‘From Cradle to Grave’: The Ripples Effects of Giving up a Child

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The biggest and perhaps the only argument I ever had with my grandmother was as a teenager, when I began chatting online with a boy in the suburbs of Thessaloniki, northern Greece.

"Aren't there enough men here? And there you are looking for a boyfriend in Greece. You're Macedonian, and he's Greek - it's not going to work," she told me, raising her voice in a way that was uncharacteristic of a woman so full of love and understanding.

A few years later, I realised she was right and cut off contact with him. I still didn't understand her behaviour, however, nor the reaction and silence of the rest of my family. I couldn't understand the irrational hatred of Greeks by people who had never displayed such intolerance before.

I always trusted my grandmother, whose name and surname I proudly bear. After she died in 2013, I mentioned during a spontaneous and intimate family gathering with my father that I never understood why she harboured so much hatred for the Greeks.

"She never hated anyone," my father said, clearly upset. "She lived with a great deal of pain. Your grandmother had a difficult fate."

Then he opened 'Pandora's box', and told me the family secret, only part of which I knew.

Torn apart by war

Katerina's grandmother. Photo courtesy of Katerina Topalova

I knew that my grandmother and her family had fled their home in the Greek village of Calendra during the 1946-1949 Civil War and that she lived in poverty in the sanctuary village of Erjelia, Macedonia.

What I didn't know was that my grandmother's mother was infertile for many years and had become convinced that someone had cast a spell on her. Her closest friend, meanwhile, was seemingly pregnant non-stop, a new...