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to The Journal of Modern History
Tara Zahra
University of Chicago
At the end of the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of children were
missing. Their faces adorned Red Cross posters, under the banner “Who
knows our parents and our origins?” Whether through bombings, military
service, evacuation, deportation, forced labor, ethnic cleansing, or murder, an
unprecedented number of children had been separated from their parents
during the war. The German Red Cross received over 300,000 requests to
trace missing children or parents between 1945 and 1958, while the Interna-
tional Tracing Service traced 343,057 lost children between 1945 and 1956.1
The problem of reuniting families after World War II proved to be more than
a daunting logistical puzzle, moreover. Although they represented only a
small fraction of the millions of displaced persons (DPs) in postwar Europe,
so-called lost children held a special grip on the postwar imagination. They
stood at the center of bitter political conflicts between military authorities,
German foster parents, social workers, Jewish agencies, East European Com-
munist officials, and DPs themselves, all of whom competed to determine
their fates. These battles were linked, in turn, to emerging ideals of human
rights, the family, democracy, child welfare, and the reconstruction of Euro-
pean civilization at large. In the words of Vinita A. Lewis, an officer with the
International Refugee Organization (IRO) in Germany, “The lost identity of
individual children is the Social Problem of the day on the continent of
Europe.”2
Following the Second World War, Europe appeared to be a civilization in
ruins. American, British, and émigré humanitarian workers often arrived on
* I would like to thank Pamela Ballinger, Daniella Doron, Laura Lee Downs, Heide
Fehrenbach, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alison Frank, Atina Grossmann, Andrew Janco,
Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Pieter Judson, Mark Mazower, Emily Osborn, Larry Wolff, and
the members of the Russian and East European Studies Workshops at Harvard and
Chicago for their helpful feedback on previous versions of this essay.
1
Der DRK Kindersuchdienst, September 30, 1958, B 106/24431, Bundesarchiv
Koblenz. For International Tracing Service numbers, see Louise Holborn, The Inter-
national Refugee Organization: A Specialized Agency of the United Nations; Its
History and Its Work (New York, 1956), 502.
2 Memo to Mr. A. C. Dunn, Policy on Unaccompanied Children, May 27, 1949,
the continent through French ports and then traveled eastward, marveling at
the spectacle of physical and human destruction.3 The sad physical and mental
state of Europe’s children, in particular, spawned dystopian fears of European
families and societies in disarray. In 1946, American freemason Alice Bailey
alerted the American public about “those peculiar and wild children of Europe
and of China to whom the name ‘wolf children’ has been given. They have
known no parental authority; they run in packs like wolves; they lack all moral
sense and have no civilized values and know no sexual restrictions; they know
no laws save the law of self-preservation.”4 Such words were often meant to
open the pocketbooks of donors, but they also reflected a widespread consen-
sus that the Second World War had destroyed the family as completely as it
had Europe’s train tracks, factories, bridges, and roads. The concepts of both
family and nation in twentieth-century Europe were redefined through expe-
riences and perceptions of mass displacement, as postwar visions of stable
families, democracies, and nations often crystallized in opposition to the
perceived instability, immorality, and dysfunction of Europe’s refugees and
DPs.
Numbers alone confirmed a grim picture: UNESCO (the United Nations’
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), founded in 1945, esti-
mated that 8 million children in Germany, 6.5 million children in the Soviet
Union, and 1.3 million children in France remained homeless in 1946. In the
summer of 1945, infant mortality was double the prewar rate in France and
nearly four times the prewar rate in Vienna. In Czechoslovakia in 1947, 35
percent of children under age eighteen suffered from tuberculosis. An esti-
mated 13 million children in Europe had lost one or both parents in the war.
Thérèse Brosse, writing for UNESCO, claimed that 60 million Europeans
were still malnourished in 1950.5
New international humanitarian organizations took a leading role in the
postwar campaign to salvage Europe’s children and youths. The activism of
3
For memoirs of such experiences, see Susan T. Pettiss with Lynn Taylor, After the
Shooting Stopped: The Story of an UNRRA Welfare Worker in Germany, 1945– 47
(Victoria, 2004); Kathryn Hulme, The Wild Place (Boston, 1953); Margaret McNeill,
By the Rivers of Babylon: A Story of Relief Work among the Displaced Persons of
Europe (London, 1950); Ernst Papanek’s diary of his tour of Europe in 1946 in
Papanek Europe Tour, F-13, Ernst Papanek Collection, International Institute for
Social History (IISH), Amsterdam; and the unpublished memoir of Aleta Brownlee,
“Whose Children?” box 9, Aleta Brownlee Papers, Hoover Archive, Stanford Univer-
sity, Stanford, CA.
4 Alice Bailey, The Problems of the Children in the World Today: Essentials of Post
European Situation (Paris, 1950); Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945
(New York, 2005), 22.
postwar Europe. As of June 30, 1947, UNRRA and the Preparatory Commission,
International Refugee Organization had handled 22,058 cases of unaccompanied chil-
dren in the American, British, and French zones of Austria and Germany. See Office
of Statistics and Operational Reports, Unaccompanied Children in Austria and Ger-
many, April 29, 1948, 43/AJ/604, AN. Another 6,000 unaccompanied children were
repatriated or resettled by the IRO between 1948 and 1951. These numbers do not
include German expellee children. Among the German expellees in the Federal
Republic of Germany in 1950, 1,832,725 were children under age fourteen. See
Jacques Vernant, The Refugee in the Postwar World (New Haven, CT, 1953), 101,
180.
7
For numbers, see Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the
Twentieth Century (New York, 1985), 297–99. While the situation in Asia is beyond
the scope of this essay, the Chinese National Relief and Rehabilitation Association
reported that it had provided assistance to 1 million refugees by 1947. For the number
of Chinese refugees, see Eugene M. Kulischer, Displaced Persons in the Modern
World (Philadelphia, 1949), 169.
8 Monnetier, June 2, 1946, Papanek Europe Tour, F-13, Ernst Papanek Collection,
IISH.
9 UNRRA, “Psychological Problems of Displaced Persons,” June 1945, JRU Co-
IRO were British and American women. Out of 12,889 UNRRA personnel in
December 1946, 37 percent were American, 34 percent were British, and 44
percent were women.10 In the laboratory of DP camps and children’s homes
in Europe, these humanitarian workers elaborated new ideas about child
development and human nature based on their observation of children dis-
placed by war and racial persecution. Through this work, they typically sought
and found confirmation of a set of universalist psychoanalytic principles.11
Specifically, a new concept of trauma developed during the Second World
War, focused on the separation of family members as much as experiences of
physical violence.12 The story of humanitarian activism around refugee chil-
dren after the Second World War thus contributes to a growing effort to
historicize the concept of trauma, as well as ideals of children’s “best inter-
ests” that are often invoked as universal human truths.13
At first glance, the United Nations’ efforts to rehabilitate refugee children
seem to reflect a familiar story of postwar Americanization in Europe. British
and American social workers employed by UNRRA and the IRO sought to
apply and disseminate the individualist, psychoanalytic, and familialist visions
that dominated child welfare in England and the United States at the time.
Recent accounts of democratization and human rights in postwar Europe have
typically portrayed World War II as a watershed moment in the advancement
10 George Woodbridge, UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and
“New Worlds for Children in the 18th Century: Problems of Historical Interpretation,”
History of the Human Sciences 3, no. 1 (1990): 69 – 83.
rights activism, see Judt, Postwar, 564 – 65; Paul Lauren, The Evolution of Interna-
tional Human Rights (Philadelphia, 1996); Mark Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of
Human Rights, 1933–1950,” Historical Journal 47, no. 2 (2004): 386 – 88; A. W. Brian
Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the
European Convention (Oxford, 2001), 157–220; Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for
the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 59; Mark
Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York, 1998), 191; Mark
Roseman, “The Organic Society and the Massenmenschen: Integrating Young Labor
in the Ruhr Mines, 1945– 48,” in West Germany under Reconstruction: Politics,
Culture, and Society in the Adenauer Era, ed. Robert Moeller (Ann Arbor, MI, 1997),
287–320.
15 For a recent challenge to this narrative, see Mary Nolan, “Utopian Visions in a
group consciousness and to clamor for rights as—and only as—Poles or Jews
or Germans, etc.”17 In particular, historians of displacement have shown how
the experience of the war and camp life often encouraged nationalist and
Zionist loyalties among DPs. The very status of DPs, after all, was dependent
on nationality. Citizens of ex-enemy nations (such as Volksdeutsche) were
excluded from DP status, and anyone labeled a Soviet citizen faced the
possibility of forced repatriation. UNRRA and the IRO also organized DP
camps along national lines in order to facilitate repatriation and avoid con-
flicts. In the process, they contributed to the nationalization of DPs through
their own practices of national classification and segregation.18
How can we make sense of the messy entanglement of individualist,
familialist, and nationalist rhetoric in postwar humanitarian and human rights
activism? This article suggests that many UNRRA and IRO social workers
themselves gradually came to emphasize the importance of collectivist and
nationalist claims on children through their work with DP children. These
claims, moreover, were rooted in Zionist, nationalist, and Socialist traditions
dating back to the late nineteenth century in Central and Eastern Europe.19
New ideals of human rights and democracy in Europe and in emerging
international organizations were therefore not simply imposed from above by
Allied occupation authorities and humanitarian organizations: they were in-
formed by long-standing local nationalist traditions and pedagogical practices
in Central and Eastern Europe.
The social workers employed by UNRRA and the IRO saw themselves as
agents of democratization and human rights. These terms, however, carried
different meanings in the immediate postwar era than they do today. Although
post–World War II humanitarian activists touted both individualist and inter-
nationalist values, they viewed two collectives, the nation and the family, as
essential sources of individual identity and agency. UN workers therefore
sought to rehabilitate European youths through a particular kind of identity
politics, which entailed both the reunification of biological families and the
renationalization and repatriation of children uprooted and allegedly dena-
tionalized by the Nazi war machine. For Jewish children in particular, how-
ever, the claims of nation (Zionism) and family (surviving relatives) often
competed or conflicted, provoking fierce debates within and among humani-
tarian organizations, Jewish agencies, and DPs. UNRRA and Jewish agencies
thus competed for authority over surviving Jewish children, while Jewish
agencies themselves, such as the American Joint Distribution Committee and
Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the
Bohemian Lands, 1900 –1948 (Ithaca, NY, 2008).
the Jewish Agency for Palestine, clashed over precisely how and where the
best interests of surviving Jewish children might be served—through family
placement with surviving relatives or foster parents or through collective (and
nationalist) education in Palestine?20
The history of activism around refugee families thus reveals the collectivist
underpinnings of postwar humanitarianism and emerging ideals of democracy
and human rights in Europe, particularly as those rights were applied to
children. By focusing on individual psychological rehabilitation, UN workers
sought to uphold the individual “best interests” and “human rights” of their
clients. But there were no abstract “individuals” in postwar individualism. In
practice, humanitarian activists targeted refugees as children or adults, boys or
girls, Jews, Germans, Czechs, or Poles. They defined young refugees’ indi-
vidual “best interests” in distinctly nationalist, gendered, and familialist terms.
lection, IISH.
23
Policies Regarding Reestablishment of Children, April 25, 1949, 43/AJ/926, AN.
24
Letters to the IRO, 43/AJ/926, AN.
25 Elsa Castendyck, Director of research and special studies, Review of the
European-Jewish Children’s Aid, New York City (Washington, DC, December 1943),
45, folder 584, RG 249, YIVO, Center for Jewish History (CJH), New York.
26 On the confusing self-presentation of DP youths, see Grossmann, Jews, Germans,
games once liberation arrives.”27 Indeed, social workers frequently cited the
inability of refugee children to play as a symptom of the deep psychological
damage they had suffered under Nazi persecution.
These unchildlike children, humanitarian workers agreed, would require
intense rehabilitation to recover from their wartime experiences. They linked
psychological and moral rehabilitation, moreover, to the broader reconstruc-
tion of European democracy and stability. In 1950, Thérèse Brosse, writing
for the United Nations in a publication entitled War-Handicapped Children,
spoke of a precious opportunity to raise a new generation steeped in interna-
tionalist, universalist values: “We must act quickly if we are to take advantage
of the special opportunities of the post-war period, for if the international
aspirations of young people . . . do not find satisfaction in a healthy and
unrestricted universality, they may once more seek fulfillment in the limited
field of restrictive groups and yet again endanger the world’s equilibrium.”28
Another humanitarian organization, founded by Vera Stuart Alexander, raised
funds for a new Stateless Children’s Sanctuary in the West Indies. This
utopian project aimed to counter nationalism by granting refugee children UN
citizenship. The group’s fund-raising brochure proclaimed:
A group of men and women in this country are determined to bring into reality an
experiment in world citizenship as a means to prevent war; they believe that the
children, owning no allegiance to any nation, will be able to view all countries
objectively without prejudice. . . . The children have been the victims of a narrow
nationalism and we would have the United Nations grant them a passport subscribed
to and endorsed by all 55 nations so that they may work, travel freely, and settle
anywhere in the world. Having lost their birthright, the children would at least inherit
the earth.29
children of the world. . . . Let us not overlook the foul education given by the
fascist nations . . . foul because it negates the rights of the individual and
exalts the state in the place of the free human spirit.”31
Strengthening European democracy, in the eyes of many postwar human-
itarian activists, was not simply a matter of creating democratic institutions
and stable economies. It required transforming individual psychology. Not
surprisingly, humanitarian activists saw children as the natural starting point
for this reeducation. The Unitarian Service Committee (USC), a human rights
organization founded in 1940 in affiliation with the American Unitarian
Association, launched a Mental Health Program in postwar Germany aimed
explicitly at cultivating individualism among German children. Helen Fogg,
who directed the program, explained, “Children and young people growing to
adulthood in Germany . . . are, for the most part . . . growing up in the grip of
the very attitudes and patterns, the human and psychological climate, which
was a factor as powerful as the economic and political factors in the rise of a
totalitarian leader. This climate currently discourages faith in the individual
which is the strength of self-government.”32
A desire to strengthen the individual in postwar Europe stimulated broader
discussions about precisely where and how the individual was constituted.
While some reformers stressed free markets and others looked to constitu-
tional and legal reforms, psychologists, social workers, and child welfare
activists turned specifically to the family as the locus of individual identity.
This focus on the family represented a shift in emphasis from pedagogical
methods in Europe between the wars. In the wake of the First World War, in
settings as diverse as France, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and
the Soviet Union, fears about juvenile delinquency, social crisis, and the
breakdown of the family had inspired utopian pedagogical experiments, most
of which took place in collective settings. While interwar reformers did not
seek to replace the family with collective education, they did typically advo-
cate institutions to supplement and support the family.33 Nationalist and
31
Bailey, Problems of Children, 5.
32
USC Child and Youth Programs, Helen Fogg—Child Care Program Prospectus
1951, 2, bMS 16036-3, Unitarian Service Committee Archive (USCA), Andover
Theological Library (ATL), Cambridge, MA.
33
Elizabeth Harvey, Youth and the Welfare State in Weimar Germany (Oxford,
1994); Edward Ross Dickinson, The Politics of German Child Welfare from the
Empire to the Federal Republic (Cambridge, MA, 1996); Detlev Peukert, Grenzen der
Sozialdisciplinierung: Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Jugendfürsorge von 1878 bis
1932 (Cologne, 1986); Dorena Caroli, L’enfance abandonnée et délinquante dans la
Russie Soviétique, 1917–1937 (Paris, 2004); Lisa Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades:
Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (New York, 2001); Maria
Quine, Italy’s Social Revolution: Charity and Welfare from Liberalism to Fascism
(New York, 2002); Laura Lee Downs, Childhood in the Promised Land: Working-
Class Movements and the Colonies de Vacances in France, 1880 –1960 (Durham, NC,
2002); Zahra, Kidnapped Souls.
34 On interwar eugenics in Europe, see Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The
German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920 –1950 (New York,
1997); Paul Weindling and M. Turda, eds., “Blood and Homeland”: Eugenics and
Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900 –1940 (Budapest, 2006);
Maria Bucur, Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania (Pittsburgh, 2002).
35
For examples of this rhetoric, see Bundesministerium für Gesamtdeutschen Fra-
gen, Deutsche Kinder in Stalins Hand (Bonn, 1951), 78; Ernst Tillich, “Die psycholo-
gische Entwicklung und die psychologische Führung der Menschen hinter dem
Eisernen Vorhang,” in Die Jugend der Sowjetzone in Deutschland, ed. Kampfgruppe
gegen Unmenschlichkeit (Berlin, 1955); Käte Fiedler, “Der Ideologische Drill der
Jugend in der Sowjetzone,” in Die Jugend der Sowjetzone, 36; Hans Köhler, “Erzie-
hung zur Unfreiheit,” in Die Jugend der Sowjetzone; Arbeits und Sozialminister des
Landes Nordheim-Westfallen, Jugend Zwischen Ost und West (Nordheim-Westfallen,
1955), 60.
36
Erika Mann, School for Barbarians (New York, 1938), 29.
37 On the place of the family in the reconstruction of postwar Europe, see Robert
Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Politics of Postwar West Germany
(Berkeley, 1993), and War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal
Republic of Germany (Berkeley, 2001); Erica Carter, How German Is She? Postwar
West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (Ann Arbor, MI, 1997);
The scramble for a “return to normality” through family life was not simply
imposed from above by politicians, social scientists, and humanitarian activ-
ists. Many DPs themselves looked to marriage, the family, and child rearing
as a means of reconstructing their social and emotional lives after the war.
Reporting on displaced youths at the International Children’s Center in Prien,
Germany, Jean Henshaw of UNRRA observed, “In many instances the inse-
curity of youth and their compelling need for family and the security of human
relationships finds expression in the wholesome relationships of early mar-
riage.”41 French social worker Charlotte Helman recalled an “explosion of
life” among liberated Jews in Bergen-Belsen in the summer of 1945, where
“many young girls of fourteen or sixteen years were pregnant, posing a
problem within the camp.”42 Atina Grossmann has argued that this Jewish
baby boom represented a form of personal agency and the affirmation of life
in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Bearing children on German territory, in
German hospitals, she argues, may have even constituted a gendered form of
revenge.43
In an expression of familialist and individualist values UN social workers
pledged to uphold the “best interests of the child” as the guiding principle of
child welfare in occupied Germany. They represented this principle itself as a
repudiation of Nazi values. Focusing on the interests of individual children
implied a rejection of other possible criteria for making social welfare deci-
sions, such as the best interests of the national collective or the goal of
creating a master race. Other American humanitarian organizations also
linked the principle of “best interests” with a rejection of Nazi racism. The
USC, for example, depicted its “mental health approach” to social work as an
antidote to the Nazi racism and eugenics. Gunnar Dybwad explained in a 1951
USC pamphlet, “In reading German case records or talking with children’s
workers, one invariably encounters the term Anlage, an inherited trait or
quality. Laziness, lying, stealing, and sex misconduct are all readily explained
as due to the child’s Anlage. With such overemphasis on biological factors
there is a corresponding underemphasis on emotional values and interpersonal
relationships. Criminality on the part of an uncle seems to be to the German
after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s
and 1950s (New York, 2003).
41
Report on International Children’s Center, Prien, from Mrs. Jean Henshaw to
Cornelia Heise, April 28, 1947, S-0437-0012, United Nations Archive (UNA), New
York.
42 Charlotte Helman, “La rapatriement des enfants de Bergen-Belsen,” in La libér-
ation des camps et le retour des déporteés, ed. Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci and
Edouard Lynch (Paris, 1995), 157.
43 Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 184 –236.
social worker of greater significance than the quality of the emotional ties
between child and parents.”44
Organizations such as the USC thereby linked psychoanalytic methods to
universalist and individualist ideals and to the reconstruction of democracy in
Europe. In 1949, Clemens Benda, a German émigré and Harvard psychiatrist
working with the USC, called for nothing less than a “psychological Marshall
Plan” in Germany.45 Helen Fogg, who led the USC’s Child and Youth
Programs division, elaborated in a 1951 memo that in postwar Germany,
“authoritarian attitudes and procedures . . . still dominate much of family life,
education at all levels, institutions for children and young people, youth group
work, social work agencies, and society as a whole despite the frequent
sincere assertions of many Germans that ‘democracy’ is something they
want.”46 “Modern” psychotherapy, based on psychoanalytic principles, prom-
ised to eradicate both children’s psychological scars and lingering racist and
antidemocratic attitudes in German society. The USC promoted these methods
through a series of summer workshops held in a castle outside of Berlin
between 1949 and 1953 for German social welfare professionals.
Psychoanalysis and Unitarianism may seem like strange bedfellows. But
Unitarians, like UNRRA workers, explicitly stressed the universalist assump-
tions at the heart of psychoanalytic principles, claiming to transcend divisions
of social class, state borders, language, and culture. Fogg reported that the
Germans who attended the USC workshops initially greeted their American
colleagues with skepticism. How could well-off Americans possibly under-
stand the challenges confronted by Germany’s economically and socially
devastated families and communities? Soon enough, however, “doubt and
rejection lost out through discussion . . . of basic human needs and of the
psychological development of personality, through which it became clear that
the problems being discussed were neither exclusively German nor exclu-
sively American problems. They were not at all restricted to one nation or the
other, but are rather fundamental problems all over the world.”47 UNRRA
workers echoed these universalist themes. “National groups differ in the stress
they lay on various strivings or failings,” explained a 1945 UNRRA report on
the psychological consequences of displacement. “Nevertheless, the main
44
Gunnar Dybwad, “Child Care in Germany,” Unitarian Service Committee Pam-
phlet, 1951, Helen Fogg: Germany—Institutes, Printed Matter, 1949 –59, bMS
16036-4, USCA, ATL.
45
Frances Burns, “Germans Say War Didn’t Upset Their Nerves, but Blood Pres-
sure and Ulcers Contradict Them,” Boston Daily Globe, October 1, 1949, Helen Fogg:
Germany—Institutes, Printed Matter, 1949 –59, bMS 16036-4, USCA, ATL.
46 Helen Fogg—Child Care Program, prospectus 1951, 1, bMS 16036-3, USCA,
ATL.
47 USC Child and Youth Programs, Helen Fogg—Germany, Institute 1950, Report
attributes of human personality— conscience and guilt, love and hate, rivalry
and friendship, self-esteem and inferiority—are found to be surprisingly
constant. Those attributes are hammered out in the experimental workshop of
the family.”48
Even within a universalist psychoanalytic framework, however, the mean-
ing of children’s individual best interests was far from transparent. Among
UNRRA and IRO social workers, these interests were typically defined in
terms of the reunification of biological families and the repatriation of dis-
placed children to their nations of origin, with family reunification taking
precedence over repatriation when the two conflicted. The principle of family
reunification was buttressed and popularized by the widely cited research of
psychoanalyst Anna Freud (Sigmund’s daughter) and Dorothy T. Burlingham
on young children evacuated from London during the war. Freud and Burl-
ingham concluded that while the evacuated children may have been safer from
the threats of bombs, infections, malnourishment, and neglect than those who
remained in London, “all of the improvements in the child’s life may dwindle
down to nothing when weighed against the fact that it has to leave the family
to get them.”49 These principles, which formed the basis of ego psychology,
found practical application almost immediately in UNRRA’s DP camps after
the Second World War. Following Freud and Burlingham, Thérèse Brosse
argued in 1946 that the so-called trauma of war for children was not the
consequence of violence and hunger. Rather, children were traumatized above
all by separation from their mothers. “It is not the actual events of war, such
as bombardment and military operations, which have affected these children
emotionally, with their love of adventure and their interest in destruction and
movement,” she argued. “What does affect a child is the influence of events
on emotional ties in the family . . . and above all, the sudden loss of mother.”50
It is important to keep in mind that UNRRA and IRO social workers were not
actually trained psychoanalysts. Rather, psychoanalytic ideas informed work
with displaced children through a vague emphasis on the importance of early
childhood experiences and maternal attachment in the development of adult
personality. As a matter of policy, this meant that UNRRA and the IRO
generally privileged foster care (family placement) over collective placement
for abandoned or orphaned children. In the words of Dorothy Macardle,
“Educational psychologists are very generally in accord with Dr. Anna Freud
48
UNRRA, “Psychological Problems of Displaced Persons,” 2.
49
Anna Freud and Dorothy T. Burlingham, War and Children (London, 1943), 45.
50 Brosse, War-Handicapped Children, 12, 24. For a comparative discussion of the
wartime evacuations in Britain and France, see Laura Lee Downs, “Milieu Social or
Milieu Familial? Theories and Practices of Childrearing among the Popular Classes in
20th Century France and Britain: The Case of Evacuation (1939 –1945),” Family and
Community History 8 (2005): 49 – 66.
in the conclusion she has expressed repeatedly; that for little children even a
mediocre family home is better than the best of communal nurseries.”51
COLLECTIVIST CHALLENGES
The familialist ideals of psychoanalytic social work were not uncontested in
postwar Europe. They frequently conflicted with the more collectivist orien-
tation of continental European politicians and pedagogues. Familialist solu-
tions also posed particular problems for Jewish children, who often had no
family to return to.52 These conflicts were forcefully expressed in the work and
writings of Ernst Papanek, an Austrian Socialist and Adlerian psychologist
who directed homes for Jewish refugee children run by the Oeuvre de Secours
aux Enfants (OSE) in France during World War II. After the war he also led
the USC’s efforts on behalf of displaced children in Europe. While Anna
Freud typically portrayed the separation of children from their mothers as a
universal recipe for psychological dysfunction, Papanek argued that particu-
larly for Jewish refugees, the collectivity of the children’s homes offered
newfound security and comfort:
The children described by Anna Freud had . . . never experienced dangerous situations
in which they could not rely on their parents and find help and shelter with them. Child
refugees from Nazi persecution presented a quite different picture. . . . The refugee
children in our homes in France . . . had left behind them families that in hours of
danger had been unable to offer them any protection or security. Certainly the
separation of these children from parents in such a tragic situation could not leave them
with a sense of lost security, or lost protectedness or shelter. These children felt rather
that they had now come to an environment less terrifying, more capable of managing
its problems—and consequently more protecting.53
51
Dorothy Macardle, Children of Europe: A Study of the Children of Liberated
Countries, Their Wartime Experiences, Their Reactions, and Their Needs (Boston,
1951), 270. For a similar statement by an IRO officer, see Short Memorandum on
Overseas Settlement of Children, 43/AJ/45, AN.
52
For more on debates over familist and collectivist solutions for Jewish children
and youths, see Daniella Doron, “In the Best Interest of the Child: Family, Youth, and
Identity in Postwar France, 1944 –1954” (PhD diss., New York University, 2009);
Avinoam Patt, “Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth Groups in the Aftermath
of the Holocaust” (PhD diss., New York University, 2005).
53 Ernst Papanek, “The Child as Refugee: My Experiences with Fugitive Children in
Europe,” Nervous Child 2, no. 4 (1943): 302, folder Ernst Papanek, Ernst Papanek
Collection, IISH.
54
Ernst Papanek, “The Montmorency Period of the Child-Care Program of the
OSE,” in Fight for the Health of the Jewish People (50 Years of OSE) (New York,
1968), 119. For an earlier elaboration of this theory, see Ernst Papanek, “Jewish Youth
in a World of Persecution and War,” unpublished essay, 1945, folder D13, Ernst
Papanek Collection, IISH.
55
Papanek, “Child as Refugee,” 307.
56
On individualism and collectivism in the Austrian school reform movement, see
John Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna (Chicago, 1995), 46 –55, 174 – 86;
Malachi Hacohen, Karl Popper—the Formative Years, 1902–1945; Politics and Phi-
losophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge, 2000), 107–16; Josef Weidenholzer, Auf dem
Weg zum “Neuen Menschen”: Bildungs und Kulturarbeit der österreichischen Sozi-
aldemokratie in der Ersten Republik (Vienna, 1981), 66 – 81.
explained, the Adlerian school held that “only the community can make a
human being out of an organism. . . . What kind of human being one becomes
is not biologically predestined.”57
Papanek fled to the United States in 1940. There he discovered that his
communitarian orientation clashed with the psychoanalytic approaches fa-
vored by American social workers. His proposals for establishing children’s
homes in the United States were flatly rejected in favor of placing refugee
children with foster parents.58 He recalled a 1942 lecture at the New York
School of Social Work where he was savagely attacked. “I wasn’t aware that
the word institution had such an unfortunate connotation in this country—
probably because it brought to mind the word institutionalization, a word
which had no counterpart in Europe. ‘This is not the American way!’ they
shouted at me. In America, children were sent to institutions only as a
punishment or because of a conspicuous inability to cope with life on the
outside. . . . The home is the only sacred institution in America. I should have
understood that.”59
Meanwhile, in 1943 Papanek conducted extensive research with child
refugees from Europe and attempted to survey their own attitudes toward their
fresh experiences of separation and collective education. It is hardly surprising
that many of the children, mostly Jewish refugees, expressed feelings of pain,
homesickness, and anxiety about their families’ safety and about their sepa-
ration from their parents. A surprising number, however, were positive about
their experiences of emigration and collective education, which they described
as an adventure. In response to the question “How did you feel when you left
your home country?” one sixteen-year-old Austrian boy wrote, “I felt curious
as to what the rest of the world was like. I was rather glad that we had to leave,
because I thought were it not for Hitler’s invasion, I would never have been
able to see the world.” A fifteen-year-old girl likewise responded, “My first
taste of freedom intoxicated me.” Many refugee children also praised the
solidarity they had experienced in children’s homes. “What I like is that no
differences are made. . . . Everybody rises at the same time in the morning;
everybody eats the same food; whether one is rich or poor, that is the same.
And I love to be among other children,” explained an eleven-year-old Aus-
57
Ernst Papanek, “Contributions of Individual Psychology to Social Work,” Amer-
ican Journal of Individual Psychology 11, no. 2 (1955): 146.
58
Out of 870 unaccompanied children officially sponsored by the U.S. government
through the U.S. Commission for the Care of European Children in 1941, 801 were
placed in foster homes and only 69 in group care. See Elsa Castendyck, “Origin and
Services of the United States Commission for the Care of European Children,” Child
6 (July 1941): 6, box 1, bMS 16029, USCA, ATL.
59 Ernst Papanek with Edward Linn, Out of the Fire (New York, 1975), 221–22.
60
Papanek, “Child as Refugee,” 302.
61
Deborah Portnoy, The Adolescent Immigrant, May 1948, folder 585, RG 249,
YIVO, CJH.
62
Children in Kansas City were accused of complaining about the lack of kosher
food available there in order to get to New York, for example. See Kansas City
Agency, February 25, 1945, folder 43, RG 249, YIVO, CJH. See also letter from Lotte
Marcuse to Hanna Steiner (Jüdische Kultusgemeinde in Prague), March 25, 1940,
folder 305, RG 249, YIVO, CJH.
63
Memo to Mrs. Lillian Wexler, Re: Irene Epstein, 5 years old, born in France,
folder 563, RG 249, YIVO, CJH; Portnoy, Adolescent Immigrant. On similar problems
with family reunification and placement in Holland, see Diane Wolf, Beyond Anne
Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland (Berkeley, 2007). For more
on the experiences of Jewish refugee children in the United States, see Beth B. Cohen,
Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America (New Brunswick, NJ, 2007).
64
Complaint of Yugsolav Leaders, November 14, 1945, S-0437-0016, UNA. For
similar complaints from Hungarian DPs, see the report on the situation of refugee
youths in Austria, May 4, 1949, 43/AJ/600, AN.
65
Complaint from Yugoslav Leaders re the Unsatisfactory Surroundings of 1,000
Yugoslav Children in Assembly Centers, December 11, 1945, S-0437-0016, UNA.
66 Yvonne de Jong, Quels sont les principaux problèmes concernant les enfants
réfugiés? 43/AJ/599, AN. See also Statistics re: Children, Children Receiving Care and
Maintenance, March 19, 1949, 43/AJ/600, AN.
67 Current Problems Relating to Children in the German Field of Operations, April,
68
For more on gendered experiences of the Holocaust and displacement during
World War II and after, see Grossmann, Germans, Jews, and Allies; Gisela Bock, ed.,
Genozid und Geschlecht: Jüdische Frauen im nationalsozalistischen Lagersystem
(Frankfurt, 2005); Katherine R. Jolluck, “The Nation’s Pain and Women’s Shame:
Polish Women and Wartime Violence,” in Gender and War in Twentieth-Century
Eastern Europe, ed. Maria Bucur and Nancy M. Wingfield (Bloomington, IN, 2006),
193–219; Lisa Kirschenbaum, “The Alienated Body: Gender Identity and the Memory
of the Siege of Leningrad,” in Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe,
220 –35.
69 Rapport sur la situation des Travailleuses en Allemagne, 9/F/3232, AN.
70 Rapport sur l’activité sociale du Gau Berlin vis à vis des femmes françaises
They have no opportunity to learn to give any attention to anyone but themselves. They
compensate for this by developing friendships with other girls of their age. That is very
good if it can be redirected to develop between two persons of the opposite sex,
because later it forms a good basis for a compatible marriage relationship. . . . Few of
the girls have had opportunity for education in homemaking. . . . The girls do not know
how to scrub floors and wash pounds and pounds of clothing. . . . When the girls go out
from Aglasterhausen they will be thrown together with people in communities who
expect them to have accomplishments similar to those of other girls and young women.
enceintes, September 25, 1947, folder PDR 5/10, Bureau des Archives de l’Occupation
française en Allemagne et en Autriche, Colmar (MAE).
71 Progress Report of the Working Party on Special Needs of Women and Girls,
They will not be excused for having lived in DP camps and in Child Care Centers
during the war years.72
Battle for Children: World War II, Youth Crime, and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth
Century France (Cambridge, MA, 2002).
There was no limit to their gluttony, and since for a time they were quite unable to shed
the reactions to the habits of the camp, they pocketed remains of food, in such
quantities they could not possibly eat. This food was later discovered among their
belongings, under their mattresses, between their blankets, and it testified to their
unbalance and their disarray. . . . Their impatience takes every conceivable form; they
are above all demanding; they feel that they have suffered and worked enough. These
young people have reached a precocious maturity in the concentration camp; but let us
not forget that their education, their training . . . has been completely at a standstill.77
Such people [refugees] in their relationships with authority, tend to turn, at least in part,
to the dependent attitudes of childhood. The rehabilitation process by which they
regain their adult independence must therefore be based to a very large extent, as it
originally was in childhood, on the existence of respect and affection for the authority
which controls their lives. Where authority is accepted, the necessary process of
weaning and the imposition of tasks and responsibility is accepted; and independence
and self-control can then be re-gained without difficulty. Where there is no respect for
76
Children in Switzerland, Comments on Reports for the Period October 12 to
November 8, S– 0401– 4 – 4, UNA. On debates over how to treat surviving Jewish
children, see Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 193–94; Doron, “In the Best
Interest of the Child.”
77 Robert Job, “Our Pupils in France,” OSE Mail 4 (August 1949): 53–55, 43/AJ/
1268, AN. See also Report No. 1 from Miss Gwen Chesters, Children in Switzerland,
Notes for Week October 12–18, 1945, 3, S– 0401– 4 – 4, UNA.
78 Report on International Children’s Center, Prien, from Mrs. Jean Henshaw to
authority . . . then there is at best a transient and unwilling acceptance of discipline, but
no development of the self-control essential for returning to a civilised society.79
As a child Anna was indulged by her parents, who, according to her own account,
granted her every whim. . . . She always had a special interest in food and after her
liberation ate so heavily that her weight rose to 160 pounds. We were inclined to accept
this as the normal reaction to a concentration camp until we observed her gleeful
expression as she described the wonderful fruits and vegetables that she ate right off
the farm as a child. As we review her life story we see that Anna’s ability to gain her
ends by making people feel sorry for her antedates by many years her experience as a
refugee. We recognize that in essence she is an emotionally immature and intellectu-
ally inadequate girl who continues to look for someone who will treat her like a young
child as her parents did. The resemblance is much closer to the maladjusted youngster
whom agencies see in their daily practice than it is to our mental picture of the strong,
self-reliant survivor of Nazi barbarism, but it is true nonetheless. Not until we
recognize this can we help Anna and others like her grow up into mature, responsible
adults.80
Robert Collis, an Irish pediatrician who cared for 500 children liberated
from the Belsen concentration camp, drew similar conclusions. He observed
“the most unexpected difference in reaction between individual children who
had undergone . . . the same mental trauma and loss of security,” and he
It has been said that a child who has experienced an unsatisfactory sucking at the
breast, perhaps associated with an unhappy weaning, may show in later life symptoms
usually associated with loss of security and rejection, while a child satisfactorily
breastfed and happily weaned will show characteristics of self-reliance and poise. . . . I
got the impression from the study of many of these children that the factor of their early
home life had a very important influence upon their reactions later, when their parents
were killed, their homes destroyed, and they themselves exposed to horror in its most
extreme form.81
children, March 5, 1948, 43/AJ/926, AN. See also Adoptions, 4, S-0401/1/1, UNA.
88
Report on International Children’s Center, Prien, from Mrs. Jean Henshaw to
Cornelia Heise, April 28, 1947, S-0437-0012, UNA.
89 See http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/p_genoci.htm.
90 Memo to Mr. A. C. Dunn, Policy on Unaccompanied Children, May 27, 1949,
43/AJ/926, AN.
91 Brosse, War-Handicapped Children, 20.
92 Thérèse Brosse, Homeless Children (Paris, 1950), 24.
what toughness and vitality even the smallest group preserves its national
character if soundly organized. In each of these small colonies the very best
elements of national culture come to the fore, the colorful variety of literary
and musical talent, folklore, jest, and humor.”93 This was more than simply a
practical strategy for housing the children. The cultivation of each child’s
national identity was essential to his or her individual psychological
well-being, in Brosse’s view: “In the course of our visits to the children’s
communities, we saw indeed how much the children need a country of their
own if they are to be psychologically normal and to feel ‘like other
people.’ . . . The all-important requirement for children who have been moved
from one country to another: to settle the child and provide him with a country
of his own and a language and culture which that implies.”94 UN social
workers were thus convinced that a firm sense of national identity, like a
stable family, was an essential source of individual identity and stability, a
basic recipe for postwar psychological rehabilitation.
This recipe posed serious problems for Jewish children, who often lacked
the desire or ability to return home. Beginning in 1946, ongoing antisemitism
in Eastern Europe, culminating in the pogrom at Kielce, Poland, in July 1946,
provoked the flight of around 170,000 Jews (so-called infiltrees) into the
American zone, most of whom hoped to move on to Palestine.95 Many
children, even those who had living parents, came in kibbutzim headed by
young Zionist leaders. American and British social workers were initially
skeptical about the separation of these children from their parents. Conflicts
over the relative merits of collective versus familial care for Jewish children
erupted in a heated debate at a 1947 meeting of UNRRA’s Jewish Child Care
Committee in Heidelberg. Although UNRRA and the IRO provided resources
and support for the care of Jewish displaced children and orphans, Jewish
agencies were accorded a great deal of autonomous authority over the chil-
dren’s education and placement. Ruth Cohen, representing the Jewish Agency
for Palestine (JAFP), urged UNRRA officials to reconsider their policy of
uniting Jewish children with their parents in DP camps “because reuniting a
child . . . with his parents or relatives . . . means sending that child into what
we know at home as slum conditions.” Children in separate children’s homes,
camps, and kibbutzim, she argued, were not only better off from a moral
93
W. R. Corti, “A Few Thoughts on the Children’s Village,” News Bulletin of the
Pestalozzi Children’s Village, May 1948, 9, 43/AJ/599, AN.
94 Brosse, War-Handicapped Children, 21–22.
95 Marrus, Unwanted, 313–17; Judt, Postwar, 22; On antisemitism in postwar
Poland, see Jan Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (Princeton, NJ,
2006); Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope.
perspective but also more likely to get the food, clothing, and medical
attention they needed to fortify their fragile health.96
Many IRO officers were initially unsympathetic to this view and worried
that children were being pressured to choose emigration to Palestine over
reunification with their families. In a 1948 memo, one IRO child welfare
officer in Lower Saxony concluded in frustration, “In view of . . . the utter
disparity between IRO’s commitments towards unaccompanied children and
their relatives, and the accepted Jewish principle, whereby an orphan belongs
to the community, it is obvious that as regards unaccompanied children, our
aims will always be completely at variance.”97 Most UN social workers,
however, gradually came to accept and even embrace Zionist solutions for
Jewish children. This change of heart had several sources. Social workers
encountered youths and parents who themselves passionately wished to em-
igrate to Palestine. Louis Pinsky wrote of the 500 Jewish children he cared for
in Germany in 1946, “The children are all Zionists and all, without exception,
wish and hope to get to Palestine. . . . Although not with parents, the children
do get affection from the group. They live a collective life which they intend
to pursue in Palestine. They work and they love it. It is not at all like an
institution.” Edith Feuereisen, a sixteen-year-old Hungarian survivor, was the
type of young refugee who converted many UNRRA social workers to the
Zionist cause. Her father was alive in the United States, had obtained Amer-
ican visas for his three children, and wished to be reunited with them. Edith,
however, felt deeply torn between her family and her political ideals. She
wrote:
I know that I will break my father’s heart if I do not answer his call, but I also know
that my duty is with my people. If I go to America, I will get used to luxury and
perhaps I will not want to go to Palestine. Now I want it above everything else and I
must, I must. . . . In America we may be comfortable for a year, for two, for ten, but
the end will be the same—we will be driven out. I have learned a lot of things in
Auschwitz and one of them is that unless we have a National Home, we will perish as
a nation. I am young in years, but I am very old in experience. I am still strong and I
want to work for my people.98
96
Jewish Children, memo from Ruth Cohen, JAFP, UNRRA district 2, to the Child
Care Committee, February 22, 1947, S-0437-0015, UNA.
97 Documentation of Jewish Children proposed for emigration to Palestine under
564, RG 249, YIVO, CJH. For more on the Zionism of DP youths in postwar Germany,
see Patt, “Finding Home and Homeland.”
UNRRA workers also praised the ethical and moral standards in the kibbut-
zim, and the degree of attention and care given to the children.99
Sympathy with Zionist goals also sometimes reflected a view of Jewish
children as essentially different from their non-Jewish peers. This entailed
both recognition of the magnitude of the Holocaust and the ongoing influence
of racial and racist logic after World War II. Robert Collis, for example,
maintained that liberated Roma and Jewish children responded differently
from other East Europeans in internment in Bergen-Belsen. He attributed
these differences to deep-rooted ethnic qualities, reporting:
We had gypsies from at least half a dozen countries, but we never thought of them as
Rumanians, Hungarians, Czechs or Germans— but simply as gypsies. We felt as if they
belonged to a different species from the human inhabitants of the world. Their
physiology was the same as ours, but that seemed to be as far as it went. . . . It seemed
as if their bodies were inhabited by elemental spirits related to those of the trees and
the streams and the animal world, and that in consequence their minds were little
troubled by ordinary human violence and brutality.
Jewish children, he insisted, were equally a world apart: “Though they might
call themselves Dutch or Italian, they seemed to us more Jew than anything
else. Indeed, when this thought struck me, I realized that it would never have
entered my mind to regard a little Dublin Jewish child as Irish. Such an idea
would be obviously absurd, so it would be equally absurd to think of the
sixty-five Jewish children in the camp who spoke Dutch as in any way Dutch
children.” Based on their ethnically distinct reactions to persecution, Jewish
children required distinct forms of rehabilitation: “Just as the gypsies seem to
have their home outside the dwellings of mankind, the Jews seem to come
entirely from the haunts of men, to be altogether urban. The gypsy children
liked being fed, played with, petted, but they remained unattached and emo-
tionally free. The Jewish children craved love, security, home. They were very
fearful, very friendly, once reassured, very ready to expand, desperately
anxious to please, and most affectionate if encouraged.”100
Of course, not all claims about the distinct emotional needs of Jewish
children relied on racial stereotypes. Jewish activists themselves, both Zionist
and non-Zionist, struggled to ensure that surviving Jewish children, especially
so-called hidden children, were recovered for the Jewish community after the
war and argued that Jewish survivors had distinctive legal, material, and
emotional needs. In Holland, Poland, and especially France, bitter custody
disputes erupted between Jewish relatives and agencies that insisted that the
children be placed in a Jewish family or institution and Christian foster
99 Historical Report: Rosenheim Jewish Children’s Transient Center, June 11, 1947,
S-0437-0015, UNA.
100 Collis, Lost and Found, 4.
The question of nationality is most perplexing in the cases of children coming from
Silesia because of the mixed German and Polish population in that area before the war.
In the absence of identity papers less dependable factors must be relied upon in
determining nationality. . . . Our most skillful interviewers report the children’s psy-
chological reactions to questions about nationality are significant. The unquestionably
German child usually replies freely and promptly. The response of the non-German
101
On custody disputes over Jewish children in postwar France, see Doron, “In the
Best Interest of the Child.” The most infamous and polarizing custody dispute was the
Finaly affair in France. On the Finaly affair, see Catherine Poujol, Les enfants cachés:
L’affaire Finaly (Paris, 2006); Katy Hazan, Les orphelins de la Shoah (Paris, 2000),
92–100; on similar conflicts in Holland, see Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank.
102
Minutes of Jewish Child Care Committee Held at UNRRA US Zone Headquar-
ters, Heidelberg, March 13, 1947, S-0437-0012, UNA.
103 On strategies adopted for determining the nationality of “lost children,” see, e.g.,
file 10, report, S-0437-0013, UNA; Removal of Children (Polish) from the St. Joseph’s
Kinderheim, October 14, 1946, S-0437-0013, UNA; W. C. Huyssoon, “Who Is This
Child?” file 11, S-0437-0013, UNA.
No one considered the possibility that a Silesian child might have been
genuinely confused about his or her national affiliation.
To complicate matters, Nazi officials had systematically changed the names
and destroyed the records of children designated for Germanization. Many
younger children had no memory at all of their native languages or families
of origin. In 1947, Jean Henshaw described Polish and Yugoslav children in
the Children’s Center in Prien who had “renounced their country, language,
and culture and vehemently claimed they were Germans.”105 Once identified,
UN child search officers typically removed Allied children from German
foster parents as quickly as possible. These separations could be emotionally
wrenching. “Very often the separation is extremely cruel; the child is very
attached to his adoptive family and no longer remembers having had any other
family,” reported IRO child welfare consultant Yvonne de Jong in a 1948
memo.106 The children sometimes had to be removed and repatriated against
their will. In one such case, Eileen Davidson noted in her daily log for October 19,
1946, “Conference with Polish Repatriation Officer re two adolescent Polish
children who have been for two years with a superior German family and are
asking permission to remain. They are orphans and have no family to return to.
Permission refused. Children to be repatriated. Picked up both children at Ans-
bach much against their will.”107 These custody battles generated sharp legal,
political, and emotional tensions between UNRRA, British and American military
authorities, and local German populations.108 In the name of the oft-cited “best
interests of the children,” British military authorities often preferred to leave the
children in German homes, invoking the principle that they would be permanently
scarred by separation from their German foster parents. They held that continuity
of care was the most important factor in a child’s psychological well-being.109 It
104
Removal of Children (Polish) from the St. Joseph’s Kinderheim, October 14,
1946, S-0437-0013, UNA; see also Huyssoon, “Who Is This Child?”
105
Report on International Children’s Center, Prien, from Mrs. Jean Henshaw to
Cornelia Heise, April 28, 1947, S-0437-0012, UNA.
106
De Jong, Quels sont les principaux problèmes?
107
Daily Log of October 19 and 21 from District Child Search Officer Eileen
Davidson, S-0437-0014, UNA.
108
For examples of protests from German foster parents and institutions over the
removal of children from Germany, see Removal of Children from refugee-youth camp
Kallmünz, May 24, 1946; Removal of Children (Polish) from the St. Joseph’s Kinder-
heim, October 14, 1946; letter of protest from Kath. Jugendfürsorgeverein der Diozese
Augsburg, July 30, 1946; all in S-0437-0013, UNA.
109 On the reluctance of the British and American military to remove children from
German foster families, see Provisional order no. 75 and the British Zone Policy,
November 9, 1948, 43/AJ/599, AN; Short Memorandum on Overseas Settlement of
is likely that the military authorities also objected to the repatriation of East
European children for more pragmatic and political reasons—in order to smooth
relations between military authorities and local German populations and ulti-
mately out of anti-Communist sympathies.
UN and IRO child welfare officers, however, consistently favored removing
children from German homes and returning them to their country of origin. Even
if family reunification was not possible (in the case of orphans), they favored
repatriating the children to Eastern Europe. In 1948, Eileen Davidson, then deputy
chief of the IRO’s Child Search Section, wrote a memo arguing that this policy
represented the “best interests of the child” from a psychological, social, moral,
and political perspective. Her argument rested largely on her conviction that
German society had not yet been purged of Nazi racism and authoritarianism; the
possibility of true assimilation and integration for East European children in
postwar Germany was therefore slim.110 Even German-speaking children from
Eastern Europe often faced discrimination as foreigners in Germany, David-
son claimed. “There was the case of two Polish children whose father had
been in the SS and who were known as Volksdeutsche. The children said that
they had always been referred to as Poles. The older girl worked long hours
in the kitchen. . . . She said that she always was told that she was a ‘dumb
Pole.’”111 Children removed from German institutions, meanwhile, showed
telltale signs of authoritarian Nazi pedagogical methods, according to David-
son. “These children are apparently subjected to rigid routines and discipline
and ordinarily they are shy, extremely fearful, and do not know how to play,
even amongst themselves. Their behavior is that of very repressed children,
and it is in marked contrast to the behavior of children in this group who have
been with us any length of time who ordinarily are extremely friendly to
adults, very active and free in their play and activities.”112
While Allied children often resisted removal from their German foster
Children, 43/AJ/45, AN; Removal of Children from German Care, June 30, 1947,
S-0437-0017, UNA.
110
Heide Fehrenbach has shown that similar arguments shaped German debates
about the future of children born to African American soldiers and German women in
occupied Germany. Many Germans argued that the children should be returned to their
fathers in the United States, as they had no hope of successful integration in Germany.
See Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler.
111
Eileen Davidson, deputy chief, Child Search Section, Removal from German
Families of Allied Children, reasons why this is to the best interest of the child,
February 21, 1948, 7, 43/AJ/599, AN. See also de Jong, Quels sont les principaux
problèmes; Memo from John Widdicome to Mrs. M. Lane, August 2, 1948, 43/AJ/599,
AN; UNRRA Child Search and Registration, Team 1071, Illustrations of Situations of
non-German children in German homes, S-0437-0013, UNA.
112 Davidson, Removal from German Families, 7.
families, IRO child welfare officers were confident that the children quickly
adjusted once “returned” to their native cultures and languages. In the case of
a group of Polish children who had been Germanized, Davidson recalled,
“They were gradually absorbed into the life of the center, and began to speak
Polish, and on their own request were enrolled into the Polish class. After a
few weeks they were eagerly learning Polish songs and folk dances. . . . By
the time that they had made the decision to go back to Poland, they were
identified with the Polish group and had thus severed their relationship with
their German friends.”113 In conclusion, she warned that Allied children left in
German foster families would surely suffer permanent psychological damage,
even if they were loved and well cared for. “Far from securing the best
interests of the child, one has run the danger with the passage of years of
contributing to the development of a warped and twisted personality, a misfit
with roots neither here nor in his home country.”114
Her position, which was typical of UNRRA and IRO child welfare spe-
cialists, is revealing on several levels. First, it illustrates the extent to which
discussions of children’s psychological well-being dominated international
child welfare work after the Second World War, even as concepts such as “the
best interests of the child” were fiercely contested. Second, Davidson’s memo
reflects the self-representation of UN social workers as agents of democracy
and denazification in postwar Europe. Finally, her position illustrates how
democratization, justice, and the so-called psychological best interests of the
child were all defined so as to privilege not only the reunification of biological
families but also the “renationalization” of displaced children. Children, in
their view, required both a stable family and a stable national identity in order
to thrive as healthy individuals.
Postwar international organizations and child welfare activists may have
been confident that there was no place like “home” for DPs. But how did
displaced children and families respond to the “rehabilitation” offered by
UNRRA and the IRO? The story of one group of 148 Polish youths displaced
to Africa suggests some tentative answers to these questions and illustrates
how cold war disputes intersected with nationalist convictions to shape the
postwar politics of repatriation. On July 30, 1941, shortly after Hitler’s
invasion of Poland, Polish and Soviet diplomats had signed an agreement that
reestablished the Polish state; provided for the release of Polish citizens in the
Soveit Union, including anti-Communist Poles imprisoned in Siberia; and
enabled the formation of a Polish army on Soviet soil, led by General
Wladyslaw Anders. In March 1942, Anders evacuated 74,000 Polish troops,
including approximately 41,000 civilians, many of them children, to Iran.
In Austria at the present time there are large numbers of Yugoslav children who were
taken by force from Yugoslavia during the war. Scattered throughout Austria, exposed
to Germanization and education designed to make them hate their own country, these
children are unscrupulously exploited as free manual labor. Efforts by the Yugoslav
government and Red Cross to find these children and bring them back to their native
115
On national ambiguity and Germanization in Eastern Europe, see Chad Bryant,
Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Cambridge, MA, 2007); Pieter M.
Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontier of Imperial
Austria (Cambridge, MA, 2006); Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations:
Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569 –1999 (New Haven, CT, 2003); Zahra,
Kidnapped Souls.
country are blocked by the occupation authorities in the Western Zones. . . . This state
of affairs is also caused, in large part, by the IRO, which will stop at nothing in order
to prevent the return of Yugoslav children to their native land.116
Polish authorities meanwhile insisted that over 200,000 Polish children re-
mained hidden in Nazi families in the Western zones of occupation. (In
reality, the total number of Polish children recovered by postwar tracing
agencies was closer to 20,000, and many of these children had traveled into
Germany with their parents.)117
In fact, IRO officials were not hostile to the repatriation of Eastern European
children, even after the consolidation of Communist power in 1948. The organi-
zation generally continued to encourage repatriation and to favor sending dis-
placed children home to nation and family. IRO Director-General J. Donald
Kingsley explained before the UN General Assembly in November 1949, “In
ordinary circumstances, the ideal solution for a displaced person is return to the
homeland. There, he finds a familiar form of social organization and hears a
familiar tongue. . . . In his homeland, he has the full rights of citizenship. Here he
has his roots.” At the same time, however, IRO policy clearly forbade the forcible
repatriation of any person against his or her will, including youths over age
seventeen. And all of these adolescents stubbornly refused to return to Poland.
Moreover, of the 148 Polish youths concerned, eighty-one were over sixteen years
of age, and only twenty-four were under thirteen.118
It was not, however, against the IRO mandate to attempt to convince DPs
to repatriate of their own “free will” (or to bribe them with cash and rations).
In August 1949, the IRO sent a team of officials, including a repatriation
officer named Pierre Krysz, a Polish national, on a three-week mission to the
116
Article from the bulletin of Tanjug, October 26, 1949, Repatriation of Yugoslav
Children in Austria blocked by the IRO. See also (in the same carton), “Les enfants
Yougoslaves retenus par force en Autriche,” Tanjug, Belgrade, January 7, 1948,
43/AJ/601, AN.
117
“Poland Asserts British Zone Holds Children,” New York Herald Tribune, Paris
ed., June 11, 1948, 43/AJ/604, AN. For a reliable estimate of the number of children
kidnapped from Poland, see Isabel Heinemann, “Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut”: Die
Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas
(Göttingen, 2003), 508 –9.
118
UN Department of Public Information, statement of J. Donald Kingsley before
the Third Committee of the General Assembly of the United Nations, November 10,
1949, Press Release PM/1550, 43/AJ/604, AN. IRO policy specified, “The recommen-
dation made for the repatriation or settlement of the child should not be contrary to the
wishes of the child. Such wishes shall be assessed in the light of the age of the child
and of all the circumstances. They shall be taken into account only if they have been
expressed freely, and provided they are based on considerations which, in the case of
a person over 17 years of age, would be considered as valid objections”: letter to H.
Allard from P. Jacobsen, September 12, 1949, 43/AJ/604, AN.
119
Narrative Report on Special Registration Assignment at the IRO Children’s
Center, Salerno, Italy, August 15, 1949, 43/AJ/604, AN.
120
Polish Children from East-Africa, I. P. Krysz to I. Page, August 10, 1949,
43/AJ/604, AN.
121 The case of these Polish children was not isolated. Many young DP children and
youths from Eastern Europe refused repatriation for personal or political reasons, and
IRO officials struggled to determine which were genuine “political” refugees and
which were adventure seekers or escaping bad family situations. See Policies Regard-
ing Reestablishment of Children, April 25, 1949, 43/AJ/926, AN.
repatriation on the grounds that he “does not want to starve.” In each case,
Krysz concluded that the children had “no valid objections” to repatriation.122
Meanwhile, the IRO faced heavy political fire from all sides. The children
became pawns in the conflict between Poland’s postwar Communist govern-
ment and the Polish government-in-exile. The Catholic and anti-Communist
activists and officials who had planned the resettlement accused the IRO of
unduly pressuring the children to repatriate. “This continued pressure and
harassment can only be interpreted as forcible repatriation,” insisted Monsi-
gnor Meystowicz in Bremen, in an urgent telegram to IRO headquarters on
August 6, 1949.123 That same day an angry crowd of Polish DPs in Tanganyika
reportedly invaded the home of an IRO officer in protest.124 The Count E. H.
Czapski, leader of the Polish anti-Communist committee charged with caring
for the orphans in Italy, wrote a passionate letter of protest to IRO headquar-
ters following Krysz’s interviews: “The young people concerned have lost
everything as a result of Soviet aggression—their country, family, and for-
tune. Saved almost miraculously. . . . Do you believe that they would volun-
tarily return to live under Soviet domination? Perhaps you are also ignoring
the fact that close to 1000 Polish children are buried in Tehran’s only
cemetery, those who were able to leave Russia but did not survive their
experiences in ‘the Soviet paradise.’”125
The IRO faced more intense criticism in favor of repatriating the children.
Not surprisingly, the Polish Red Cross, the Polish government, and other
Communist sympathizers were most forceful. In a letter of protest to the IRO,
the Democratic Women’s Association of East Germany claimed that the
children’s refusal to repatriate reflected the defective state of their characters,
a consequence of displacement and denationalization itself: “These young
people were torn from their homes as children and put in a completely new
environment, far from their country and their parents. It was impossible there
to create for them a new home such as growing young people need for their
development, and so they became beings without roots.” Rehabilitating these
children—and European democracy—required returning the youths to their
nation and families, the association insisted: “Now, four years after the end of
the war, it is the duty of all people of democratic thought and feeling to repair
the wrongs done by the Fascist murderers and criminals. That certainly
includes the return to their old home of all whom Hitler uprooted from their
native land. These young people, too, although they may have spent the last
122
Polish Children from East-Africa, I. P. Krysz to I. Page, August 10, 1949,
43/AJ/604, AN.
123 Telegram, August 6, 1949, Monsignor Meystowicz, Bremen, to IRO Geneva,
43/AJ/604, AN.
124 Telegram, August 6, 1949, 43/AJ/604, AN.
125 Count E. H. Czapski, August 8, 1949, 43/AJ/604, AN.
few years in Africa, are Polish by nationality, tradition, and character, belong
to the Polish people, and will always by homeless in a foreign country.”126
Polish Communists, likewise, used the affair to question the democratic
credentials of the West. The Polish journal Repatriant protested, “In the
course of recent years, this is not the first case of theft of Polish children who
should be returned to their country. . . . Does such an attitude conform to the
humanitarian principles promoted in the West?”127
Pressure to repatriate the children did not, however, simply flow from the
pens of Communist propagandists. For example, in a letter to the president of
the United Nations General Assembly, the International Union for Child
Protection, the first and largest international child welfare organization (es-
tablished in 1913), insisted that uniting displaced children with their nation
and families was a matter of guaranteeing basic human rights. The union
declared, “We feel obligated to inform you how concerned we are . . . about
the subject of children removed or separated from their parents, whatever the
reason. . . . The Declaration of the Rights of the Child, promulgated in 1923
by our union, demands respect for the intangible rights and duties of parents
with respect to their children, and the same is true of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights.”128
In spite of such protests, the first group of children set sail for Canada on
August 29, 1949, and the rest followed shortly after. The IRO injunction
against forcible repatriation ultimately prevailed over competing ideals of
nation and family. Afterward, in a speech to the UN General Assembly,
Kingsley defended the resettlement. He expressed his hopes that it reflected a
new kind of postwar migration, that of a more democratic and humanitarian
world: “In the long history of mankind, there have been many mass migrations
of people, some of them also overseas. Most, however, had their motivation
in evil or fanaticism, were executed in violence or necessity. . . . Never before
has there been such a movement as this, motivated by good will, executed in
generosity, and adding, surely, to the hopes of millions for a peaceful life.”129
The case of these 148 orphans therefore seems to end with the triumph of
the individual rights of children over the nation’s collective rights to children.
But this case also clearly suggests the profound significance of perceived
126
Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands, October 20, 1949; see also the letter
from the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) to IRO Geneva, January 1, 1949; both
in 43/AJ/604, AN.
127
Extrait du journal Repatriant 132 (182): 182, 43/AJ/604, AN.
128
Union Internationale de Protection de l’Enfance, January 24, 1950, letter to
Carlos P. Romulo, president of the General Assembly of the United Nations, 43/AJ/
602, AN.
129 UN Department of Public Information, statement of J. Donald Kingsley before
the Third Committee of the General Assembly of the United Nations, November 10,
1949, Press Release PM/1550, 43/AJ/604, AN.
national “rights” to children in postwar Europe and the ways in which collective
identities— both familial and national—were embedded in emerging postwar
ideals of democracy, human rights, and social and individual rehabilitation. These
nationalist and familialist ideals were not uncontested. The story of activism
around refugee and displaced children in Europe pushes us, nonetheless, to
historicize contemporary understandings about the nature of human rights, de-
mocracy, and trauma, as well as visions of the family that are often invoked as
universals. It suggests, moreover, the extent to which social and family policies
and new forms of expert knowledge developed through transnational encounters
and conflicts during and after the Second World War.
Humanitarian activists and international child welfare experts in Europe
after World War II insisted that the material and psychological best interests
of individual children should guide their work. They sought to foster individ-
ualism and human rights in the name of a radical break from the fascist past.
Simultaneously, however, UNRRA and IRO experts looked explicitly to the
nation and family to achieve their Enlightenment visions. In their efforts to
rehabilitate European children from wartime trauma, pedagogical activists and
social workers tested, institutionalized, and internationalized new forms of
expert knowledge about child development and the family. They embraced the
seemingly universalist and individualist potential of psychoanalytic princi-
ples. At the same time, they embedded children deeply in the context of
smaller communities, valorizing both nation and family as the essential
sources of individual identity and agency. They also sought to rehabilitate
refugees as particular kinds of individuals, insisting that children had distinct
psychological needs that depended on their age, nation, religion, and gender.
Hannah Arendt observed that the refugee camps of interwar Europe exposed
the limits of the universal ideal of “human rights.” Ultimately, such rights were
nothing but empty promises to DPs who lacked national citizenship. “The con-
ception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of human beings as
such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it
were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other
qualities and specific relationships— except that they were still human,” she
maintained.130 After the war, humanitarian activists and international organiza-
tions responded to the perceived failures of the interwar system of minority
protection and child protection by constructing new international, individualist,
and universalist regimes of human rights and theories of child welfare. But
Arendt’s insight, it seems, applied to the postwar world of the DP camp, the
children’s home, and the orphanage, as well as to the interwar refugee camp.
Rehabilitating lost children—and Europe itself after World War II—seemed to
require that children return “home” to family and nation.