model (Branco et al. 2023, p. 58). To this day, Chrisy has not learned how and why her adoption came about. Nonetheless, Chrisy recognizes trauma, as in the lines, “Why on earth would I want to know about these or any other tragedies? Don’t I have to negotiate enough trauma as it is? Why would I want to add more traumatic narratives in my life?” Recent scholarly work has delved deep into adoption and trauma, as in the special issue of Child Abuse & Neglect, which was edited by McSherry et al. (2022). The Adoptee Consciousness Model builds on and recognizes this prior work (Branco et al. 2023).

3.2. Rupture: Andrew Mossin: Plucked out of the Frying Pan and Put into the Fire

Greek-born adoptee Andrew Mossin interweaves words and material records in his personal memoir that embodies rupture and deconstruction from a very young age. Andrew’s memoir transcends the adoption story by far. His writing is tinged, too, by nostalgic poetic shades, which come to fruition in his poems that address otherness, alienation, and the loss of a native land. Andrew has called his 2021 memoir A Son from the Mountains: A Story of Adoption, Family Violence and Separation. The title refers to the young Andrew’s confrontation with the suicide of his adoptive mother, the accusations hurled at him by his adoptive father, and his own path of rising above the heavy burdens and eventually surviving. Andrew’s childhood reflections plumb the depths of not-belonging. They show how the past can become a cage, a kind of tyranny, a state of imprisonment. The author’s writing, covering various formats including quotations from medical reports and academic writings, attests to the salience of displacement in the adoptee’s life. It challenges the trite assumption that international adoption is the only option for “unwanted” children, and therefore, by way of very poor logic, the only “good” option. For many Greek adoptees born in the 1950s and 1960s, as for Andrew, the uprooting from Greece was merely the first of many more displacements. Numerous adoptive families kept on moving from one place to the next, sometimes for professional reasons, as when the parents were active in the foreign service or in the armed forces, but sometimes also to avoid the probing questions of neighbors, social workers, or relatives living nearby. This itinerant lifestyle further reduced the steady points in young lives with unsteady beginnings. Growing up adopted became a kind of acrobatic balancing act, where losing one’s footing was but the least of the risks.

Andrew gives poignant voice to his childhood memories of his adopted non-status, interlaced with his recollections of other historical and simple local events that occurred while he was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. Documents, personal letters, and material objects spur on his memory, elicit thoughts, translations, fixations. Andrew dwells on the “talk” with the adoptive parent that was not a revelation of previously unknown origins but, rather, an identity crisis, for the insecure mother as well as for the child:

“Why did you and my father bring me to this country?” I once asked Iris [Andrew’s adoptive mother] … A shocked expression came over her face.

“What kind of question is that?” she said.

“Why did you bring me here if you didn’t want to have a child.”

“We wanted a child, very much. We didn’t know how it would be or how difficult.”

“Then why did you adopt if you weren’t ready to take care of someone?”

“Darling …” she began and her voice trailed off. “I couldn’t conceive, that was why, and your father wanted a child, very much, and so you ….”

And she stopped and her dishrag fell onto the floor and I picked it up and gave it back to her … she turned back toward the sink and next door the neighbors had returned from work and there were the sounds from next door of dinner being made … And it was like a tri-fold world we were in, so that I could see at any one moment the other worlds folded into ours, those we weren’t part of nor ever could be, and sometimes it was as if we really could have been placed anywhere and none of it would have been any different and what happened next or what had happened before were only reflections, nothing more, of some other state of being that we would never reach, never know.

When my mother turned, her face was pale and soft and she said almost in a whisper, “What do you want me to say, Andrew. What do you want me to say?” Her hands rested on the sink ledge and she pulled the strands of cat hair off her skirt and let them fall to the floor, and held up her hands and shrugged, and I understood that this was all she seemed able to say or offer …

(Mossin 2021, pp. 196–97)

After such a “chat,” after more walls have just come crumbling down, how does one return to an identity that has yet to be realized? When old kinship bonds have abruptly been broken off, and when new ones have not yet been solidified, if they ever will, does that leave the adopted child socially and communally dead? In repeated drunken stupors, Andrew’s mother relished in telling him that he was the unwanted bastard child of an uneducated woman who was raped by a violent, illiterate man. The adoptee’s true ancestry turned out to be very different: He was born to an unwed young mother, whose boyfriend abandoned her, leaving her in no position to raise a child by herself. This truth, however, was denied to Andrew through the many years he spent isolated from his native culture and language, while his new relationships and friendships were constantly being curtailed. Andrew foregrounds the Freudian family dynamics that are rewritten in so many new adoptee experiences and reunion stories. His memoir makes place morph into heavy-handed time, and time into suffocating place—an indelibly ugly place with which Andrew could only cope by holding on to words, by writing. Andrew deconstructs the family romance; he redefines parenthood and childhood but most of all survivorhood. Since a young age, he has been encountering information that disrupts the status quo, that subverts the rosy master narrative of intercountry adoption, to which he has long decided that he cannot subscribe. Andrew’s survivorhood expresses itself in his willingness to eventually accept the long-shattered image of a “successful” adoption from abroad, to connect with other adoptees via writing, and to reassemble the pieces.

3.3. Dissonance: The Walking Wounded: Propagating Tales, Collage and Assemblage

θα βρω κάνα φιλέλληνα να δώσω το μωρό;

Will I find some philhellene to give the baby to?

(Actress Anna Panagiotopoulou, line from the song “O Έλληνας,” “The Greek”5)

Adoptee lives are precarious, and so are their stories and truths. And some of their truths operate in the domain of dissonance, which is perhaps the hardest phase of the Adoptee Consciousness Model to properly define. The model defines dissonance as the “tension or contradiction between what seem to be opposing beliefs or truths,” often resulting from “newfound information” (Branco et al. 2023, pp. 58, 60). The section below makes a first attempt by relying on collectively gathered information, whether through snippets of interviews or social media posts or through more targeted conversations with adoptees and other observers. For me, the touchstone of dissonance has come to mean, not only the lack of a harmonious, logical understanding of adoption-related facts (if that exists), but also a certain amount of—and willing acceptance of—disagreement and dissension. It is the position that Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa defines as that of the “orphan,” “abandoned by all that’s familiar” (Anzaldúa 2002, p. 547). But it also entails actively abandoning what little was known, that is, being unattuned to actual facts.

In my years of interviewing many Greek adoptees and members of their natal families, several tales of babies stolen from Greece have been known to unravel and to lay bare the raw realities of family and societal pressures, which caused harm long before institutional coercion took over. Poverty drove widows to make difficult and often divisive decisions, which affected the fate of—typically—their youngest daughters, for whom a dowry would have to be provided. Unimaginable family pressure, too, was brought to bear on unwed first-time mothers to give up their “illegitimate” children. Unmarried mothers in postwar Greece were made to undergo systemic injustices, even in institutions like the Babies’ Center Metera, which opened in 1955 and was set up as a shelter for young mothers and their babies born “out of wedlock” (Van Steen 2019, p. 58 n. 127). Many of these vulnerable mothers may not have fully understood what was happening to them and to their newborns, and what would be the long-term psychological as well as practical consequences of family separation by way of irreversible, plenary adoption.6 Even decades later, the once “disgraced” mother, who has spent a lifetime seeking to be accepted again by her immediate family, cannot easily admit to the strains placed on her by her parents and (older) siblings, precisely because such disclosures would taint the very family whose reaffirmation she still needs. Seeking acceptance by their long-lost child as well, some mothers begin to whitewash themselves and their close relatives by blaming the Greek institutions, the “mafia” networks, Queen Frederica, the state … Suffice it to say that the typical adult Greek adoptee who grew up in the United States shows ample understanding about family and societal constraints in the postwar years. But the dramatic tale of a child “stolen” by unscrupulous outsiders and of a mother pining away for it for many long decades tends to become the more palatable version of the story for everyone involved. Yes, the fiction might just be better than the reality.

Some cases of corruption have tainted the historic Greek adoption movement, but they are not many. I do not mean to suggest that the adoptive parents were to blame in cases in which corruption occurred. The new American parents, most of whom did not know Greek, might not have been aware of any illegalities, even as they normalized certain commodifying practices (Van Steen 2025a). Some American parents did display their proprietary tendencies and availed themselves of a system that permitted loopholes and anointed all-powerful middlemen, who lacked even the most basic training in social work and adoption-related psychology. The adoptee was then not only defined but also essentialized as an “orphan” and perpetual child—a status that facilitated an overseas adoption but took away a first identity. The diagnostic category of “orphan” maintained the fiction of rescue from a place of no return, of the kind of undesirability that begged for the child’s new beginnings in another country. The tenacious label of “orphan” marked the dead-end language of no-progress upon no-return.

Odd as it may sound, a good number of Greek adoptees want to be stolen babies. They reduce themselves to such a position, yielding to the pressure of the sensationalizing media. They use the path to knowledge or conocimiento as a testing ground for questioning old and new information. The old information speaks of baby trafficking and scandals rooted in Greece, but the new information reveals that a majority of Greek birthmothers gave written consent to the adoption of their child—without delving into the circumstances. I would not lightly make this claim of adoptees identifying as stolen babies if it wasn’t that I have seen it play out in many cases. The reason behind this overt dissonance is simple and yet so complicated: The thought of deliberate abandonment by a birthmother or family is just too disturbing to the adoptee. Abandonment is, therefore, all too often presented as involuntary and/or unavoidable for a variety of reasons. Greek adoptees who themselves underwent less-than-ideal experiences may grasp for something in the natal family that has to be better than what they had. They create the impossible narrative of the impossible return, to a lost childhood of innocence and to a family that they never really get to know. To substitute for the “forever family,” they create the forever-lost home. But the past cannot be undone, even when one burrows into it. Neither can a future consist of making up what is lost. The adoptees’ committed search to know becomes the quest to not-know any harsh truths; it transforms into the even more vigorous pursuit of non-truths. This fictionalizing, this myth-making, reinforced by others’ joining in the conspiracy theory, may take on a life of its own. Together, they satisfy the need to embellish abandonment, to name it by another name, to concoct a new, “logical” story. But if there cannot be any credible information or corroborating evidence, is anyone served by active misinformation? In light of this tyranny of unspoken truths and prolonged silences, it may be more productive to start using the terms that have been applied to the missing children of Chile, “the children of silence,” defined as babies who were taken away from their biological parents in past decades, in many cases without the parents’ consent or knowledge of what was happening, and given to adoptive parents (Romo 2014). To describe the missing children of Greece, I propose the notion of “the children of the unknown”: children of unknown or unexamined origins, or declared to be foundlings “of unknown parents”; children moving through unfamiliar institutions and transportation channels, to unknown and understudied destinations; children going from unknowing birth parents to unknowing adoptive parents in the United States, by way of poorly documented pathways that leave the adoptee, to this day, in the position of knowing least of all.

The overwhelming majority of the Greek adoptions of the 1950s and 1960s do not follow the “stolen baby” scenario. For me, the strongest argument is a scientific one: The many Greek-to-American adoptees who have done DNA tests find no matches among the Greek families who are looking for an infant that, they were told, was stillborn or died shortly after being born. Admittedly, as of 2025, most of these searching Greek “families of loss,” as I call them, have not done DNA tests. They have merely posted their pained requests on the pages of social media groups and hope that the description of the date, location, and circumstances of the birth, and the pictures showing likenesses among blood relatives, will lead to a match. The practice of using social media platforms to find and be found is common among searching birth family members and adoptees, but, again, it generates very few results.

The Greek cases of missing children or of the “dead baby scam” once made international news, as in Helena Smith’s article, “Greece in Uproar over Sale of ‘Orphans’ Claimed Dead,” in the San Francisco Examiner of 28 May 1995 (Smith 1995). The talk tends to be about “thousands,” as in the article’s subtitle, “Thousands Seek True Identity at Hearing of Forged Papers Scam.” Back in 1995, a government investigation promised to deliver clarity. But there is no formal report, and testimony from any “handlers” or “go-betweens” is exceedingly scarce. To have one’s adoption associated with illegality, that, too, is a life sentence, as it casts suspicion on every step leading up to the procedure’s completion. Unfortunately, we can only rely on provisional and incomplete information for lack of comparative data for this early period of Greek adoptee awareness (which preceded the widespread use of the internet). But over time, comparisons with data collected from younger generations of foreign-born adoptees may put our preliminary findings in a broader perspective.

Just as I had concluded once more that the overlap between the two groups is exceedingly small, that is, that the children adopted out tend not to be the children that went missing from hospitals and private clinics, I had the opportunity to share my impressions with a dear friend in Athens. I have been friends with Dimos for years, without knowing much at all about his family background. Here is how that meeting went:

One chilly evening in April 2019, I sat down for dinner with Dimos, who asked me how my research and writing were coming along. I told him that I was still struggling to find evidence of the children stolen from the arms of their mothers, as so many Greek people believe happened frequently. When he looked puzzled, I explained what I meant: “I am looking for doctors, midwives, or nurses who, for sure, helped some of the under-the-table domestic Greek adoptions along—the kind where a doctor declared that the child was born to the adoptive mother rather than to the birthmother.” Such a “virtual birth” then prompted the issuance of a fake birth certificate of which the adopted person may never become aware. Close family members would not necessarily be in the know, or they are sworn to secrecy. The adoptive parents take the secret to their grave, unless the child senses that “something doesn’t quite add up” and seeks answers via DNA testing (Van Steen 2019, pp. 165–66). “If only I had a few confessions from the people involved …,” I explained, “Would that kind of practices not have rested heavily on their conscience, so heavily that they would have confessed to it, perhaps on their deathbed?” “Oh,” Dimos answered casually, “my father, who was a doctor on the island of Crete, used to talk about that type of practices quite often in later life. In fact, he served as the pediatrician affiliated with the Geronymakeio Orphanage in Irakleio (Γερωνυμάκειο Βρεφοκομείο Hρακλείου Κρήτης) in the 1950s and 1960s. He used to invite us, his own children, to head over there and see the kids. I remember playing with those kids. Occasionally, my father would try to help out two desperate individuals: a young unwed mother of a child that she could not keep, and a childless older woman who was all too eager to have a baby “of her own.” “But what of the child?” I asked, “Were the children told once they were a little older?” “I doubt it,” he replied. “No need to, either. Everyone was better off this way.” “And what of the next step, Dimo?” I pressed him. “What if the young mother was told that her newborn had died, when, in reality, the child was handed over to the adoptive mother, who could also reward the doctor financially?” “My father would never do that,” Dimos asserted, “but I have of course heard of it happening.”7

Again, I cannot not but ponder: How could any criminal investigation happen when everything about a full-severance Greek adoption was confidential? Are not all parties hiding behind the veil of mandatory privacy? And when there was no formal adoption in the first place, and the newborn child was simply registered as being born to those who were its adoptive parents? Who would ever have turned against a respected doctor, who had probably served the family on many occasions? Who would have placed personal authority or knowledge above his? Who would ever have hired a lawyer to pursue such an intimate matter against him? Without a court order, one could not build a case based on evidence, because one would simply not be given access to the evidence. So, any case would run into the roadblocks of the confidentiality rules that “protect” the adoption—to this day. Any alternative evidence would have to come from a confession of, let’s say, the doctor himself or any other go-between, which is not likely to happen. With the confidentiality clauses firmly in place, the system designed to serve the adoption industry has been protecting itself, has closed in on itself. Publicity at the expense of the adoptees, on the other hand, involves a different kind of risk.

3.4. Expansiveness, Compromise, and Adoptee Community

Anzaldúa called this phase “el compromiso,” stressing the adoptee’s integration of multiple perspectives. Branco et al. elaborate: “This is a time of re-invention and/or re-incorporation of their multiple selves, seeing themselves intersectionally [i.e., with intersecting ethnic, cultural, or racial identities] rather than being forced into one identity” (Branco et al. 2023, pp. 58, 60). In this phase, adoptees often turn to creative, occasionally competitive expressions, which allow them to “integrate new awarenesses into their identity, reconstruct their narrative, and tell their story on their terms” (Branco et al. 2023, p. 61). It is a formative step in which contact with—and mindfulness of—others prove to be critical. Now well into the third decade of this century, much of this process of compromising within and among the Greek-born adoptees plays out on social media, where tolerance and thoughtfulness of others are, however, not always present. Divisiveness and lack of solidarity within adoptee communities are, sadly, common phenomena—and not only because adoptees find themselves at different stages of the “consciousness journey” (Branco et al. 2023, p. 61). “Within adoption, there is a tendency to want everything to be conflict-free,” state (Branco et al. 2023, p. 61). That means that suppressed emotions and opinions may also more easily rise to the surface for adoptees who feel that they have been living “beneath the surface.”

The Greek-born adoptees who grew up in the United States have turned en masse to social media platforms to link with one another and to voice communal concerns. Their longing for a shared relational space and for “a connection with people like me” has been acute. Facebook groups prove to be the prime adoptee-centric community spaces for this generation of adoptees, and far more women than men take part. The Greek adoptees participate in a new information interchange with adoptees across the globe, regardless of their place of origin or destination. They have left behind the digital traces of their searches in various online networks. The new technologies that they have been exploring together, such as DNA testing sites and databases, have been exerting their impact on roots searches and reunifications.8 International family search consultancies and other online reunion forums cannot, at this time, be very helpful to the Greek-born adoptees, even as their stories and advertisements continue to gratify sentimental needs. The bulk of the Greek public records and genealogy resources have not yet been digitized.9 Also, the Greek language, in its various forms of the past decades, including its handwritten forms, constitutes a significant barrier and limits access as well. Feelings of isolation have been strong among the older Greek-to-American adoptees, who were cut off from their birth culture and first language. The feelings are poignantly expressed, across geographical boundaries, by Larissa MacFarquhar (2023).

It is this lack of a land of origin, the absence of a more material identity, that has pulled many Greek adoptees together in a virtual community that must substitute for more substantive ties to the homeland. But adoptee community cannot really serve as a surrogate for a birth family and a land of roots. Newcomers to the active online networks react with excitement to finding a peer group and often define old crib mates or new friends using the language and labeling of the family-by-adoption (as in “my orphanage sister,” “my orphan brother,” “my sister in arms,” “we’ve now adopted each other”). “Even if I don’t find my biological family, I feel like I have already found a wonderful new family of brothers and sisters in the adoptees,” A.K. declared (email communication, 14 August 2022). The search for like-minded adoptees from the same country of origin is on: It is a matter of helping one another understand the shared history. “For the first time, I heard and saw other adoptees state what I had only ever been thinking about,” G.F. concurred, “I feel indebted to my ‘support group’ of adoptees and yet, for the first time, too, I don’t have to show gratitude.” Thus, the adoptees re-create expectations of family support and continuity. They cultivate a connectivity that is rife with kinship metaphors, joining a quest not only for personal origins but also for one another’s origins and experiences. Their networks, however, sometimes fall short of paradigms of solidarity. In many geographically oriented adoptee groups, the phase of survivor activism has proven to be very fragile. Initial solidarity is easily dented by conflicts about who will be allowed to tell the collective story, who will be the designated spokesperson to engage with the media, who controls the narrative, who does the work. Outsiders, too, hasten to project kinship relations on the “family” of the adoptees, which comes with expectations of integrity and loyalty, which are easily bruised.

Together the Greek-born adoptees maintain organizational platforms from which to conduct a common exploration of family and rootedness. Social media, however, do not satisfy in full the Greek adoptees’ hunger for connection, but they offer up an informal data economy and a forum for exchanging names, places, and circumstances. The adoptees socialize but also open up spaces for critical thinking and advocacy, restoring some power to the public sphere.10 Many participate in current, broader debates about cross-border adoption and communicate with adoptees from other countries. Some posts on social media engage in sweeping expressions of Greek nationalism, even in the absence of diaspora-homeland encounters to ground them. Scores of adoptees plan visits to Athens and remote little Greek towns and villages. The typical Greek festivals that so many American diaspora communities organize are, despite their tremendous popularity, hardly the places for adoptees to get their Greek culture fix. Greek salad is not a gateway to reculturation. Neither is anyone’s stake in the much-touted Greek quality of philotimo, the moral imperative to act honorably and justly.11 “Greekness” is sometimes stripped down and quintessentialized for only a few attractive attributes. “Return tourism” of the Greek-born adoptees is real but is, as always, vulnerable to the kind of consumerism that commodifies Greek culture for quick consumption. Most Greek adoptees have been doing the so-called “culture keeping” themselves and by themselves.12 The “realness” of being Greek-born but left unrecognized clashes here with a Greekness that sometimes feels fake for trying too hard. Some adoptees move beyond diaspora patriotism and nationalism and plan reunion activities, even conference platforms, bringing more of them together. But it will take new and (more) inspired leadership to make them work: Any overrepresentation of the individual’s experience might eclipse the experience and even the suffering of the group. Self-promotion may sideline the real victims and make their experiences subservient to other motivations. A third danger is that these reunions may claim a kind of American primacy where there is none, since there were many get-togethers in the 1990s and also in the Netherlands, for several years.

3.5. Forgiveness? Far from Forgiveness: Combatting the F.o.g. of the Adopted Life

Greek-born adoptees are not at the stage of embracing forgiveness. Rather, they have been pouring their energies in “resurfacing,” in dispelling “the fog,” which has also been their most prominent domain for social activism. The Adoptee Consciousness Model listed a few definitions and interpretations of “the fog” (Branco et al. 2023, pp. 55–56), but the Greek adoptees are closer to subscribing to the following reading: “The fog” is what hangs like a somber cloud over intercountry adoptees, in undue measure. In these subjects’ strong views, this f.o.g. consists of fear, obligation, guilt. “Coming out of the f.o.g.” can be a harrowing, multi-year process. It involves dropping the perspective of the adoptive nation and parents and replacing it with the lenses of the birth country and family. It also involves “flipping the script,” or discovering “adoptionland” as an adoptee, and no longer just listening to how adopters and agencies portray adoption. This process of coming out of the fog is not shock-free, for it entails breaking away from a state of self-placating. Awareness is vitally important, and it starts with deconstructing the materially inclined “measuring” discourse of adoption. “Lucky” and “unlucky,” “grateful” and “willful” or “thankless” are not terms that should apply to international adoption cases. Being and staying in the new family should not be cast as a status that the adoptee must “earn” or otherwise “deserve.” “You seem to be doing very well,” “At least you have a family,” will be the unasked-for answers. And, with the savior rhetoric always lurking, comes society’s imperative “Count your blessings. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

“I am grateful only for the roof over my head, the clothes on my back and the food in my stomach they [the adoptive parents] provided. Love not included,” Robyn stated in a public Facebook comment on 29 December 2019. “Thanking people for doing the least is a hard habit to break when you’ve spent your whole life being told it’s the most you deserve,” she posted in another online comment. “Why was I made to feel guilty when I was grieving over what I had lost?” Calling Robyn “lucky” would be most inappropriate. “Luck” is not the steering power behind a child’s fate. Luck plays in buying a lottery ticket, not in placing a child. Some adoptees have integrated the language of luck, as when Maria writes: “Did I win the adoption lottery with the Paces? I didn’t win the big prize in the father department, but I still got a good deal. Fortune was on my side” (Heckinger 2019, p. 103). The facile label of “lucky” is typically assigned, however, by parties who are not adopted, with a degree of blindness to individual as well as to social harm. It also suggests that the child was “unlucky” prior to the adoption, which is precisely the state about which those parties know very little or prefer not to learn. Any attributes or characteristics short of “lucky,” “happy,” “special,” “grateful,” and “well-adjusted,” such as “angry,” “bitter,” “hurtful,” “demanding,” or “petulant,” read like harsh value judgments: Highly reductive as they are, they imply that the “indebted” child has failed to behave according to the how-to manual that must guide the creation of the—unilaterally conceived—“forever family” in the “forever country.” Apart from stigmatizing the adoptee, such branding unfairly shifts the blame and absolves the system and the individual perpetrators, who do not need to admit that any harm was done and may well prolong it. Such stereotyping also leaves the adoptee predestined or conscripted, as it were, for one home only, whose location is again determined by the adoptive parents (as in a relationship based on blood kinship). It reiterates the sense of a fated and permanent contract made, but a contract to which the child was not privy. The trite labels also imply that, irrespective of age, the adopted child is forever a child, forever childish—never not adopted.

These superficial categories remain stuck in the presumption that, even for the “unlucky” adoptee, life in the homeland could only have been “a lot worse,” that everything “over there” is inferior, and that everything “over here” must incontrovertibly be better and superior. Such uninformed pronouncements perpetually rekindle the “rescue” myth. Time and again, they guilt adoptees into being “thankful” for being adopted. The salvation rhetoric uncritically posits that the adoptee is better off with the adoptive family than with the birth family, better off in a wealthy nation than in an impoverished country, better off in a city with educational opportunities than in a remote village, and so on. This “better” must mean that the adopted children and their background are “less than,” distinctly “worse,” and cannot possibly be a source of proud identification. The common trope affirms that the child is better off with a bad adoption than with no adoption at all. It also expects the adoptee to be “migrateful,” that is, grateful for the process of migration from poverty associated with neglect—uncritical of whether (touted) wealth is immune to neglect. The “better than” trope, construed materially, does not reckon with any “side-effects”; it is perceived to be wholly unproblematic. Thus the “better life” cliché bespeaks hierarchies of human relevancy, which reek of imperialism, reiterating that the poor child ranks lower than the child from/in a prosperous and powerful country (McKee 2019, p. 129).13

The “always-better than” camouflages the unabashed “whiter than.” The international adoption system just assumes the best of the adopters and of the receiving country, and the worst of the birth parents and the country of origin. It also trusts the adoptive parents more than the adoptees on this call—and on any subsequent assessment. “Happy” and “well-adjusted” are the words used to describe the “thankful” adoptee who has embraced the American material world, who has lived up to never-ending expectations. The adoptees’ worth then is made commensurate to ever-elevated degrees of assumptions. But the standard of “well-adjusted” is again set by the receiving country and couple. Being on the lookout for “adjustment” is steering an adult-led research-type question: How well did the child adjust to our world? It is never, “How well did the adoptive parents adjust to the child’s world?” “Adjustment” studies with Greek-born adoptees as subjects have been carried out in the Netherlands. To me, however, they represent an outdated mode of measuring the impact of adoption. I acknowledge the adult adoptees’ objections against “specialists” articulating how they, the transplanted children themselves, “turned out.” The measure is never a reflection on how well-adjusted the child really was in the culture and family of loss.

Expressing gratitude and asserting “relatability” were “mandatory,” says Greek adoptee K.P. That was “the price of admission, the prerequisite.” “My adoption had to prove that love conquers all … There simply was no room for me to talk freely and in my own words about my feelings of loss and abandonment … the strangers I was given to stubbornly believe that there is more joy on the Pretend Train than there is freedom in Truth.” Adoptees were taught and learned very quickly how to people-please. Adoptees were taught, too, what their “place” was in the new family. An indicative vignette touting the “love” of a new American mother of two Greek boys made it into a local newspaper: “She and her husband occasionally act as if they are peeved at [boys’ names] … The boys’ first reaction is: ‘Oh, no, you’re not going to send us back’” (Ellis 1959, p. 7).14 These telling lines, describing a classic case of conditioning, offer a glimpse into how adoptees were trained in mandatory positive affirmation of their new parents, who even told the local community of the mind games they were playing. It was disrespectful and disempowering behavior, then and now, that put the adoptees squarely within the trappings of a discipline to which a natural child would not normally be subjected.

“I felt like I was just selling an ideal version of myself,” states Greek adoptee J.M. “That did not leave me feeling good at all. I was just trying to figure out who I was—and was asking myself if I was selling myself out, if I was just wearing a mask and playing a role to make myself acceptable …” J.M’s adoptive sister concurs: “We were living in a majority religious culture, and I was just trying to survive, to find a balance.” She means that she and her adoptive brother grew up in a household in which a fire-and-brimstone brand of Christianity held sway, which invoked the torments of hell to degrade the “gutter” country of origin. Greece was nothing more than a place from which children needed to be rescued. Poverty, neglect, and abandonment were only ever associated with Greece, not with places or families in the southern US state in which they grew up. The siblings were made to feel like they had to earn their adoption, that they had to redeem themselves. “Obviously,” J.M. continues, “it was not us but those who brokered the backstreet adoptions who needed to seek redemption.” Denouncing the rhetoric of this Christian Americanism, J.M. concludes: “That’s just what it took: wearing the mask of gratitude, putting on a performance, feeling out the atmosphere, minimizing oneself. First, I had to audition for my own life, then I was subjected to constant audits. I see the situation more clearly now: We didn’t know it then, but we suffered the adoptee version of the Stockholm Syndrome.” “First, my body was kidnapped,” says another, “and ever since my soul has been kept hostage.”15 Adoption has frozen the adoptee in time and place.

Many adoptees become victims of narcissistic gaslighting, with the adults manipulating them into questioning their sense of reality and eventually their own sanity. The adoptees’ perceptions of reality are constantly overwritten; their emotions are invalidated. The adults’ disavowing of the abuse, however, can be worse than the abuse itself. Telling one’s story then is bearing witness, affirming one’s reality, and revalidating oneself. “I was put in a play in which I had to perform all the characters,” says G.S., “I had to be this character to these people and that character to another family. In the end, how am I supposed to know who I am.” “I’ve spent my life measuring up to a perfect ghost child … and failing miserably,” concurs an adoptee who wishes to remain anonymous.16 But performative acts were asked of, or initiated by, the adoptive parents as well: Most of them claim that they did, in all honesty, not know how the country of origin handled the adoptions of their children. They invoke the best intentions and unquestionable innocence, and they blame any lack of transparency on the part of the mediators. They also make claims to parental fitness and solid preparation, of which there was little evidence in the 1950s.17

“I was always reminded of having been adopted and coming from Greece. As a child, I was often trotted around like a show pony. Crazy stuff,” says Mary Cardaras, who has since written her own story and is coming to terms with the many layers of it (Cardaras 2023a). She has also collected the stories of other Greek adoptees (Cardaras 2023b). “I was never allowed to be sad: Me being sad would not have fit the pretty picture,” Cardaras continues about an unwritten rule that many adoptees have felt that they had to obey. The adopted child just had to be lovable and the deserving object of love, under intense family and communal pressure. That societal mandate came with the expectation that the child would, at the very least, gratify the parents emotionally and would secure their psychological fulfilment. That conditional, always probationary environment left the adoptees feeling like they were constantly walking on eggshells with their own emotions—that they had, in the end, hardly any agency or control.

In a similar vein, Moses Farrow remembers his older, Vietnamese-born sister Lark, on the anniversary of her birthday. The sense of having to perform for the outside world as well as for the celebrity adopters (the American actress Mia Farrow) only added to the already existing strains:

So much of our attention and energy was focused on playing the roles we were put into. It was as if there was no room for us to truly get to know ourselves. We were forced to be in a perpetual state of survival, yet told to conform.

(Farrow 2025, public Facebook post of 15 February)

The “demand for gratitude,” based on consumerist and material thinking, has not been confined by American shores (McKee 2019, pp. 8–13; see also Piper 2020). It expanded into new geographical but familiar psychological territories. Marina van Dongen was born in Greece but was raised by non-Greek parents in the Netherlands. In the eyes of outsiders, Marina “jumped class”: Her adoption made her belong to a well-to-do Dutch family “that gave her everything she could possibly wish for.” Marina speaks to the pressure of having to show gratitude, of being “programmed to perform,” in the clearest possible terms:

Some call me ungrateful. After all, I had the chance to grow up in the Netherlands, to receive a good education. But they do not know what a high price I had to pay. Other people’s best intentions for me as a child often disguised their own self-interest, their own selfish reasons for messing with me. I was left grieving because I was forced to become someone else. I mourned for the Dutch girl that I never became, and I mourned for the Greek girl that I can never become again.

(Van Dongen 2017, testimony of 25 May)

Marina lived a life crafted for her: She lived the character of the script of her adoptive life, written by everyone but her. She tired of delivering the safer, the reassuring version of herself. She is done with tiptoeing around the tensions. She calls for loving the adopted persons for who they are rather than for who they are expected to be. Marina has also boldly inverted the rhetoric of the “best interests of the child.” She deconstructs this exhausted cant by unmasking it as “gesol met mij,” a colorful Dutch expression for “messing around with me.” She dares to go off-script on the topic of the grateful adoptee when she speaks with frustration about the circumstances in which her own Greek adoption unfolded:

Bepaalde vragen over mijn afkomst heb ik niet meer, maar daar is een sort boosheid voor in de plaats gekomen. Het is mijn Griekse moeder onmogelijk gemaakt een leven met mij te hebben. Ze stond tegenover een macht waartegen ze niet was opgewassen. En mijn ouders hebben zich haar kind toegeëigend. Iedereen houdt vol dat het allemaal met de beste bedoelingen voor mij was, maar ondertussen hadden alle betrokkenen hun eigen belang bij het gesol met mij.

… Als mijn moeder had geaccepteerd dat er nooit een Corrie zou komen, had ze misschien kunnen genieten van de Marina die er wel was.

(Van Dongen 2013, p. 19)

I no longer have any specific questions about my origins, but that [curiosity] has been replaced with a kind of anger. My Greek mother was prevented from living her life with me. She was confronted with a power that she could not possibly withstand. And my [Dutch] parents took possession of her child. Everyone maintains that everything happened with the best intentions for me, but meanwhile all parties involved pursued their very own interests when messing with me.

… If my [Dutch] mother had only accepted that there never would be a Corrie [Cornelia], then maybe she could have enjoyed the Marina who actually was there.

When the adoptees came together on our root trips, they did “kids’ stuff”: They recaptured their carefree childhood, a childhood in which social and family conformity did not rule, did not impose boundaries. They found in one another the comfort zone to do “silly” things, perhaps more so than in the “happy place” or in the family of origins (see Figure 1). By going out to play, they seized upon an embodied alternate reality.

4. Discussion: Activism Then and Now

… the deliberate decision to act in ways that affirm our shared humanity by sustaining each other’s lifeworlds.

(Gotlib 2020)

In the 1970s, when the American Adoption Rights Movement took off,18 Greece was still reeling from a military dictatorship and was in no position to join the fray. The Greek-born adoptees’ pursuit of their genetic history had not yet taken shape in any organized manner. Both practical information and institutional access were lacking. Also, a good number of the first adoptee activist organizations restricted membership to adoptees from the same country of origin, and did not work across international boundaries, in their eagerness to find basic common ground. In earlier decades, therefore, intercountry adoptees in the United States may have missed important opportunities to gain momentum, building on their very large numbers. Many Greek-to-American adoptees told me that, through the 1970s and 1980s, they were well aware of their identity-across-borders, but they thought of their own adoption as an isolated occurrence. They had no idea that they were part of a historical and social phenomenon that had left hundreds of other Greek children in a situation like their own. The Greek adoptee rights movement, active then since 1995, has made concerted efforts and has achieved some significant breakthroughs. In recent years, however, Greek adoptee activism has been steered by critical adoption scholars, including myself, who have sought to work with and for the adoptees and in dialogue with other advocacy groups championing the rights of intercountry adoptees and their birth families (see the volume edited by Cardaras 2023b; Van Steen 2024). More work remains to be done to achieve the full range of “[e]xtrapolating beyond oneself” (Branco et al. 2023, p. 59). Meanwhile, the global critical thinking about the rights of adoptees as composed of children’s and adults’ rights has sharpened (Llobet et al. 2025). But time is running out for Greek adoptees, most of whom were born in the late 1940s and in the 1950s. Many of those still alive face serious health problems and other challenges, which, along with the forbidding language and bureaucratic barriers, discourage them from taking up more active advocacy roles.

In a very recent development, however, the Greek government has responded to the demands of the activist group Nostos for Greek Adoptees, which had been advocating for years for the restoration of Greek citizenship to Greek-born adoptees. The movement sprang from the author’s research and was enriched by dedicated teamwork with Greek adoptees, especially with communication expert and adoptee, Mary Cardaras, and DNA wizard and adoptee, Stephanie Pazoles. On 22 April 2025, the Greek Ministry of Interior announced that it signed a new law into effect that creates a manageable pathway to finally restore the Greek citizenship of the hundreds of children who were adopted from Greece in the 1950s through 1975. The law’s official publication followed on 2 May 2025 (Government Gazette of the Greek Republic 2025, Law no. 2108). Despite all the prior hurdles, the goal of most Greek-born adoptees has been to restore essential components of their first identity, through knowledge and nationality. They share this desire with many other adoptee “diasporas” of children too young to make the decision to migrate on their own.

The Greek-born adoptees were given the promise of an expedited track to Greek citizenship on 17 September 2024, by the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, when he granted a personal meeting to the author and Cardaras. The Greek government has now delivered on that promise and resolved a protracted story of adoption and quest—of never being quite done with either. The historic mass adoptions from Greece had been covered over by confidentiality and secrecy, which the new law has now dispelled. Public voice has replaced private silence. By issuing the new law, the Greek government has actioned transparency on this forgotten chapter of its postwar history. By accepting direct guidance from us, external advocates, the Greek state has further depolarized aspects of its Civil War trauma related to child placements and evacuation campaigns, which had left a heavy legacy. The resolution of this charged legacy, which so often seemed to be beyond reach, is, therefore, far from an uncomplicated win. For me, this cathartic recognition befits an exemplary truth and reconciliation model, which has been my longer-term goal. Our sense of fulfilment is great, as is our sorrow for those adoptees who did not live to see this day.

The many carefully planned actions of the Nostos team led to the momentous policy reform. Crucially, the actual process and the close involvement leading up to this change had already begun to heal the wounds of the past. The programmed actions of the Nostos team included: two book publications; numerous interactions with officials, policymakers, and journalists; scholarly presentations and popular interviews; various documented and fact-checked press features; social media networking; consulting on podcasts and documentary films; a film screening enhanced by an archival exhibition; an online petition; and even the production of a testimony theater play. The play titled For Three Refrigerators and a Washing Machine premiered in London on 24 October 2024 and has now been published (directed by Kyriaki Mitsou; Van Steen 2025c). The online petition, which was propelled by Cardaras, garnered more than 75,000 signatures from all around the world. Supporting a petition may be the form of activism with which some adoptees are, at this stage in their lives, most comfortable. It still constitutes their own measure of activism whenever and wherever they feel called to engage. The petition’s tremendous success speaks loudly to the goal of identity preservation that is shared with adoptee activist groups across geographical borders: They, too, seek to restore the recognition and citizenship of the adoptee’s first family and communal identity. Holding that passport of the country of origin is a shared objective among thousands of intercountry adoptees, of older and more recent generations alike. It means holding the key to the right to return of one’s own volition and for as long as one wishes.

For the Greek Nostos team, momentum has always been enhanced through personal contacts, as reflected in this essay, in addition to deliberate actions. Adoptees have contributed much by sharing generously in those personal exchanges, which constitute yet another form of adoptee activism. Meanwhile, my own research was always ongoing, and new data and contacts kept coming in. With the Greek-born adoptees coming out of the woodwork and sharing their documentation and lived experience, I have benefited from a robust feedback loop that has kept the issues current and urgent.

The debates about historic intercountry adoption flows hold tremendous currency not only in the United States and the UK, but also in Sweden and the Netherlands, where recent, state-mandated diachronic investigations have laid bare illicit or illegal practices of the past. Independent committees of experts authored the Dutch investigative report (Commissie Onderzoek Interlandelijke Adoptie 2021a; 2021b) and the Swedish report (Adoptionskommissionen 2025, issued at nearly 1600 pages). Both reports study 65 years of intercountry adoption history and come to similar conclusions about protracted irregularities. They also document numerous illegalities of which the respective state authorities had at least some basic knowledge. Both long-view reports have sent shockwaves through the world of adoption and family formation. But what was overlooked on both occasions, amid the dust stirred by the disturbing findings, is that intercountry adoption to the Netherlands and to Sweden started with Greek children: The two countries took in their first “orphans” from the Babies’ Centre Metera shortly after its opening in 1955. I have come to know many Greek-born adoptees in the Netherlands and some in Sweden, and they confirm the circumstances of their arrival in their new home countries. Therefore, the Nostos team’s next phase of activism will be to press for a Greek investigation that starts in the 1950s and discloses these and other historical connections.

5. Conclusions: When the Adoptee Sits in Judgment

It is the underlying unkindness that you don’t matter enough.

(Lemn Sissay, acclaimed author and survivor of the British foster and institutional childcare system)

This essay has tied Greek-to-American writings, reflections, and other modes of adoption-related expressions to the Adoptee Consciousness Model (Branco et al. 2023), illustrating the five phases of consciousness that the adoptees may experience throughout their lifespan. It has marked areas of agreement with those phases, especially the first four steps of (a) status quo, (b) rupture, (c) dissonance, and (d) expansiveness. However, it has also signaled divergence from—or reinterpretation of—the model at the level of (e) forgiveness and activism. The scholarly implications of this essay, which has foregrounded the oldest cohesive group of post-WWII intercountry adoptees, confirm the model’s robust foundations. As far as the outlets and results related to forgiveness and activism are concerned, this essay has offered some pertinent suggestions for nuancing the framework. The phase of adoptee activism proved to be more open to research-led initiatives, especially when dealing with older age groups and formidable language barriers, but always in dialogue with the adoptees themselves.

The individual’s story that contains the kind of raw material that deconstructs the nation’s master narrative constitutes the accessible voice of postmodernity and of revisionist, de-colonizing history-writing. Its candor has been valued in Greece as well as in the United States. The telling, the re-telling has brought relief, especially for the adoptees, and may therefore point to a possible new way forward in adoption studies, alongside adoption research in theory and practice. Many adoptees have told a narrative of return, to origins, a country, a culture, to childhood memories. Several of them have resisted the outsider-researchers who present adjustment to the new and “superior” society as the greater good, which was then measured by the adoptee’s effectiveness in forgetting or obliterating the birth culture, or any emotions associated with it. In the old adoption parlance, a full adoption had to eliminate any legal or emotional disruption for the child, but it caused disquietude or trauma of a different kind. With the knowledge we have today, the rigidity of full adoption should be prevented or alleviated. Many adoptees and their circles have come to the realization, too, that even reunification remains a narrative of no return—that 1950s Greece, the Greek village, or a Greek past are places of no negotiation. I have shown, however, that a more intense local identity may become the productive spark of a more global identification on the level of adoption activism, capturing a shared or shareable sense of displacement or deracination, conveying emotions that derive from ever-precarious life—from life as a sentence.19 I have also shown that the restoration of the adoptee’s citizenship of origin, whether in response to activism or not, constitutes an important form of redress through recognition. It is the kind of recognition that is genuinely restorative of first identities and transformations since. It is the acknowledgment that lets adoptees transcend a lifetime of obstructive sentences and the entrapment of being reduced or sentenced. A family’s uprooting might not reside in one individual’s past alone but may prove to be a recurring marker of the collective Greek family history of several generations, whether as refugees from Asia Minor in 1922, as economic refugees and migrant workers, as hosts to incoming Middle Eastern refugees, or as recent diaspora Greeks and brain drain subjects. Greek US-bound adoption, too, was an aspect of global mobility and local population management, which took on biopolitical overtones. New research (especially on underresearched groups) can help the reader to better understand the systematic approach that sending and receiving countries took to intercountry adoption, which reached much further than placing the individual child. Such new research findings can be even more impactful when they are informed by the voices and other contributions of the adoptees themselves and are organized by way of an interpretive, analytical framework that is transferable as well as relatable.

I have not shied away from pointing out a few limitations to the Adoptee Consciousness Model, but I acknowledge its validity in an area that has thus far been overlooked: its country-wide applications and implications. The steps of (a) status quo, (b) rupture, (c) dissonance, (d) expansiveness, and (e) forgiveness and activism have proven to be particularly useful instruments of meaning-making and identity formation for the Greek-born adoptees. But they have also served as helpful tools in Greece’s process of coming to terms with its adoption history: from acceptance of a historical status quo, to the rupture of a former “rescue” narrative, to the discovery of irregularity/illegality as dissonance, to the expansiveness of numbers and voices, to the ultimate, reconciliatory redress in response to activism. Like the adoptees, Greece, too, can dispel the f.o.g. of fear, obligation, and guilt and break the spell of its own sentencing. Greece has grappled with its identity formation as a sending country, but it is now ready to receive its return-adoptees (in its symbolic as well as literal sense, through the restoration of their Greek citizenship).

I prefer to offer a few further observations by way of final conclusions, on topics that I have had a chance to discuss with many of the Greek-born adoptees. The adoptees’ input is written into this section, too, as it well should. This essay has engaged with heterogeneous adoption voices, texts, objects, and causes, with Greece as their common point of gravity, a Greece that has been clouded in distant time, space, and materiality. This heterogeneity affords a reflection on the essay’s writing process as identity-making process, ranging from the investigative to the emotional and often communal efforts of writing and recovering. The multiple voices but shared threads running through the above stories and story fragments unify the essay into a single, recognizable story, united, too, in resisting any finite interpretation. The wide array of forms, as varied as the adoption experiences themselves, places the interpretive frame under continuous pressure. It also pressures and deconstructs adoption’s underlying master narrative of the “savior” myth, of “white saviorism.” If the adoption of a child is celebrated, it is celebrated as an arrival, not as a departure or separation. That arrival celebration, that “gotcha day” spirit (as if of a child kidnapping mission accomplished), is only one of the many landmarks on the path of the lack of validation of adoptee feelings of loss and grief—of adoption as a life sentence. Estrangement is a familiar ingredient in international adoption stories. Yes, the adoptees would like to enjoy the sensation of looking into a mirror and noticing physical resemblances, which prove far more extensive than just facial looks. They would love to experience that “genetic mirroring” of biological heredity, even “the shock of the mirror” (Sumner 2020, p. 53), seeing likenesses in other persons that go beyond physical features to include the tenors of voices, mannerisms, interests, hobbies … Add humor, likings, partialities … Their world is, after all, filled with not-knowing anyone who looks like them. For the adoptive parents, that means raising children who do not look like them or anyone in their bio family—let alone be like them. Few non-adoptees understand how hard it is not to share any genetic familiars. (Belated) recognition does not compensate for the loss of family, of personal data, of culture. “I was always expected to absorb American history but never to delve into my own,” adoptee D.G. adds pointedly (email communication, 7 May 2020).

Informed by Greece’s postwar adoption history, however, the Greek government and diaspora community may wish to relativize their highly idealized self-representations and to move beyond the nationalist polarity of us versus them, to fully embrace diaspora’s transnational affinities and bicultural or multiple identifications. The foreign adoption wave from Greece lends itself to a quieter, more self-reflective Greek American history, which involves revisiting rural areas and provincial capitals, such as the ever-resurging locale of Patras, but also transcending this regionality and ethnic focus. The newly opened dialogue on the Greek adoptions may transform some of Greece’s own sociopolitical scripts, debunk the reductive cultural or nationalist representations, and start to resonate with more global concerns. The recent and momentous change that the Nostos team was able to achieve on behalf of Greek-born adoptees, and the way in which it was achieved, may rightly leave models for other adoptee activists and groups, for remedying other historical and cultural deficits.