From Displaced Memory to the Memory of Displacement: Refugees from Greece to the Middle East during World War Two

Alexandros Lamprou

In comparison with the population movements that took place in modern Greek history, such as the population exchange between Turkey and Greece in 1923 or the overall population displacement during the decade that saw war, occupation and civil war (1940-1949), displacement to Turkey and the Middle East between 1941 and 1946 was of a lesser magnitude. Even taking into account the Greek Muslims and Jews who were leaving Greece up until the early 1950s, the Greek citizens who left Greece for Turkey and/or the Middle East between 1941 and 1951 numbered less than 100 000. Juxtaposed with the hundreds of thousands of dead and displaced throughout Occupation (1941-44) and the Greek Civil War (1946-49), the number appears small and is perhaps the primary reason why, until very recently, it passed almost unnoticed. 

The short essay is dealing with the public memory of displacement and how it has been processed, silenced and recounted in memoirs, recollections, and public memory work since the end of the Second World War.¹ It argues that significant political and social change, such as the 1974 liberalization of the political regime and the current refugee crisis, was swiftly reflected in the way in which the memory of displacement was managed. While the post-war restrictive regime in Greece effectively toppled the Middle East displacement from public memory, the current refugee crisis has triggered the emergence of a new memory of Greek wartime displacement. 

Between 1941 and 1945, hunger, persecution and warfare caused no less than 70 000 Greek citizens (50 000 Christians, around 17 000 Muslims, and as many as 3 000 Jews) to flee from Greece to Turkey. While the Muslims stayed in Turkey, the rest were sent to various locations in the Middle East and Africa. Approximately half were settled in refugee camps in Cyprus, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and what was then Belgian Congo. The remainder was enlisted in the Greek Army in the Middle East. In 1945/1946, the Christians and a number of Jews were repatriated. It is unlikely that most Muslims returned. 

Post-civil war Greece (1950-1974): the politics of oblivion

From the 1950s to 1974 the wartime experience of displacement was conveniently ejected from public memory. The sole exception to this amnesia was the collective memory of the island communities, the origin of most of the displaced. It is no coincidence that the only text penned by a refugee was published as a short account in a local journal.² Following a traumatic decade of war, including the Civil War of 1946-1949, the post-war political situation in Greece explains this ‘politics of oblivion’. Armed clashes between the communist-led resistance movement and right-wing groups had already flared up in Greece during the occupation (1941-1944). The growing polarization between Left and Right was also transferred to the Middle East, where thousands of Greek soldiers revolted in 1943 and 1944 in support of the left-wing resistance movement in occupied Greece and were then imprisoned. The conflict continued after the liberation of Greece in late 1944, eventually leading to the Greek Civil War, which ended with the defeat of the communist side and the establishment of a strict anti-communist regime. In post-war Greece up until the political liberalization after the fall of the military junta (1967-1974), those defeated in the Civil War were exiled or imprisoned, and narratives of the recent past effectively censored. In the collective memory of people and communities, the war and the occupation period were shaped by what immediately followed, the Civil War and its deep trauma. According to historian Polymeris Voglis, the Civil War was “the filter through which consecutive generations confronted” the experience of the Second World War in Greece.³ The victors and society at large chose to suppress the memory of the Civil War in an attempt to overcome the trauma, including wartime displacements. Post-war official narratives, both on the Right and the Left, chose oblivion over memory. Consequently, testimonies that touched on the Middle East displacement were rarely published, not to mention texts referring to refugees. Nor did the memoirs of politicians show any interest, devoting, if at all, a few paragraphs to refugees.⁴ Hence, against the background of a restricted political environment and the general societal wish to leave the trauma of fratricidal war behind, the Middle Eastern refugee experience was essentially displaced from public memory. 

Post-1974: “Explosion of Memory”

The fall of the Junta, liberalization of the regime, legalization of the Communist Party and the return of Civil War refugees combined to create an ‘explosion of memory’. Not only political and military leaders but also ordinary protagonists of the period felt the need to publish recollections that had been suppressed for more than thirty years. Although events of the war decade in Greece (1940-1950) took centre stage, a series of recollections by people who had been displaced from Greece to the Middle East were also published. Apart from politicians, memoirs were written by men from the lower classes, soldiers in the Greek Army. As such, all of these texts focus primarily on military matters and politics, the uprisings in the armed forces, and the Civil War. Most include a few paragraphs or pages on the flight to the Middle East, up until the moment their authors were conscripted. Refugees are habitually missing in these accounts, at most a footnote in the narration of ‘more important’ events. Voices from the military abound but not from the refugee camp. This is the case with politicians and officers whose families lived in the cities of the Middle East, and even for soldiers whose families spent the war in tents at refugee camps in Sinai and Gaza, or in huts in the Congo. 

It is easier to understand the lack of interest in the refugee experience if we consider the identity of the narrators: whether politicians, army officers or soldiers, they were all men. Their accounts favour the space of politics and the military camp. The refugee camp, on the other hand, hosted women, children and a few men over fifty. In terms of social stratification, the majority of the refugee population came from the lower classes, with significant levels of illiteracy, especially among women refugees. 

Another attribute of these narratives was the strong local character of memory. The vast majority of the displaced came from a few islands adjacent to Turkey. As such, these formerly displaced men – in addition to almost exclusively narrating the male world of politics – habitually related their experiences to their island communities. It comes as no surprise that several of these accounts appear to have addressed a local audience and, more often than not, were published as short memoirs and articles in local journals. 

The current refugee crisis and the reworking of memory: from displaced memory to the memory of displacement

The 2000s witnessed the publication of recollections that for the first time discussed the refugee experience at length, apart from or beyond politics.⁵ Yet, this disinterest in politics and the emphasis on the refugee camp was to become dominant in public memory in the years following the current population displacement. 

Beginning in 2011, the wave of refugees fleeing to the Greek islands and towards Europe initially ‘awakened’ collective memory on the islands that had produced thousands of refugees to the Middle East in the 1940s. Since then, the experience of displacement in the Middle East during the Second World War has been rediscovered and recounted on the Internet, on the radio, and in the press in Greece.⁶ It is practically the first time since the post-1974 explosion of public memory that the specific experience of refugees and their predicament – not soldiers or politicians – has received so much attention. Clearly, the current population displacement has triggered the interest of scholars but more so of the public at large in the displacement of Greeks in the Middle East during the Second World War. 

Apart from the content, there is an ongoing shift in the frame within which the memory of the Middle Eastern displacement is set and given meaning. The reworking of public memory, framed as it is in the context of the recent refugee flight, seems to be moving away from the older framework of national history, that is, Occupation and the Civil War in Greece. It highlights the ‘humanitarian’ rather than the political aspect of the experience, presenting it as a tale of human suffering and deliverance. Accounts in the 1980s and 1990s were emphatically branded by politics, since political identity was behind the writing and publishing of memoirs by the ‘common people’ on the Left. In contrast, the current reworking of public memory prioritizes the refugee experience, which is also signaled in the shift in memory spaces: from the barracks and the space of (adult male) politics to the refugee camp and a more gendered experience of displacement. 

What is more, a significant part of the newly published material can be described as post-memory,⁷ as memory transmitted to a second generation, usually the children of refugees. In a number of cases, the recollections are a blend of early childhood memories and the memory of older generations communicated in families and local communities.⁸

Moreover, the emergence of a public memory of wartime Greek refugees in the Middle East is consciously linked to current debates on the refugee crisis, since the framing of wartime refugees in terms of human suffering and their expressive association with current refugees is offered as an argument in favour of accepting the latter and granting them asylum.

Beyond Greece, the Greek experience is seen in conjunction with the simultaneous displacement of other wartime “refugees from Europe” – Poland and Yugoslavia – to the Middle East and Africa. This newly emerging interest in wartime ‘European’ displacement has been intrinsically connected and openly related to the current ‘reverse’ movement from the Global South to Europe and North America.⁹ Another standpoint that juxtaposes current ‘eastern’ with past ‘western’ refugees specifically attempts to reveal the duplicity of the ‘West’. To give an example, a Turkish state news agency contrasted the relief ‘Middle East nations’ (and Turkey) offered to ‘European’ refugees in the Second World War to ‘Europe’s’ refusal to admit Syrian refugees today, arguing that ‘Europe’ employs double standards.¹⁰

Conclusion

This short review of the public memory of Greek displacement in the Middle East has revealed specific shifts in the way displacement has since been recounted. Up until the 2000s, a variety of causes had effectively dislodged the Middle Eastern displacement from public memory. The post-war anti-communist regime and a broad societal desire to overcome the trauma of the Civil War were behind the wider oblivion of the war decade and displacement. With the post-1974 ‘explosion of memory’, the Middle Eastern displacement saw some albeit small interest, but this was framed within the overtly political context of public debates on the Occupation and the Greek Civil War. It is only since the 2000s and more so since the current refugee flight that the memory of displacement has (re)emerged. This (re)emergence differs from previous recounting in two respects. On the one hand, recent accounts tend to place the recounted experience beyond national historical frames by relating it to past and current displacements, such as the 1923 Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey but above all the current refugee flight. On the other hand, recent interest in wartime displacement is framed in a humanitarian more than a political context, which is evident from the growing attentiveness to and emphasis on the experiences of women and children, rather than of (male) elites and politicians. 

Alexandros Lamprou has studied history in Greece and the UK, and holds a PhD in Turkish history from Leiden University. Since 2010 he has taught in universities in Greece, Turkey, and Germany. His research focuses on social history, state–society relations, and population displacement with special emphasis on the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey. 

1. I do not examine works by professional historians who have only recently taken an interest in the subject: Ι. Μichailidis, Παιδιά Του Οδυσσέα: Έλληνες Πρόσφυγες στη Μέση Ανατολή και στην Αφρική (1941-1946) [Ulysses’ Children: Greek Refugees in the Middle East and Africa 1941-46] (Athens, 2018); A. Lamprou (ed.), Πόλεμος και Προσφυγιά: Πρόσφυγες από την Ελλάδα: Τουρκία, Μέση Ανατολή, Αφρική 1941-1946 [War and Displacement: Refugees from Greece to Turkey, the Middle East, and Africa 1941-1946](Thessaloniki, 2021). [↩]
2. Th. Kapela, “Το Χρονικό της Προσφυγίας” [The Chronicle of Refugeehood], Καλυμνιακός Παλμός, no. 3 – no. 12 (1951-2).  [↩]
3. Polymeris Voglis, “Οι μνήμες της δεκαετίας του 1940 ως αντικείμενο ιστορικής ανάλυσης: μεθοδολογικές προτάσεις” [Memories of the 1940s as a subject of historical analysis: some methodological proposals], in Μνήμες και λήθη του ελληνικού εμφυλίου πολέμου [Remembering and Forgetting the Greek Civil War], eds. Riki van Boeschoten et al. (Thessaloniki, 2008), 63.  [↩]
4. Indicatively: P. Kanellopoulos, Ημερολόγιο Κατοχής. 31 Μαρτίου1942 – 4 Ιανουαρίου 1945 [Diary of the Occupation. 31 March 1942 – 4 January 1945] (Athens: 1977); P. Argyropoulos, Απομνημονεύματα [Memoirs], (Athens, 1971). [↩]
5. Y. Tamvaklis, Οδοιπορικό Στη Μέση Ανατολή 1941-1944 [Journey to the Middle East 1941-1944] (Athens, 2003). S. Vakras, Προσφυγικό ταξίδι [Refugee Journey] (Samos, 2009). Also a collection of oral testimonies (albeit narrativized to a certain extent) from the ‘common people’ – including women refugees: Y. Makridakis, Συρματένιοι, Ξεσυρματένιοι. Όλοι: Χιώτες Πρόσφυγες Και Στρατιώτες Στη Μέση Ανατολή [Refugees and Soldiers from Chios in the Middle East. Personal recollections](Chios, 2006). [↩]
6. Indicatively: http://www.ert.gr/egeopelagites-prosfiges-polemou-to-ert-gr-parousiazi-mia-schetika-agnosti-plevra-tis-istorias/;http://www.efsyn.gr/arthro/ta-kaikia-tis-diafygis-espasan-ta-desma-ton-nazi [↩]
7. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (Columbia, 2012).  [↩]
8. Maria Chasapidou, Προσφυγοπούλα αριθμός 2014 [Refugee Girl no. 2014] (Athens, 2019); N. Bratsos, Αιγαιοπελαγίτες Πρόσφυγες στον Β΄ Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο. Μια Οδύσσεια Επιβίωσης μέσα από Αφηγήσεις των Πρωταγωνιστών [Refugees from the Aegean in WWII. An Odyssey of Survival through the recollections of the Protagonists] (Athens, 2017).  [↩]
9. Indicatively: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/06/02/the-forgotten-story-of-european-refugee-camps-in-the-middle-east/; https://mvslim.com/european-refugees-in-the-middle-east-looking-for-safety-during-world-war-2/ [↩]
10. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/life/syria-hosted-european-refugees-during-world-war-ii/1755189 [↩]

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