The Children Evacuated from Greece in 1948: To the Eastern-European Countries and Yugoslavia

Abstract

During the Greek civil war (1946‑1949), on the basis of a special decision of the Provisional Democratic Government of Greece adopted in the name of “saving the children from the horrors of war”, around 28 000 Macedonian and Greek children were evacuated from the areas affected by military actions. Their originally planned short residence in the Eastern European countries lasted a whole decade as a direct consequence of the civil war, in which forces grouped around the Communist Party of Greece were defeated. Although new destinations – children’s homes and boarding schools in the involved countries – handled the necessary conditions for normal life, education and recreation, the desire of the Macedonian children and their parents was their permanent destinations to be in Yugoslavia respectively the People’s Republic of Macedonia, the largest center of Macedonian refugee population from Greece. Repatriation of children will be found in the center of the Cominform conflict and disrupted relations between the countries concerned with the issue of children. Therefore, their arrival in PRM or in the countries where were their parents, will be intensified in the middle of the fifth decade of last century, after the death of Stalin.