Why there is no place in the official memory for the Greek Gastarbeiter? In the first place, they existed as an unacknowledged minority, being excluded from the decision-making that directly concerned them. Nowadays, more than sixty years after the first Greeks arrived as labor migrants in West Germany, their experience and memory remain undiscovered.

However, oral testimonies shed light on unknown local histories and family strategies, not only in the receiving country, but also back in the homeland. Oral narratives are the key to the understanding the socioeconomic conditions of the postwar Greek society and all the pressures that the migrants had to face during their migration journey. In their form as life stories, they span in the period of a lifetime and include war traumas and the challenges of migrant adulthood.

For my doctoral thesis, I conducted 11 semi-structured interviews in the form of life-stories with returnees in their native villages and cities in Northern Greece. I used the snowball method to locate my narrators, using my network of family and friends as intermediaries. As a target group, they make up an age cohort born approximately between 1930 and 1950. Each interview was approximately a 2-3 hour-long audio recording. They were loosely structured according to my questionnaire.

What I gain through the testimonies of my narrators, is the knowledge about the family survival strategies of the prospective migrants and the social conditions that made them take the decision to migrate. Moreover, they are the par excellence source about the lived experience of being a Greek Gastarbeiter. The issue of family networks and their activation before and during the emigration, the new reality of industrial work and the relationship with their co-nationals, other foreign workers and the locals remain in the spotlight.