'Choosing' Between Children and the Elderly in the Greek Famine (1941-1944)

Hionidou, V

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-77467-1_11

'Choosing' Between Children and the Elderly in the Greek Famine (1941-1944)

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Violetta Hionidou ORCiD

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Abstract

The famine in occupied Greece affected different areas at different times and to varying degrees, and even within well-defined geographic areas its effects were uneven. The distribution of the available food had to be prioritised at both national and family level. At the national level there was a strong rhetoric emphasising the significance of children for the future of the fylē/nation and thus offering them privileged access to food. At the family level it is more difficult to establish how – if at all – access to food was prioritised. The difficulty arises not only from the fact that this was an extremely traumatic experience but also because those marginalised would not have survived to tell the story. Marginalisation can be detected in the oral histories of survivors who talk about the elderly who died, sometimes their own relatives, and emerges even more strongly in relation to the flight of starving islanders from Chios, seeking refuge in Turkey. As this was an illegal, expensive and dangerous trip, choices had to be made. Stories of marginalisation come from informants who timidly explained both their good behaviour towards their elderly relatives and the bad behaviour of others towards their elderly. In other instances, those who had abandoned their elderly on Chios expressed through the recounting of dreams their distress at leaving their vulnerable relatives to an inevitable death. Thus evidence of a privileging of children at the expense of – mostly – the elderly exists both at national level and, although more tentative, at family level.