The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II (review)

Tara Zahra's eloquent and meticulously researched book The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II intersects numerous significant strands of historical inquiry. It is simultaneously a study of postwar European reconstruction, the Holocaust, and modern humanitarian efforts, synthesized through the lens of children and families devastated by war. Broad in scope yet richly textured, The Lost Children is an original and welcome addition to a small but growing body of work on childhood during and after World War II.

The author lays the foundation for her study by tracing the development of international relief on behalf of children after World War I. She describes how the events of the Armenian Genocide and the thousands of children forcibly and brutally displaced from home and family provoked the first international efforts in child rescue and rehabilitation. Pushed forward by the League of Nations, these efforts paved the way for those that came later, during and after World War II.

Woven into her discussion of the evolution of relief for children is a theme that is fundamental to her analysis; the idea of children's "best interests," a concept that emerged after World War II and thus was not embedded in centuries of cultural and societal norms. Zahra returns frequently to this notion of children's "best interests," arguing that while Europeans were in agreement that the plight of children was an important postwar humanitarian consideration, there was little consensus about its practical remedy. Even as humanitarian agencies pushed to help displaced children, their particular agenda was often at odds with those of both nations and families.

Zahra analyzes several European child rescue programs of the late 1930s and early 1940s, including the Kindertransport that brought Austrian, German, and Czech Jewish children to Britain, and the wartime evacuations of native youngsters from British cities to the countryside. These efforts have already received much scholarly attention. What makes Zahra's discussion unique is that she contextualizes the opportunities that brought children to safety within the framework of contemporary ideas of child development. Belief in the importance of family, collective education, and maternal attachment, for example, often drove the communal workers' ideas of how best to smooth the way to a new life for refugee children. The author argues that these same pedagogical and psychological theories were adopted under the extreme conditions of the Holocaust as well. Jewish adults in the Terezín ghetto consciously drew from popular educational ideas of the collective in the ghetto's children's homes; so, too, did Janusz Korczak, who employed modern pedagogy in his orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. These largely unsuccessful attempts to save children, in both physical and psychological terms, would be linked after the war to efforts to reclaim and rehabilitate the survivors.

Children's wartime and postwar experiences with adults were far from equal, of course. While some adults sought to save, others sought to destroy. Here the author casts a wide net that illuminates the terrible range of victimization of children during the war, from forced Germanization to murder, depending on the child's ethnicity. Among the many examples she describes is the Nazi program that took "desirable" non-German children from their families in Poland, and the painful and painstaking process Polish parents underwent to find their offspring— not unlike the efforts of Jewish parents or agencies to reclaim their own. But while she sees children as the ultimate victims of war, Zahra is careful to distinguish child survivors of the Holocaust from other displaced children. In addition to the extreme trauma of what they had experienced during the war years, the Jewish children faced unique challenges after its conclusion. The idea of home was fraught; most were not welcome in the land of their birth, and possibilities for emigration from Europe were few. At the same time, reestablishing families could be heartbreakingly complicated when Jewish children were caught between surviving...