Lost Children: Displacement, Family, and Nation in Postwar Europe

Lost Children: Displacement, Family, and Nation in
Postwar Europe*

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,

43/AJ/926, AN (Archives Nationales), Paris.
The Journal of Modern History 81 (March 2009): 45– 86
© 2009 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2009/8101-0002$10.00
All rights reserved.

46    Zahra

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

War Education (New York, 1946), 9 –10.
   5 For statistics see Thérèse Brosse, War-Handicapped Children: Report on the

European Situation (Paris, 1950); Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945
(New York, 2005), 22.

Lost Children      47

social workers in the United Nations’ Relief and Rehabilitation Agency
(UNRRA, 1945– 47) and its successor, the IRO (1947–51) in DP camps offers
a glimpse of the ideals and conflicts that shaped both the mission to rehabil-
itate displaced children and a broader campaign to rehabilitate Europe after
World War II. In September 1945, UNRRA and other allied agencies were
charged with housing, feeding, clothing, and repatriating over 6 million DPs
in Europe, including at least 20,000 unaccompanied children.6 This repre-
sented only a small portion of the total number of Europeans on the move, as
it does not include the 7 million Allied DPs in the Soviet zones of Germany
and Austria or the 12–13 million Germans who either fled or were expelled
from Eastern Europe.7
   The project of rehabilitating displaced children was not understood simply
in terms of providing shelter and preventing starvation and disease, although
these were formidable tasks. In a shift from earlier efforts, postwar humani-
tarian activists saw themselves as agents of individual psychological recon-
struction and rehabilitation. “It is time to do something beyond giving food.
The girls who come here weighing 62 lbs must be fattened up, but they must
also see something which is worth fattening up for,” noted Austrian psychol-
ogist and émigré Ernst Papanek in 1946.8 In June of 1945, UNRRA itself
proclaimed, “The United Nations Administration is concerned not only with
relief—that is with the provision of material needs— but also with rehabili-
tation—that is with the amelioration of psychological suffering and disloca-
tion. For men do not live by bread alone.”9
   Many of the social workers who volunteered to work with UNRRA and the
   6 It is difficult to estimate precisely the number of unaccompanied children in

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-

operation with Other Relief Organizations, Wiener Library, 1.

48    Zahra

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

Rehabilitation Administration (New York, 1950), 417, 418.
   11 For a helpful overview of American psychoanalysis in the 1940s (and tensions

within the psychoanalytic community), see Rebecca Jo Plant, “Willian Menninger’s
Campaign to Reform American Psychoanalysis, 1946 – 48,” History of Psychiatry 16,
no. 2 (2005): 181–202, and “The Veteran, His Wife, and Their Mothers: Prescriptions
for Psychological Rehabilitation after World War II,” in Tales of the Great American
Victory: World War II in Politics and Poetics, ed. Diederik Oostdijk and Markha G.
Valenta (Amsterdam, 2006), 95–100. On British psychoanalysis, see Laura Lee
Downs, “A ‘Very British’ Revolution? L’évacuation des enfants urbains vers les
campagnes anglaises, 1939 –1945,” Vingtième siècle 89 (2006): 47– 60; Denise Riley,
War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and the Mother (London, 1983). For other
work historicizing theories of child development, see Larry Wolff, Postcards from the
Edge of the World: Child Abuse in Freud’s Vienna (New York, 1988); Carolyn
Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority (Cam-
bridge, MA, 1993); John R. Morss, The Biologizing of Childhood (New York, 1990);
Erica Burman, Deconstructing Social Psychology (London, 1994).
   12
      Nicholas Stargardt historicizes the notion of trauma and focuses on the agency of
children in his recent work on children during the Second World War. See Nicholas
Stargardt, “Children’s Art of the Holocaust,” Past and Present 161, no. 1 (1998):
191–235, and Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (London, 2005).
   13 On the general challenge of historicizing childhood, see Ludmilla Jordanova,

“New Worlds for Children in the 18th Century: Problems of Historical Interpretation,”
History of the Human Sciences 3, no. 1 (1990): 69 – 83.

Lost Children       49

of liberal, individualist values in Western Europe.14 In response to the Nazi
threat, historians have argued, liberal democracy, free markets, consumerism,
and human rights triumphed over the more collectivist values and totalizing
ideologies of interwar nationalist and fascist movements.15
   At the same time, however, historians of refugees and displacement have
typically emphasized the extent to which DPs, especially Jews and East
Europeans, themselves organized along nationalist lines after World War II.16
As Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “Not a single
group of refugees or Displaced Persons has failed to develop a fierce, violent,

   14 On the triumph of individualism in postwar West European politics and human

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

Post Utopian Era: Human Rights, Americanism, Market Fundamentalism,” keynote
address for conference “Utopia, Gender, and Human Rights,” Vienna, December
12–15, 2007. Historians of Germany have also challenged this Stunde Null argument,
tracing continuities between Nazi and postwar German society. For an overview of the
Stunde Null narrative in historiography on Germany, see Robert Moeller, “Introduc-
tion: Writing the History of West Germany,” in his West Germany under Reconstruc-
tion, 6 –30.
   16
      Anna Holian, by contrast, stresses the “formation of communities of interest along
political rather than national lines” among DPs in her 2005 dissertation. See Holian,
“Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: The Politics of Self-
Representation among Displaced Persons in Munich, 1945–51” (PhD diss., University
of Chicago, 2005), 10. For more on the “nationalization” of DPs and refugees, see
Gerard Daniel Cohen, “The Politics of Recognition: Jewish Refugees in Relief Polices
and Human Rights Debates, 1945–50,” Immigrants and Minorities 24, no. 2 (July
2006): 125– 43; Dan Diner, “Elemente des Subjektwerdung: Jüdische DPs in histo-
rischen Kontext,” in Jahrbuch 1997 zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust, ed.
Jacqueline Giere, Hanno Loewy, Werner Renz, and Irmtrud Wojak (Frankfurt, 1997),
229 – 48; Pamela Ballinger, “Borders of the Nation, Borders of Citizenship: Repatri-
ation and the Definition of National Identity after World War I,” Comparative Studies
in Society and History 49 (2007): 713– 41; Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Vom Zwangsar-
beiter zum Heimatlösen Ausländer: Die Displaced Persons in Westdeutschland,
1945–51 (Göttingen, 1985); Zeev W. Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope:
The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany (New York, 2002); Liisa
Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu
Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago, 1995).

50     Zahra

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

  17 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951), 292.
  18 Holian, “Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism,” 50.
  19 On children as nationalist property in East Central Europe before 1945, see Tara

Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the
Bohemian Lands, 1900 –1948 (Ithaca, NY, 2008).

Lost Children     51

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.

THE “PSYCHOLOGICAL MARSHALL PLAN”
In order to care for displaced children, humanitarian activists first had to
determine how to define a “child.” This was no simple task in the postwar
context. The war had shattered perceived boundaries between childhood and
adulthood. Adult refugees, for example, were persistently infantilized in the
rhetoric of humanitarian workers. A June 1945 manual for UNRRA workers
explicitly encouraged them to view the adult refugees and DPs in their charge
as “hurt children,” whose “need for affection is so great that neutrality is
interpreted as hostility. Such people’s demands become insatiable like a
greedy baby’s.”21 At the same time, actual children often seemed like or
pretended to be adults. Technically, the IRO considered anyone under age
seventeen to be a child. Many children and youths, however, had learned to lie
systematically about their ages for the sake of survival during the war. They
continued to do so in their encounters with postwar military officials and
humanitarian agencies, instrumentally crossing the line between childhood
and adulthood. Ernst Papanek noted with frustration in 1946 that he could
“never know how old a person really is. . . . They ‘adjust’ age to purpose—
when they believe children will go to Palestine first and they want to go, even
men with beards say they are fourteen or fifteen, a girl that looked like a
twenty-five-year-old said she was sixteen. When a worker doubted it, she said,
‘After all I suffered in the concentration camp, do you wonder I look old-
er?’”22 In other circumstances DP youths inflated their ages. East European

   20 Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied

Germany (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 193–94.
   21 UNRRA, “Psychological Problems of Displaced Persons,” 4.
   22 June 27, 1946, Bergen-Belsen, Papanek Europe Tour, F-13, Ernst Papanek Col-

lection, IISH.

52     Zahra

governments (Poland, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia) adamantly insisted
that any non-Jewish unaccompanied child under age seventeen be forcibly
repatriated. But many adolescents refused repatriation to the East in the hope
of settling abroad or on political, religious, or personal grounds. These
children either lied about their age or were forced to mark time in camps until
they reached age seventeen. Many IRO social workers condoned this practice,
maintaining that teenagers should have a say about their own future.23
   Meanwhile, a startling gap emerged between the images of DP and refugee
children disseminated by the press and demographic realities in the immediate
postwar setting. Many displaced “children,” especially Jewish children, were
actually adolescents since the Nazis had efficiently murdered those unable to
work. But images of very young refugees circulated in the press and fund-
raising brochures, inspiring couples in the United States and elsewhere to
offer homes for adoption. They were often disappointed upon discovering that
blonde three-year-old girls were in short supply. Mrs. J. L. Young from
Galveston, Texas, thus wrote to the IRO in 1949 to request “two little girls
between the ages of four and ten. As for nationality I prefer French, Irish,
Scottish. I would prefer them to be of Protestant belief.”24 An American social
worker who sought foster placements for European Jewish children in the
United States remarked cynically, “When people learned that the children
were 1) not for adoption 2) predominantly boys 3) older children and 4) just
children, not geniuses, there was disappointment, and sometimes withdrawal
of the offer of a home.”25
   The war itself also seemed to accelerate the transition from childhood to
adulthood, particularly among surviving Jewish youths.26 Years of malnour-
ishment had robbed Jewish children of inches and pounds, and they often
appeared far younger than their ages. Most had also missed years of schooling.
But to social workers, surviving Jewish youths also seemed frighteningly
independent and mature. One French psychologist concluded, “Precocious
maturity, already favored on ethnic grounds, is particularly developed by the
lives of adventure they have led. Their heavy responsibilities, each holding the
lives of others in his hands, the familial obligations that fell on their young
shoulders, do not encourage them to sit on the school bench and play innocent

  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,

and Allies, 150 –52, 157–59.

Lost Children       53

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

   Individualism was even more central to the postwar rhetoric of reconstruc-
tion and democratization in Europe. Mark Mazower has observed that in
postwar Western Europe “the struggle against Hitler had revealed the impor-
tance of human and civil rights. In the legal and political sphere, in other
words, the trend was to reassert the primacy of the individual vis-à-vis the
state.”30 But this did not simply entail restricting the rights of the state to
infringe upon individual liberties. In the realm of education, it occasioned a
broader campaign to mold individuals capable of standing up to the state.
Alice Bailey’s appeal was typical in this respect. She proclaimed, “Let us
consider what can be done as soon as the war is over to rehabilitate the

  27 S. Marcus Jeisler, “Réponse à l’enquête sur les effets psychologiques de la guerre

sur les enfants et jeunes en France,” Sauvegarde 8 (February 1947): 12.
  28 Brosse, War-Handicapped Children, 96, 12.
  29 “Children without a Country to Become World Citizens,” 43/AJ/597, AN.
  30 Mazower, Dark Continent, 191.

54     Zahra

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-

Lost Children      55

collectivist priorities also dominated social policy in interwar Europe, as
politicians and social welfare experts across the continent sought to increase
the quantity and racial “quality” of children through biopolitics and eugenics
and to mobilize youths in new mass political movements.34 After the Second
World War, however, many humanitarian and political activists linked prac-
tices of politicized, collective education with totalitarianism and championed
education in the family in the name of democratization and human rights.
They conflated the individual, the family, and democracy in several ways.
   First, in Europe during and after the Second World War, antifascists widely
depicted the evil of Nazism in terms of an attack on both the individual and
the family. Anti-Communists after the war continued the tradition, linking
Nazism and Communism through their alleged destruction of the private
sphere.35 In 1938, Erika Mann, Thomas Mann’s daughter, published an exposé
of educational methods in Nazi Germany entitled School for Barbarians. “The
break-up of the family is no by-product of the Nazi dictatorship, but part of the
job which the regime had to do if it meant to reach its aim—the conquest of
the world. If the world is to go to the Nazis, the German people must first
belong to them. And for that to be true, they can’t belong to anyone else—
neither God, nor their families, nor themselves,” she wrote.36 If the Nazis had
subverted family unity, reconstructing traditional family life after World War
II represented both denazification and democratization.37 In the realm of

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);

56    Zahra

collective memory, antifascists linked Nazism and the destruction of family
unity in the popular trope of the child informant. Rumors of child informants
powerfully represented the alleged Nazi destruction of the private sphere, the
totalitarian quality of Nazi pedagogy, and the ironic reversals in power in
occupied society. French psychologist Alfred Brauner claimed in 1946 that
brainwashed German children had “denounced, if required, their father, who
remained loyal to his old political party, and their mother, who preferred to
believe the priest rather than the Führer. They are the youth who blindly
executed all orders and were prepared for this voluntary submission since their
earliest childhood.”38
   The family and the individual were also tightly linked in emerging theories
of child development. Psychoanalysis in particular located the formation of
the individual self in emotional relationships between parents and children.
For the psychoanalytically informed social workers in UNRRA and the IRO
in the late 1940s, the family seemed to be the sole institution capable of
raising children to be healthy individuals. Finally, postwar pedagogical ac-
tivists were also informed by a deeper liberal tradition, which positioned the
family, in opposition to the state, as the bedrock of civil society, a private
realm in which rational male citizens should be free to exercise their authority
over their “irrational” dependents (women and children), unbridled by state
interference. Restoring (male) sovereignty over the so-called private sphere
was implicitly linked to the reconstruction of civil society and democracy
itself in Europe.39 Humanitarian workers in Western Europe thus depicted
strengthening the family as a means of cultivating individualism and as an
antidote to the threat of fascism and Communism in postwar Europe. They
depicted the family as an apolitical sanctuary that represented a postwar
“return to normality.”40

Elizabeth Heinemann, What Difference Does a Husband Make? Marital Status in
Germany, 1933–1961 (Berkeley, 1999); Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory
and Morality in Twentieth Century Germany (Princeton, NJ, 2005); Heide Fehrenbach,
Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America
(Princeton, NJ, 2005)
   38
      Alfred Brauner, Ces enfants ont vécu la guerre (Paris, 1946), 182.
   39
      On the relationship between imagined public and private spheres and citizenship
in liberal and republican thought, see Isabel Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in
Germany, 1700 –1815 (Ithaca, NY, 1996); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Palo
Alto, CA, 1988); Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French
Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1988). For a discussion of the uses of the public/private divide
in gender history and historiography, see the forum “Women’s History in the New
Millenium: Rethinking Public and Private,” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 1
(2003): 11– 69.
   40 On the “return to normality,” see Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, eds., Life

Lost Children      57

   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.

58   Zahra

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

no. 2, bMS 16036-4, USCA, ATL.

Lost Children      59

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.

60    Zahra

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

  Papanek was not motivated by political, Zionist, or nationalist goals.
Rather, he was convinced that because Jewish children had been persecuted as
members of a group, they required a therapeutic community of peers who had

   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.

Lost Children      61

undergone similar traumas in order to recover from their experiences. He
therefore challenged the universalist underpinning of psychoanalytic theories,
insisting on the distinctive needs of Jewish refugees. “Group treatment is
always indicated where mass neurosis has been created by a trauma suffered
by many in common with many,” he maintained.54 “It will not be sufficient to
place the refugee child in a nice, decent, family home. More than any other
child, he must gain anew the feeling that he is accepted, that he is a member
of a group.”55
   At a deeper level, these views reflected Papanek’s training as an Adlerian
psychologist and the influence of the collectivist, Socialist traditions of the
interwar Austrian education reform movement. Papanek belonged to the
second generation of the Austro-Marxist pedagogical reform movement,
which had begun with Karl Seitz’s Freie Schule movement in turn-of-the-
century Vienna. Seitz and his followers struggled against clerical and Chris-
tian Social influences in the Austrian public school system. The movement
continued in the First Republic, animated by Socialist reform pedagogue Otto
Glöckel. Individualist and collectivist ideals were interdependent in the ped-
agogical visions and psychological theories of these reformers. They saw
schooling and other collective forms of education as a means by which to
educate emancipated, rational individuals with strong “personalities” who
would be capable of engaging in the class struggle and standing up to the
traditional enemies of Austrian Social Democrats, such as the Catholic Church
and Christian Socialists.56
   Alfred Adler’s “individual psychology” was highly influential among these
reformers, particularly within the school reform movement and in new city-
sponsored child guidance clinics in interwar Austria. Adler, an Austrian
psychologist, rejected the biological underpinning of Freud’s theories of the
self, with their insistence on natural instincts and drives, instead stressing the
role of the environment and community in shaping human personality. In
contrast to the Freudian view of society as an institution “whose authority we
fear and for which we have undertaken so many repressions,” Papanek

   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.

62   Zahra

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.

Lost Children      63

trian girl. An eighteen-year-old German simply insisted, “Every child should
be in an institution for some period!”60
   In the United States, meanwhile, social workers working with refugee
children reported stubborn resistance to their “individualist” methods. In
1948, Deborah Portnoy, a field representative with European Jewish Chil-
dren’s Aid (EJCA), which placed Jewish refugee children in American foster
homes, complained, “The case worker tries to individualize but the European
adolescents react as a group. They still retain their ‘herd’ psychology.”61 Her
observation reflects contemporary antisemitic stereotypes about Jewish “clan-
nishness.” The EJCA also attempted to combat the alleged “herd” mentality of
Jewish refugee children and encourage assimilation by placing them outside
of New York (and away from other Jewish refugees), a policy that was not
popular with the children, who typically craved the community of fellow
refugees.62 Through trial and error, however, even the EJCA gradually con-
cluded that Jewish children placed with relatives in the United States often
experienced a more difficult adjustment than those placed in collective homes
or with foster parents. “We know from all of these experiences that the mere
fact of relationship alone does not insure a happy placement,” observed one
American social worker in 1943. By 1948, the EJCA noted that a full
one-third to one-half of placements with relatives in the United States failed.63
   Papanek was not the only critic of familialist solutions. East European DPs
themselves and Jewish agencies also expressed grave doubts about the restor-
ative value of the family for refugee youths. While often motivated by
nationalist or political priorities, they also spoke in the new language of
psychological rehabilitation and individual best interests. In Munich in 1945,
Yugoslav leaders thus demanded that 1,000 displaced Yugoslav children in
the American zone of Germany be removed from their own parents in DP
camps and placed in special children’s camps. “These children have to live in
big common rooms, not only with their parents, but also with strangers, in

  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).