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Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (Granta Publications, 2006)
Bruce Clark's book, which I read in its excellent Greek translation, published in 2007 by POTAMOS Publications, makes for powerful reading for several reasons. It offers a collection of personal stories by a number of those who were forced to leave their homeland, on the basis of the population exchanges agreed between Greece and Turkey between 1922 and 1923. These stories are deeply moving, not only for the Greek or Turkish reader, but for anyone who tries momentarily to imagine what it is like to be uprooted from their life and compelled to lead a new one in their "own" country.
Without Clark's work, these accounts would have soon passed to the realm of family stories, along with millions of others never documented, as very few of those directly affected are still alive. They tell of the lives of people before the exchange, the inhumane conditions under which they were transferred, and the immense difficulties they had in their new countries. In particular they also reveal the fallacy and arbitrariness of the criteria...