The difficult homecoming of Greece’s ‘lost children’

Many decades ago, mainly between 1948 and 1975, orphanages and families that could not afford to raise them sent some 4,000 Greek children to the United States, the Netherlands and other countries for adoption. The children themselves were never asked if they wanted to leave, or if they agreed to lose their Greek citizenship. They knew nothing about the circumstances of their departure. Many were given to families that had no Greek roots, cutting them off not only from the land of their birth but also from their culture, their identity. It is only in recent years that these isolated "lost children" discovered that they were among thousands, protagonists in an unknown but heart-rending episode in the history of the Greeks after the Civil War and during the Cold War. Now, some of them wish to close the circle of their lives with the restoration of their Greek citizenship. One would...