The Exodus of the Macedonians from Greece: Women's Narratives about WWII and Their Exodus

Lid?a Stojanovic-Lafazanovska and Ermis Lafazanovski, The Exodus of the Macedonians from Greece: Women's Narratives about WWII and Their Exodus, Skopje: Euro-Balkan Publishing, 2002 (2nd edition, 2008), 220 pp., ISBN 978-9-98913-659-7.

This book consists of ten interviews with Slavic-Macedonian women from Aegean Macedonia, in northern Greece. They describe their lives during World War II, the Greek Civil War that followed, and the consequences of the wars for them, their fami- lies, and their communities. Born between 1926 and 1932, they were adolescent girls or young women when they experienced, in 1948, the so-called exodus of the refugee children from Macedonia (decata-begalci in Macedonian). They were transferred to Yu- goslavia and then to different communist countries. Beginning in the late 1950s, they reunited with their families and settled in Yugoslavia's People's Republic of Macedo- nia (PRM).

The interviews were conducted in 2001 by two researchers at the Marko Cepen- kov Institute of Folklore in Skopje, Lid?a Stojanovic-Lafazanovska and Ermis Lafaza- novski. The latter is himself a son of an Aegean Slav-Macedonian father who at the age of ten was taken to Romania and as an adult brought his family to the PRM. The au- thors are guided by mainstream Macedonian nationalism, which asserts the historical identity of the Slavs of Aegean Macedonia as ethnically, linguistically, and culturally distinct from the Greeks. The narratives support this belief. They provide a picture of village life roiled by distress and injustices caused by the Greeks.

In the 1940s, most of...