Alexandra Maros, one of the Greek children who were adopted in the 1950s by a family in the United States, spoke about her story on “Our Global Voice” with Petros Diplas and Dimitris Kontogiannis.
Alexandra Maros, who was born in 1955 at Alexandra Hospital in Athens and was adopted at the age of 3-4 years by a mother of second-generation Greek-American parents, stressed that she feels within her that Greece calls her but that Greece rejects her like other adopted children. She herself never met her biological mother Maria Antonopoulou, who was 16 years old and single when she gave birth to her. She didn’t eat American food because she didn’t like it at first and that’s why she lost weight but when her stepmother took her to a Greek restaurant in Chicago to eat sea bream and bread with olive oil everything changed.
Ms. Maros also talked about her bad experiences such as being locked in a closet as a young child, which made her afraid of the dark and to have nightmares; and the bad experience of other children at school in suburban Illinois because she didn’t speak fluent English at first.