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"A historical investigation of children's memory of the Holocaust in Greece illustrates that age, generation and geographical background shaped postwar Jewish identities. The examination of children's narratives deposited in the era of digital archives enables an understanding of the age-specific construction of the memory of genocide, which shakes established assumptions about the memory of the Holocaust. In the context of a globalized Holocaust memory established through testimony archives, the present research constructs a genealogy of the testimonial culture in Greece by framing the rich source of written and oral testimonies in the political discourses and public memory of the aftermath of the Second World War. The testimonies of former hidden children and child survivors of concentration camps illuminate the questions that haunted postwar attempts to reconstruct communities, related to the specific evolution of genocide in Greece and to the rising anti-Semitism of postwar Greece. As an oral history of child survivors of the Holocaust, the book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of the history of childhood, Jewish studies, memory studies, Holocaust and genocide studies"--

Review of: Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid Pro Quo?, Gonda Van Steen (2019)
Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 323 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-47213-158-7, h/bk, $94.95
ISBN 978-0-47203-881-7, p/bk, $39.95


Zitountai paidia apo tin Ellada: Yiothesies stin Ameriki tou Psychrou Polemou, Gonda Van Steen (2021) (Trans. Ariadne Loukakou)
Athens: Potamos, 520 pp.,
ISBN 978-9-60545-173-8, p/bk, €25.20

This special issue of Historein offers new documentation and insights in a new area of historical research by contextualising different aspects of Jewish history in the Netherlands and in Greece: efforts to come to terms with sadness and loneliness due to the loss of the family, restitution struggles, disillusionment and hopes, persisting antisemitism, and political constraints. Any effort to better understand those years has to overcome traditional constraints and divisions between "internal" and "external" histories of the Jewish communities. Our issue points in the direction of the transnational approach. The dismantling of narratives that subsumed Jewish victims and their experiences under the general battle against fascism formed the basis for comparative studies that use various axes around which research questions revolve: time as a parameter for understanding the shifts in identities in relation to political and social contexts, the development of welfare politics that emerged as an antidote to the catastrophe, the generational experiences that established new memory frames, and the responses to conflicting memories. We need, at the same time, to remind ourselves that the demise of the "antifascist" narrative that shaped the postwar period was substituted by the "free market" one in European memories, which enabled the articulation of opinions whose expression was not accepted without difficulty in the public sphere. The rise of far-right movements across Europe makes all the more pertinent the comprehension of the economic exploitation and ideological factors that shaped conflicting memories. We hope that the research from the perspective of postwar Jewish experience and its comparative dimension paves the way for the enrichment of the research agenda and will allow us to better understand our contemporary world and those who made it.

As was the case in many other countries, it was only in the early years of this century that Greek and Turkish labour historians began to systematically look beyond national borders to investigate their intricately interrelated histories. The studies in Working in Greece and Turkey provide an overdue exploration of labour history on both sides of the Aegean, before as well as after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Deploying the approaches of global labour history as a framework, this volume presents transnational, transcontinental, and diachronic comparisons that illuminate the shared history of Greece and Turkey