Victim of Black Market 'Adoption' Recalls Quest to Find Her Family

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 .

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.

A CHILD IN GREECE

Born in 1947, Giangardella grew up in the poor but idyllic village of Ouranoupolis, then called Pergos, the gateway to Mt. Athos, a pilgrimage site for Greek Orthodox faithful.

Her father, Michael Metropoulou, died in the early 1950s, which Giangardella blames partly on the political climate of the time. Her uncle was associated with the Communist party, the Andartes, a broad term describing guerrillas in the civil war that broke out after Allied forces freed Greece from Axis occupation in World War II.

Because the Greek army knew Giangardella’s father was brother to a Communist rebel, they arrested and tortured him and other family members, even though they were noncombatants, she said.

Michael Metropoulou spent the civil war in and out of prison camps, and Giangardella remains convinced that the ulcer and subsequent stomach cancer to which he succumbed were a result of the torture and starvation he experienced.

“We were very, very poor,” she said. “After the civil war, Greece went into major economic problems. There was famine, and people just didn’t have any money, and it was very difficult to rebuild. I remember getting care packages from the United Stated with the basic things. I remember standing in milk lines.”

Although her early childhood was marred by loss and heartache, she also fondly recalls spending her days playing with friends and plucking octopuses from the rocks along the coast for supper. She lived in a tiny, whitewashed mud-and-brick home her father and grandfather built. She lived with her mother, brother and sister.

THE ROAD TO AMERICA

After Giangardella’s father died, her mother, Fani, found work as a housekeeper in the home of a wealthy foreign couple who had rented the town’s 800-year-old historic tower from the government.

In her off hours, Fani hand-weaved intricate carpets and painted traditional religious icons—a proclivity for art she handed down to her daughter.

Giangardella suspects that her mother's employers, missionaries with ties to European and American aristocrats, eventually connected her with the adoption program that forever altered her life.

The program, set up after the wars, purported to place Greek children with foreign host families to give them a better education and economic opportunity, she said. In reality, it was a corrupt bureaucracy that conned Greek parents into handing over their children to be adopted by U.S. families, never to see or contact their offspring again, Giangardella said.

Of course, Giangardella, then 10, and her mother didn’t know this.

“All I could think about was going to America and eating chocolate bars and playing with dolls that walked and talked,” she said. “My mom said ‘no’ at first. The only thing that I knew about America that it was sort of this golden-street, beautifully abundant sort of place.”

The caseworkers involved convinced Fani she would be able to keep in touch with her daughter—the program was akin to studying abroad, they said.

“[My mother] felt like if she didn’t do it, some time in the future she would regret it,” Giangardella said. “She was a self-educated woman. She could read, she could write, and a lot of other women couldn’t.”

In 1957, the family traveled by ferry from their peninsula town and hopped on a bus to Thessoloniki, about 60 miles away and the nearest town with an airport.

Giangardella, who had never seen an automobile, was whisked away from her mother in a taxi, accompanied by a social worker, and packed in a plane with dozens of other children.

“My mother was crying and telling me not to forget where I’m from—‘Don’t forget … don’t forget,' ” Giangardella recalled.

MAKING HER WAY BACK HOME

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.”