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Convenor: Koraes Professor Gonda Van Steen
Helena Schilizzi was the founder of the first public maternity hospital in Athens in the late 1920s: she wanted poor women to be able to give birth in a hygienic and professional environment. Through this and other impactful initiatives, Helena Schilizzi brought a unique sense of urban and societal priorities to her life in the public eye (as the spouse of Eleftherios Venizelos).
King’s Centre for Hellenic Studies dedicates its first Schilizzi Social History Workshop to the memory of Helena Schilizzi, who helped to change Greece’s medical and family history. Our first workshop assesses child survival and orphanhood, child placement and adoption, welfare policies, and social progress, both in Greece and across borders, with the benefit of several decades of hindsight. As such, our social history workshop also builds on “The Global 1922”, the conference that King’s will be holding on 31 March and 1 April 2022, which will focus on political, diplomatic, and military historical developments of the 1920s.
Speakers
- Mariela Neagu, author of Voices from the Silent Cradles: Life Histories of Romania’s Looked-After Children (2021): ‘Orphans of the Cold War: Reframing the International Adoption Narrative’
- Joanna Michlic, Honorary Senior Research Associate, UCL Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS), Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, editor of Jewish Families in Europe, 1939-Present: History, Representation, and Memory (2017): ‘Un-taught Lessons from the Holocaust: Memories of Jewish Childhood in Poland during and in the Aftermath of the Holocaust’
- Gonda Van Steen, Koraes Chair at King’s College London, most recently author of Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece (2019): ‘Five Years of Feeding: An Unpublished Source on the Living Conditions of the Children of Late 1940s Greece’
Abstracts
Joanna Michlic: ‘Un-taught Lessons from the Holocaust: Memories of Jewish Childhood in Poland during and in the Aftermath of the Holocaust’
Between 2012 and 2021 the ongoing refugee crises in Europe and beyond have triggered evocation of young Jewish survivors from the Holocaust in the commentaries about the plight of young victims and survivor-refugees of wars and genocides in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In my own essay, ‘Mapping the History of Child Holocaust Survivors’, I also argue that the history of child Holocaust survivors ‘can offer a valuable template for historical and contemporary comparisons that, in turn, could advance our understanding of the impact of displacement and the loss of family upon young survivor-refugees of post-1945 wars and genocides’. However, I do not think that such a holistic, educational and memory project is easily viable, despite the frequent evocations of the plight of young Jewish refugees in the current discussions about the situation of young refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. It seems to me that in these discussions, evocations of young Jewish refugees usually have a rather purely emotive character and are vague, if not shallow. Furthermore, there is a glaring lack of historical and contemporary comparisons of young survivors of wars and genocides in the post-1945 period till the present, comparisons that would not only seek differences and similarities, but would use one set of phenomena to understand another.
In this paper, I discuss some public representations of young Jewish victims of the Holocaust that tend to gloss over the more complex and difficult memories of the children’s wartime and early post-war experiences. I explore agents and the broader historical, cultural, and social contexts of the more aesthetically pleasing and sanitized ‘happy representations’ of survival using cultural examples from the United Kingdom. I contrast these with painful self-representations of child survivors pertaining to survival and the reconstruction of post-war family from contemporary Poland. I argue that listening and interrogating the voices of specific communities of child survivors, which are not shaped and mediated by certain hegemonic national narratives of the Holocaust, might enable us to uncover and contextualize difficult and taboo aspects of lives of orphan child survivors. They could provide us with valuable lessons for understanding the short-term and long-term impact of wars and genocides of the twentieth and twenty-first century on child survivors.
Mariela Neagu: ‘Orphans of the Cold War: Reframing the International Adoption Narrative’
Historian Dennis Deletant holds that World War II ended for Romania in 1989, at the end of the Cold War when the communist regime which isolated the nation came to an end. This moment coincided with the exposure of the precarious conditions in which many children had been institutionalised. As the subject made international headlines, Romania became one of the global suppliers of children for Western families or individuals willing to adopt. The country was regarded as ‘the last reservoir of Caucasian babies’. Early concerns of child trafficking and attempts to protect children inside the country resulted in political pressure on Romania from the receiving countries to resume international adoption. Between 1990 and 2004 (when Romania incorporated the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into law), children were treated as commodities by adoption chains and as ideological weapons by elites and interest groups who shamed the country in order to influence a specific policy. Furthermore, the topic became a battleground between the contrasting approaches of Europe and the USA in relation to children in care, at a time when the country aspired to both NATO membership and accession to the EU.
Drawing on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, this presentation explores the interplay between different circles of vulnerability at the macro (global), meso (national) and micro (personal) level, and also the interferences of non-state actors with state policies in a fragile political context.
Gonda Van Steen, ‘Five Years of Feeding: An Unpublished Source on the Living Conditions of the Children of Late 1940s Greece’
On 17 May 1946, the American social worker Charles Schermerhorn arrived in Greece. He arrived at a critical time: Greece had just come out of a brutal Nazi German Occupation and was about to engage in a three-year-long and devastating civil war (1946-1949). Charles was appointed by UNNRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.), subsequently by the Near East Foundation, and eventually by UNICEF. That means that, in the course of a mere five years, Charles saw a tremendous amount of American-influenced administrative and logistical planning for Greece, which was a focus of intense early Cold War friction and scrutiny. Charles’ own appointment as an UNRRA child welfare specialist attests to a Western-imported and hegemonic humanitarian model, which had to serve as an antidote to the rise of Soviet-style communism in Southern Europe and the Balkans. The global focus of the time was on children: they held the future of their respective societies and, as adults, would determine whether a nation would align itself with the West or with the East.
Charles’ mandate was to organize food distribution channels to feed especially the children of Northern Greece, the region most affected by the civil war conflict. This was a role he embraced, and he meticulously recorded the details in a hitherto unpublished manuscript. Charles faced tremendous challenges: many of the villages of Northern Greece are located in the most remote mountain areas; many had been either destroyed by the communists or semi-evacuated by the royalist troops. Corruption was rampant, also among the representatives of local and foreign organizations. Charles decries the foreign experts’ lack of experience on the ground and their focus on scoring political points. But his writing becomes a most powerful source on the fate of the children of the rural and afflicted populations, and these are not necessarily Greek-speaking children. Charles tells of pockets of Muslim, Albanian- and Turkish-speaking children, of Armenian children from refugee families, and also of a handful of Jewish Holocaust survivors. His unique account paints a sympathetic but poignant picture of the living conditions of hundreds of Greek children whose basic needs can hardly be met. My paper focuses on these needs, on the local and imported welfare services, on the ambivalent role of the Greek Orthodox Church, and on one idealist’s commitment to five years of feeding.