"Children's paths in times of war", is a collection of personal testimonies from refugee children who were hosted in the Centers for Unaccompanied Minors, of the organization "Kinoniko EKAV". It is a book dedicated to children who have gone through and are going through the horrors of war. More than 2,000 of these children who have lost their families are now in our country. These "unaccompanied minors", as we call them somewhat coldly in administrative documents, have lost everything. Not only their home, their village, or their town, like any other refugee, but also the embrace of their mother, the affection of their father, and even the simple presence of a relative.
We can easily understand that they have lost everything, but we do not easily understand that they have experienced situations that most of us know only from films, books or TV news. We don't realize it because they usually don't talk about it themselves, they want to forget it or rather, because they can't forget it, they want to close it in a box in their soul so that it stops tormenting their daily life.
This book aims to shed some light on these children's journeys. The people who take care of them, in the shelters of Kinoniko EKAV, have made a great effort to create for each child a context that allows and motivates them to open up and tell stories of unspeakable pain. They took great care to translate these stories into our language, faithfully conveying the essence, but also the form of the children's narrative.
In addition, some of the stories were recorded in Greek and English and are presented in podcast form on the Spotify platform. To listen to the narrations for free, you can click here:
You can additionally find all the stories available for listening at the end of this text.
*For the protection of minors' privacy, changes have been made to their personal information.