Chapter 6 Controversies over the Holocaust and the Greek Civil War: Painful Memories in Greek Children’s Books
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Abstract
This chapter examines Greek children’s books of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that deal with the two most tragic and traumatic events in recent Greek history: the Holocaust of the Greek Jews and the Greek Civil War. The transference of such traumatic memories often clashes with the optimistic premise of literature for children, which assumes that even when facing violent or painful themes, child readers must be led to optimistic conclusions. The chapter’s main concern is to establish whether, and to what degree, the antithesis between the presentation of the historical event or the unpleasant historical memory and the optimistic outlook crucial to child-rearing is preserved in the discussed texts. Memory studies have shown that collective memory is social. The remembrance of historical events through literary narratives is a reconstruction of the past into the present, and it is through this prism that the selected Greek children’s books are analyzed.