Effrosyni Mamouni
The various narrative forms that address the tragedy of the Second World War and Nazi domination in Europe, most often revolve around the implementation of racial policies, confinement in ghettos, displacement, and the depiction of the extermination of millions of people in Nazi concentration camps, culminating in the victory of the Allied forces and the final liberation from the camps. In 1945, when the Allied forces entered the Nazi concentration camps, they discovered piles of corpses, bones and human ashes- evidence of the mass murders committed by the Nazis. The images of these people create the impression that, despite the torture and the experience of extreme inhumanity, they are now able to resume their lives from the beginning. However, for many survivors, this happy ending never truly existed. Little attention is paid to the conditions they experienced after liberation: their endless wandering across a devastated postwar Europe, the stay of some of them in displacement camps- this time under the supervision of the Allied forces- the abuse they suffered, the search for lost relatives, as well as the odyssey of returning to a homeland that proved to be unwelcoming.
This particular presentation focuses on the postwar experience of the displacement of thousands of Greek Jewish women to camps for displaced persons after liberation, known in the English -language scholarship as “displaced persons camps”, and on their subsequent trajectories. Emphasis is placed on Greek Jewish displaced women, on the ways in which they negotiated the concept of displacement, their experiences within the camps, and the roles they went on to assume. A significant part of the analysis will be devoted to the issue of marriage formation and family creation from an anthropocentric perspective, and the phenomenon of the “baby boom”- that is, the dramatic increase in birth rates recorded in the camps- will be examined.The present paper draws on a wide range of studies addressing this subject and is contextualized with primary source material derived from the Jewish historical archive of Thessaloniki, as well as from the Historical Archive of Macedonia. In addition to the above, oral testimonies of the protagonists themselves are employed as supplementary material, enriching the understanding of the topic and permeating the analysis.