Greek Black Market Adoption Book

“From the beginning, Joanna Giangardella’s childhood was tumultuous. Born in an impoverished village at the end of Greece’s civil war, she lost her father at age 5 and then got shipped to an abusive home in Los Angeles as part of an alleged black-market adoption scheme.

Giangardella, 63, of San Clemente, made a good life for herself, however. She beat cancer and got a degree in art at the Laguna College of Art and Design.

Now she’s written a book about her experiences, specifically her adoption and the quest to find her birth family.

The Girl from the Tower: A Journey of Lies is a self-published memoir Giangardella hopes will encourage the hundreds of children who were swept up in Greece’s controversial mid-20th century adoption system. Problems with dislocated children began after the Greek civil war under Queen Frederica and continued with corruption at orphanages throughout northern Greece in the 1950s.”

Reunion

“Giangardella declined to talk much about her adoptive parents in L.A., except to describe the wealthy, childless couple—a Bulgarian-born doctor who ran Queen of Angels Hospital and his exiled Tsarist wife—as abusive.

Giangardella said she was never allowed to write or speak to her mother, and lost her native language through strict punishment whenever she spoke Greek. To this day, she can’t speak the language.

Giangardella married at 18, in large part to escape the yoke of her adoptive parents, and began the quest to find her biological mother, she said.

She wrote to UNICEF. She wrote to the Red Cross. She heard nothing.

It wasn’t until some years later that she met someone of Russian descent who found distant relatives through the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Giangardella immediately wrote to Greek Orthodox Church administrators in Greece, telling her story.
“It was 1972, 15 years after I left,” said Giangardella, who was living in Palm Desert at the time. “I wrote a letter, and in about three months, I got a telegram from my mother.”

Giangardella came home to find a Western Union message from her mother. It read only, “After all these years, I am immensely happy. I can’t wait to talk to you. Love, Mother.”

A month later, she flew to Germany and boarded a train to Thessaloniki, where she reunited with her mother, sisters and brother for the first time in more than 15 years.

“I have a mission with this book,” said Giangardella, who now resides in Talega with her husband, John Giangardella. “There were so many of us. There are still people looking for their biological families. The mission is to reunite us and to maybe have a reunion with all of us.”

Victim of Black Market ‘Adoption’ Recalls Quest to Find Her Family
[San Clemente Patch 6/30/11 by Adam Townsend]

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