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94 CHAPTER 5 “Unaccompanied Minors” THE STORY OF THE DISPLACED ORPHANS  1 October 1946. The S.S. Ernie Pyle pulled into New York. Among the ship’s passengers were a handful of war orphans whose plight was described in the Herald-Tribune: “20 War Orphans among 945 on The Ernie Pyle . . . Waifs’ Ages Range from 8 Months to 18 Years; All Will Go to Foster Homes.”1 The journalist observed that the “youngest of the lot was eight-months-old Sigmund Tryangel, whose Polish father was killed by the Nazis during the last week of the war in Europe. His mother died at the baby’s birth after enervating months in a Nazi concentration camp. Rosy and happy, the baby grinned at the flash of news cameras.”2 The article depicted a group of children whose “morale was high”; even “the babies did their part by not getting seasick.”3 The Herald-Tribune was one of many papers that recorded the arrival of these young refugees and predicted a future of promise and renewal. Like other accounts of refugees in the media, it cast the newcomers in an optimistic glow and emphasized the contribution they would make to America. It quickly became clear to those involved that these particular newcomers were anything but rosy and happy babies. Few young children and even fewer babies had survived the Holocaust. Most were adolescents who had experienced years of deprivation and horror. Nevertheless, they were the most sympathetic of victims. Made parentless by Hitler, many had endured concentration camps and were their families’ sole survivor. To some, they were motherless children; to relatives they were the surviving orphans of murdered sisters and brothers; to others they symbolized a youthful link between the devastated Jewish world and a Jewish future in America. While the public perception varied, one fact remained constant: they were alone and without means of support. To whom could they turn? European-Jewish Children’s Aid (EJCA) was the American agency that supervised the resettlement of at least one thousand “unaccompanied minors”—a benign designation that belied the Holocaust experiences, which had orphaned these few surviving Jewish children. EJCA took charge of these youth from the time they stepped off the boat in New York until the orphans were adopted, married, or came of age. EJCA located and supervised the children’s placements, and for this it relied on local cooperating agencies such as the Jewish Family and Children’s Services in Denver. How effective was the agency in meeting this challenge of settling and protecting their charges? How did the system shape the children’s experiences? How did the orphans’ traumatic past influence their assimilation into American life? The answer is not simple. A confluence of factors—agency policies, foster care placement, location of settlement, the children’s wartime experience—shaped the resettlement of these most vulnerable charges. Some of the same questions and dilemmas that faced older refugees applied. But there were other considerations, unique to orphans, which necessitated different responses. EJCA evolved out of German-Jewish Children’s Aid (GJCA), which had been created in 1934 to care for German Jewish refugee children. GJCA was a landmark: the first agency in the United States to be involved with the protection of the rights of alien children. It developed placement guidelines for locating appropriate homes for refugee children as well as followup supervision of the placements. When the United States Committee for the Care of European Children (U.S. Committee), a voluntary agency, was founded in 1940 with the goal of rescuing children whose lives were endangered because of the war, GJCA became one of its cooperating agencies. The U.S. Committee then assumed the role of deciding which children were eligible to enter the United States. In 1941, GJCA became EJCA, with sole responsibility for placing the small number of Jewish children that the U.S. Committee brought to this country . Like other refugee organizations, EJCA’s activities withered during the war years. After the war, however, EJCA once again became the primary cooperating agency for the care of Jewish children in conjunction with the U.S. Committee. The U.S. Committee decided whether a minor could enter the United States and supervised the process until EJCA met that child in New York. The former screened the children in Europe, provided temporary care while their applications were processed, made arrangements for travel, selected an escort when necessary, and assumed port and dock services in America. Unless...

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