Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
Lack of personnel, especially in Austria, often required individual UNRRA workers to be searchers. Such forays were not for the fainthearted, especially as cars were hard to come by, information was often vague, and the postwar population nomadic. After tracking down lists of possible households with foreign children in Vienna for days, one worker said she felt more like a postman and that her specialty had become “stairs and door bells.” Even more fortitude and sleuthing were needed in the country. Here transportation was sometimes bizarre: one searcher was so determined to reach a certain town that she rode up a mountain in a coffin-shaped cargo box on a ski lift. Workers haunted pubs and marketplaces, and questioned village priests and burgomasters:
In one small village, having gone by car as far as possible, I then walked across meadows, crossed a brook, climbed a stile and eventually braving my way through a flock of geese, found myself at the Burgomeister’s
house. His office, a complete contrast to the rural isolation of the cottage, struck me most forcibly. The Burgomeister was amazed to think I had troubled to come there. He laid down his Tyrolean pipe and exclaimed … to his daughter, “This lady had come all the way from London to see us.”
That was just the beginning of the adventure. Once armed with locations, the searchers had to go to the houses. Although most were decent enough, there were exceptions:
It was getting dark, I had left the car by the road-side and walked through snow for half-an-hour when I located the house I had been looking for. As I pushed open the door and found myself in a dark porch, I felt a little boy and asked him where his mother was. He opened the next door and what I saw was a filthy kitchen, black ceiling and walls, dirty pots and pans hanging on the wall and a large untidy old woman stirring a pot. She did not seem to understand me and looked at me vacantly, so I asked the boy to find his father.… In the meantime a tall youth, an idiot, came in and stared at me. I must confess that I did not enjoy this very much at the time (all this was happening in a barely lit room and I never did feel happy in the dark). At last the foster father appeared. He was carrying two bottles and his eyes were bloodshot.… He explained how he came to have the child. The mother had given it to him whilst she was working on a farm and later when she had come back for him the foster parents had refused to give him back. What he must have told the poor woman I leave to the imagination, but she never dared return.… Had I had a children’s home anywhere, I would have broken all the rules and taken the child away. As it was, I had to wait until morning.
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The legal division of the Military Government was reluctant to authorize the Child Search workers to enter such homes and forcibly remove children, and never issued clear directives on this delicate subject. The uncertainly often led to delays and disputes in court over “the best interests of the child” and made the process longer and more agonizing.
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Indeed, many of the searchers themselves dreaded the terrible scenes the separations created, and had very mixed feelings about the justice of their actions. The distinguished historian Gitta Sereny worked in Germany on one of these teams. In an article written fifty-three years later, she described her visit to a German farm family that had been given Polish twins four years previously by Lebensborn. The blond boy and girl, now six, were particularly dear to this family, as one of their own children, also
a twin, had died very young. The farmer and his family believed that the twins, who were healthy and happy in the big farmhouse, were “German orphans from the Eastern territories.” But photographs of the children at the time of their arrival in Germany were identified by their parents, who were alive and well near Lodz. This proof overrode all other factors, and the twins were taken from the farm to an UNRRA center. Sereny did not perform this dreadful task, but a few months later, she visited the center and recognized the children, who had no memory of Poland or their parents and were clearly miserable and disturbed. They recognized her too. It was a devastating encounter:
The two children’s appearance—their faces were sallow and there were shadows under their eyes—and Johann’s reaction to me and Marie’s awful apathy shook me to the core. Marie was scrunched up in a chair, her eyes closed … her thumb in her mouth, but Johann raced up as soon as he saw me, and shouted hoarsely,
“Du! Du! Du!”
(You! You! You!), and hit out at me with feet and fists.
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Later, Sereny escorted a trainload of children back to Poland to be reunited with their parents, and what she saw there made her feel better:
Just as I can’t forget the pain of the German foster parents when they had to see the children leave, I will never, as long as I live, forget the welcome they received in Poland, never forget the faces of the parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters. The miracle of recognition of a long lost child by those who love them is awesome to behold.
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Other Child Search workers agreed with this aspect of the process: one man could not forget the face of a Pole who for months had met every train of repatriates, asking for his granddaughter.
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The decision to leave Germany was harder for older children in middle-class families who were given a say in their fate. They had often been required to be members of the Hitler Youth or Bund Deutscher Mädel, eventually had full social lives at German schools, and considered themselves completely German. The discovery of their origin, or that parents long thought dead were still alive, brought forth mixed emotions. One girl wrote to her birth mother in Poland that she was very happy and lacked for nothing with her foster parents: “We have a lovely house with a garden, also a car in which my father always takes me riding.… Next year I shall learn to drive.” She was glad to hear from her mother and to know that she
was alive, but said that she did not wish to go back to Poland, noting that “at this age [fifteen] I should already know whom to be thankful to and where I can have a good life. My parents will be pleased if you will visit me someday.” It is clear that the girl did not know of the Nazi plans for those of “good blood.” Her letter reveals considerable inner struggle. With some resentment she continues, “Dear mother, I am thinking, why did you put me in an orphanage when I was little? Why do you ask about me now,” but then says that she would like to “hear something about [my father] someday.” And she not only sent her mother a picture of herself with her new family, but asked for one in return. The emotional pressure on her, and a remarkable lack of comprehension on the part of her German family, are illustrated by a note from the foster mother to the birth mother: “I should like to write you a short note. I love your child so much, that I am not able to be without her. Today [she] has been saying to me, Mother do not cry, I shall stay with you. My good lady, leave the child with me.” This girl apparently did not go back; the dossier contains a series of ever more frantic letters from her mother, but no replies.
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But there were others who, after early denial and hesitations, did return, and there were even cases in which parents, foster parents, and children ended up visiting back and forth and became friends.
Both the Child Search program and ongoing repatriation, valiantly promoted at the United Nations by former UNRRA team director Richard Winslow, who enlisted Eleanor Roosevelt on his side, would struggle on under the aegis of various agencies, fighting all the while against funding cuts and, as seems inescapable, subject to changing political winds. The Soviet attempt to prevent Allied access to Berlin in 1948 offered dramatic evidence that Communism would prevail in the East, and occupation officials, who had to approve all repatriation requests, were less and less inclined to send children to Communist countries, even if there was proof that they had parents there. In 1951, an Allied judge rejected the custody request of a Yugoslav mother who had survived Auschwitz. Although he was sure that she would be able to give her ten-year-old son, who had been taken by Lebensborn, a satisfactory home, he felt that the Germans who had taken care of the boy for eight years deserved to keep him. When welfare workers argued that the family had been Nazis, the judge declared dismissively that they had now been “de-Nazified.”
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This anti-repatriation trend was exploited both by émigré organizations and by German foster parents determined not to lose their children, and eventually led to the easing of restrictions on resettling children in Western nations, including the United States.
The Child Search programs of the IRO were ended in August 1950, and its files and a small staff were transferred to the International Tracing Service at Arolsen in Germany. In his final report on Child Search, IRO chief Herbert Meyer indicated that there were 13,517 unfinished investigations of children who had been adopted by Germans or who were still in foster care or in German institutions. There was no doubt in his mind that most of these cases, if left to the German authorities, would not be resolved in favor of foreign parents seeking their children, and that the result would be that these and perhaps thousands of other children “would remain in Germany and for their whole lives be ignorant of their identity and background.”
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The unaccompanied children were only a small part of the larger DP problem, which had not vanished by 1948 as the Allies had hoped. The opening of Palestine was a great help, but this still left an estimated 750,000 DPs, mostly from Eastern Europe, also generally viewed as undesirable in the West, who were unlikely to be repatriated. Among them were many families with children. With glacial slowness, small groups suitable for specific tasks were admitted to Allied nations. In the fall of 1946, Britain, which had already allowed more than 100,000 Polish Army veterans to stay, began to recruit young Baltic girls for hospital work and later expanded this campaign to include other nationalities who would be employed as nursing aides and domestic workers. The program was so successful that in 1948 79,000 more DPs were admitted as “European Voluntary Workers.” Belgium, Holland, and France took tens of thousands of men to work in their coal mines and other industries. Australia at first agreed to accept a small group of workers without families, but was careful to choose only blue-eyed blonds. The early arrivals were so acceptable that 180,000, hair color unknown, eventually followed. Canada too, surprised to find it had a labor shortage, eased its normal immigration requirements and allowed in DPs who had close relatives there. By the end of 1951, Canada had taken more than 150,000. Others went to South America. In all, more than fifty countries had, by 1951, sent representatives to Germany to screen and process suitable immigrants.
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The United States was for a long time an exception to these special admissions. Forty thousand DPs, mostly Jewish, could and did come in under the quotas, but it was not until June 1948, after the usual anti-immigration battles in Congress, that a bill allowing entry for 200,000 DPs was passed. Public pressure was strong. Earl Harrison, who had so vehemently
criticized the conditions in the Jewish DP camps, now lobbied just as dramatically and successfully for the dissolution of all such camps. Noting that the United States had created “an arsenal of democracy” and “produced the atom bomb” in a “brief period of time,” he challenged Congress to drop its “moral lethargy” and take care of the DPs or risk being “accused of callousness just as the Nazis have been accused of cruelty.”
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The bill that passed was still very limited: preference was given to individuals whose nations had been “annexed by a foreign power,” such as the largely Nordic and non-Catholic Balts, whose countries were now controlled by the USSR. It did not include Poles, as Poland was technically independent, and of course it excluded Russians. The bill also required that 30 percent of those admitted should have “agricultural experience,” and that the DP must have arrived in Germany before December 22, 1945—which eliminated most Jewish and Polish infiltrees. The law was amended in 1950 to cancel these discriminatory clauses and to allow in 200,000 more DPs, including
Volksdeutsche
expelled from the countries bordering Germany, as well as Greeks, Italians, and Yugoslavs.
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More than 2,000 unaccompanied children came to the United States under the auspices of the Committee for the Care of European Children and were resettled by a plethora of organizations; several thousand more went to other countries.
The vetting for resettlement could be cruel, and for many DPs was remarkably similar to that of the Nazis. Families had to appear before endless screeners and committees and deal with miles of documentation. Those who were ill or disabled were not acceptable, which sometimes led to tragedy: one blind father committed suicide so his daughters could be admitted to the United States. There were, of course, humanitarian programs: among others, Sweden took a large group of tuberculosis patients, Belgium admitted some of the elderly, and the United States a few of the handicapped.
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But these programs were far from enough. An unaccompanied child who was handicapped or sick could be refused resettlement to a foster home in another country. If the child had a family, the suggested solutions were harsh: they could stay in Germany permanently with the child; postpone emigration until the child could be rehabilitated; or emigrate without the child, which “sometimes involves placing him permanently in an institution under the custody of IRO.” These remedies, as one welfare worker aptly wrote, were “complicated by reality factors,” not least among which were the shortage of acceptable institutions and the fact that IRO was about to be terminated. One Lithuanian family was rejected because one of their four children seemed to be retarded.
Their argument that they could care for the child was of no avail and, in despair, they returned to their DP camp. A sympathetic doctor there thought the boy might have a thyroid problem. After five months of treatment, the child had improved so much that the family was accepted for resettlement.