AS I follow the modern Greek tragedy unfolding in Europe, I flash back to the 18 years I spent in Athens, walking to school in Plaka (the old part of the city), on the same streets that have recently been filled with protesters and violent clashes.

When I was growing up, my family was a tiny microcosm of the current Greek economy. We were heavily in debt; my father’s repeated attempts to own a newspaper ended in failure and bankruptcy. Eventually, my mother took my sister and me and left him. We all lived in Athens and we continued to see my father, though we had our own one-bedroom apartment. (It wasn’t the bankruptcy that got to my mom in the end, but the philandering; “I don’t want you interfering in my private life,” my father had told her when she complained.)

Further austerity was coming, but my mother was clear about one thing: she would cut back on everything except our education and good, healthy food. She owned two dresses and never spent anything on herself. I remember her selling her last pair of little gold earrings. She borrowed from anyone she could, so that her two daughters could fulfill their dreams of a good education — me at Cambridge, and my sister at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. At the time, Greek girls still offered dowries to be married. My mother used to tell me, “Your education is your dowry.”

As I contemplate the statistics — especially the 54 percent unemployment rate among young Greeks — I think of all the stories behind this appalling data. All the dreams dashed. All the promise unfulfilled. And all the guilt, shame and fear that so often go hand in hand with intractable unemployment and little hope for a better future.